My brother’s role in building the Alaska we know

My brother Mike’s political career spanned a decade, from 1966 to 1976. It was a transformative for Alaska.

The mid-to-late 1960s were years just after statehood and before oil was discovered. Those were lean years when Alaska’s economy was essentially seasonal fisheries in coastal regions and timber harvesting in Southeast. In the Interior, where Mike lived, it was mainly military construction, so the only good jobs were at the construction sites.

Mike had come to the then-Territory of Alaska in the mid-1950s to work as a deckhand on Yukon riverboats. Over several summers he worked his way up to first mate and then river pilot. Yutana Barge Lines served communities from the upper to lower Yukon, so Mike got to know people from Fort Yukon, north of Fairbanks, to Marshall and Emmonak on the lower river near the Bering Sea coast. This gave him a firsthand knowledge of rural Alaska conditions of the day, which he was able to use in his legislative years. Although he loved working on the river and with boats, after marrying and starting a family Mike decided he should not have a profession that kept him away from his family a good part of the year. By the early 1960s he also completed his college degree at University of Alaska Fairbanks.

His career change, however, took a surprising turn, to the newspaper business. He became a reporter for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner covering city council, school board and local politics. Legislative races gave Mike his introduction to politics, and when he left the News-Miner in 1965 he went to Juneau to work as a legislative assistant in the state House. Mike Gravel, later U.S. Senator, was Speaker then, and was a mentor. Mike then joined Gov. William Egan’s office in coordinating rural programs in President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which took him to all parts of rural Alaska and further broadened his knowledge of rural conditions. His appetite for politics whetted, Mike ran for the state House in Fairbanks in 1966 and was reelected to five terms, serving as Speaker in 1975 and 1976.

In his legislative years Mike worked with his colleagues on Alaska economic recovery from the 1964 earthquake, the Fairbanks flood in 1967 along with other issues. The discovery of oil on the North Slope in 1968 and the state’s $900 million oil lease sale in 1969 ushered in a new era for Alaska. It would be years before oil and really big revenues would flow but Alaskans had a taste of what was coming, and began to prepare for it. As part of the legislative leadership Mike was instrumental in bringing the Brookings Institute to Alaska to conduct a series of community conference and workshops on how to use the new oil money. Many of the recommendations from Alaskans made during these conferences were adopted into law by Mike and his colleagues, including programs that are still with us today, such as community revenue sharing.

Also, as part of the legislative leadership, Mike was deeply involved in the state’s adoption of its first comprehensive oil and gas tax and regulatory legislation in preparation for the coming construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline System and the North Slope oil fields.

Mike served until 1976, through years that saw Alaskans deal with the frustrations of delays of the pipeline, and oi revenues, due to lawsuits brought by conservation groups. Alaska businesses and communities were under severe financial pressure at the time, and Mike and his legislative colleagues had to develop special financial structures, including a unique forward “loan” by the oil industry, in the form of a tax and tax credit, that helped tide the state over to 1977, when the pipeline was finally completed and oil revenues began to flow.

Alaska Permanent Fund

Mike played a behind-the-scenes role in facilitating the Legislature’s passage of the constitutional amendment creating the Permanent Fund. He credits Chancy Croft, an Anchorage attorney, who was then President of the Senate, with playing a similar role guiding the amendment through that body.

Both men had aspirations for higher office, but they knew that if one or both attached their name to the legislation it would likely have killed it because critics would have seen it as a ploy to further their political ambitions.

So, both stood back to let younger, newer legislators get the credit, such as then-Reps Terry Gardiner of Ketchikan and Hugh Malone of Kenai. Bradner and Croft quietly helped divert the opposition to the idea of the Permanent Fund.

There was opposition, too, Mike said. The memory of the devastating 1964 earthquake was still fresh, and many older legislators worried about locking away oil money in a dedicated fund and being unable to use it if there were an emergency like another earthquake.

There were also legislators who saw the idea of a protected savings account as a diversion of oil revenues that could be used to finance loan subsidies and built megaprojects of dubious value other than the industries building them.

That, however, was the very reason that Malone, Gardiner and the other younger legislators pushed the Permanent Fund so passionately, out of a fear that lobbyists and industries would grab the oil money for big projects.

This was highly unusual, that politicians would deliberately take money “off the table,” so it couldn’t be spent and would be saved for future generations.

At the time few in Juneau had any idea of the scale of Alaska’s future oil revenues, which would amount to billions of dollars yearly.

The constitutional amendment did pass the Legislature with an important assist from Gov. Jay Hammond, who had originally conceived the idea. It was approved by Alaska’s voters in 1976, and that led to the Permanent Fund we have today, and the Permanent Fund dividend, which came later.

Interestingly, four of the young House members mentored by Mike, as Speaker, in those two important years when the Permanent Fund was created went on to follow his footsteps and become House Speakers themselves: Gardiner, Malone, Jim Duncan, of Juneau and Sam Cotten, who represented Eagle River, a part of Anchorage.