Capitol Undercurrents

A painful end, to a sad story

     Assuming there ought to be a rule, like don't swim right after eating, I've waited 48 hours to write this column about l'affair Renkes. And, knowing that critics too often are defined as just people along for deride, I'm going to start with the positive.
     Positive Item No. 1--(Former) Attorney General Gregg Renkes did the right thing. The fundamental question from October 1, when details of his stock portfolio and state activities slopped into the news, was: are Alaskans well served when people doing state business with the AG wonder if he's guilty as charged or the victim, as he says, of a campaign of personal destruction.
     Positive Item No. 2--Rep. Eric Croft, who filed a complaint with the state's personnel board along with Republican Sarah Palin, said over the weekend he's withdrawing his complaint. Withdrawing the complaint helps depoliticize the affair, begin the healing, and helps us move forward.
     Positive Item No. 3--The whole stinking mess may lead to realistic statutory definitions of what a financial conflict of interest for public officials really looks like. I temper this positive item by noting that a recipe in law can't fully cover transgressions in the future because we can't anticipate each and every type of transgression.
     Positive Item No. 4--Elected officials who were apologists for the behavior of Mr. Renkes failed to trump public opinion. Alaskans can make up their own minds about good behavior and bad behavior and the steady drip, drip of their opinions does and did lead to a just outcome.
     Item No. 4 is the most positive outcome from this sordid affair. For those more interested in right and wrong instead of legal or illegal, the question of whether Mr. Renkes' $125,000 holding in KFx (while he negotiated a coal agreement with Taiwan in which KFx was center stage) was significant or not was not even a close call. 
     For those with a well-honed sense of right or wrong, eyebrows really wiggled when he claimed under oath that destruction of thousands of emails the afternoon the day the first story was published about his potential conflict of interest was nothing other than coincidental. Even the attorney who took his statement had doubts about the AG's veracity--especially given the fact that the AG was questioned for that first story by the newspaper reporter the day before.
     The elements of the series of KFx/Renkes stories boiled down to this:

• the AG was prime negotiator of an agreement with Taiwan to pursue coal exports from Alaska;
• because Alaska coal is water-logged, coal drying technology promoted by KFx was stipulated in the agreement;
• the AG's stock portfolio in KFx during these negotiations was variously valued at between $75,000 and $126,000;
• correspondence between the AG and Taiwan was sometimes drafted or suggested by KFx interests;
• while KFx was integrally involved in the negotiations, owners of the Alaska coal leases did not even know the state was negotiating the potential export of the coal resources they had under lease;
• the attorney hired by the governor to review the KFx connections, and whose legal fees could reach $170,000, found there was no illegality other than a technical violation of not reporting a potential conflict--though he said it was a "close call." (That close call hinged on his finding that a stock portfolio of up to $125,000 was "insignificant.")