The deficit is growing because oil prices have collapsed at the dawn of the Golden Age of Alaska.

Dunleavy took note of the drop in a May 6 letter to the finance committee leaders in the Legislature, saying there will be “hundreds of millions dollars less coming into the state treasury.”

The state’s March update to the oil price guessbook has been cast aside.

“We should only be focused on the most critical items to preserve our reduced cash flows and liquid reserves in this lower price environment,” Dunleavy told legislators.

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Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who thinks he has all the answers, doesn’t trust locally elected school boards, mayors, borough assemblies, teachers, administrators and families. They are not under his control and they don’t share his opinions on some key policy matters.

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Sen. Bill Wielechowski said he was handed a copy of the draft bill directly by the governor in 2023.

He also said that Dunleavy had asked him to introduce bills to close the Hilcorp loophole, because Hilcorp would not provide its North Slope gas, and to reduce oil tax credits.

All of these ideas were examined in detail by the Dunleavy administration, but the governor’s spokesman has repeatedly denied it happened.

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More oil and gas production in Alaska will never happen unless prices are high enough to produce big profits, a contradiction buried at the heart of the energy dominance scam.

What is more noteworthy is that the GOP is trying to ban court challenges of any government action and allow oil companies to get expedited treatment if they pay for environmental reviews. The plan is a radical one that deserves thorough analysis in Alaska.

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Some Republicans and nearly all of the Senate Democrats are supporting closing the Hilcorp loophole, though it may stall because Democrat Matt Claman says his constituents don’t want higher oil taxes.

As I’ve written here before, that is not a good excuse on the easiest oil tax vote in the history of oil tax votes. The situation is only going to get worse. This is just one of the tax changes the state has to face.

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The Alaska Department of Revenue needs to admit that the state’s financial plight during the opening months of the “Golden Age of Alaska” is far worse than the Dunleavy administration guessed in March.

Falling oil prices are swelling the Dunleavy deficit by the day.

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Sen. Bill Wielechowski is correct in saying it was the Dunleavy administration that came up with the idea for SB 113, which would change state law so that some tax income from businesses with more than half of their income online would be apportioned to Alaska.

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I understand why Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum would want to keep the public from knowing that he took unauthorized leave in the first week of April. But the revenue department should never have made the ridiculous claim that this information is a state secret.

Alaskans deserve to know whether it was Crum who made the decision to redact a public document to conceal what happened.

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Rep. Nick Begich the Third joined about three dozen other Republicans in calling for repealing the entire Inflation Reduction Act and its renewable energy subsidies.

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Assembly member Barbara Haney should have declared that she is in no position to be impartial about Savannah Fletcher and declared a conflict of interest.

Instead, she said, “I think I can be fair.”

All the evidence says otherwise.

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