Speaker of the House Mike Chenault’s opinion editorial stating that the governor is not communicating in the Alaska LNG Project garnered a written response from Bill Walker Friday.
The governor sent Alaska’s 60 House and Senate members a letter responding to the Speaker’s analysis of his actions, stating: “I reject your assumption that I have not been forthcoming about my intentions.”
Gov. Walker: “My door’s wide open if anybody wants to come and see me they do and we have lots of meetings with legislators when they stop by. About a week or four or five days before that op-ed came out, we provided about 50-pages of analysis to the legislature on the Trans-Canada buy out.”
In Chenault’s critique last week, he penned that the governor has shown his unwillingness to work with the project partners. He stated “We’ve gone from steady progress and diligent work to advance a critical project, to uncertainty, ambiguity, lack of communication and facing another year without a vote to advance the pipeline process to its next stage.”
Governor Walker says he was working on project certainty by requiring gas committed to the project.
Gov. Walker: “I had hoped to have that from the producers before the announcement of the special session, it’s been something I’ve been talking about since about a week after I was sworn in. I didn’t receive that so I went ahead and put on a provision that’s referred to as a reserves tax.”
Walker said his proposed natural gas reserve tax bill will be distributed to legislators “as soon as they are ready.”
The legislature is slated to address the particulars of the Alaska LNG project in a special session that will begin October 24.
Read Speaker Chenault’s full opinion editorial by clicking here.