Larry Persily, who writes op-eds regularly for the Anchorage Daily News, has a new column out on his usual theme of “Alaska needs to tax Hilcorp.”
Persily is the owner of Good Journalism, LLC, which is the owner of the Wrangell Sentinel LLC, a paper he bought decades ago, sold, and then repurchased a few years ago.
The Wrangell Sentinel’s business license has been expired since 2022, or so it shows at the Alaska Division of Corporations, Business and Professional Licensing.
Persily is running his newspaper business through an LLC, just like Hilcorp owner and CEO Jeff Hildebrand is running Hilcorp as an LLC, and Persily is not paying personal income tax or corporate income taxes for either Good Journalism, LLC or the out-of-compliance Wrangell Sentinel, LLC.
The difference is that Jeff Hildebrand invests hundreds of million of dollars into Alaska, employees thousands of Alaskans, and even kept the lights on in Southcentral Alaska during the near-blackouts during the worst of the winter cold snap this past season, ensuring that natural gas kept flowing to Enstar at the same price, not gouging the natural gas company, which was having trouble meeting demand from customers. That was during a critical time when Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and the Municipality of Anchorage had turned down the heat in public buildings. Hilcorp never got credit for stepping up and supplying the demand even without a contract.
“All corporations, whether publicly owned biggies like Amazon and Walmart, or privately owned moneymakers like Hilcorp, big law firms or medical practices, are able to succeed at their businesses, in great part, because government provides services the companies and their employees and customers use, such as roads, ports and police. Government also provides financial assistance that their lower-paid employees need,” Persily argues in his op-ed, which argues that LLCs should be taxed.
Unappreciated by pro-taxers, companies like Hilcorp also provide services to the public, such as heat, but there are those like Persily who are wedded to the idea that government has a duty to skim capital from any company that risks investment in a tough-to-operate place like Alaska.
The additional irony is that Persily’s op-ed ran in the Anchorage Daily News, also organized as an LLC by the Binkley Co., which is also an LLC. Persily is arguing that the newspaper, which can barely stay afloat in this era and depends on grants from nonprofits to pay its journalists, should pay taxes to the state.
Persily is the go-to guy for Alaska journalists for a reliable quote from an “oil and gas expert,” having served as Federal Coordinator of the Alaska Natural Gas Transportation Projects during the entire Obama Administration. He has worked on and off in government and journalism for most of his career. He worked for Rep. Mary Peltola when she first took office.
