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November 2008

Vol. 13, No. 46 Week of November 16, 2008

40 Years at Prudhoe Bay: Alaskans remember Prudhoe Bay — Gov. Jay Hammond

Nancy Pounds

Most Alaskans don’t remember what Alaska’s economy looked like before the discovery and development of Prudhoe Bay. Only 14 percent of about 670,000 Alaskans today lived in the state in 1968, the year of the Prudhoe Bay discovery, according to Scott Goldsmith, economics professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research. So nearly nine out of every 10 residents today know little about Alaska prior to major development on the North Slope, he said. Goldsmith compared 1968 and 2008 in a recent report called, “How North Slope oil has transformed Alaska’s economy.” A few longtime Alaskans, participants and decision-makers during Alaska’s major economic changes, recently recalled events of the era.

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Nearly all Alaskans receive the Permanent Fund dividend, an ongoing economic legacy from an investment fund created with oil revenue from the Prudhoe Bay oil field and other North Slope development.

Former governor Jay Hammond, who died in 2005, is considered author of the fund. The Alaska Permanent Fund has a history of controversy yet its “no-small-change” annual dividend has repercussions for retailers, banks and other businesses.

Hammond arrived in Alaska in 1946 and worked as a bush pilot, commercial fisherman, trapper and wilderness guide before entering politics. Hammond was a member of the state House of Representatives from 1959 to 1965, then a state senator from 1967 to 1972. He was mayor of the Bristol Bay Borough from 1972 to 1974. And he served as governor from 1974 to 1982 — intense years of the state’s oil rush.

“You might question his policies, but you could never doubt his love for Alaska,” Arliss Sturgulewski said.

Hammond speaks from his 1994 autobiography, “Tales of Alaska’s Bush Rat Governor.”

“To the United States, with its insatiable appetites, Prudhoe Bay’s billions of barrels of oil (were) heralded as but one more fat item on the energy menu. But to Alaskans, it was seen as the end of dark poverty and the dawn of prosperity,” he wrote. “As Alaskans eagerly awaited the ‘boom’ after so many decades of ‘bust,’ thousands from elsewhere began flooding the Greatland, detonating a population boom of their own.”

Hammond pushed the proposed dividend for several years amid controversy and many changes. In his book, he described his view of its economic significance.

“The dividend is capitalism that works for Alaska. In a state where locals traditionally watch in frustration as most resource wealth goes Outside, the dividend’s grassroots ‘trickle up’ distribution now accounts for the largest new capital infusion into Alaska’s local economies each year,” Hammond wrote.

Editor’s Note: Jay Hammond served Alaska as governor from 1974 to 1982, the years during which Alaska built an incredible oil pipeline, banked a large amount of the oil lease revenues, as well as created the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend Program.






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