JUNEAU — Gov. Bill Walker’s administration is pitching the board overseeing Alaska’s oil wealth nest egg on a potential investment in the state’s oil and gas tax credit program.
No decisions were made during Friday’s Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. board meeting in Anchorage. The pitch was made by former Attorney General Craig Richards, who is working as an oil and gas consultant for the administration.
One idea is that a producer might sell credits to the corporation, perhaps at a discount, and the corporation would receive the full value of the credits from the state once the state pays them.
With the state mired in a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, Walker has deferred hundreds of millions of dollars in credit obligations, pushing those to future years. The credit obligation for the next fiscal year is expected to be $1.2 billion.
