Bloated state lawsuit claims and false precision from the overreach industry
One of the many odd things about the Dunleavy administration lawsuit over imaginary oil revenues from undiscovered oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the dreamlike quality of its estimates.
The ANWR lawsuit claims in its first paragraph that the “state would have earned hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in royalties and other revenues” had the Biden administration not intervened.
It was timed for July 2, so that Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor could issue this press release saying, “As the rest of the nation celebrates the Fourth of July, the federal government has systematically undermined the state’s ability to maintain its economic independence. This was not what was promised Alaskans at statehood, and why the state must continue to fight.”
The first sentence of the complaint doesn’t make the $25 billion claim contained in Taylor’s press release.
Two paragraphs later, the state abandons the “hundreds of millions” claim entirely and settles on “billions of dollars in revenue . . .”
Then on page 13, the state retreats to “at least hundreds of millions, and perhaps tens of billions,” after giving a precise imaginary number—$24.56 billion.
If the state is going to claim in a lawsuit that it is owed $24.56 billion, then the attorney general and his contract attorneys shouldn’t be suggesting in the same lawsuit that the real number might be $24 billion less than that amount.
This is legal overreach, from the same deep thinkers who say the state deserves $700 billion from the federal government for the property that is home to the imaginary Pebble Mine.
The state hired the Colorado law firm Davis, Graham & Stubbs for $250,000 to pursue the ANWR issue more than two years ago.
After I began asking about how much the Dunleavy administration pays contract attorneys per hour and publishing the $600-per-hour results, legislators took notice.
The Dunleavy administration invited Davis, Graham & Stubbs and others to claim such information should be withheld from Alaskans. Davis, Graham & Stubbs readily agreed.
The attorney general ruled in April that the payments can be claimed as “trade secrets” after the fact.
This is the contract with Davis Graham & Stubbs.
The state employee working on the case is Ronald Opsahl, a former Colorado attorney hired by the state in 2021 who has strong opinions about “liberal courts” and “radical environmental groups.”
The Anchorage Daily News reported on the ANWR financial claims lawsuit July 4, but the state withheld its contract from the newspaper.
“A spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law did not immediately provide the state’s contracts with outside counsel in response to a request made Tuesday,” the Daily News reported last week.
The Department of Law has easy access to the electronic versions of this and other contracts and should have cooperated with the Daily News.
This is the contract with Davis Graham & Stubbs, which the state released in response to a public records request I made last year, as part of my continuing effort to understand where the millions spent by Dunleavy on the statehood defense industry have gone.
The contract and the per-hour rates were public information both before and after I asked for the details, but were redacted after the fact.
Here is the affidavit from Davis Graham & Stubbs claiming that secrecy is essential. The company does not admit that this was in response to the state’s invitation. Disclosure of how much they charge would create an “unlevel playing field,” claims Colorado attorney Christopher Richardson.
These are the attorneys under contract with Attorney General Tregarraick Taylor. The state invited Davis, Graham & Stubbs to claim the per-hour charges are secret. The Colorado law firm accepted the invitation. The per-hour rates should not be treated as secret because they are not.
As I wrote here last December, there is a bumper crop of bluster from the millions spent so far. Dunleavy and his overreach team love to portray Alaska as a hapless victim of federal interference.
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