North Slope, Fairbanks, Valdez sue over pipeline tax values

Three Alaska governments are challenging how the pipeline is valued for taxes — taking on the oil companies and the state at once.

The trans-Alaska pipeline doesn't just move oil. It underwrites the governments along its path — and three of them just went to court to defend that.

The North Slope Borough, the Fairbanks North Star Borough, and the City of Valdez filed a joint appeal in Anchorage on June 22, challenging the state's findings on how the pipeline is valued for taxes. The assessed value of pipeline property sets the local tax base, so the number at the center of this case is, in effect, a number about their budgets.

On the other side sit the companies that own and run the line — ConocoPhillips Transportation Alaska, ExxonMobil Pipeline Company, Harvest Alaska, and Alyeska Pipeline Service Company — along with the Alaska Department of Revenue and the state board whose findings are being challenged. So the three municipalities aren't only up against the oil companies; they're contesting the state's own determination. How much the pipeline is worth for tax purposes has been fought over in Alaska for decades.

The stakes aren't even across the three. The Fairbanks borough has just two miles of pipeline within its boundaries — at the maximum rate, Mayor Grier Hopkins told a Senate committee on June 10, that comes to only about $400,000. That a borough with so little to gain signed on anyway is a sign the case reaches past any one community's revenue, to how the whole pipeline is valued — where the real money is for places like the North Slope and Valdez.

What this filing doesn't yet spell out — the assessment year, the dollars in dispute, and exactly what each side argues — lives in the court documents, not the one-line notice of the case. It lands while the Legislature wages a parallel fight over how pipeline infrastructure should be taxed and which governments collect the revenue.