Going Rogue: An American Life (23 page)

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would be your plans for your kids?” Murkowski said.

“I’d bring rhem with me. They’d go to school in D.C., bur we’d ptobably do some back-and-forth to Alaska because I wouldn’t want them to lose touch wirh home-“

“You don’t undersrand,” he inrerjected. “This is really tough on kids.”

He repeared a few more times those same senrimenrs. It was then that I knew I wasn’t getting the gig. It seemed to me that though he thought me competent enough to make his short list, the father in him felt compelled to protect me from the storm that is national politics.

Murkowski then talked a

about the logisticsof Senate

service, touched on our common goal of energy development, but again he repeated his mantra about working and kids and the shredderlike nature of Washington politics.

About thirty minutes passed, and then we were done. I thanked the governor and the mostly silenr AG, said my goodbyes, and elevatored down to meet Todd in the parking lot.

“Well, it’s not going to be me,” I told him, shaking off the cold inside the truck’s warm cab.

Todd steered the truck back out inro the street. “Why not?”

“Governor Murkowski kept repeating how tough it would be on the kids. But it will be interesting to see who he picks. It’s not going to be a woman with a family.”

We were disappoinred … for about seven seconds. We talked about the way the “ball bounces.” We reminded each other how UCLA Coach John Wooden had captured our thoughts in a book we’d read about him.

I told Todd, “Coach Wooden said, ‘Things work out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.’ ” We said in unison, “Or something like that!” Then we drove home through the gorgeous winrer landscape,

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making it back in time for Bristol’s basketball game and Track’s evening hockey practice.

Soon afterward Governor Murkowski made his big announcement. He’d chosen the “most politically aligned Alaskan to replace him in the U.S. Senate,” he said. He then handed what was called the most coveted government job in rhe state to his daughter, Lisa, a mom with two young kids. I guess Murkowski took me seriously when I said my most important issues were energy and resource development. A couple of months into his administration, he offered me a job as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC). Established during the days when Alaska was a territory, the commission is a quasi-judicial regulatory body that has a range of duties, many of which affect people, companies, and markets in the Lower 48 and around the world.
It
was confirmation that having lost out on the lieutenant governor’s posirion and the U.S. Senate appointment were actually blessings. Working at AOGCC, I could still live in Wasilla while working on the issue I cared most about for the state and our nation. The salary was eye-popping, to me, at $124,400 a year.

As the entertainment industry is to Los Angeles, corn is to Kansas, and markers are to New York, so is the energy industry to Alaska. More than 85 percent of the state’s budget is built on petroleum-based energy revenues. For more than thirty years the big oil companies like British Petroleum (BP), ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips have extracted the oil underneath Alaska lands and sold billions of barrels of it to very hungry markets. But oil is not a renewable resource. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, so it has to be dealt with prudently. Many Alaskans were aware thar these huge multinational energy corporations had been leasing oil-rich chunks of • 93

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land On the Notth Slope, but wete just sitting on the leases, in some cases for decades. And as long as they held the leases, nther companies couldn’t come in and compete for the right to tap our resources, so parts of the oil basin were essentially locked up. o

When Murkowski appointed me AOGCC chairman, one of the first things I told him was that we needed to make sure our resources were not being wasred and hold rhe oil industry accountable to its contracts. AOGCC functions include maximizing oil and gas recovery, minimizing waste, approving oil pool development rules, and maintaining state production records. The commission also lends a hand in protecting the environment from contamination during drilling and also ensures environmental compliance in production, metering, and well abandonment activities, so federal agencies like the EPA as well as private interesrs and environmental groups have key interests in the commission’s activities.
In
my view, the nation deserved an agency that was a fair, impartial body with the best interesrs of Alaskans and the country in mind.

I hadn’t been there long when ir became clear thar that wasn’t necessarily the case. Nor did I have any idea how my involvement would lead me into a head-on confrontation with the forces of corruption in the highest levels of the srate and my own party.

The AOGCC is led by three commissioners appointed by the governor, one each representing expertise in petroleum engineering and geology, plus a representative from the public sector-the post I filled. A geologist, Dan Seamount, an experienced, nonpolitical outdoorsy type who was friendly and especially knowledgeable in coal bed methane development, was already serving on the commission. Randy Ruedrich, a former general manager of Doyon Drilling and a contracror for the oil company ARCO, was named to the petroleum engineering .

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It was Mutkowski’s thitd eyebrow-taising appointment in his shott tenute. But this one was especially troublesome because Ruedtich was the state Republican Patty chaitman and would temain so during his tenure. He was also a membet of the Republican National Committee. Ruedtich was jovial, and he was vety smart when it came to extracting and selling oil. He said once that he was the only petson who could chait the Alaska Republican Patty because he had lots of money
from
that oil exttaction and “no one else could affotd ro do it for free.”

Ruedrich was the key fund-raiser for the GOP and naturally solicited party dollars from the oil and gas ind)lstry players we were to be regulating, something that should have immediately been pegged as a conflict of interest. Of course, being married ro Todd, I was also accused of literally being “in bed” with the oil industry. I had ro explain that as a blue-collar union hand, a production operaror wearing a hard hat and steel-toed boots, Todd wasn’t calling the shots for the corporate bosses in London. In fact, I told Alaskans, “Todd’s not in management. He actually
works.”
The state determined that there was no conflict of interest with Todd’s Slope job. Ruedrich, though, had held his former position as Doyon’s GM during the period when the company pled guilty ro federal felony charges for environmental crimes on the North Slope. In July 1995, Ruedrich testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natutal Resources Committee (chaired by thenSenatot Frank Murkowski) that a new method of disposing drilling waste back down wells had boosted environmental safety because it eliminated unsightly “waste pits.” But just a month . later, a whistleblower reported that Doyon was actually injecting illegal and hazardous substances down wells in order to save money. The FBI and EPA investigated Doyon and BP. BP paid a

$500,000 fine, and Doyon paid a $1 million fine.

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When Ruedrich became an AOGCC commissioner, there were whispers on the staff and among the public about the fox guatding the henhouse. And the trouble began almost immediately. I began commuting into Anchorage five days a week, diving headlong into a learning curve that would deepen my knowledge of Alaska’s energy resources, the energy problems facing the country, and the close relationships clouding judgment on both. When Murkowski tapped me for the commission, he quickly named me chairman. That meant I also became the ethics supervisor of the staff, a job that turned out to be more than just a compliance title. When a staffer hinted right away that Ruedrich seemed to spend a lot of rime running the Republican Party from his new AOGCC office, plus dealing with GOP operatives as a National Republican Committeeman, I mentioned it to the party boss-slash-commissioner.

Then another problem cropped up: Ruedrich involved himself in adjudicating two cases that wete closely intertwined with his old Doyon illegal dumping case. Commissioner Seamount and I urged Ruedrich to recuse himself, but he refused. An administrative assistant took me aside ro say she suspected Ruedrich of sharing confidential commission information with a coal bed methane company we were supposed to be regulating. She was right: he was passing agency information to the company’s lobbyist.

I was dealing with the issue while observing my own chain of command. I spoke personally to Ruedrich numerous times. Dan Seamount also raised concerns. But no one, including my own ethics supervisor, seemed to take the concerns seriously. He was a young guy who was a political appointee of Mutkowski’s and a good ftiend of Randy’s. In fact, Randy menrioned often that he was like a grandfathet to the ethics supervisor’s child. At one point, an angry Alaskan’s e-mail arrived in my inbox: • 96

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