Linking Alaska’s Resources to Alaska’s People 36 2024 Meet Alaska Conference & Trade Show Unconventional, innovative ideas led to success The Alaska Support Industry Alliance turns 45 this year after decades of advocacy on behalf of its members. What the organization does most effectively is sending a message to Alaska’s elected officials that the state’s oil and gas industry is more than large companies, and that it includes hundreds of mostly locally-owned medium-sized and small companies who employ thousands of Alaskans. They are constituents of the politicians. Oil and gas are important to Alaska. Production from the North Slope has provided billions of dollars of royalty and tax revenue to the state, making possible a huge array of public services with no statewide broad-based tax as well as the annual Permanent Fund Dividend, a direct annual payment that is particularly important to low-income Alaskans. In Cook Inlet, where the Alaskan industry began in 1957, the continued operation of offshore oil platforms and the onshore and offshore gas fields provides the energy for space heating and electrical generation, as well as the state’s main supply of gasoline and jet fuel that supports a growing air cargo industry at Anchorage’s airport. None of this can be taken for granted, however. Almost as soon as Alaska’s oil was discovered in the 1950s and 1960s, out-of-state groups with special interests arrived and began working to throttle the economic engine driving the state’s growth, oil and gas. Closing off the state’s oil revenue and oil activity would slow the economy and the migration of working-age people to Alaska. Without the prospect of good jobs, over time people would leave. Eventually Alaska would essentially become a vast park with beautiful land, but few jobs that pay family wages, the kind needed to retain young people. It is this dire future that the Alliance works to avoid by reminding government leaders that their actions affect thousands of ordinary working Alaskans. This is important because in Alaska the oil and gas industry lacks the kind of natural constituency that it has in most other states. In those places the industry produces mostly on private lands. Farmers and ranchers who are land and royalty owners are quick to mobilize when their producers are threatened. This isn’t the case in Alaska. Here the state owns the land where most oil and gas production take place. Royalties are paid to the state treasury. Alaska citizens are affected when the industry hits headwinds, but the connection is indirect and not often well understood or recognized. The Alliance reminds elected officials that they have an Alaska constituency affected directly when bad things happen. The Alliance gives a voice to workers in them, the service companies and support companies. It took a while for this to happen, however. The Alliance had not yet been formed but its major activity — advocacy — came out in full force at the 1979 joint federal-state lease sale on the slope. This was a combined offering, the first of its kind, of prospective undeveloped acreage offshore where the large oil finds had been made onshore. It was also the first time that opposition groups had organized to oppose an expansion of exploration and development, particularly offshore where the operating conditions were difficult. The lease sales survived the initial lawsuits against the state and federal governments, but the opponents were also focused on urging the agencies to put stipulations, or conditions, on new leases that would make them difficult to develop. Larger Alaska companies, particularly ARCO Alaska, were worried that an outpouring of opposition at public hearings held by the agencies might lead to those stipulations being attached, particularly if only a handful of large companies based out of state At 45 years, The Alliance celebrates Webb’s legacy
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