Suzanne Downing: The anti-development playbook returns, but this time in a water taxi

By SUZANNE DOWNING

April 2, 2026 – Bob Shavelson wants readers of the Anchorage Daily News to believe he’s just a concerned dad who runs a water taxi in Homer, watching the world get more expensive while oil companies get richer. That’s the folksy, relatable, and anti-business commentary that plays to the instincts of those who hate successful companies and successful people.

What Shavelson doesn’t tell readers is that he spent years as a leader of Cook Inletkeeper, one of the most aggressive anti-resource development organizations in Alaska. That omission was allowed by the ADN, even though they know better.  Instead, they let him say he “has worked on oil and gas issues in Alaska for the past 30 years.” More deceit.

Once you know that, his column reads less like a neutral plea for “fair share” taxes and more like the same long-running strategy: Use tax policy to make development uneconomic, to slow down or stop investment, and ultimately reduce resource production in Alaska.

It’s the same-old song: Raise uncertainty. Increase costs. Target investors. Then point out that the industry is threatening to leave when it stares at the obvious economics.

Shavelson writes that whenever Alaska considers higher taxes, companies warn they may pull back. He calls that fear-mongering, when it is actually just good business sense. If Homer decided to tax his water taxis at a higher rate, he’d leave, too.

But history says otherwise. In 2010 and 2011, Cook Inlet was widely believed to be running out of gas. Major producers were exiting. Southcentral Alaska faced real shortages and potential brownouts. Then Hilcorp stepped in.

The privately held company took on aging, high-risk assets others had abandoned and began investing hundreds of millions annually to stabilize production. Today, Hilcorp supplies roughly 85% of the Railbelt’s natural gas, about 50 billion cubic feet per year. It’s Hilcorp that powers homes, hospitals, schools, and businesses.

How quickly the radical left forgets, and how conveniently they ignore the realities of Alaska life in the winter.

The reason Southcentral has energy and didn’t freeze over during this record-setting winter is because Alaska created and protected a business environment where investment made sense. Certainty is everything in the high-risk energy sector.

Shavelson dismisses all of this and instead focuses on Jeff Hildebrand’s wealth, his polo ponies, and private jets, driving a wedge between him and readers with a classic Marxist approach. The attack of a successful man who made it on his own is a familiar rhetorical move worthy of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”

So let’s talk about Hilcorp for a moment. The company Mr. Hildebrand runs employs roughly 1,750 Alaskans directly, supports thousands of contractor jobs, works with more than 700 Alaska vendors, and has invested billions into Alaska assets. Not to mention nonprofits. The company has invested more than$1.5 billion in the Cook Inlet Basin, produced more than 750 billion cubic feet of natural gas, powering hundreds of thousands of Alaska homes and businesses, and yes, drilled more than 190 wells. Hilcorp has invested $4 billion annually into the Alaska economy.

Recently, Hilcorp testified to the Legislature that it is committed to drilling more than 20 wells per year in the Cook Inlet basin to deliver roughly 50 billion cubic feet of natural gas for the region. To accomplish that, Hilcorp spends hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment year after year, with more than 300 direct Hilcorp employees in Kenai, as well as various contractors, drilling crews to support development. Today, they are investing at the highest levels ever in Cook Inlet, and both 2024 and 2025 marked their busiest drilling, construction seasons on record. In 2026, the company says it will develop 25 wells in the Basin.

The impact has been remarkable: Five years ago, Hilcorp employed approximately 1,500 people in Alaska. Today, Hilcorp employs more than 1,750 direct employees in Alaska. That’s an 18% growth in employment. Contractor jobs have grown to about 3,500.

Thus, it’s ironic to hear lectures about “corporate privilege” from someone like Shavelson, who looks down his nose at oil and gas workers and who carefully avoids mentioning his own long history advocating policies designed to restrict resource development. His omission preserves his illusion of neutrality.

Shavelson’s column also fits neatly with the current slate of legislation in Juneau that anti-development groups are applauding. Bills like SB 227 that dramatically increase taxes, create new oversight hurdles, and inject uncertainty would fundamentally change the economics of developing resources here.

If your goal is to discourage investment, you would love the House and Senate majority’s current trajectory.

And that’s the point: This isn’t really about Shavelson bashing Hilcorp. He’s just a tool for the environmental wackos. But this debate over taxes is about whether Alaska remains competitive for investment in oil and gas — the very industry that funds the schools, roads, and public safety that Shavelson says are “crumbling.”

Well, in reality, they are not, but you don’t fix things by driving away the companies that are paying the bills.

There’s another layer of hypocrisy in Shavelson’s column. He identifies himself as someone who “runs boats.” Presumably those boats don’t run on wind and goodwill. They run on petroleum.

Unless he gets out his oars and starts paddling, his own hypocrisy makes his arguments laughable.

Suzanne Downing is founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan.

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