A figurative game of chess appears to be happening between the Alaska LNG and ASAP Pipelines.
Governor Bill Walker ordered a 45 day review of the Alaska LNG Project in early April, the motives of which appear to be unknown.
In a recent move, Legislature took the unspent funds from the ASAP gasline development fund and reallocated the money to education funding.
Now, if the Governor vetoes that line item and restores gasline funding, he’ll be doing so at the expense of public schools.
Speaker of the House Mike Chenault explained why the legislature did that.
Spkr. Chenault: “We have not had a detailed plan that has had hearings in the legislature about what the governor’s proposing that he wants to spend this money on. And that’s upwards of $85 million. Any other plan that’s out there that we have funded, we have had hearings to determine: is it a good project? Is it a place that we should be spending money? How are we going to spend that money? And what do we stand to receive?”
Chenault insists that he and the governor are not bickering, Walker has asked to be on the speaker’s bowling league, but Chenault says the ASAP project is competition to the LNG terminus planned for Nikiski.
Larry Persily, the special oil and gas assistant to the borough mayor and former Department of Revenue deputy commissioner, said the slick move by lawmakers didn’t surprise him.
Persily: “Legislative opponents of the governor’s proposed back-up project lost that battle where the governor vetoed the bill[HB 132] which would have stopped work on that project[ASAP], the legislature did not have enough votes to override it but they’re politically shrewd and they essentially said OK governor, we can’t stop you from working on the project but we’ll take the money away.”
He added that he hopes the game quits before it negatively affects the project but right now it appears to be the governor’s move.
