Big Oil spends big bucks to attack tax -
RESERVE: Ads, signs cost opponents of ballot measure hundreds of thousands.
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By RICHARD RICHTMYER, Anchorage Daily News
Published: October 4, 2006
Last Modified: October 4, 2006 at 05:49 AM
With five weeks until the Nov. 7 election, opponents of a ballot initiative to tax unproduced North Slope natural gas reserves are turning up the volume on their advertising campaigns aimed at crushing Ballot Measure 2.
Alaska's big oil companies and oil-industry-backed political groups have plans to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to dissuade voters from approving the measure.
Meanwhile, the initiative's supporters say they hope to raise as much as $20,000 to run a campaign to answer what they say are misleading claims from the other side.
"We're going to raise a little bit of money from individual Alaskans to try to counter the millions from Outside corporations," said Rep. Eric Croft, an initiative co-sponsor.
It's not clear just how much the industry-backed groups plan to spend fighting the initiative. A better picture of their budgets will emerge next week when they file campaign finance reports with the Alaska Public Offices Commission.
"I would imagine we'll spend over half a million dollars," said Curtis Thayer, treasurer of Alaska First, a political nonprofit group formed to campaign against the initiative.
Alaska First -- an offshoot of a separate group that had been running ads attacking the reserves tax but didn't want to disclose its membership list or budget -- will begin airing television and radio ads opposing the reserves tax in the next couple of days, Thayer said.
BP, Conoco Phillips and Exxon Mobil, the three companies that would pay if a reserves tax were passed, are helping to fund Alaska First, Thayer said.
Meanwhile, the Alaska Oil and Gas Association has formed its own campaign group and is collecting money to fund an ad campaign that started about two weeks ago, said Kara Moriarty, the trade group's external affairs manager.
Moriarty wouldn't say how much the group has collected or how much it plans to spend.
The ballot measure asks voters to approve taxing large, undeveloped gas reserves every year until a pipeline is built. It could collectively cost the producers up to $1 billion a year.
Sponsors say their intent is to compel the companies to build a pipeline while allowing them to recover some of their tax payments if a pipeline started running.
Opponents say the tax would add cost, risk and delays to the long-wished-for mega project and cause a drawn-out legal challenge.
For its part, Conoco Phillips has spent more than $156,000 campaigning against the ballot initiative, a tally that is likely to rise in the coming weeks, said Jack Griffin, a Conoco vice president in Anchorage.
About $55,000 of that was pledged to the oil and gas association's campaign. The rest is paying for Conoco's own advertising and other campaign-related efforts, including producing bumper stickers, yard signs and an anti-reserves-tax Web site, Griffin said.
Conoco also will help fund Alaska First's ad campaign, Griffin said, but he wasn't sure Tuesday how much the company will contribute.
Conoco executives are worried that Alaska voters, bitter about high gasoline prices and record oil-industry profits, might vote for a reserves tax based on their emotions without considering what it might do to the prospects for a gas pipeline project, Griffin said.
BP also is contributing $55,000 to the AOGA effort and will give some money to Alaska First as well, said Daren Beaudo, a BP spokesman in Anchorage. The company is not planning its own campaign against the reserves tax, he said.
Croft and fellow Democratic Reps. Harry Crawford of Anchorage and David Guttenberg of Fairbanks collected more than 47,000 signatures to get the measure on the ballot. They'll run a more grass-roots campaign, Croft said.
That will include calling people, writing letters to the editor and discussing the issue at such civic groups as Rotary Clubs and chambers of commerce, he said.
They'll also get some of their big-name supporters such as former governor Wally Hickel and Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor Jim Whitaker to rally support for it, Croft said. |
