Joshua Saul, Anchorage Dispatch

Bill Walker filed a records request on June 24 looking for information about the bids the TransCanada Corp. open season was bringing in. “When the election comes about, Alaskans need to know whether we’ve had a failed open season or not,” Walker said at the time.

Well, Gov. Sean Parnell’s office replied to Walker’s request late Wednesday — but there weren’t many details on the open season. The letter from the governor’s administrative director, Linda Perez, mostly asks for clarification. Walker asked for documents related to TransCanada’s open season through Aug. 1, but Perez wrote that her office is not able to honor continuing public records requests.

“The logistics of monitoring and responding to continuing records requests would be unmanageable,” she wrote.

Walker had also asked for records related to the veto of Senate Bill 305, the so-called “decoupling” bill that, among other things, would have separated oil and gas in Alaska’s production tax structure. Perez wrote that she could proceed with that request and give him an estimate of how much that would cost.

Perez went on to say that if Walker wants open season documents up to Aug. 1, he’ll need to make a records request once that date has passed. She then asks if he wants open season bids that the state held as of June 24 (the date of his request) or if he wants to wait until Aug. 1.

Walker didn’t like that. In a press release sent out Thursday morning he said Parnell is hiding behind technicalities in hopes of continuing to stall the process so he can keep the results of his “failed plan” secret until after the election.

“If he truly had Alaska’s best interests in mind, he would bend over backwards to make this information public,” Walker said in the release. “We have paid over $100 million in public funds into this process, yet the governor clearly has no intention of letting Alaskans know the results out of fear of losing the election.”

There are currently two pipeline projects in open season. The first is the state-sanctioned Alaska Pipeline Project, led by TransCanada Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. The second is the Denali Project, a joint effort of BP and ConocoPhillips.