Former Alaska Attorney General Craig Richards has signed a second no-bid contract with Gov. Bill Walker's administration since Richards resigned in June.
Richards' first contract, capped at $50,000, was signed in July with the Alaska Department of Law, the department he ran before he quit. That contract called for Richards to work on oil and gas development, which included a proposal that the Alaska Permanent Fund invest in tax credits held by oil companies — a proposal rejected by the Permanent Fund's board.
The second contract, signed in August, is capped at $10,000 and calls for Richards to give "advice on fiscal and other matters." That contract's existence was first reported by Must Read Alaska, a blog run by Alaska Republican Party spokeswoman Suzanne Downing.
The party has been in opposition to Walker, a lifelong Republican elected as an independent.
[Click here to see Richards' second contract.]
Deputy Attorney General Jim Cantor said the second contract became necessary because Richards' work was expanding outside the scope of his original project and into the Walker administration's efforts to fix the state's multibillion-dollar budget deficit.
Richards' invoices under the second contract show he met in Juneau in late August with a group of Walker's advisers who are working on ways to diversify the state's economy.
The second contract "seemed like the best way to handle that," Cantor said, rather than expanding the original one "in an undefined way."
In a brief phone interview, Richards said it was natural for him to keep working on the budget-balancing plan because of his prior role in the administration — as one of the "principal architects" of Walker's legislation to restructure the Permanent Fund and use some of its investment earnings to pay for government services.
The second contract, Richards added, was "very small."
Cantor pointed to a clause in the department's standard contract that specifies that the state may require a separate contract "on any matter which, in its judgment, may be specifically complicated or prolonged to justify a separate contract."
The law department is allowed to sign no-bid contracts for up to $50,000 for legal services and there's no prohibition on signing more than one contract with the same attorney or firm as long as the contracts are for different work.
Cantor said the department wasn't trying to skirt procurement rules.