What secret promises have been made to Glenfarne?
Late Monday, after Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed the pension bill that he was using as a bargaining chip in the gas pipeline tax cut campaign, the Anchorage Daily News reported, “With the veto, it is unclear whether lawmakers will move forward with legislation intended to give tax breaks to project developers.”
That makes it more likely that Dunleavy will call a special session to try to get the tax break approved.
Two months into the debate over Dunleavy’s 90 percent tax cut plan, there’s a lot we don’t know.
It would help all concerned if Alaskans were allowed to find out what secret promises have been made to Glenfarne by the state and why.
Those promises may contain details of what circumstances would trigger a situation in which the state must pay Glenfarne for its work on the project if it does not decide to build a pipeline.
The public and legislators are forbidden from seeing the contract that the Alaska Gasline Development Corp. signed with Glenfarne.
No one has given a believable explanation as to why this deal is treated as a state secret.
That Glenfarne and the Dunleavy administration prefer stonewalling to transparency is not a justification.
We also don’t know how much the pipeline is supposed to cost. That is another secret that no one can explain. The company claims it can’t reveal key economic details for competitive reasons. It does this while it also claims that state officials don’t need key economic details before cutting taxes.
The Senate Resources Committee has done a good job in investigating this complex project to answer some of the questions that are vital to Alaska. But key information has been withheld.
Reveal the underlying promises made on our behalf to Glenfarne and publish the updated cost estimate of the project. Then the Legislature will be closer to having the information it needs to act.
About that pension bill
By the way, the veto message from Dunleavy about the pension bill reeks of hypocrisy.
He had told lawmakers he would allow the return of a defined benefit pension system for public employees to become law if they gave him the gas pipeline tax cut.
But in his veto message, he claimed that the Legislature needed to provide revenue to pay for long-term spending obligations that would come with the pension system and failed to do so.
House Speaker Bryce Edgmon noted that Dunleavy didn’t introduce his tax cut plan until the third week of March and “lawmakers were asked to take it up in the middle of session while balancing budgets and addressing numerous other urgent priorities facing the state."
"HB 78, the pension bill, should stand on its own merits," he said. "Alaska’s public employee retirement crisis is real, and the bipartisan effort to restore a reasonable pension system should never have been leveraged against unrelated gasline legislation. These are separate policy issues with separate consequences for Alaska’s future."