I don’t know how it happened, but the Dunleavy administration reversed itself on the Transportation Advisory Committee meeting plan, dropping the ban on in-person participation.

The meeting is set for Thursday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Key Bank Building at 100 Cushman Street in downtown Fairbanks.

This was the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do was the earlier decision by Transportation and Public Facilities Commissioner Ryan Anderson to ban in-person participation to better control the group.

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Department of Transportation and Public Facilities Commissioner Ryan Anderson still has time to correct the blunder he made by ordering that a Thursday meeting of the committee reviewing the Kinross ore-hauling plan will be “virtual only.”

The meeting of the Transportation Advisory Committee is from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday is a crucial one for preparing its final report. It needs to be held in person. Those who can’t make it in person can use the online approach.

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I think I made it clear in a series of blog posts over the last two months that the trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund were on the wrong track with their strategic plan because they failed to include the public and the Legislature.

In the end, they did the right thing and followed the advice of financial experts by pulling back. What I don’t understand is why they waited so long to ask for advice. Or why they aren’t making a concerted effort to ask Alaskans what the strategic plan should include.

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Mary Vought’s contract to burnish the national image of Gov. Mike Dunleavy has been extended eight times over nearly four years, a textbook case of ignoring the state procurement law that requires competitive bidding. Two more contract extensions are already in the works.

The Vought contract, which could cost nearly $400,000 by the end of 2026, does not match up with any of the nine examples mentioned in state regulations about instances in which sole-source contracts might be appropriate.

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If you haven’t done so already, read the latest investigation by Kyle Hopkins of the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica.

Hopkins’s investigation of the deaths of Jennifer Kirk and Sue Sue Norton reveals an outrageous failure of the justice system in Alaska.

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A reader writes that the questions I put to Sen. Dan Sullivan’s office about the delay in selecting potential judicial nominees for a vacant federal court position in Alaska were of the predictable kind, all guaranteed to produce pat answers. I missed the big picture, the reader said.

I thought it over and came to the same conclusion.

It is not mentally rewarding or enlightening to read Sullivan’s pre-packaged statements that senators have many different ways of recruiting and vetting nominees for federal judicial appointments, and that his new committee is nonpartisan, etc.

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The Dunleavy administration ignored the legislative limits placed on the hiring of former President Donald Trump’s lawyer for $600 an hour for the continuing anti-union crusade that has cost hundreds of thousands.

A legislative audit has concluded that the Dunleavy administration acted illegally, spending $315,034 that it did not have legislative authority to spend with Consovoy McCcarthy.

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Sen. Dan Sullivan’s committee to pick right-wing judicial nominees, led by former Gov. Sean Parnell, has already met twice, with no public notice, and plans to continue operating in secret, according to Sullivan’s office.

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Citing a host of transportation regulation violations by the state and safety questions, the Committee for Safe Communities is seeking a preliminary injunction, pending a trial, to decide if the Kinross ore-haul plan “can ever go forward in light of public nuisance laws, general public safety and particularly the safety of our children.”

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The inescapable Kinross “Just the Facts” ad campaign in Fairbanks could benefit with more facts about its ore hauling project.

The company has a highly selective notion about just what Alaskans should know. The facts about corporate economics are nowhere to be found.

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