The Red Pen Challenge Update

This morning I called and left messages regarding the Red Pen Challenge at the following gubernatorial campaigns:

Ethan Berkowitz
Hollis French
Sam Little
Sean Parnell
Bob Poe
Ralph Samuels
Bill Walker
Donald Wright

If you know of a candidate for governor that is not on this list that would like to be included in the challenge, please ask them to contact me, or if you are one of the above candidates and somehow did not receive my message, please contact me as well. For the sake of convenience I have reprinted the Red Pen Challenge below.

I call this proposal The Red Pen Challenge.

I propose that every candidate for governor should review the capital budget and identify those items they would veto and submit them to the people of Alaska at the same time the Governor submits his signed capital budget bill, with appropriate vetoes if any, to the people of Alaska.

Rules of the Challenge

1) The governor agrees, in advance, to the date and time he will make public his decision on the capital budget.

2) Each candidate will submit their proposed capital budget to the public on the same date prior to the governor’s submittal to the public.

3) Governors Rules apply. – Each candidate will be required to provide the public with a copy of the budget with the specific “vetoed” items lined out and initialed, just like the Governor is required to do.

4) All newspapers will be encouraged to post on their web pages all responses so the Alaska public can compare the “decisions” of each of the participating candidates and add this information to their overall evaluation of who they want to support for governor.

I believe the above proposal will provide the appropriate scrutiny that was not applied during the legislative process to each and every appropriation in the capital budget.

Since the capital budget has not been transmitted to the governor there is still plenty of time for each of the candidates to comply with the above challenge. They will have the same amount of time to review and analyze the capital budget as the governor has.

I am also certain that if a candidate needs more information about the value of a specific appropriation, the recipient of that appropriation will be glad to provide the candidate with as much information as the candidate needs to make their decision.

I will be contacting each candidate and the governor over the next week to see who will be willing to rise to the challenge. The governor is the only candidate that will automatically participate because he is required by law to make a decision on the capital budget. The governor still needs to agree to a specific date and time when he will communicate his decision on the capital budget to the public.

I am looking forward to sharing their responses to the challenge in a future article.