Commonwealth North gives Hickel award to former CIRI and Old Harbor chief Carl Marrs

Commonwealth North gave its Walter J. Hickel Award for Visionary Leadership to Carl Marrs, who led Cook Inlet Region Inc. and later Old Harbor Native Corporation, at the policy group's annual gala in Anchorage. Its Egan award went jointly to Sen. Lyman Hoffman and Senate President Gary Stevens, who are both leaving the Legislature.

Marrs spent more than three decades at CIRI, rising to president and CEO, and ran Old Harbor from 2010 to 2024. He grew up in a Seldovia fishing family, served in the Marine Corps and spent eight years as a University of Alaska regent, presenter Gloria O'Neill said. He now chairs Alaskans for Common Sense and writes op-eds about the Permanent Fund, she said.

Sophie Minnick, who worked with Marrs at CIRI, called his push to change the law on Alaska Native settlement trusts one of his most significant contributions. Congress let Native corporations create the trusts in 1988 to hold Native land permanently and provide for the health, education and welfare of Native beneficiaries. But the tax code made it costly to move land and money into them, Marrs told a U.S. Senate committee in 2017 as Old Harbor's CEO, testifying for Sen. Lisa Murkowski's Settlement Trust Improvement Act. Parts of the bill became law in the 2017 federal tax overhaul, including a deduction for corporations' contributions to the trusts.

At CIRI, Minnick said, an investment in a small telecommunications partnership that became part of VoiceStream Wireless, now T-Mobile, paid for special distributions to shareholders, most of them tax-free. When the first, $50,000, went out, car lots flashed signs welcoming CIRI shareholders, she said. Marrs also led the effort to give the CIRI Foundation a $53 million endowment for the education and careers of shareholders, their descendants and other Alaska Natives, she said.

O'Neill, who runs Cook Inlet Tribal Council, said Marrs advised her when she took over the council in 1998 at 28. In the late 1990s, as the Legislature blocked a constitutional amendment to protect subsistence, she said, he posted blown-up photos of eight legislators in front of about 4,000 people at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention. "Now you know who to vote against," he told them, she said, adding, "It's not personal. Their position is bad for Alaska."

Marrs called the introduction "a mite over the top" and credited the boards and staff at CIRI and Old Harbor. He also said he and Hickel "didn't get along great. We had a few arguments, and he's probably spinning in his grave."

Old Harbor Native Corporation was the gala's key sponsor, Commonwealth North Executive Director Ross Johnston said. Hickel and former Gov. Bill Egan founded the group in 1979.