Watching the television news report the other night about the standing-room-only Anchorage public hearing on hotly contested Ballot Measure 1, it was hard not to laugh.
The measure appearing on November’s ballot, and drafted by an organization calling itself Stand for Salmon, an environmentalist-heavy bunch, would be devastating for Alaska’s economy and future development, its myriad detractors point out. Alaska already has some of the world’s best environmental protections for fisheries, they say.
Opponents of the measure were the majority of speakers at the hearing, which apparently miffed the group’s president, Ryan Schryver
“Our opponents are primarily deep pocketed, foreign mining and oil companies,” Schryver told the KTUU reporter. “And they’ve been able to pay people to show up at these types of events.”
Foreign mining and oil companies? Really? If we are going to talk about Outside money in this fight, let’s talk about who supports the ballot measure – and where they come from.
Paul Easley, a member of the Alaska Policy Forum board of directors, wrote in the Anchorage Daily News:
“A quick look at the measure’s APOC financial filings makes clear that many of its member groups have ties to multimillion-dollar anti-resource development campaigns taking place around the country.
http://www.anchoragedailyplanet.com/133008/home-grown-hardly/