ANCSA - MONEY
The amount of money distributed through ANCSA was $962 million, which was essentially determined on a per capita basis. It came from both the State of Alaska and the Federal Government over a period of about 11 years. The long timeframe for distribution greatly diminished its value due to inflation.
In the first five years, 10 percent of the money distributed went to all individuals who were shareholders. The regions retained 45 percent of the total, and the remaining 45 percent was distributed to the villages and the "at-large" shareholders on a per capita basis. At-large shareholders were those who enrolled only to a region and not a village.
After that, the money was distributed 50-50 with half retained by the regional corporations and half distributed to the village corporations and at-large shareholders on a per capita basis. A provision of ANCSA, Section 7(i), requires that regional corporations share 70 percent of their resource revenues from their ANCSA lands among the corporations. Under Section 7(j), half of the money each region receives is shared with their villages and at-large shareholders on a per capita basis.
The sharing provision is an extremely unusual aspect of ANCSA and it took the corporations about 10 years to hammer out an agreement that spelled out exactly how this would be undertaken. The concept was sound - find a way to make sure that resource-rich corporations shared with those who were resource-poor simply by accident of location.
As Byron Mallott, one of the early leaders who lobbied for ANCSA has said, "Seven (i) was easy to put in the Act because none of us were business people. What if in the airline industry all airlines had to share 70 percent of their revenues, one with the other, because the government believed there should be equity in air transportation? "If we'd known business or had any business experience, particularly on the finance side, someone would have posed the fairly straightforward and obvious question: Well, shouldn't we define 'revenue' in the Act?
"It seemed simple and elegant as public policy and became very, very difficult in its implementation."
