No on One

On November 7 Alaskans will be deciding some important matters, like who will be governor of Alaska for the next four years and another very important item, Ballot Measure One, the salmon habitat initiative.

Often we decide such things based on personal experience with the individuals or the issues. When we don’t have personal experience the safest thing is often to decide who you trust.

For governor I’m voting for Mike Dunleavy. I don’t know the man personally but he is a Republican, which is a good thing in my book. But most importantly, people I know and trust do know him well and are enthusiastic about Dunleavy and his candidacy.

And that brings us to the salmon habitat initiative — and who I believe can be trusted in that deal. I’ve been working ever since I graduated from college in 1959. About half that time has been spent in journalism and half in public relations, 11 years as PR manager at ARCO and the rest as a consultant.

My consulting clients before I joined The Voice of The Times in 2000 included many of the major oil companies operating in Alaska. For much of my time representing industry I worked closely with senior industry management and did battle with environmental activists. I saw close up who was telling the truth and who was using every trick in the book to make the companies look bad. And when things went wrong, as they sometimes did, I had a close-up view of who was trying to fix problems and who was trying to make them worse.

There have always been good people involved on both sides of the top environmental issues. Some were well-informed and some were not, but that did little to stop anybody from arguing, sign-waving and letter-writing. Many of their concerns were well-founded but what too many failed to understand is that the large companies inevitably have their own reputations and their financial futures at stake in such issues.

Because of that the companies tend to be scrupulous about things like making sure their operations do minimal damage to the environments in which they are working. When local or regional managers fail to meet such standards, their heads roll.

That brings us to the issue of who to believe on Ballot Measure One. Its supporters are primarily environmental activist groups. Its opponents are primarily oil companies and a number of mining companies. I don’t know the miners but the oil companies include both BP Exploration Alaska and ConocoPhillips. I do know and trust those people and assume they would not join forces with any company or organization that represented a threat to Alaska’s natural environment.

Ballot Measure One is a serious threat to Alaska’s future economy and as such is probably the greatest threat imaginable to its environment. The companies operating here now very much have their own interests at heart, but that means they need a strong and healthy economy as well as a healthy and well-protected environment. Without those, we all lose — the companies, their employees, their contractors and every other person and critter in this great state.

The existing rules for operating in Alaska are generally well-written and effective. Changing them as proposed in Ballot Measure One would undo a lot of good work and threaten Alaska’s economy, its environment, its air, sea and land critters and its people.

The primary effect of Ballot Measure One would be to impose unnecessary restrictions that would jeopardize the jobs and the flow of royalties and taxes into the state treasury that Alaska needs to secure its future.