State Sen. Charlie Huggins, Exxon's BFF

Charlie Huggins is the best basketball coach my son ever had. I coached youth soccer and little league baseball in the Mat-Su Valley for years. My son played those sports, ran and skied. Basketball coaches tend to be fairly unimaginative, compared especially to hockey coaches. Huggins wasn't. He inspired the kids, turning them into winners.

Basketball teams tend to rely far too much on their first-string core. Hockey is structured to put everyone out on the ice, and sub-units within teams are trained to work together. Huggins sort of did that with the teams I've seen him coach.

His approach to politics is clearly different. He seeks to satisfy the most retro elements of Valley and Alaska politics. He's like Vic Kohring, without Vic's big heart or sense of mission for the little guy in his district. Huggins is similar to his predecessor in the Senate, Scott Ogan, in being very inattentive to queries from constituents who don't match his narrow set of beliefs. Like Ogan, he has never answered any of my e-mails or phone messages. Even Lyda Green has answered most, if not all, of my queries.

Whenever I see the evidence of environmental degradation in the middle Knik River area, I see Charlie's presence. He has become the poster boy for the motorheads who seek to make this place the ugliest example in Alaska of how irresponsibly our citizens can deal with conflicts over the use of sensitive lands. Sometimes Huggins can even make nutcases like one of his other bff's, Penny Nixon, the fool behind Mat-Su Proposition One last year, seem relatively sane.

Huggins has introduced legislation to give oil companies open-ended and difficult to verify grounds for deducting "expenses" related to the so-called legacy oil fields on the North Slope. Reading his bill, it appears Conoco-Phillips would be able to write off the cost of the enormous glossy ads they're inserting wholesale into the state's print media.

Huggins also seeks to end the retroactivity of the new oil fee legislation enacted in the November Special Session of the Legislature. Sean Cockerham's article in today's Anchorage Daily News, probably the best ADN article yet on the session, points out that Sen. Lyda Green and Joe Hazelwood, er - I mean Sen. Bert Stedman, are steering Charlie's bill, SB 242, full speed ahead, through the Juneau Narrows:

Senate President Lyda Green sent the bill to only one committee. That's an indication she doesn't want it held up. The bill is going only to the Senate Finance Committee, where Sitka Republican Sen. Bert Stedman said that he'll hold hearings on it.

A commenter to the ADN article describes rather well the distinction between what Huggins characterizes the fee to be and what it actually is:

Charlie compares Alaska citizens to the IRS and refers to the revenue sharing agreement passed as a tax. People ..it is not a tax when you own the resource. We own the darn oil. It is a revenue sharing agreement and Charlie thinks that we should give away more of our revenue to a multinational company (that has and will no doubt either funded his campaign or at least his retirement). A multinational company that tried to manipulate our state legislature with bribes through its surrogate. I hope Charlie is just a naive buffoon and not a corrupt politician. I am upset with his divisive action and cannot wait for Alaskans to show him and his partners the door.

At least we once again know where Charlie's priorities are, don't we? Ishmael Melville of Kodiak Konfidential put it bluntly this morning, writing:

Don't these jerk wads know how unhappy we are with big oil right now? We're paying more and more and more at the pump and big oil is making record-breaking profits every year!

Ishmael adds:

Could there be a breakdown of the majority over this? Any chance of a new coalition? Lyda Green has got to be removed from any position of power before she continues on this path of killing our state. And anyone who stands with her must be taken care of, too.

I've got my fingers crossed! Oh, yeah, for those of you not into texting code, BFF.

Update - Saturday night: Sen. Huggins called this evening while I was washing dishes. He said he was calling about my queries about thoroughly testing all our National Guard soldiers immediately upon return from Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo for exposure to depleted uranium, whether or not they've been exposed to recent close detonations. I made the queries well over a year ago.

At first I found it hard to believe he was only responding now to the long-ago e-mails and messages. But he convinced me that it was mere serendipity.

Sen. Huggins is having Gen. Craig Campbell, the State Adjutant General, look into the legislation already passed by Connecticut, Louisiana and other states on this necessary testing, as I had suggested back in the early spring of 2006. I urged him to put it on the front burner.

Charlie also tried to assure me - and failed - that he is only cleaning up debris from the final moments of last year's special session with SB 242.

He says he'll be at JD High this week to watch the Colony Knights take on Juneau. Huggins and I have both coached three of the kids on the Colony boys' basketball team. I told him I hope he makes it, but things might get a lot busier in the Alaska State Senate this week than anyone has anticipated.