This article was first published on the author’s personal Substack, September 6, 2026, under the title “Before You Vote Again, Read How They Voted Last Time.”
Nothing in this piece opposes the Alaska LNG project, carbon storage as a technology, or new mining and industrial development in the Mat-Su Valley. Cook Inlet’s geology is real. West Susitna’s mineral resources are real. Federal money is already flowing into the Valley to prove it, forty-three million dollars to Nova Minerals for an antimony mine and refinery, a coal and biomass plant proposed for the same district by Terra Energy Center.
The question here is narrower. It is whether the Matanuska-Susitna Borough will have an independent seat at the table when that development arrives, with its own taxing authority and its own pore space intact, or whether both have already been signed away, and whether the people elected to speak for the Valley have even been the ones asking the questions.
HB 50: What the Vote Actually Authorized
HB 50 built Alaska’s legal framework for carbon capture, utilization, and storage. It is also the statute now being used to justify a specific, publicly confirmed plan: importing industrial carbon dioxide from Japan by tanker for permanent underground injection in Cook Inlet, a basin that runs directly beneath the Mat-Su Borough.
The Cook Inlet forearc basin sits along a steeply dipping reverse fault system. According to USGS research, blind faults coring fault-propagation folds in this kind of structure are capable of generating magnitude 6 to 7 or greater earthquakes. The storage reservoirs themselves are made up of dozens of stacked, discontinuous channel-belt sandstone beds, an architecture in which CO2 plume migration is difficult to predict, contain, or monitor reliably over decades of injection. The Castle Mountain Fault runs directly through the Mat-Su Borough and is documented by USGS as one of the only faults in Southcentral Alaska with both historical seismicity and Holocene surface faulting, meaning it has moved in geologically recent time.
None of this describes using Alaska’s own North Slope carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery, a closed domestic loop that predates HB 50, has a straightforward commercial logic independent of any credit or import scheme, and is not the concern raised here. The concern is narrower and more specific: an arrangement, already confirmed on the record by DNR Commissioner John Boyle, to export Alaska energy to Japan and import Japan’s industrial carbon dioxide by tanker for permanent underground disposal in Cook Inlet. That is not enhanced oil recovery. It is not a byproduct of Alaska’s own gas processing. It is another country’s industrial waste, accepted for a fee, and injected into ground that sits on an active fault system running through the Mat-Su Borough.
HB 50 is the statute that makes that arrangement possible. Whatever revenue Alaska collects for accepting it, the $2.50 per ton surcharge that survived the Legislature’s own last-minute amendment, is revenue for permanently hosting a foreign country’s carbon dioxide in a seismically active basin, indefinitely, with the monitoring obligation eventually passing to Alaska taxpayers after a 50 year waiting period. If carbon dioxide is dangerous enough that Japan needs to pay to be rid of it, the question of whether the price Alaska is charging to take custody of it is worth the long-term geological risk is not a rhetorical one. It is the question this statute answers by default, without ever being asked directly on the House floor.
None of this argues that the borough, rather than the state, should hold final authority over subsurface resource management. That responsibility sits with the state under Alaska’s Constitution, for good reason, and nothing here disputes it. The argument is narrower and does not require relitigating who should decide. A bill enabling permanent underground storage of imported industrial waste, next to a fault documented by USGS as capable of magnitude 6 to 7 seismicity, passed the House 32 to 8, the Senate 18 to 2, and a House concurrence vote 37 to 3. Those are not the vote counts of a bill that received the scrutiny its subject matter warranted. HB 50 needed more debate before it became law, not a different decision-maker.
This is the storage complex the delegation voted to authorize. Here is the record.
Voted Yes, April 17, 2024
● Rep. DeLena Johnson (District 25)
● Rep. Jesse Sumner (District 28, succeeded by Elexie Moore in 2024)
● Rep. George Rauscher (District 29, appointed to the Alaska Senate, District O, November 2025)
● Rep. Kevin McCabe (District 30)
Voted No, April 17, 2024
● Rep. David Eastman (District 27). Eastman lost re-election to Jubilee Underwood in November 2024 by 196 votes, and filed in 2026 to run against her again for the same seat.
● Rep. Cathy Tilton (District 26, then Speaker of the House). Tilton left the House voluntarily in November 2025 when Governor Dunleavy appointed her to the Alaska Senate, District M, replacing Shelley Hughes, who resigned to run for governor.
Four of five Mat-Su representatives voted yes. Of the two who voted no, only Tilton left through appointment; Eastman lost his seat at the ballot box to a challenger who went on to vote yes on the tax bill that followed two years later. In 2026, Eastman is running again for the same seat, against the incumbent who defeated him. Voters in that district will decide whether to restore the delegation’s one no vote on the storage architecture, or keep the representative who has since voted yes on what followed it.
