capital focus

JUNEAU–Should state lawmakers be able to raise money for federal office during a legislative session?

Rep. Kevin Meyer, a Republican from Anchorage, says no.

“It seems to me like it’s just common sense,” he said Tuesday. “You don’t want somebody handing you a check the same time they’re asking for your support on a bill.” More »

Sen. Gary Wilken of Fairbanks says he’ll encourage members of the Interior delegation to say No to a $100 million state crime lab unless lawmakers also get behind the $113 million biological sciences facility proposed for the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus.
“If we can build a crime lab, we can build a research facility,” he said.
The crime lab proposal comes from Palin and involves getting the money by issuing bonds. While Wilken and other Fairbanks lawmakers have sought direct appropriations in the past, Wilken says bonds could work for BIOS, too.

Brian Wenzel of ConocoPhillips told the House Resources Committee this afternoon that his company was looking for 20 to 25 years of certainty on gas taxes to get a gas line going. The length of time is based on the expectation that gas leaseholders would have to commit to ship their gas for that long to enable the project financing.
If leaseholders are going to make a financial commitment worth potentially $150 billion, Wenzel said, “We ought to be able to take out that one form of uncertainty.” More »

Gov. Sarah Palin has responded to ConocoPhillips’ gas line proposal with a series of documents prepared by her gas line team and provided to lawmakers on the Senate Resources Committee. The documents include an overview of the proposal, a 17-page critique of it, and a list of nine “Questions Alaskans should ask ConocoPhillips.” More »

There’s been a lot of talk down here about airing out the gas line proposals that didn’t make it. Senate Resources will kick things off with a presentation this afternoon by ConocoPhillips, and House Republicans are also planning meetings.
Some of the impetus is to learn everything possible about pipeline economics and so on, but some is clearly to compare Conoco’s and other companies’ proposals against TransCanada’s, the only one that passed the AGIA test.
The hearings could be expected, but they also seem to reflect something of a distrust in the AGIA process.
My bad, said Joe Balash on Monday. More »

Last year, Rep. Jay Ramras was a Wal-Mart kind of gas line guy.
If you have a big open lot in a prime retail area, he argued, don’t put a McDonald’s in the middle of it — build a Wal-Mart and add the restaurant later. That is, don’t mess around with a 2 bcf all-Alaska line when the state could earn much more money from a 4 bcf line through Canada. More »

JUNEAU — Local government leaders from across Alaska are diving back into two key funding debates this week in Juneau. More »

JUNEAU — Residents near Ester Dome will soon have a new option for high-speed Internet service a little more than a year after Alaska Wireless cut its service in the area. More »

JUNEAU — The head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission made it clear Friday that state rules dictating how oil and gas fields are developed won’t stand in the way of a large-scale natural gas pipeline. More »

JUNEAU — When Rep. Scott Kawasaki came to Juneau last year as a freshman lawmaker, he was “kind of wide-eyed, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” he said Wednesday, referring to the 1939 classic starring James Stewart. “You want to stand up on the floor and say it like it is.” More »