"Alaska is Unsustainable" an Interview with Robin O. Brena - TAS #9

This episode will make you mad and will open your eyes. Anchorage attorney and real estate investor Robin O. Brena is spearheading the Fair Share Act on the ballot in November to raise production taxes on Alaska's most established and profitable oil fields. He clearly lays out the flaws in Senate Bill 21 in 2013 that let oil companies obscure their profits and evade production taxes, explains why the Alaskan economy was still in recession when oil was at $70 a barrel recently (hint: we aren't getting our fair share) and how this state's dividend and essential services are flat out unsustainable if Alaskans let oil companies buy their votes this November. We also discuss his major litigation wins (fighting on behalf of AND against oil companies), his pro-business approach, and commercial real estate in Anchorage. 

Interview starts right away - no timestamps!

Links

https://voteyesforalaskasfairshare.com/

https://rsd-properties.com/ - developing coworking space in Anchorage

www.TheAKShow.com

Interview Notes

Robin O. Brena is the founding partner of Brena, Bell and Walker law office in Anchorage. He is a commercial real estate investor, born and raised in Skagway and is one of the three sponsors of Fair Share Act.

Fair Share Act:

Robin has skin in the game - he’s spent $100,000+ of his own money

It’s not anti-business - it supports some oil fields and not others

He has a long history of fighting big oil on behalf of Alaskans and independent producers.

The Fair Share Act is on the general election ballot in November. It raises the production taxes on our three largest and most profitable fields in a transparent way. One of the most important pieces is it requires the production tax returns associated with Prudhoe, Alpine, and Kuparuk to be transparent. Their production tax files will be public. That’s critical because it’s our oil on our land and we’re in partnership with these companies and have no clue what their revenues, costs, and profits are in the three major fields. It’s hard to be a proper steward of this resource when we have no access to this information. The administration and legislature doesn’t have this information.

How did we get into the situation with no transparency? It was a process of political influence over years chipping away at the reporting. We used to have this information years ago and we don’t have it anymore. People are passing oil policies in Juneau and they don’t know how the fields are performing.

Has it always been like this? Robin doesn’t think people understand how important it is that they stay informed and engaged. We’ve reached a point where we’re getting very little for our oil. Robin thinks one of the most important things the Fair Share Act does is allow Alaskans and the industry to sit down and determine what is fair based on knowing something.

Under normal circumstances it would raise about a billion dollars a year. Even with that it will be lower than the average production tax in the past three decades. That money will help fund essential services, Permanent Fund, and PFDs, and hopefully we will get a capital budget back to do construction which we haven’t had since Senate Bill 21 passed in 2013 lowering these taxes.

Alex thinks something has to give. We need money fr