The head of the agency that manages the Alaska Permanent Fund is getting a raise. The Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation’s Board of Trustees approved a 10% pay increase for CEO Deven Mitchell on Tuesday, bringing his total salary to more than $420,000 a year.
Board chair Jason Brune said the raise comes after Mitchell got high marks on an annual performance evaluation conducted in a closed-door session.
"We're very happy with Deven's performance, and we had a very good discussion with him about what happened this past year and put some metrics in place for this next year," Brune said during the public portion of the meeting.
It’s the second year in a row Mitchell has gotten a 10% raise for leading management of Alaska’s roughly $80 billion nest egg.
The board gave its evaluation verbally in an executive session to avoid it being accessed by public records requests. That’s allowed under a policy change approved by the board in 2023 after the controversial firing of its prior CEO.
During the two-day meeting in Juneau, Permanent Fund managers said the fund is performing well.
Its target return is 5% above inflation, as measured by the consumer price index, and it’s ahead of that mark by nearly half a percentage point in the year to date. The fund is trailing that target over the past five years, according to Chief Investment Officer Marcus Frampton, but he said the Permanent Fund is not alone in that respect.
"I don't think any peers I'm aware of have hit CPI plus five over the last three years, so we're not unusual in that respect," Frampton told the board. "Over these short-term periods, probably about half the time, on a look-back basis, we're over CPI plus five,
Frampton said the Permanent Fund is ahead of its performance benchmark this year, and over the past three- and five-year periods. The performance benchmark measures the value added by Permanent Fund managers while accounting for the structure of the state’s portfolio and swings in the markets.
