Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy said Tuesday he is ordering state lawmakers into a special session to force a new decision on his top priority: property tax breaks for the company proposing to build a massive pipeline system to ship natural gas from the North Slope to tidewater.

Dunleavy outlined his plan during a news conference at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference in Anchorage. 

The special session, to start 10 a.m. Thursday morning, “will go on as long as they need to come up with a decision,” he said at the news conference.

The Legislature’s ongoing regular session ends at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday night, and legislators will enter special session the following morning.

The governor has characterized property tax-relief for the project as his top priority, and at the news conference he accused lawmakers of risking Alaska’s future by rejecting his plan.

The bill would replace state and local petroleum property taxes with an “alternative volumetric tax” on natural gas that would eventually flow through the pipeline.  That gives Glenfarne Group, the company developing the pipeline in conjunction with the state, a tax break that its leaders have said is necessary to attract investors.

Negotiations to pass the governor’s preferred legislation fell apart on Monday, and Dunleavy blamed lawmakers for that outcome.

“This is a decision on the part of a handful of folks in Juneau who wish, for whatever reason I don’t understand, (to) play with the future of Alaska,” he said at the news conference.

Legislative critics of Dunleavy’s approach said Glenfarne had provided too little information on its cost estimates, thus making it impossible for them to determine whether the proposed tax break was appropriate. Some argued that the process had been too rushed. Dunleavy introduced his proposal in March, with the regular session half over.

But the governor had harsh words for those lawmakers. He said they were focused on the wrong things after an extremely cold winter that strained energy supplies in the populated Railbelt corridor.

“Last night there was time to shove a spay and neuter bill into an invasive species bill in (House) Finance,” he said at Tuesday’s news conference. “So Rome is burning and we’re shoving a spay and neuter bill into an invasive species bill.”

Dunleavy was referring to a popular bill to establish a statewide spay and neuter fund, House Bill 258, which was combined during Monday’s House Finance Committee meeting with another bill related to animals, Senate Bill 174, that would establish a state invasive species council. It has since been removed from the bill.

U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a featured speaker at the conference, also nudged lawmakers to accept Dunleavy’s plan.

As a former governor of North Dakota, Burgum said he considered it “inappropriate” for him to insert himself into Alaska legislative business. However, he said lawmakers should focus on getting the gas pipeline built before worrying about how the revenues from it would be allocated.

“The key thing for when we’re competing (for) capital that can go anywhere around the world, the key thing for Alaska is: Get the project,” he said at the news conference. Alaskans should not worry about the revenue distributions until after a project is built and providing its promised myriad economic benefits, he said.

Burgum’s comments at the news conference echoed comments he made about the gas pipeline during his address at the conference.

“That project has to happen. And I would just invite Alaska to not get in your own way if you’re worrying about, ‘How do we divide up the pie,’ and the pie hasn’t even been baked yet,” he said. He called the gasline “a generational, transformational project that’s going to affect the state, the communities, the prosperity, the universities. I mean, the benefits of this thing are unbelievable.”

But lawmakers say those benefits have not been made clear to them, and neither have the cost tradeoffs.

Senate President Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, did not mince words in a newsletter she issued Tuesday morning that said the governor has demanded that lawmakers “pass his version of a gas pipeline bill that no one is allowed to know much about.”

“His version of a gas pipeline defies our Constitution – ignoring resource development for benefit of Alaskans (benefit for a private company), surrenders our taxing authority (removes local taxation authority, forbids financial transparency, logical financial assessment),” Giessel’s newsletter said.

Dunleavy’s decision to veto a pension-overhaul bill that had been two years in the making after lawmakers rejected this gas pipeline bill was a “transactional” decision that is “the worst possible way to make public policy,” she said.