A Citizen’s Guide

TAXING: During an oil tax hearing Friday afternoon in the House Finance Committee, a question came up about whether the new plan is an income tax, a production tax or something else.

If our lawmakers don’t know what to call the tax at this stage of the proceedings, that’s a sign that they need to slow down.

They should not be pressured into taking final action in the next four days on a measure that means so much to Alaska’s future.

Instead, they should get the regular end-of-the-session deals and vote swapping out of the way.

The risk is that a bloated capital budget, with extra pork all around, may be used to line up votes on oil taxes. Our lawmakers must remember that Alaskans deserve a transparent process.

Lawmakers should stop working on oil and gas taxes immediately and take up the issue again Wednesday, when the special session starts.

From a distance of 625 miles, this seems like a sensible action, one that may not appear so obvious to lawmakers confined to the Capitol during the final days of an intense session.

The advantage of a delay on oil taxes is that by the middle of next week, lawmakers should have their hands on the gas line contract negotiated by the Murkowski administration. That’s the first step to fiscal certainty for Alaska.

The reason to consider oil taxes and the gas line contract at the same time is that the two are directly linked.

Everyone in Alaska who has seen an oil company ad in the past couple of months knows this.

The court order Friday was as direct as possible. “The contract shall be released to the public,” Juneau Superior Court Judge Larry Weeks said.

Whether the contract will be released before Wednesday is not known because the administration must give the oil companies a chance to be heard on the release of any proprietary information, which creates an opportunity for delay.

But BP, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips all know what is in the contract, so this is not a matter of the companies keeping secrets from each other.

No matter when the release takes place, lawmakers would be foolish to vote on oil taxes without seeing the gas line contract first.

As Judge Weeks put it, “It is hard to see how the Legislature can be cognizant of the risks and ramifications of the oil tax without seeing the contract that it will affect.” “The public as well as the Legislature has a right to know of the implications of the proposed contract on the oil and gas revenues of the state and how that will affect fiscal certainty,” Weeks said.

The judge is correct.