ANGDA gets funding, not board members

The Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority will live to see another year, but still faces challenges as it tries to operate without a quorum on its board of directors.

Gov. Sean Parnell kept a $319,000 allocation for the public corporation of the State of Alaska in his fiscal year 2012 operating budget, giving ANGDA enough money to meet its projected expenses for the coming year with a little bit left over for new contracts.

ANGDA finished out fiscal year 2011 with around $376,000 in the bank. With the $319,000 budget allocation and nearly $145,000 saved by cancelled or reducing existing contracts, ANGDA goes into fiscal year 2012 with more than $840,000 on hand.

After spending the $592,000 required for payroll and basic operating expenses, ANGDA expects to have less than $250,000 available for new capital projects this coming year.

Among its ongoing contracts funded from previous allocations, ANGDA plans to continue funding its effort to set up a propane distribution network using resources from the North Slope and its efforts to improve gas supplies for utilities in the Railbelt.

President and CEO Harold Heinze previously said that with the $319,000 appropriation, ANGDA could also continue open season negotiations on two gas pipelines.

Heinze and his staff will do much of that work on their own, though.

The ANGDA board of directors is unable to hold meetings because it currently doesn’t have the four members required by statute for reaching a quorum. At its last meeting, in June, the four sitting board members at the time anticipated that possibility and preemptively gave Heinze the authority to issue small contracts without board approval.

Parnell made two appointments to the ANGDA board last summer and early fall, but none since being elected to his first full term in office last November. ANGDA made several requests to discuss the issue with the governor, but received no response.

The Parnell administration said it has not made any decisions regarding ANGDA.

—Eric Lidji