JUNEAU — The state of Alaska has opened an office in Tokyo to help promote trade and advance a long hoped-for natural gas pipeline project.<\/p>\n
The office and the hiring of Masatoshi Nick Shiratori to direct it was only announced to companies doing business with the state on Jan. 12. A copy of the announcement was obtained by The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
Shiratori has been under contract since August, working for the Alaska Gasline Development Corp.<\/p>\n
Corporation spokeswoman Rosetta Alcantra says the contract is for up to $130,000 and expires in June. Shiratori will work in a small office, which the state pays about $5,300 a month rent.<\/p>\n
Alaska faces a multibillion dollar budget deficit because of chronically low oil prices, and lawmakers began a 90-day session this week that will be dominated by what Gov. Bill Walker has called a financial crisis.<\/p>\n
Walker advocates building a multibillion dollar natural gas pipeline to diversify the economy. Previous efforts to build such a pipeline have failed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JUNEAU — The state of Alaska has opened an office in Tokyo to help promote trade and advance a long hoped-for natural gas pipeline project. The office and the hiring of Masatoshi Nick Shiratori to direct it was only announced to companies doing business<\/a> with the state on Jan. 12. A copy of the announcement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-28940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28940"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=28940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}