The Alaska Constitution requires natural resources to be managed for the maximum benefit of Alaskans, not private investors.
Updated: 15 minutes agoGov. Mike Dunleavy, left, and Brendan Duval, CEO and founder of Glenfarne Group LLC, talk about construction of an Alaska LNG pipeline during the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference at the Dena'ina Center in Anchorage on Thursday, June 5, 2025.
by 90% for the Alaska LNG pipeline. The discount would last for the lifetime of the project — 30 years or more. Alaska has never done anything like it. The state normally levies a 20-mill property tax on oil and gas infrastructure.
The governor’s bill would exempt the pipeline from that tax and instead impose a small tax on the gas flowing through it. Under current law, the project would owe nearly $1 billion per year. By 2042, the Department of Revenue projects the state’s share would fall from $8.4 billion to $829 million, and local governments’ share from $5.7 billion to $728 million. Not once.
Every year. For a generation. Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel called it a pretty big ask. She is right.
But the size of the ask is not the real issue. The real issue is the Alaska Constitution. Article VIII was the first article ever written into a state constitution to deal solely with natural resources. Fifty-five delegates drafted it in Fairbanks in 1955 and 1956.
Section 2 reads: “The legislature shall provide for the utilization, development, and conservation of all natural resources belonging to the State, including land and waters, for the maximum benefit of its people. ” For the maximum benefit of its people. Not for the developer’s maximum benefit. Not for the maximum benefit of a New York investment firm.
For the people. The delegates who wrote those words knew what they were doing. Alaska had spent decades watching outside commercial interests extract its resources while Alaskans bore the costs and saw little of the return. The fish trap was the symbol of that era — Outside-owned canneries hauling salmon out of Alaska’s waters while local fishermen struggled to make a living.
Territorial Gov. Ernest Gruening called it exploitation by absentee interests. The constitutional convention put an end to fish traps and enshrined the principle in Article VIII: Alaska’s natural resources are a public trust, to be managed for the common good. Glenfarne Energy Transition, the New York-based company developing Alaska LNG, acquired a 75% ownership stake in the project last year.
The state-owned Alaska Gasline Development Corp. retains 25%. Glenfarne has told lawmakers this is a private-sector project — that the company will bear all costs, secure all investors and accept all risks. If that is true, it raises a straightforward question: Why does a privately financed, privately profitable project need the largest property tax reduction in Alaska history?
The governor says the revenue from the gas tax is more than the zero the state collects if the project is never built. That arithmetic is correct. But arithmetic is not the same as principle. The question is not whether something is better than nothing.
The question is whether the people of Alaska are getting a fair return on a resource that belongs to them. The gas under the North Slope was there before Glenfarne arrived. It will be there long after. The 55 delegates who gathered in Fairbanks in 1955 had seen what happens when a territory lets its resources walk out the door in someone else’s pocket.
They wrote a constitution to make sure it would not happen again. Article VIII was their answer. It was a promise to every Alaskan who would come after them — that the wealth beneath their feet would serve the people who live above it. Evan Swensen is the founder of Publication Consultants in Anchorage and the author of “End Property Tax.
” He has been an Alaskan since 1957. The Anchorage Daily News welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email
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