www.AlaskaAlliance.com 2024 Meet Alaska Conference & Trade Show 51 Forty years ago, when The Alliance was formed, it was a different world for Alaska, and the Legislature. North Slope oil production was still climbing and royalty and tax revenues were gushing into the state treasury. In 1984, some of this was flowing into the new Alaska Permanent Fund and the Permanent Fund Dividend had been created. State capital budgets, for construction, were soaring. Legislators worried about how to responsibly spend hundreds of millions of dollars annual of an oil windfall even with part of the money being saved in the Permanent Fund. A massive, multi-billion-dollar hydro project at Susitna was being considered (it was later shelved) but the state was building hydro projects in several coastal communities. Today these supply some of the lowest-cost power in Alaska. Rural legislators were pushing for construction of schools in small communities around the state, mostly Alaska Native. The schools were built, funded with oil money, so that children would have to leave their homes to go to boarding schools, in many cases in the Lower 48. Despite the huge influx of oil revenues, petroleum taxes were still a perennial topic. Many legislators felt Alaska was still not getting its “fair share” of profits from the North Slope, although no one could define what a fair share would be. Arguments over oil taxes would continue for years, and continue today. — Tim Bradner LOOKING BACK: 40 years later, legislators still discussing wide variety of topics
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==