HB 381: What the Vote Actually Gave Away
HB 381’s own short title, as recorded by the Legislature, is Oil and Gas Property Tax, Municipal Tax, AGDC. It replaced the existing 20-mill ad valorem property tax on the Alaska LNG project with an Alternative Volumetric Tax, a flat, state-set charge per unit of gas throughput, and moved rate-setting authority for that property out of municipal hands.
The Department of Revenue’s own modeling, presented to the Legislature on June 2, 2026, shows exactly what that swap was worth. Under current law, without the AVT, municipal property tax revenue from the pipeline segment alone was projected at 11 million dollars in 2029, rising to 116 million dollars a year by 2033. That is one component of the project; the Gas Treatment Plant and LNG Facility components were projected to generate far more, bringing total current-law municipal property tax revenue to 497 million dollars a year by 2033. Under the AVT structure that HB 381 would have enacted instead, DOR’s own projection for total state revenue from the tax was 4 million dollars immediately after the temporary abatement ended, rising to only 15 million dollars by 2033, for the entire project, not the pipeline alone.
The bill did specify how municipal AVT revenue on the pipeline segment would be split: half allocated by each municipality’s share of total pipeline mileage, the other half sent to the state, which the Legislature could choose to redistribute to unorganized borough communities on a per capita basis, an allocation decision made in Juneau, not Palmer. The Mat-Su Borough’s exact dollar share would depend on how many of the pipeline’s roughly 807 miles cross its boundaries. What is not in dispute is the scale of the gap DOR itself modeled: a swap from a system generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year in municipal property tax to one generating a small fraction of that, statewide, for the whole project combined.
Voted Yes, June 12, 2026
● Rep. DeLena Johnson (District 25)
● Rep. Steve St. Clair (District 26, appointed December 2025 to replace Tilton)
● Rep. Jubilee Underwood (District 27, defeated Eastman in 2024)
● Rep. Elexie Moore (District 28, succeeded Sumner in 2024)
● Rep. Garret Nelson (District 29, appointed December 2025 to replace Rauscher)
● Rep. Kevin McCabe (District 30)
Voted No
None. Every Mat-Su House seat voted yes.
The Timing Worth Sitting With
In the same year the Legislature was negotiating HB 381, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District closed three elementary schools, Meadow Lakes, Larson, and Glacier View, to close a budget deficit that reached 28 million dollars. The district had already cut roughly 160 staff positions the year before. Superintendent Randy Trani identified insufficient state education funding as the largest driver of the shortfall. The borough itself was asked to contribute an additional 9.4 million dollars to avoid the closures and could not fully close the gap.
This is not a claim that HB 381 caused those closures; the AKLNG project would not generate its first property tax revenue until 2029 at the earliest under any version of the bill. It is a governance observation about priorities and timing. While the borough’s own school district was closing buildings and laying off staff for lack of a few million dollars, the same borough’s legislative delegation was voting unanimously to forgo access to a tax structure DOR itself projected could have generated hundreds of millions of dollars a year within a decade.
Alaska’s school funding statute sets two separate numbers for every city or borough school district, both driven by the same input: the total assessed value of taxable property in the district.
The Required Local Contribution, under AS 14.17.410(b)(2), is a mandatory minimum, the equivalent of a 2.65 mill tax levy on the district’s full and true property value, capped at no more than 45 percent of the district’s basic need. The Allowable Additional Contribution, under AS 14.17.410(c), sets a ceiling on how much more a borough may voluntarily choose to give its schools beyond that minimum, the greater of a 2 mill equivalent on that same property value or 23 percent of basic need. A larger assessed tax base does not just raise what a borough must pay. It raises the ceiling on what a borough is permitted to pay if its own Assembly decides to.
HB 381 wrote the Alaska LNG project’s assessed value out of both calculations. The bill amends AS 14.17.510 to state that the full and true value of taxable property used in the school funding formula does not include property subject to tax abatement under AS 43.59.010 or the alternative volumetric tax levied under AS 43.59.020, the AVT itself. Under ordinary ad valorem taxation, the hundreds of millions of dollars in assessed value DOR modeled for the pipeline, the Gas Treatment Plant, and the LNG facility would have raised the ceiling on how much more the Mat-Su Borough Assembly could choose to direct toward its own schools, on top of the state-mandated minimum, at the Assembly’s own discretion. Under the AVT, that value is statutorily excluded from ever counting. The bill did not simply reduce a revenue number. It wrote the underlying property value out of the formula that determines how much local control over school funding the borough is even allowed to exercise.
The Land Transfer Nobody From the Valley Signed
This is not the first time in this same period that a proposal directly affecting the Mat-Su Borough moved through the state process with the questions coming from somewhere else.
