North Slope Borough, Alaska Mayor Josiah Aullaqsruaq Patkotak has survived a recall effort due to the incompetence of the rebels who were trying to take him down, Alaska Public Media reports.

The 31 year-old independent former Acting Speaker of the state House and lead actor in the middling 2011 Sundance film festival entrant On The Ice had been accused of expensing tens of thousands of dollars of public funds on first class airfare on trips to New York City, Peru, DC, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other places, often booking luxury accommodations and bringing his family along with him. In December 2024 the borough assembly, led by Assembly President Crawford Patkotak – yes, he’s the mayor’s dad – voted 8 to 3 to legalize expensing travel costs for family members. This was still after the $16,000 September 2024 trip to the International Whaling Conference in Lima, Peru where Patkotak – whose salary is $280,000 a year, nearly twice that of Alaska Gov Mike Dunleavy’s $145,000 – stayed eight nights in a luxury suite equipped with a hot tub and sauna, bringing his wife and infant daughter along with him on important whaling business.

So yeah it should’ve been a slam dunk politically and easy enough to get more than 371 verified signatures in a borough (Alaska’s word for “county”) of 11,031 in two months, even if it is the size the state of Utah. The Arctic Ocean shore city of Utqiagvik, formerly Point Barrow, is home to nearly 5,000 people. Yet this week Borough Clerk Sheila Burke (lol) issued her determination that only 153 signatures had been verified in a jurisdiction where Patkotak won the October 3, 2023 election to his post with 796 votes while his three opponents received a combined total of 669 votes.

North Slope Borough, Alaska encompasses the entire US Arctic Ocean coastline.

Sure there was some no doubt intentional friction from Clerk Burke’s office. She was slow to respond to the paperwork submitted in February to certify the petition. She rejected the first draft for containing too many not recallable offenses. She fucked with the second draft and edited out the part on Patkotak’s approving the use of the borough’s medevac plane for non-medical errands.

And yet in a land where nearly half the population is concentrated in one town, where the number of people who voted for other candidates alone was more than enough to reach the minimum threshold in two months, where 11 percent live below the poverty line and this asshole spent $3,000 on non-refundable hotel reservations for a conference in Iceland that he didn’t even end up going to – that was a leg of a trip to New York City for “a syndicated bond sale” that set the borough back $115,000 for Patkotak’s entire entourage – the petitioners couldn’t come up with 371 signatures.

North Slope Borough Mayor Josiah Patkotak spotted in a very comfortable first class on a flight from Seattle to D.C. Nice Birkenstocks, bro. pic.twitter.com/gd607qEpAO

— The Alaska Landmine (@alaskalandmine) March 11, 2025

“We had four main complaints for Josiah, and they still stand, but [Burke] watered them down. That’s when we had a fallout with some of our people,” said organizer Beverly Aqak Hugo. “The changes made it harder to gather signatures because some people involved in the recall effort did not feel that the final petition reflected all of their complaints,” the article indirectly quotes Hugo.

For the very smallest shred of reasonable balance, Patkotak’s NYC trip netted $129 million in bond sales on solid terms consistent with the borough’s AA and AA+ ratings from Fitch and KBRA, respectively. The money he earns and has pissed away on frivolous travel expenses while leading the vast tundra’s jurisdiction is not on the backs of ordinary taxpayers but the oil companies whose facilities generate almost the entirety of the property tax revenue. But profitable warlordism is still warlordism and in a place where both the micro and macro effects of a century of oil’s effects on the environment are becoming less and less deniable, shouldn’t North Slope at least look a little more like Osage County, Oklahoma in the beginning of Killers of The Flower Moon than Patkotak looks like Mohammed Bonesaw and/or Mayor Quimby with this almost comical level of self-enrichment?

North Slope has a pretty friggin nice municipal website in comparison to, for example, Huron County, Michigan.

Still, all of it says far more about the petitioners’ political acumen than it does Patkotak. They did at least take Burke to court in March when it first became clear she was jerking them around. Hopefully their lawyer is better at this than the actual plaintiffs because man do they suck at the game.

The same group also filed a petition to recall the senior Patkotak. Burke rejected it because they submitted the paperwork inside of the 180 day deadline before the expiry of his current term on the Borough Assembly. The petitioners complained Burke dragged her feet on reviewing that one too.