Mat-Su Borough is ‘open for people’

A phrase circling in the air in Alaska has taken up roost at the Mat-Su Borough Assembly table this year.

We heard it first at a forum in Anchorage organized as a for-profit venture by an Anchorage talk radio host several years ago. This same for-profit meeting also gave birth to the first tones of the now familiar refrain that oil taxes in Alaska are responsible for declining throughput in the oil pipeline.

The root of our pipeline throughput problem is the aging legacy fields that have filled the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System since the first oil made the journey from the North Slope to Valdez in 1977. And while taxation can have a depressive effect on production, those legacy fields today produce significantly less oil, and new fields coming online are not producing oil at a pace to make up for this natural decline.

It was also at that for-profit meeting where the drumbeat began. Lower taxes on oil companies equals increased oil in the pipeline, which equals more tax dollars for Alaska and larger PFDs for Alaskans. And it was at that same for-profit meeting that we first heard representatives from local oil and gas lobbies decry that Alaska was no longer “open for business.”

Now that refrain is being sung here. We are told that the borough needs to be “open for business.”

We are, of course, supportive of responsible economic development and understand the relationship between commerce, sustainable jobs and quality of life. But this is one of those phrases that warrants a closer look.

What does it mean to be open for business? More importantly, what does it mean for the people who live here if the borough prioritizes being open for business?

The borough — and state government — can’t seemingly serve two masters. If those at the assembly table are open for business, what about the people who elected them to represent their interests?

Who do our assembly members represent when they pull chairs up to that table? Do they represent you, or is their allegiance now with the chamber of commerce and Mat-Su Business Alliance?

There is a role for lobbying groups like the chamber and business alliance, but it was the people of the Mat-Su Borough who elected those seated at the assembly table to serve. So far, businesses and corporations in the United States do not have the right to vote. In some ways, maybe that’s why the chamber and other groups are formed: to influence the process of government of the people, by the people and for the people.

No person is elected to serve business. Every person elected is tasked with doing the people’s business. But businesses and corporations don’t need to vote if they can get our elected officials to join them in singing a few verses of that so popular “open for business” tune.

Our votes count for naught if the people we elect to represent us have already forgotten who it is that elected them and whom it is they serve.