Palin gives and saves amid big Alaska surplus

DELTA JUNCTION, ALASKA — Daniel Congiolosi is sure it won't be long before energy is so expensive he won't be able to pay the bills. When that happens, he will be ready. This spring, he tripled the size of his garden. He's rushing to install a hand pump on the well, build a concrete-lined root cellar and get an ice house ready before next summer.

Thanks to soaring oil prices, he'll be able to pay for it all. Americans have been hit hard by months of $120- and $130-a-barrel oil, but in Alaska, they've hit the jackpot.

Congiolosi this month expects a check from the government for as much as $29,000 before taxes -- a combination of the annual dividend he and his large family have earned from the state's oil wealth and a special $1,200-per-person energy rebate signed into law last month by Gov. Sarah Palin.

The fuel givebacks will cost the state $750 million. With a temporary freeze on gasoline taxes and a long-standing program to help poor rural Alaskans pay their fuel bills, the state this summer is handing out $1 billion in energy relief. Though the amount of the dividend won't be announced until this morning, analysts say that even a family of four will probably get a check for up to $13,000.

Few states could afford such a bonanza, likened by Republican state Rep. Mike Kelly of Fairbanks to "morphine and welfare payments." But Alaska is on pace to earn more than $10 billion from oil and gas operations this year, double last year's revenue.

Palin's stern veto pen at a time when the state is swimming in cash has helped establish her credentials as a fiscal conservative, economic analysts here say -- although critics complain that she has failed to use the state's unprecedented oil bounty to help tackle perennial issues of domestic violence, alcoholism and inadequate child healthcare.

"The surplus just seems to get bigger and bigger," said Oliver Scott Goldsmith, head of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska. "The state is awash in oil dollars, and the projection is that for the next few years we will have significant surpluses over and above current levels -- in the billions of dollars."

Estimates of the budget surplus by early next year range from $5 billion to $9 billion, a huge amount in a state of 670,000 people. Spending it -- or saving it for a day when oil is not so plentiful or expensive -- is one of the central policy issues confronting the administration of Palin, the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain.