The Tetlin Native Corporation has posted a press release on its website making serious allegations about parties involved in the mineral lease that underlies the Kinross plan to truck ore to Fairbanks.

The many legal issues will be sorted out if and when the dispute over the mining lease ever goes to court.

As for the political and ethical issues, the court of public opinion will come into play.

One of the central issues, it seems to me, is whether the people of Tetlin were treated fairly in this matter from the start. There is reason to believe they were not, having entered negotiations with an experienced Texas promoter at a serious disadvantage.

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Enstar, a company owned by Canadian public pension investment funds, is trying to take over efforts to build a small diamater in-state natural gas pipeline that could require an Alaska state subsidy of $8 billion or more to keep Anchorage heating costs about the same.

Nat Herz of the Northern Journal has the story. Herz is doing a lot of good work on energy and politics. I suggest you read this one thoroughly.

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The oil tax for Cook Inlet is permanently capped at $1 a barrel. The natural gas tax for Cook Inlet is permanently capped at 18 cents per thousand cubic feet.

The miniscule state taxes are supposed to be an economic incentive to drill for more gas in Cook Inlet.

With the looming natural gas shortage and the prospect of importing natural gas to supply Alaska utilities, some Republican leaders say the obvious solution is to make the taxes more miniscule or eliminate them altogether.

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The department has ensnared itself in a bureaucratic knot, fully aware that Dunleavy wants to say “Yes” to anything and everything Kinross wants.

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The Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation’s makeshift plan for a temporary new 1,200-square-foot office in Anchorage is what happens when bloated political egos get in the way of what should be the only priority of the trustees—overseeing the management of a $75 billion fund.

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The trustees, meeting this week in Juneau, need to explain to Alaskans exactly how and why they gave a policy directive to the staff—one that directly led to Chief Operating Officer Mike Barnhill quitting his job—a month after they met in public and declined to take that step.

I suspect that Gov. Mike Dunleavy inserted himself into the process and orchestrated events that led to the bizarre Permanent Fund press release on Aug. 10, the one that promised the fund will "open a satellite office in Anchorage as soon as possible to support the retention and recruitment of professional staff.”

The governor may have intervened on his own or at the request of one or more of the trustees who called him in for political muscle to demand instant action.

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I’d like to see the Daily News-Miner start to use its pages to tell its real story: “Not owned by a vulture hedge fund” would be a good slogan for an ad campaign.

The best thing the newspaper has going is that it is locally owned by a nonprofit that is not trying to bleed the place dry and is focused on keeping the paper going. It deserves support.

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Borough Chief of Staff Jim Williams says there was a ”breakdown in the exercise of authority to request protestors to move” Saturday outside the Carlson Center.

City police officers, who said the were acting on behalf of Kinross, threatened a group of protesters with arrest if they did not leave the parking lot where the Kinross truck was parked.

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Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor has resurrected the mutual legal aid society that met statewide opposition on legal and ethical grounds when Dunleavy floated it during the Kevin Clarkson era of justice.

All of the public comments submitted to the state in 2019-2020 were opposed to the plan and it was never adopted.

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There was almost no press coverage of the golden shovel ceremony in Tetlin Tuesday that brought Gov. Mike Dunleavy and top executives of Kinross and Contango ORE to mark the start of the Manh Choh mine project.

The local TV stations had a brief story, but there was nothing in the Daily News-Miner and no press release from Dunleavy, any state agency or Kinross.

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