By SUZANNE DOWNING
Aug. 13, 2026 – Gov. Mike Dunleavy appears to be throwing in the towel on the latest special session after legislative leaders refused to return to Juneau to consider his final compromise on the Alaska LNG project.
In a sharply worded Facebook post Tuesday, Dunleavy blamed the Legislature for failing to act on the property tax changes that project developer Glenfarne says are necessary to finance construction of the North Slope gas pipeline.
Update: On Wednesday, he doubled down: “Since the leadership of the legislature has chosen not to attend the special session to advance the AKLNG gasline project that could bring jobs, investment, and a stronger future for Alaska, there’s little reason to keep the session going. I will not continue to watch public dollars spent for a special session when legislative leaders decline to work on my bill, any bill, to finally bring more affordable energy to Alaskans.”
“The Legislature’s decision to not return to Juneau to take action on the proposed property tax change needed to advance the Alaska natural gas pipeline project is deeply disappointing and has consequences that extend well beyond this session,” Dunleavy wrote on Tuesday.
The statements read like a postmortem on a special session that never gained momentum.
Dunleavy had asked lawmakers to reconvene in Juneau on Aug. 20 to take up his latest proposal. But the House majority coalition said the legislation did not have enough support to pass, with opposition coming from members of both the majority and minority.
The governor’s bill represented a substantial concession to the legislative majority. Although Dunleavy has repeatedly opposed imposing a new corporate income tax on privately held oil and gas companies, his compromise retained an S-corporation tax — one of the majority’s central demands.
The proposed tax would have been a flat 2%, rather than the higher graduated rate sought by some lawmakers, and would have taken effect in 2030 or when commercial gas first began flowing through the pipeline.
The proposal was otherwise largely identical to the conference committee version lawmakers debated earlier this summer. It also removed a provision that could have reduced state education funding to boroughs receiving revenue from the pipeline’s proposed throughput tax.
But even after Dunleavy accepted the principle of an S-corporation tax, legislative leaders declined to return to Juneau.
The governor’s subsequent statement contained no indication that further negotiations with the majority were expected. Instead, he warned Alaskans that the cost of the Legislature’s inaction will eventually appear in household utility bills, school budgets, business expenses and the reliability of the Railbelt energy system.
“Alaska is running out of affordable, reliable natural gas,” Dunleavy wrote. “This is a long-standing issue that has grown more urgent over decades of inaction. Delaying action only increases risk, raises costs, and limits future options.”
Cook Inlet natural gas production has been declining for years, while Southcentral utilities are preparing to import liquefied natural gas to fill the approaching supply gap.
ENSTAR President John Sims recently said imported LNG could cost approximately $22 per thousand cubic feet, compared with the utility’s current gas cost of about $10.80. ENSTAR says approximately 80% of a customer’s bill reflects the cost of the gas itself, meaning substantially higher wholesale prices will be passed along to families and businesses. The utility has identified the Alaska LNG pipeline as the strongest long-term option for stabilizing the region’s energy supply.
“The impacts will be felt across the state — by families, military installations, schools, hospitals, universities, and businesses,” Dunleavy wrote. “Reliable, affordable energy is essential to Alaska’s economic stability and quality of life.”
Dunleavy also warned that Alaska’s inability to settle the tax structure sends a troubling message beyond Juneau.
“This delay also sends a negative signal to investors and potential partners in Alaska, the nation, and around the world,” he wrote. “Large infrastructure projects require certainty and sustained commitment.”
The governor ended by saying his administration would “continue to pursue all viable options” to advance the pipeline. Noticeably absent was any call for another round of negotiations with the Legislature.
“Ensuring reliable and affordable energy for Alaskans is both an economic necessity and a responsibility to current and future generations,” he wrote. ” The challenge remains, and we will continue working to address it.”
What those remaining options might be is unclear. But after several special sessions, months of negotiations and a final concession on the S-corporation tax, Dunleavy’s message suggests the Legislature is no longer among the options he considers viable — at least for now.
The special session may continue on paper, but politically, the governor appears to have declared it finished.
8 thoughts on “All over but the shouting: Dunleavy signals gasline special session is done, blames Legislature for failure to act”
I think there might be 2-3 legislators who deserve to be retained. We have a team of really really poor representation leading our state. It is pretty disgusting. Please vote YES on 2 so we can get rid of rigged choice voting and improve our chances of electing people with some semblance of logic. If they had done the right thing to begin with there would have been no need for these special sessions.
Yes on 2 is by far the most important vote. No on 1 helps as well.
Republican voters need to pull their children out of the public school district they are still enrolled in to educate their children themselves.
Alaskans never will change until parents change the direction of their children’s education.
Our current children’s generations are on track to continue today’s adults mistakes electing such idiot and illiterate adults into leadership positions because Alaskans don’t know any better.
Maybe had the gov put forth a clean proposal with no AVT this may have gone forward
These legislators never wanted a gasline built by Americans. Else Glenfarne will been building the pipeline now. They don’t want America 🇺🇸 to be building this gas pipeline, they want China to build it.
Well this is actullay good news for Alaska
For two months, the loudest complaint from the governor’s office and the House Republican minority has been that Alaska cannot get a “clean gasline bill” passed. On July 15, the Alaska House Republican Caucus called on the Senate to place “urgent focus” on approving what it described as a clean gasline bill for the Railbelt. Rep. Justin Ruffridge, R-Soldotna, a member of the HB 381 Conference Committee, put it this way: “We cannot lose sight of why we are here. This isn’t about state government squeezing every last penny out of a pipeline that hasn’t even been built yet.” The Alaska Support Industry Alliance, the Alaska Chamber of Commerce, and the Alaska Oil and Gas Association used the identical phrase days earlier, urging lawmakers to pass “a clean version of HB 381 focused solely on advancing the Alaska LNG Project.”
Listen to that framing long enough and it starts to sound like the fight in Juneau has been between a simple pipeline bill and legislators who keep dirtying it up with unrelated taxes. That is not what has been on the table at any point since March. Every version of this legislation, from the governor’s original March 20 introduction through the House Finance committee substitute that passed 34-5 on June 12, through the Senate’s rewrite, through the conference committee product that died 19-19 on July 16, through the governor’s August 12 compromise that never received a floor vote at all, has done the same thing: eliminate Alaska’s existing 20-mill property tax authority over a $54 billion natural gas project and replace it with a fraction of that revenue under a volumetric tax structure no other American jurisdiction has ever used. That is not a pipeline bill with some tax provisions attached. That is a tax bill, full stop, and “clean” has never described anything other than which version of that tax restructuring gets voted on. When the House Republican Caucus and the industry coalition say “clean,” they mean the bill without the Senate’s added corporate income tax on pass-through entities like Hilcorp. They do not mean a bill that leaves Alaska’s property tax authority intact. No such bill has ever been introduced by anyone.
https://raff6482.substack.com/p/there-was-never-a-clean-bill
The legislators behavior over a gasline that would had Benefited not only Alaskans but also the rest of the country, these legislators of the 2026 legislature shown their true color being Anti-America.
I hope their district voters will recognize it when these legislators are gearing up their re-election campaigns. But likely not since Alaskans are illiterate.
Call them back and keep calling them back until they get it right. If they refuse to show up, have them arrested.