Bell’s Firm Got $1 Million+ from BP

Well, well, well.

Ask not for whom Mr. Bell shills – he shills for BP.

We practically needed the jaws of life to pry the truth out of candidate Bob Bell, but it has finally been liberated from the mangled wreck of his financial “disclosure” forms.

If you remember from the other day, Mr. Bell decided first that he didn’t want to tell us who gave his engineering firm money. Then APOC told him he had to not only disclose who, but how much.

Then he disclosed who, but NOT how much.

Apparently it became more uncomfortable for Mr. Bell to violate the law than to comply, because now we know how much BP gave his company. Sort of. We know a range. The range would be $1 million on the low end and “more than that” on the high end.

Yowza.

So, let’s think about this for a minute. Bob Bell wants to run for the state senate. In that position, should he win, he’ll be dealing with many issues. But the big bad issue of the day is oil taxes. In a nutshell, the governor (and those he promised to install through his efforts in this election) wants to give $2 billion a year to the oil companies with no strings attached. Just because they may decide to be nice, and they may explore more, or hire more, or put more oil in the pipeline. Or not. We don’t know. But we must do this anyway.

Sounds like an awesome deal! For them.

The senators in the bipartisan majority coalition, on the other hand, would like some accountability, and to know what we’d be getting for our $2 billion a year. The nerve!

So, Bob Bell would like to be one of 20 senators who is voting on this issue. Meanwhile one of the companies that stands to make gazillions on this deal just handed Mr. Bell’s firm a big ol’ giant pile of cash, to the tune of $1 million or more in 2011.

Gee, no conflict of interest there!

The Anchorage Daily News explains Bell’s philosophy on the whole thing:

“What it gets down to — do you have the strength of character to be able to represent people and not be biased by what goes on around you?” Bell said. “I proved that when I was on the Assembly. A good example would be that prison that Veco wanted to put in South Anchorage.”

Veco, once Alaska’s biggest oil field contractor, teamed up with other companies in the mid-1990s to propose building and operating a private prison. One of the first places they suggested for the prison was South Anchorage.

“They approached me and said we got a whole bunch of money here for your re-election campaign and we’ll give you the engineering contracts and everything,” said Bell, who was running for his second Assembly term in 1996. “And I said, ‘Ain’t going to happen. Nobody in South Anchorage wants that prison there and I represent them and it ain’t going happen.’ “

But Bell also said he didn’t go to the FBI. Told that the offer of an engineering contract in return for his support of the prison as an Assemblyman could be a crime, Bell replied:

“It is?”

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