In late 2025, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority applied to the Department of Natural Resources for a no-cost conveyance of 20,000 acres of state land in Houston, Alaska, for a multi-use industrial and energy development district publicly understood to center on a hyperscale data center, an application attached to a December 9, 2025 submission. DNR’s preliminary decision on the conveyance went out for public comment through August 19, 2026. Houston city and borough officials learned of the plan from a DNR public notice forwarded by a news outlet, not through direct state outreach. The Houston City Council voted unanimously to oppose the process.
The Senate Resources Committee sent a formal letter to DNR Commissioner John Crowther raising legal concerns about the conveyance, arguing that DNR’s reliance on AS 38.05.810(a) misconstrued legislative intent, that the proposal risked establishing bad precedent, and that the Legislature’s constitutional duty to ensure Alaskans receive the maximum benefit from development of the state’s resources was implicated by a hyperscale data center’s potential effects on public health, safety, and welfare. Five senators signed that letter: Cathy Giessel, the committee chair, Bill Wielechowski, the vice chair, Forrest Dunbar, Matt Claman, and Scott Kawasaki. All five represent Anchorage or Fairbanks.
Senator George Rauscher, the Mat-Su Republican who sat on that same committee and whose own district includes Houston, did not sign it.
No public record identifies a comparable letter, resolution, or formal objection from the Mat-Su Borough Assembly or from any member of the Mat-Su legislative delegation raising the same legal and public-interest concerns about a proposal to give away 20,000 acres of land inside their own borough. The concerns on the record came from legislators representing other regions of the state, not from the people elected to represent Houston and the rest of the Valley.
Taken together with the HB 50 and HB 381 votes, the pattern is the same one: decisions with direct, lasting consequences for the Mat-Su Borough, its tax base, its subsurface geology, and its land, moving through the Legislature with the loudest and most persistent questions coming from outside the delegation elected to ask them.
What Connects All Three Records
HB 50 opened the pore space. The Alaska LNG project’s first phase, the pipeline and Gas Treatment Plant, intends to use North Slope pore space under that framework to store CO2 removed from North Slope gas during processing. If the project reaches its second phase, clean hydrogen and LNG production, the CO2 generated by that process is intended to be injected in Cook Inlet, the same basin where the Japan import concept has been publicly discussed. HB 381 does not authorize storage itself, but its own definitions section reaches directly into HB 50’s framework: HB 381 defines “qualified property” and “taxable property” to include carbon capture, utilization, and storage infrastructure integrated with the project, including a carbon dioxide storage facility under AS 41.06, the exact chapter HB 50 created. Whatever favorable tax treatment HB 381 would have extended to the pipeline and gas treatment plant was written to extend to that storage infrastructure as well, not as an afterthought but as an explicit statutory cross-reference.
HB 381 also rewrote the school funding formula so the borough could never fully recapture the difference on its own terms. The Houston land transfer showed that when a separate but related question of transparency and process arose in the delegation’s own backyard, the people who raised it publicly were not the people elected to represent that backyard. Alaska’s Constitution requires uniform treatment of similarly situated taxpayers, and a legislative disclaimer stating a bill should not be read as precedent does not bind a future court asked to apply that requirement, a point made independently by an Anchorage Daily News opinion piece in July 2026, not just by this reporting.
Five of six current Mat-Su House members carry a consistent yes record across the storage and tax votes, either directly or through inheriting a seat from a colleague who also voted yes. The one senator positioned to raise formal legal concerns about a land giveaway in his own district chose not to sign the letter that did. The borough that sits on top of the storage complex, that gave up the clearest path to recapturing its own tax base, and that will host whatever industrial development follows, currently has no legislator in either chamber with a public record of pushing back on any of the three.
What a Better Version Would Have Looked Like
None of this required refusing to help the Alaska LNG project get built. A construction-period property tax abatement, ending once the project reaches a defined level of throughput or a fixed number of years, has precedent and a reasonable policy rationale, and a version of that concept already existed in the bill’s own text. Alaska’s oil production tax already contains a price-responsive mechanism, a per-barrel credit that scales up when prices fall and a minimum tax floor that applies regardless of profitability, so a comparable market-correction feature for a gas project, reducing the mill rate if prices fall below a defined threshold for two consecutive quarters, would not have been a novel concept for this state. Either approach could have made the project financeable without permanently transferring the borough’s ad valorem taxing authority to a state-controlled formula, and without writing that same property value out of the borough’s own school funding ceiling.
That version of the bill was never introduced. The version that was, and that every sitting Mat-Su House member voted for, did the harder thing: it built the tax swap in from the start, on top of a storage framework that already invites imported industrial waste into ground that sits on an active fault, following a land transfer episode in which the Valley’s own representatives were largely silent while others asked the hard questions on their behalf.
