I love to see you voting. It’s beautiful, simple and easy with our Homer privilege. Definitely worth the free sticker.
There are some concerning large-scale threats facing us in the near future which do not appear on our ballots, and are worth more than a free sticker. There’s the leviathan STAK data center proposed on the melting permafrost of the North slope, because, well… it’s cold up there. Not as cold as it used to be. Almost all the electricity used by server hardware is converted into heat. The proposed 1.3 gigawatt STAK data center would generate a 1.3 gigawatt “’heat island,” the term experts use for the increased ground temperature around cities and facilities like the STAK project. For context, STAK would consume 13 times the peak electrical demand of the entire Kenai Peninsula, by burning more than twice the volume of natural gas used by all of urban Alaska.
Lots of folks are concerned about the natural gas supply in Southcentral Alaska as well. Hilcorp is the main producer in the area, with more than 80% of the active drilling operations. They enjoy a virtual monopoly and pay absolutely zero corporate income tax to the state of Alaska. Good news for owner Jeffery Hildebrant whose net worth has hit $15 Billion at the time I am writing this. More than one piece of legislation has been introduced that would require pass-through entities like Hilcorp, also known as S Corps, to pay a state income tax. When revisions to state tax code were proposed again in 2024, Hilcorp contacted the major Alaska utilities, citing a looming shortage of gas in its leases. Hilcorp claimed they would terminate their supply contracts if production became more expensive due to the same income tax that most other producers pay.
Luke Saugier, Hilcorp’s Senior VP for Alaska at the time, contacted every utility in Southcentral Alaska later the same year, “to provide an update on Southcentral gas supply in light of the Senate Resources Committee unexpectedly advancing an S Corp tax provision targeted at Hilcorp and other Cook Inlet gas producers.” He claims Hilcorp anticipates investing, “nearly a billion dollars or more on projects to maintain gas supply to Southcentral Alaska.” He threatened to reexamine that investment if the Alaska legislature attempts to close the S Corp loophole, and require Hilcorp to pay a corporate income tax. He did not clarify why Hilcorp would plan a huge investment in an oil field that was apparently drying up.
As the majority owner of oil and gas leases in Cook Inlet, Hilcorp’s pronouncement of an area-wide gas shortage has a chilling effect on investment in other producers’ projects, and helps protect Hilcorp’s monopoly. It is impossible to know for sure if these scarcity claims are true. The state of Alaska maintained an auditing provision built into oil and gas leases known as a Consent Decree. It would have allowed the state to assess whether Hilcorp was throttling gas production, creating artificial scarcity to drive up prices. The government allowed that clause to expire in 2024, and now has no authority to investigate.
Alaska’s former DNR Commissioner John Boyle threatened to revoke another gas operator’s lease on a promising field in Cook Inlet, another handout to Hilcorp in 2025. Boyle now works for STAK Energy, and ran for a seat in the Alaska legislature against the incumbent Ky Holland, who is an outspoken advocate for closing the S Corp loophole. Boyle’s campaign disclosures show substantial donations from Hilcorp’s Senior VP of Government and Public Affairs, from their Alaska VP, and from Luke Saugier- now Hilcorp’s Senior VP of Operations. It is worth noting that Hilcorp has signed an agreement to meet the huge gas demand from the STAK data center complex.
No laws were broken by this circle of mutual-enrichment, and this is not an isolated case, but an overarching trend in Alaska. Our natural resources are extracted to generate wealth for a small group of already-wealthy individuals, at the expense of clean air, water, and healthy ecosystems. The public is along for the ride even if we elect so-called progressive candidates.
Have you heard about the planned Donlin gold mine in the center of the Kuskokwim watershed? It would be the largest open-pit gold mine in the world. Separating gold from rock and earth requires a cyanide leaching process. The earthen dam required to leech gold from Donin’s tailings would be a 400 foot scar across the land where Indigenous communities are already coping with the collapse of the salmon populations they depend on. Donlin’s toxic cyanide lake will never go away.
Dr Steven Vick, a renowned tailings dam expert, explains that all tailings dams fail eventually, “…simply because there are too many opportunities for too many things to go wrong. In a statistical sense, all [mitigation] can do is push failure farther out in time. System failure must be accepted as inevitable.” In October of this year, the US Army Corp of Engineers issued an Environmental Impact Statement which said that even a partial dam failure would bury the nearby village of Crooked Creek within two hours, under 10 to 30 feet of toxic tailings. Crooked Creek would become uninhabitable and the disaster would result in, “loss of life.”
To be clear: every person on the state ballot supports these projects. Our current Governor is responsible for our Hilcorp-take-the-wheel policies and maintaining the S Corp loophole. At least Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins has indicated that he will think about it. Otherwise the Donlin mine, STAK and a variety of other bad ideas are becoming reality with political consensus.
Have you heard about the Terra Energy Center? Through the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) and the state legislature, millions of tax dollars and acres of land have been handed to an unholy corporate alliance proposing to build the only new coal-fired power plant in 20 years at the mouth of a coal mine- with a massive data center as its main customer. The selling point is that the already healthy MatSu power grid might soak up a few extra megawatts downstream of the data center.
What about the Johnson Tract gold mine? Tunneling has already begun into the side of Mt. Iliamna, which will require a commercial air strip, gravel pits, haul road, and a deep water dock to be built across Lake Clark National Park. This project would haul ore by barge, year-round through the only known winter foraging habitat of endangered Cook Inlet Beluga whales. Families have lived in the area and supported themselves with set-net fisheries for generations. The mine is slated to operate for just seven years, but it will change the East side of the Inlet permanently.
I love to see you voting, it’s a great start. Kwame Ture famously spoke about the misconception of voting every few years as political responsibility, reminding us that, “Politics is every day … every minute.” Decades later, Dr. Hortense Spillers added, “God damn it, it’s not over yet. We’re still doing civil rights.” Environmental stewardship, politics, and civil rights overlap in the state of Alaska. A multi-national conglomerate building a 400-foot toxic lake upstream from the food source your relatives have stewarded for centuries, regardless of your feelings on the matter, is a great and terrible example. I am tired of hearing the ‘jobs’ argument. Even the best jobs are temporary. Toxic waste is forever.
Barnard Smith is an Anchor Point resident.
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