I am humbled by Governor Hickel’s continued support of my candidacy. Today, he made the following statement in an opinion piece that ran in the Anchorage Daily News:

“Unless we have a change of direction in the coming election, we will return to the closed-door negotiations that Gov. Frank Murkowski utilized to guarante…e “fiscal certainty” (locked-in tax rates) for the world’s largest corporations. The terms of the gas line contract he negotiated were so skewed to benefit the producers that the Legislature, to its credit, wouldn’t even take a vote on it.

Fortunately, Bill Walker, the most knowledgeable person I know when it comes to the All-Alaska natural gas pipeline, has entered the race for governor. Both a builder and an attorney, Bill knows the oil and gas industry well, gets along with it, but is unafraid to stand up for Alaska.

His first priority will be to implement the law overwhelmingly passed by Alaska’s voters in 2002 to build a state-owned gas line from Prudhoe to Valdez. That is the surest and fastest way to get Alaska’s vast energy supplies to Alaskans and to sell the additional trillions of cubic feet of gas to the most lucrative markets in the world.

Each year, the oil flowing through the trans-Alaska oil pipeline is dropping by roughly 6 percent. When it comes to the gas line, if we allow the current charade of “study and delay” to continue, the state will soon be in deep trouble.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. We may not be able to influence the decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court, but whom we elect in Alaska is completely up to us.”

Please help spread the word by forwarding this to your friends and email contacts. Together, we can take back Alaska’s future.