Fairbanks borough considers energy projects fund

The Associated Press

Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor Jim Whitaker wants to set aside funds to support energy projects.

Whitaker said his proposal could turn into help for the Alaska Gasline Port Authority.

The proposal is part of a larger plan to support several projects using portion of a state grant the borough received nearly two years ago.

The proposed $2.8 million ordinance would give Whitaker the authority to spend as much as $636,139 on two agencies, including the port authority, a municipal organization created more than eight years ago to build a natural gas pipeline across the state.

The other agency is the Fairbanks-based nonprofit Alaska Sustainable Energy Center, created last year to help carry renewable energy projects and technology to market.

Whitaker said the ordinance could be tweaked to instead benefit another organization considering a commercial clean-coal project.

Either project, he said, would reduce long-term energy costs and save millions of dollars.

“We have no higher priority than to deal with our cost of energy,” he said.

The port authority this past fall submitted a plan, under the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, to the state for rights to build a gas pipeline. The state is reviewing the application and others submitted under the act.

Whitaker, chairman of the port authority’s board of directors, said the agency needs funding to pay its bills as the review progresses.

A significant grant from the borough to the port authority would be the first such payment in more than three years.

Whitaker’s proposal comes after Valdez Mayor Bert Cottle successfully lobbied the Valdez City Council to contribute $250,000 to the port authority. Cottle said the authority is keeping the issue of a gas pipeline on the state’s “front burner.”

“Without (it), there wouldn’t even be any talk of a gas line in Alaska,” he said of the authority, which was created by voters in Valdez, Fairbanks and the North Slope.