ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – President Donald Trump is set to announce a $54 billion investment into Alaska’s proposed LNG pipeline project on Wednesday, a White House official tells Alaska’s News Source.
Watch the announcement live in the video player above.
“President Trump will announce major energy infrastructure investments that deliver on his day one promises to unleash American energy and unlock Alaska’s extraordinary resource potential,” White House Spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in a statement.
The amount is enough to create the entire gas line, according to figures Glenfarne, the major developer of the project, announced in June.
The officials said the investment is a portion of the $200 billion committed in the “US/Korea Trade and Investment Initiative” announced in November.
The announcement is expected to be made in the Oval Office, according to the White House official. Dunleavy, Sen. Dan Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska will be among the participants in the announcement, alongside several Trump cabinet members.
Rocky road remains
A critical issue centered in Alaska’s state legislature has not been resolved: property taxes.
Glenfarne said the company needs property taxes exemptions to make the project economic, an issue at the center of the entire legislative session and months of back-to-back special sessions called in by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, R-Alaska. Majority lawmakers have largely contested the exemptions the company wanted were too steep and they wouldn’t pay their fair share.
By the end of the second special session, about eight months after the legislative session began, lawmakers were the closest they’ve been to passing a plan. The bill included a desired property tax scheme for the gas line but also had a contested corporate income tax for privately held oil and gas companies classified as S-Corporations.
Though the tax did not affect the gas line, Dunleavy and Republican lawmakers called the S-Corp tax a “poison pill.” The Senate passed the bill 11-8, but the House failed by a single vote with House Majority Leader Chuck Kopp, R-Anchorage, defecting from his caucus.
Even if that bill did pass, it was bound to die. The governor said in the middle of debate in the House that he would veto the bill if it landed on his desk, and lawmakers didn’t have the votes for an override.
Alaska’s governor tried at another special session, but state lawmakers were fed up.
After eight years of tension between his administration and the legislature, a record-setting number of vetoes in the latest session (including one veto created from a quid-pro-quo on the LNG issue: pass the property tax exemptions or lose the pension plan) and numerous special sessions preventing lawmakers from campaigning under state law, lawmakers said the governor lost the good will for a compromise — teeing the issue up to the next legislature and governor.
“I feel like the circumstances only get more difficult from here and unless the governor and Hilcorp are willing to reconsider the package, I think there’s very little appetite to deal with this this year,” Rep. Calvin Schrage, NA-Anchorage and chair of the final committee to draft a compromise plan, told Alaksa’s News Source in July. “This will have to be something to come back and deal with it in January.”
Dunleavy said “politics” killed the tax breaks.
“The project is fiscally challenged,” Dunleavy said in a news conference in the dying hours of the second special session. “Everyone admits that. But that’s not what’s standing in the way.
“What’s standing in the way is politics. Pure, unmitigated, simple politics.”
Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, said the governor was the one who was politicking.
“The governor was willing to trade the pension bill for the gas line, and we said no,” he said after the bill died.
“It was politics. It was just politics and we just said no.”
This is a developing story. We will update with more information as it becomes available.
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