By SEN. ROBERT MYERS
May 2, 2026 – For the 2025-26 Legislature, I’ve been serving on the Senate Natural Resources Committee. The committee has spent a significant amount of time collecting information and weighing various proposals regarding the gas line. I’ve spent a significant amount of my own time reading to prepare for those hearings and to gather my own information on the project.
While there are a lot of legitimate questions and issues surrounding the gas line, what has stunned me in the last year has been the attitude that I’ve seen from some people in the legislature that all they care about is how much money the state will get from the gas line. These people don’t care about lowering energy costs for households, the potential expansion of mining and other industries that can happen with lower cost energy, or the wider economic development that surrounds a project of this magnitude. The bottom line to the state treasury is the only thing that matters. It’s not every legislator or probably even a majority, but it is a large portion. Let me explain why that attitude exists.
People care more about something when it is where their livelihood comes from. It’s a cynical take, but government is the same way: it cares about where its money comes from. The gas line is projected to bring is serious money, with estimates being somewhere in the $800 million per year range. But that compares to the $4 billion that we will bring in from the Permanent Fund draw this year. To the state, that seems small enough that we can live without it. And that is not factoring in the costs that come with it.
For every other state, that would not be the calculation. While any state would love the gas royalties and taxes, the calculation would be primarily aimed at that larger economic growth that comes from the gas use in state. Every other state has some kind of broad-based tax (sales, income, property) that relies on that wider economic activity to generate revenue. Our municipalities do that and are more supportive of the project as a result, but our state does not.
To make it worse, all of that potential revenue growth is years away. We hope to get gas to Alaskans by 2029, but the real money for the state won’t kick in until the export portion starts up about 2031. Politicians already have an incentive to think in the short term because of election cycles, and construction of this project will go over at least two if not three cycles. Most politicians are focused on the short-term impacts that will happen during that time period.
More economic activity means more people in the state, which means more road maintenance, more kids in schools, more calls to EMS, and more crazy young guys doing stupid things on Friday night with their big construction paychecks. While the effects will be much smaller than we saw during the TAPS days in the 1970s, they will still be there. At the same time, the state and municipalities will collect little to no extra revenue during this time to offset those potential costs (except for probably some alcohol tax). A sales tax would capture revenue from some of that economic activity almost right away. An income or property tax would do so the following year. The state has none of the above.
So in effect, some politicians are worried that they could lose their elections because people will be unhappy in the short term for the disruptions that we will see from construction with no money to address the problems, but they won’t see the benefits until they have run the gauntlet of two to three election cycles of angry residents. The overall effect is for politicians to try to get as much revenue as possible from the project, especially in the short term when the project has the least ability to pay, even if it means tanking the project in the end. They don’t mind if the project doesn’t happen because they still have the $4 billion in the Permanent Fund every year coming in, and that will continue to grow.
Our constitution says that we are supposed to manage our resources in such a way that we maximize the benefits to all Alaskans. The problem is that we have defined that in such a way as to mean only the maximum revenue to the state. That surely is one form of benefit, but it’s not the only benefit. It’s also the benefit that will tend to skew in favor of the most politically connected.
We’ve created incentives for politicians to ignore all other types of benefits to the people as a whole: lower energy costs for households, larger economic growth, etc. The politicians get no direct benefit from that, and instead they get to deal with short-term costs. So they try to minimize short-term costs and lose long-term benefits. Then we wonder why people, especially working-age people with kids, are leaving the state. This is the result of giving the state a large enough chunk of the Permanent Fund to become the largest source of state revenue.
We need the gas line to help pull our economy out of the doldrums that we’ve been in for decades. We have the lowest median household income growth in the nation since 1984, and our economy has been effectively flat outside of oil and government for two decades. But what we are looking at as a savior could only be a temporary reprieve, if the legislature doesn’t tank it first, if we don’t reform our state’s fiscal system to have incentives that align with the people and the economy as a whole.
Senator Robert Myers was born in Fairbanks and spent much of his young childhood at the Salchaket Roadhouse, owned by his parents. He attended the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he studied philosophy, political science, and history. While in college, he drove for a tour company, sharing Alaska with countless visitors. He currently drives truck and travels the Dalton Highway (Haul Road) frequently. He ran for office because he wants an Alaska his children will choose to make their home down the road. When not working for his Senate District B, North Pole, he enjoys reading, history, board games, and spending time with his wife Dawna and his five kids.
