By SUZANNE DOWNING
May 13, 2026 – There are moments in the Alaska Legislature when you realize the hearing isn’t really a hearing at all. It’s theater. The outcome has already been decided, the public testimony is just a box to check, and the people running the show are hoping the folks most affected by the decision don’t make it into the room in time.
Welcome to another round of Groundhog Day in the Senate Resources Committee.
Today, the Senate Resources Committee, chaired by Sen. Cathy Giessel, is once again taking up Senate Bill 280, the oil and gas property tax bill tied to the long-discussed Alaska LNG gasline project. This hearing was originally scheduled for 3 pm. Then, at the last minute, Giessel moved it to 9 am.
She pulled the old switcheroo.
The nuts fall from the crazy tree, as Sen. Giessel tries to kill Alaska’s gasline
And it looks purposeful because she well knows that a number of oil and gas professionals, business leaders, and pro-gasline advocates were flying into Juneau this morning specifically to testify. By moving the hearing to the morning, many of them simply cannot get there in time.
And this isn’t the first time she’s done this.
It’s the third time Giessel has shifted hearing schedules in ways that conveniently sideline testimony from people who actually build things, finance things, engineer things, and understand what it takes to move a $40-plus billion energy project from fantasy into reality.
At some point, patterns are hard to explain away as accidental.
Meanwhile, over in the House, the legislation is moving. The bill has left House Resources and is working its way through Finance. The clock is ticking. There are six days left in the regular legislative session, maybe eight if lawmakers decide to grind through the weekend.
But in the Senate, the bill sits trapped in Resources, where Giessel appears determined to slow-walk it into oblivion.
This is particularly notable because Giessel began the session sounding alarms about the social consequences of a gasline project, warning it could bring human trafficking and other social ills to Alaska. Those comments stunned many Alaskans who see the gasline as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to monetize North Slope gas, provide long-term energy security, create jobs, and stabilize state revenues.
Now the rhetoric has evolved into procedural warfare: If you can’t kill the bill outright, you delay it. If you don’t like what industry experts might say, you move the hearing before their plane lands.
The Legislature loves to talk about transparency and public participation. But transparency only works when the public can actually participate.
And let’s be honest about what’s happening here: Alaska’s business community is frustrated. Not just oil companies. Contractors. Engineers. Labor. Suppliers. Communities desperate for affordable energy. Alaskans who are tired of watching opportunity after opportunity get strangled by endless process and ideological resistance.
There is a growing sense that the anti-development wing of the Legislature is perfectly content to let Alaska drift into managed decline, as long as nobody builds anything controversial.
Giessel, alongside Sen. Bill Wielechowski, has increasingly become the face of that resistance.
Alaskans have seen this movie before. Endless hearings. Endless delays. Endless “concerns.” They’re planning to delay this bill long enough that the builder of the gasline, Glenfarne, won’t be able to get the steel rolled for the pipes on schedule, and will have to renegotiate manufacturing deals that have expiration dates fast approaching.
At some point, voters have to decide whether they are being represented or managed.
Today’s hearing switch may seem like a small procedural maneuver inside the marble halls of Juneau. But outside the Capitol, it looks like exactly what many Alaskans fear most: another deliberate attempt to silence the people who still believe Alaska’s future should include development, jobs, affordable energy, and economic growth.
We are getting Giesseled again.
South Anchorage — have you had enough?
Suzanne Downing is the founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan.
10 thoughts on “Suzanne Downing: Alaskans are getting Giesseled again on the gasline”
If you want Alaska to come alive again we need the gas line. Greasy Giessel wants us to forever live in squalor. We, who are now in a perpetual state of crime fatigue, want something to give us hope. (Yeah, google it. Anchoragites are especially in in this state.) Come on Giessel, give us some hope!
Giessel, Wielechowski, and this 2024-26 legislature are there because of Alaskans are government dependent.
I doubt most Alaskans are concerned about the private sector, they more concerned about just maintaining their government dependent employments. As long as Alaska state government keeps funding their government jobs. They hadn’t yet put one n one together a weak private sector comes government layoffs eventually; so if their government dependent job is important they’d want development and businesses and lot’s of them.
However the federal government has been cutting federal spending that state’s have used spent on workers dependent on those federal dollars from health care workers because medicaids and Medicare reduced spending like as what places like Providence and ANTHC has seen because of their dependency on government monies; as well as massive layoffs in retail, technology, manufacturing. So there are nearly 2 million Americans who received their layoff notice and don’t have a job. It’ll get worse as long as our government dependency hamstrings, cripples industrialists and business owners from development.
Could Co-Governor & Finance Minister Giessel actually have a point?
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Okay, Polar LNG bought a $180K per year lobbyist, Glenfarme didn’t, maybe that explains something.
