After Walker’s actions on gasline, questions about his candidacy

The Alaska State Capitol on Monday, Jan. 19, 2026. (Jasz Garrett / Juneau Independent)

By Eric Forrer

Nine years ago  Bill Walker, in his last year as governor of Alaska, sat in the laborer’s union in Fairbanks and signed House Bill 331. It had been passed in the last three days of that year’s session. Walker accompanied his signature ceremony with a shockingly untrue mantra about jobs, oil company investment, and basically the standard mythology that accompanies any legislation that directs more Alaska public resources into resource development corporate hands.

HB331 had been introduced by Walker himself and he nursed it through the legislative process. As a means of distancing the state from its own constitutional debt limits, the law established a shell corporation with no assets and no income, and authorized the corporation to contract a billion dollars in bond debt. The funds were to be given to exploration oil companies on the basis of something called oil wellhead tax credits. These credits had been created by a number of previous administrations, and they were intended to inspire natural gas exploration and discovery in the Cook Inlet and Anchorage area fields. These credit programs had seen some $5 billion in public funds go out the door to qualifying companies, but the goal of a stable energy supply was not achieved. The terms of state payment on these credits were spelled out in the legislation and the state was never in default.

Over the years, and due in part to a legislative error ("Capital Crude, The Impact of Oil on Alaska Politics," pages 155, 158), the oil and gas wellhead credits had taken on a life of their own, and could be used as collateral with banking interests. Lobbying pressure from these third parties and oil companies had inspired Walker to attempt a solution with the billion-dollar bond plan created in HB 331. There was some skepticism in the Legislature and by legislative attorneys about the constitutionality of the new law, but Walker persisted.  

I was among a group of skeptics regarding HB331 and I filed a lawsuit against the Walker administration alleging that HB331 was unconstitutional in that it violated the constitutional restrictions on public debt. The concern was at least twofold. First was the magnitude of the proposal, which even in the oil business world was serious money, and more so in the public sector funding world. Secondly, and ultimately more importantly for the state’s future, the legal precedent established by HB331 would kick open the doors of unrestricted state debt. The authors of the constitution were part of the generation that had just endured the great depression and the Second World War, and they were emphatically opposed to debt as a funding mechanism for their new state. Some of the authors' own families had lost farms and property in the Depression and had seen the “Grapes of Wrath” in person. They felt that public debt was a tempting, and ultimately a deadly trap. At the time it looked like HB331 would pass, and it raised a red flag of long-term alarm. Lacking the Legislature’s help, a lawsuit seemed the only way to block the legislation.

In the first year of the Dunleavy administration, an administration that expressed support for HB331, the law was declared to be “…unconstitutional in all of its parts.” It was effectively and legally dead, and the 62-page opinion from the State Supreme Court established a modern precedent in the law strengthening the original debt restrictions of the state constitution. Based on the arithmetic of bond debt and attendant fees and commissions over ten years, this case saved the state roughly $400 million in interest and fees.

The point of this excursion in legislative history is that Bill Walker has recently filed for the governor’s position.  The details of legislative history fade quickly in the hurly-burly of life.  Mr. Walker, an individual who has been engaged with gasline interests and history for decades, is now asking for the top spot in the state, again. His record makes it clear that he was willing to saddle the state with enormous debt that would have had long-term risk for mountains of debt in the future, exactly what is known as the "resource curse." His solutions lack a grasp of fiscal and historical reality. 

There is something about ex-governor Mr. Walker’s filing for governor that doesn’t quite pass the smell test.   Has he been motivated to file to split the vote? Are we seeing resource company political tactics to split the vote and push the outcome to the right?  Mr. Walker, your decades-long gasline dream and your fiscal policies do not wash.

• Eric Forrer, a 64-year resident of Alaska, is a retired carpenter. In the 1990s he was appointed by Gov. Steve Cowper to the University of Alaska Board of Regents and subsequently served on the Alaska Postsecondary Education Commission. He has filed several legal actions against the state, including one lawsuit against the Walker administration, and three against Dunleavy.