This story was originally published on The Alaska Memo.
On Monday, the Alaska Legislature appointed the conference committee on the operating budget, kicking off the 24-hour period that allows meetings to be noticed a day in advance and starting the final mad dash to adjournment on May 20.
As with any session, what can and will happen over the next week depends not only on political will but also on time. With less than a week on the clock until Day 121, lawmakers still need to reach deals on the budgets, pass priority legislation, hold a joint confirmation session to vote on the governor’s appointees (which is scheduled for tomorrow), and, oh, they’re ostensibly trying to pass a massive multibillion-dollar, multi-decade subsidy for the AKLNG pipeline project that they’ve only had in bill form for about a month and a half.
Legislators will need to tread carefully because each one of those is an opportunity for the minority caucuses to be difficult, whether it’s lengthy amendment sessions or everyone-needs-to-say-their-piece debates.
Recall that the former House GOP Majority spent the entirety of the 2024 session’s final Saturday and part of Sunday on passing its virtue-signaling trans sports ban after that year’s House Minority Coalition mounted as near a filibuster as it could under the rules, jamming up the process with 90 amendments and plenty of fiery debate. As expected, the measure promptly died in the Senate, but the time had already been spent. The crunch was felt in the final days — leading to five bills, three of which were by conservative Republicans, eating a veto for passing after midnight on the final day of session.
So it’s with all that to say that layering on the AKLNG subsidy bill on top of the usual end-of-session sprint is a ridiculously tall order.
Lame-duck Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy and company waited until late March to drop HB 381 and SB 280, launching a high-pressure pitch for a $7.2 billion tax break for the 800-mile pipeline project. The strategy banks on Southcentral’s energy-supply anxiety, with a dash of Iran war opportunism, to paper over a litany of concerns and longstanding skepticism about the long-ballyhooed project connecting the North Slope’s vast gas reserves to Alaskans living along the pipeline corridor and hopefully lucrative foreign markets. Big issues like the project’s cost, its timeline, the cost of gas to Alaskans, its profitability, whether there are actually customers beyond Alaska and its impacts on state and local governments are all big question marks that legislators have struggled to get answers on.
The place to watch right now is the House Finance Committee, which took up House Bill 381 on Friday after the House Resources Committee did its work on the bill and seems to be leading the charge on the issue — even as the Senate Resources Committee continues hearings on its own version of the bill. As it stands, HB 381 calls for a smaller, yet significant subsidy for the project while forcing the players to the negotiating table with some of the most heavily impacted communities — the North Slope and Kenai Peninsula boroughs — while also making a push for a spur line that would deliver much-needed energy to Fairbanks (though, whether it’s affordable is a big question).
That’s because Glenfarne, the private company that took the reins of the project from the state last year, plans to build it in two phases. First, the large-diameter 800-mile pipeline that would run well under capacity to sell North Slope gas to road-system utilities. And at some point in the future, they would build the costly treatment and export facilities needed to sell gas to those potentially lucrative foreign markets, hopefully filling the pipeline’s capacity. While the backers argue it’s the best way to finance and build the massive megaproject, it also poses the risk of complete disaster for Alaskans if those export facilities don’t get built.
“The only way that we end up with higher cost gas coming out of the pipeline is if there is no (final investment decision) on the LNG export facility until beyond 2029, and I can personally tell you, I think that’s unlikely,” Adam Prestidge, the president of Glenfarne Alaska LNG. “It’s a very promising and high probability project, in my opinion.”
It should be noted that Glenfarne had planned to reach that stage of the pipeline project by the end of 2025, but it still hasn’t.
He also added that if the facilities aren’t ever built, the AKLNG gas would be “competitive” with alternative plans, such as imported LNG that Southcentral utilities are already pursuing. So a multi-billion-dollar subsidy for “competitive” gas is within the range of possible outcomes. How possible is that?
If you take them at their word, not very.
And while I wrote that there are some similarities between the current process and the one used more than a decade ago to pass the 2013 oil tax break, there are big differences. Of course, legislators aren’t quite as keen on taking industry claims as gospel as they once were, but that doesn’t mean they have the answers.
The lack of transparency, information, speed and pressure tactics has left many legislators feeling as if they’re operating in a fog of war.
As Senate Resources Chair Sen. Cathy Giessel told me during an interview on Friday, the state’s capacity to answer questions, analyze issues and provide answers is greatly diminished from 2013. Gone are the carts full of binders for each and every legislator, seemingly replaced with a $100,000 contract for Mark Begich to spar with lawmakers as well as a corresponding ad blitz.
“They have about 30 openings,” she said of the Department of Revenue and the corresponding slide in the quality of modeling, noting that the understaffing is having far-reaching consequences beyond just the Capitol. “This is horrible. This is horrible for the private sector because we’re not sure. I mean, can (Chief Economist Dan) Stickle generate the credible data that he used to be able to do?”
For the process-focused Giessel, the lack of answers and the litany of issues that come loose when you start to tease out the project’s details make it hard to sign on the dotted line. Still, despite broad skepticism that this project is any different from the several failed iterations before it, legislators seem willing to give it a shot.
Giessel noted that as of Friday, the Legislature had already held dozens of hearings on the AKLNG project this session. The House Finance Committee and the Senate Resources Committee, where the bills currently sit, have meetings scheduled every day this week to work on the bill.
Even if the wheels were greased, the bill still needs to go through the amendment process in several committees, floor amendment processes in both chambers and debates. While political will can carry things a long way, they are getting close to the point where the immutable nature of time will be a problem. For some, extra innings are a near-certainty, whether it’s a 10-day legislator-driven extension where all bills stay alive or a narrow special session called by the governor.
“Honestly, I don’t see us coming to conclusion in two weeks and a couple of days,” Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, said a week ago. “That’s a lot to do for the House and the Senate to come together and to conclude this entire issue of a gas line. So what happens? Well, the governor has the opportunity to call us back into a special session immediately, or he can call us into a special session in August, or whenever he chooses.”
Still, it hasn’t stopped some industry-friendly Republicans from grousing that the scrutiny is an unwarranted slowroll by the haters.
At Monday’s House Finance Committee hearing, co-chair Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, fired back that the time crunch isn’t the Legislature’s doing.
“We’ve been at this for 72 hours,” he said. “The bill dropped on March 20. Everyone knows what’s happening. We lose authority to work as a Legislature in nine and a half days. We’re going to have to do everything we can to get through this, but I don’t feel any responsibility at this point for not moving expeditiously. We’ve just begun this exercise.”
Fellow co-chair Rep. Neal Foster, D-Nome, put it a little more diplomatically.
“We’re trying to push this out in a few days,” he said. “I feel a lot of what you might feel, which is that it’s going to be difficult to get up to speed, but we’re trying.”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
