Op-Ed: Tom Jones: If Alaska’s laws aren’t enforced, nothing works

There is no shortage of big issues on the table in Alaska right now, and no shortage of loud, well-funded voices weighing in on every one of them. Before Alaskans decide who to listen to, they deserve to know something simpler: whether the groups that are competing for their money and their trust are complying with the law.

That is why the we filed a formal complaint with the Alaska Department of Law asking the Attorney General to investigate the New Venture Fund, a Washington, D.C. dark money operation and two fake groups it runs inside the state: SalmonState and the Alaska Venture Fund.

SalmonState launched in 2015 and has been one of the loudest and most destructive environmental voices in Alaska ever since. It raises its own money, employs its own staff, keeps its own donor list, and presents itself as its own organization. So does the Alaska Venture Fund. But neither is an Alaska organization in any legal sense. Both are “projects” of the New Venture Fund, which holds the money, files the tax returns, and answers to a board in Washington, bankrolled by some of the biggest foundations in the country.

Alaska law does not prohibit that arrangement, but it does impose rules. SalmonState did incorporate as an Alaska nonprofit once, and the state involuntarily dissolved it in March 2018. A dissolved corporation may wind up its affairs. It may not keep fundraising, hiring, and running multi-year campaigns. SalmonState did anyway, straight through to the present. Its own director told the Anchorage Daily News at the time that he had learned it did not need to be registered at all. The New Venture Fund cannot plead ignorance either. It holds a certificate of authority to do business in Alaska as a foreign corporation.

Think about what that means for the donor. An Alaskan who writes a check to SalmonState reasonably believes there is an Alaska nonprofit by that name. There is not. The money goes to an unregistered District of Columbia corporation, and the project can be reorganized or shut down at the sponsor’s discretion. Nobody tells the donor any of that.

In 2016, the New Venture Fund was the largest donor to the ballot measure that created automatic voter registration through the Permanent Fund Dividend application, giving more than $1 million, roughly 70 percent of the campaign’s cash. In the 2018 fight over Ballot Measure 1, it put around $260 K into the Yes for Salmon committee while the campaign’s director drew his paychecks from Washington. At the APOC hearing that fall, Commissioner Tim Dietz asked how an average Alaska voter could tell who was actually funding the campaign. Opposing counsel was blunter, telling the Anchorage Daily News that SalmonState is “not a real organization.”

The Alaska Venture Fund may be the starkest case. It files no tax return of its own and discloses nothing to the state, to APOC, or to the public. Everything folds into the New Venture Fund’s consolidated filings in Washington. If AVF has spent money in ways that would require disclosure from a stand-alone Alaska nonprofit, the paperwork hides it. That is not an accident. It is the design.

Washington is now asking the same questions. The New Venture Fund sits inside the network built by Arabella Advisors, one of the largest dark money operations in American politics. After years of congressional investigation, Arabella ceased operations last November, and its business reappeared under a new name, Sunflower Services, which now runs SalmonState’s back office. House Oversight Chairman James Comer has kept digging, documenting what his committee called an “organizational scramble” to move projects beyond the reach of its inquiries. Alaska is not a footnote to that story. It should be a case study.

Here is why this matters: Alaska’s rules rest on a simple bargain: transparency in exchange for the privilege of asking Alaskans for money and joining their public debates. The food pantry in Fairbanks honors that bargain. The youth hockey booster club in Wasilla honors it. When some of the biggest, best-lawyered operations in the state ignore it for a decade without consequence, the message to every honest group is that compliance is for suckers. If the laws on the books are not enforced, nothing works. Not disclosure. Not fair elections. Not public trust.

To be clear, this is not about salmon, mining, or pipelines. We take no position on those fights. Alaskans can argue over their own resources and settle it at the ballot box. What they cannot do is fairly weigh an argument when they cannot see who is making it or who is paying for it.

Our complaint asks for specific remedies: an investigation reaching back to 2015, a halt to soliciting Alaskans until these groups comply with the law, honest corrective disclosure to past donors, the return of money raised unlawfully, and a full accounting of every project that has solicited in this state. None of it requires a new law, only the will to enforce the ones Alaska already has. As Alaskans vote this fall, that is what they should demand. Everything else depends on it. 

Tom Jones is the president of the American Accountability Foundation, a nonprofit government watchdog based in Washington, D.C.