|
French files for release of gas contract
A state senator is Alaska State Sen. Hollis French, D-Anchorage, filed for an injunction in Juneau April 21 asking the Superior Court to force the release of a natural gas contract between Gov. Frank Murkowski and the state’s three largest oil producers.
He asked the court to issue an order making public the long-term fiscal agreement, which is a key step in building a $20 billion pipeline to take stranded North Slope gas south through Canada to Lower 48 markets. French said he considered legal action the last step after he was denied two public-records requests. He said he would still like the governor “do the right thing” and release the contract on his own.
Murkowski spokeswoman Becky Hultberg said administration officials have no plans to release details of the contract outside of their own timeline. Since then the governor has said he will release the proposed contract on May 10.
Tax based on net profits The natural gas deal was negotiated in secret under the state’s Stranded Gas Development Act.
Murkowski announced in February that all parties had agreed to the provisions in the contract, but the deal remained under wraps while the governor introduced a bill to replace the state’s oil production tax with one based on energy companies’ net profits.
The new tax is to be incorporated into the contract and locked in for 30 years, Murkowski has said.
In an April 9 denial to French’s public records request, Murkowski Chief of Staff Jim Clark wrote that the gas contract would not be complete until the Legislature finished its work on the tax bill. Technical changes are also being written into the contract, Clark wrote.
BP spokesman Ronnie Chappell also said the contract wasn’t finished, although he declined to say what was still lacking since the Feb. 21 announcement that an agreement had been reached.
French: deal should be public now French said the gas deal should be made public now so lawmakers can see how the new petroleum profits tax, or PPT, they are considering fits into the contract. It would be the state’s most significant change to the tax structure in decades, with hundreds of millions in annual tax revenue at stake.
There is nothing in law keeping the contract from becoming public; the only confidentiality provision in the Stranded Gas Development Act is to protect documents that reveal negotiating secrets, French said in his legal document.
—The Associated Press
| 