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Two months of asking these questions, no answers to date. …this much money in play, shouldn’t someone know the answers already, might the silence be a red flag?
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Our issue isn’t pro- or anti- LNG, business community, or Giessel. it’s anti BS. No answers, no LNG. Capisci? (like that means anything, but it’s fun to say).
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May we ask again:
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1. How much will Alaskans’ heating and electric bills increase following pipeline construction?
2. Will product be sold directly or indirectly to Communist China?
3. If supply or demand issues arise, are Asian buyers prioritized over Alaskan customers?
4. Are Communist Chinese entities involved in project financing, insurance, or construction?
5. Is a contingency plan in place if Democrat-controlled administrations revoke permits or local governments demand more taxes?
6. Recall Palin’s $500M giveaway to TransCanada, what prevents a similar giveaway or debt trap from happening?
7. What assures pipeline-control gear will be CISA vetted? (https://www.cisa.gov/)
8. When LNG development is actually over, will AGDC be disbanded?
9. What assures Alaskans and the Permanent Fund won’t be on the hook for up-front costs, contractor fraud, and losses if Glenfarne can’t get, or later loses, binding financial commitments from Asian companies and governments?
(https://ptop.substack.com/p/guide-to-uncovering-contractor-fraud?)
10. What makes Polar LNG -not- better positioned to move natural gas by leveraging existing Prudhoe Bay infrastructure, minimizing new onshore development, and delivering a more efficient and lower-impact path to market …at a quarter of the cost?
(https://polarlng.com/project/)
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On June 25, 2025, AGDC released an updated $38.7 billion cost estimate for the Alaska LNG Project.
(https://agdc.us/updated-38-7-billion-project-construction-cost/)
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Now Glenfarne wants $44 billion-plus.
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Then there’s this: “The latest evidence that no one knows what the gas will cost comes from an independent report by Rapidan Energy Group, which says the likely cost of the pipeline project is far higher than the $44 billion estimate still in circulation …Add in the cost of the so-called first phase—building a pipeline from the North Slope to Anchorage without compression and export facilities and the total project cost would exceed $70 billion.”
(https://www.dermotcole.com/reportingfromalaska/2025/6/24/glenfarnes-latest-deceptive-press-release-about-alaska-lng-project)
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Who’s on the hook when project cost runs up to, say, $90 billion, or reaches a point at which it doesn’t seem worth building because financial, geopolitical, legal, and physical risks outweigh benefits, making it unlikely to turn a profit during the lifetime of anyone alive today?
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Is Senator Giessel responding out of concern for what the Rapidan analysis shows, which the Dunleavy administration, AGDC, and Glenfarne analyses apparently don’t show?
(https://www.rapidanenergy.com/about)
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Surely it’s not anti-development for Alaskans to demand answers because: (a) they don’t trust government officials or the business community who bought the lobbyists who make up the biggest half of Alaska’s lobbyist-legislator team, and (b) they don’t want to be left holding the bag, again, when another epic screw up goes down.
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Maybe it’s all good. Or not. Bottom line is we don’t know, and in this climate of uncertainty and corruption, it seems only prudent to know more than we’re being told.
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So, has South Anchorage, and arguably everywhere else, had enough?
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Yes.
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Under Alaska’s regime of FUBAR’d election and grand-jury systems, can South Anchorage, and arguably everywhere else, hope to do anything constructive about it?
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No.
Another dIMOCRAP, same as Lisa what needs to be flushed from the Republican Party. What a jerk.
You know Tina, you are starting to sound like a broken record with all your crap about Alaskans being “government-dependent”. I detect a little jealously in your tone of voice. I suspect that the job you do have doesn’t pay you enough and so you resort by attacking (if that’s the correct word those who do depend on the government for one reason or another. If you are so low on the totem pole when it comes to your paycheck, I would suggest that you consider taking night classes to better yourself then apply for a better paying job. Stop putting others down because they need a little help.
All the comments here but for yours are constructive. Many AK elected leaders do want to see an economy limited to government employees, health care (almost entirely paid by government), and the dole of SNAP, WiC and the like. Those elected leaders want the power that such an economy brings to them. They don’t want miners and oil field workers bringing free market ideas to the polls. The eschew work ethic and personal responsibility. They hold their noses while saying that a gas line will bring prostitutes – even as it’s clear that cute girls have a much better chance of being brought to Juneau in every new crop of legislative aidettes. They support a state income tax and rank choice voting.
Wow Sherry. You feel good about yourself now? 🙄 What say we just stick to the subject that is all the non government dependant workers being financially choked out by crappy decisions made by lawmakers who rather obviously do not care about all Alaskans. Alaska, ALL of Alaska NEEDS this development NOW.
I sure do. Thank you for asking.
She would tax her mother’s grave.
RIP, grandma.