capital focus

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BG’s David Keane just finished a presentation to the Senate Resources Committee. The company put a bunch of money into studying a gas pipeline project and worked on a proposal under AGIA but ultimately didn’t apply because of underlying regulatory and resource risks. More »

I got something wrong in my last post about when to change the gas tax. Here is Pat Galvin’s explanation:

In the hearing yesterday, I said that a year ago when we were bringing forward AGIA I had told them that we were focused on gasline issues, and that we had not yet spent much time on tax issues. At that time, I had told them that my confidence level in the gas tax rate was not high, because we had not yet looked at it. The tax rate was not critical because AGIA locked in the rate that would be in place at the time of the initial open season, giving us time to make any necessary changes. More »

Before I came down here, I assumed gas line talk was going to heat up at the end of the session. Wrong. It’s pretty much the big item down here already.
Here’s my take on a few of the issues floating around. More »

Don’t people read my stories?
Sen. Charlie Huggins brought up the Mogel memo on TransCanada’s application at today’s floor session as if it was hot news. Actually, Sen. Gene Therriault mentioned it on the floor last week, and I wrote a story about it this weekend. More »

Remember last year how lawmakers described education funding, the PERS/TRS fix, and revenue sharing as three legs of one stool? The idea was that each component was more or less important depending on where you lived — the PERS/TRS fix would really help urban areas, for instance — so lawmakers looked for ways to balance the benefits in the separate bills, and stopped short of passing one without the others lest lawmakers lose interest once they got the part they liked.
So . . . the three pieces are back this year. More »

The Anchorage Daily News this morning blasted the Susitna dam project, calling it a “boondoggle” and recommending it “be put back in the crypt where it belongs.”
Ouch.
The editorial argues that a gas pipeline would be a better bet, providing heating and real economic development opportunities in addition to electricity. Then it argued against putting all your eggs in one mega-project.
Steve Haagenson, the recently retired head of Golden Valley Electric Association, took issue with the assessment.
“They did not even look at the reality around them,” he told me. More »

I don’t remember there being this much trouble last year.
Lawmakers and now the governor are in something of a tiff over her budget proposal, how she’s portrayed it, and, ultimately, how big it is. Or rather, how much bigger it is than last year’s.
Palin of course continues to promise fiscal restraint, but lawmakers are charging that her budget represents a big jump in spending over last year. More »

The Senate minority passed out an “AGIA timeline” at their morning presser, which raised a good question — What is the plan?
The public comment period on the TransCanada pipeline proposal runs through March 6. After that, the administration has as long as it needs or wants to decide whether to recommend issuing a license to TransCanada. Once the administration announces it wants to issue a license (assuming it does), lawmakers will have 60 days to vote on it.
The public comment period started weeks ago, so where are the public hearings? 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.