There was very little about Monday’s push to pass a massive tax break for the 800-mile pipeline project connecting the North Slope’s gas fields to Southcentral that could be called good public process.
Under the gun to pass a bill by midnight or face a veto of the public pension bill — something most already assumed was destined for a veto — lawmakers in the House tried to not only slam through the AKLNG bill, but a coalition of industry-friendly legislators. Minority Republicans and a handful of centrist Majority members were in the driver’s seat for much of the process to ensure the product landed to the liking of the project backers.
Over the course of the day, they rejected attempts to create price protections or close tax loopholes while approving rollbacks of transparency provisions and removing a K-12 education fund from the bill.
The on-the-floor lawmaking meant the usual process of asking questions, getting information and wordsmithing wasn’t available — which, frankly, was probably the point.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy has been pressuring lawmakers to approve the massive subsidy for the 800-mile pipeline project before the end of session, deploying his trademark blitz of angry news conferences and social media ad buys. While legislators have been broadly supportive of the project, they’ve been wary about signing off on such large and long-term subsidies without better understanding on the project.
Lawmakers on Monday were left working on the fly, with some writing amendments by hand, as others regularly checked in with Glenfarne executives and the Dunleavy administration throughout the day.
“So, based on confirmation that this is an administrative headache to the developer, and they’re very happy with this amendment, I have no problem with it,” said House Majority Leader Chuck Kopp, an Anchorage Republican who caucuses with the Majority but spent much of Monday working hand-in-hand with Minority Republicans to control the process. “I support it.”
That was about an amendment that shifted the administration of a $40 million community impact aid fund from Glenfarne’s direct purview to the state. Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, said he worried that it’d leave too much discretion to determine what was and wasn’t an eligible expense for a local community, noting that it left the money in Glenfarne’s account. The amendment was accepted without a vote, but it was clear that if Glenfarne wanted to retain control of the fund, friendly lawmakers would have ensured that it was.
And while backers of the changes argued the prevailing legislation pulled from the House and Senate bills, not just the developer’s wishlist, it was developer-friendly on most of the big-ticket issues, such as the tax rate and the ramp-up window.
The precarious plot eventually came crashing down after an amendment by Rep. Robyn Frier — the co-chair of the House Resources Committee, who spent much of the day watching her work be undone or ignored — restored provisions that would allow the North Slope and Kenai Peninsula boroughs to negotiate directly with the project developers for alternative tax rates. Because of prior changes to the bill, the amendment was missing key pieces to work, requiring either another amendment or the undo button. Kopp went for the undo button, seeking to reverse the amendment, but failed on a 20-20 vote after House Minority Leader DeLena Johnson, R-Palmer, broke with the industry-friendly crowd and voted against taking it up again.
Stuck with a provision the developers didn’t like and the logistically technical challenge of crafting a cleanup amendment, the House eventually switched gears to other bills as the clock ticked past the point at which anything could realistically have happened.
It was always a long shot, and pro-industry lawmakers ultimately missed.
And that’s not to mention the challenge of getting the whole thing through the Senate, whose input on the subsidy plan would have been reduced to a simple up-or-down concurrence vote. While Senate lawmakers tried to play along, leaving the door open until 10 p.m., they were none too pleased about the process.
“You don’t circumvent the finance committees and play gamesmanship on a multibillion-dollar project and inject uncalculable risk to the investors just for some political gain on a deadline for the next two days,” Sitka Republican Sen. Bert Stedman told Alaska Public Media ahead of the vote. “That’s crazy. I think they’ve done a lot of damage playing around with this sleazy politics.”
In its final meeting of the session, the Senate Resources Committee met to advance its version of the AKLNG project — a much less generous plan for the developers — with several members decrying developments in the House, describing them as “groping around in the dark.”
“We’ve done our best,” said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, of the Senate bill. “I think it’s a good product. It’s a product I could support on the floor. The bill that’s moving in the House? There’s no way I could support that bill if it comes over as-is.”
With lawmakers having failed to get the AKLNG bill to the governor’s desk by midnight, he delivered his promised veto of House Bill 78, the public pension bill.
Why it matters
Frankly, the problem with the whole thing is that the overlap between legislators who wanted both an industry-friendly subsidy for the AKLNG project and the public pension bill was limited to Rep. Chuck Kopp and a handful of other centrists. Conservatives trust the industry, want subsidies and no pension, while progressives and moderates are pro-pension, more skeptical of the industry and lukewarm to subsidies.
Ultimately, the AKLNG backers will likely get their legislation, whether over the next few days or in a special session, but they’ll hopefully have to face a little more scrutiny than this take-it-or-leave-it, fire-sale approach that was tried on Monday. It’s yet to be seen where the votes are in the Senate on all of this, but it’s unlikely that this approach would have won them many on-the-fence votes.
Plus, frankly, there are some legislators, like Stedman, who vehemently oppose the pension altogether and will see Monday night’s failure as a win.
What’s next
I doubt legislators will put much more of the remaining two days into the AKLNG bill, especially when it’s already consumed a full day that could have been spent on just about anything else. There’s still interest in avoiding a special session, but now that the pressure’s off, I doubt the Senate will be particularly eager to rubberstamp whatever emerges from the House.
As for the pension bill, its demise was expected. After all, this is a governor who was found by the Alaska Supreme Court to be operating with “abundant evidence of anti-union animus.” That it was held out as leverage is interesting, but it was always expected that pensions — as with a litany of working-class reforms in Alaska — will need to wait until the next governor.
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.