This Is a Governance Question, and the Ballot Is Where It Gets Answered
This piece has not asked anyone to support or oppose a particular candidate, and it does not do so now. It has asked a narrower question: when the state offered to take power away from local government, in three separate instances, storage authority, taxing authority, and a land transfer, who from this delegation stood up for the borough, and who did not.
That question is not partisan. It is a conservative governance question in the plainest, oldest sense of the term. Government closest to the people should hold the power to tax, to set land use, and to decide what gets buried under a community’s own ground, unless there is a clear and compelling reason to move that power further away. The presumption should run toward the borough, not toward the state, and the burden of proof should sit with whoever wants to move that authority to Juneau, not with the people asking why it moved.
Every race discussed in this piece has more than one name on the ballot. Some of the people running have a documented record on these three questions, votes cast, letters signed or not signed, positions taken or left unstated. Others are new, without a voting record yet, but with the chance to say plainly, before an election, where they stand on whether the borough should keep its own taxing authority and its own voice in what happens to its own subsurface geology.
On the land transfer specifically, and on what HB 381 did to the borough’s taxing authority and potential revenue, the record shows the same gap. No member of the Mat-Su legislative delegation and no member of the Mat-Su Borough Assembly is on record publicly questioning the lack of transparency in how Houston and the borough learned of the land conveyance, and none pushed back publicly on what HB 381’s tax structure would have done to the borough’s independent revenue base. The Assembly is the body most directly positioned to watch what the state does to the borough, its land, its tax authority, its subsurface rights, and to say so before the fact, not after. On this record, that watching did not happen from within, it happened from outside, from legislators representing other regions who had no direct stake in the outcome.
That is the standard worth applying to every Assembly race on the ballot, not just the legislative ones. The Assembly cannot vote on state legislation, but it can speak publicly, pass resolutions, send letters, and put the state on notice the way Houston’s own City Council did when it voted unanimously to oppose the land conveyance process. Listen for which candidates, current officeholders and challengers alike, are actually talking about this kind of state overreach while they campaign, and which ones are not. A candidate who raises it now, before taking office, is telling voters something. A candidate who has held office through all of this and never raised it is telling voters something else.
Voters in every one of these districts have a record now. It is public, it is dated, and it is theirs to weigh. The only ask here is that they weigh it, against the plainest conservative standard there is: does this candidate, in office or running for it, believe power belongs closest to the people it affects, and has their record, or their stated position, actually reflected that belief when it mattered.
The author has no commercial interest in any energy or mining project discussed in this analysis.
Sources
● Alaska House Journal, April 17, 2024, Third Reading Final Passage, CSHB 50(FIN), page 2328 (akleg.gov).
● Alaska House Journal, June 12, 2026, Third Reading Final Passage, HB 381 (akleg.gov).
● Ballotpedia, Alaska House of Representatives District 27, election results 2024 and 2026 candidate filing.
● Alaska’s News Source, “Fight for the majority: dozens of competitive state races as David Eastman makes reelection bid,” June 3, 2026.
● Alaska Beacon, “Alaska Senate Republicans confirm Rauscher, Tilton and open two vacancies in state House,” December 2, 2025.
● HB 381 bill status, short title “Oil & Gas Property Tax; Muni Tax; Agdc,” 34th Legislature (akleg.gov).
● Alaska Department of Revenue, HB 381 / SB 2001 presentation to the Legislature, revised June 2, 2026, AKLNG Property Tax Changes and Alternative Volumetric Tax sections.
● HB 381 enrolled committee substitute text, AS 43.59 allocation provisions and AS 14.17.510 amendment excluding AVT and abated property from local school funding calculations.
● Alaska Statutes 14.17.410(b)(2) and (c), Required Local Contribution and Allowable Additional Contribution; Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, Local Contribution FAQ and Public School Funding Program Overview.
● Alaska Beacon, “Alaska districts close 12 schools this year, amid severe budget cuts,” June 17, 2026.
● Mat-Su Sentinel, reporting on Mat-Su Borough School District budget and closures, February through April 2026.
● Senate Resources Committee letter to DNR Commissioner John Crowther, Houston land conveyance, signed by Senators Giessel, Wielechowski, Dunbar, Claman, and Kawasaki.
● Anchorage Daily News, “Opinion: The state of the state’s confusion over HB 381,” July 24, 2026.
● USGS publication on Cook Inlet basin fault-propagation fold seismicity (pubs.usgs.gov/publication/70022145) and Castle Mountain Fault historical and Holocene activity records.
● Mining.com and Mining Weekly, Nova Minerals $43.4 million U.S. Department of War award, October 2025.
