When Richard A. Fineberg lived in a small cabin in central Alaska, overlooking a valley near Fairbanks, it was packed with documents.
Piled floor to ceiling, they were the product of years of scrutinizing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System — its construction, finances and safety — and probing other environmental and public interest issues. Still more papers were stashed under the cabin, outside in an Airstream trailer and in a storage unit.
Mr. Fineberg accumulated this hoard over five decades of dogged research, first as a political science professor and then as an investigative journalist and magnet for whistle blowers, a policy analyst for two governors, and an independent researcher.
“His articles during the building of the pipeline were a major factor in the safety of the line today,” Steve Cowper, a former governor of Alaska, told The Associated Press in 1995.
Another admirer, Larry Persily, a former deputy commissioner of revenue for the state, told Far North Oil & Gas magazine in 2006, “I don’t take everything he says as the gospel, as his supporters do, nor do I believe he’s the Antichrist, as his critics do.” But, he added, “I think Alaska benefits from having people like Richard Fineberg.”
Mr. Fineberg spent nearly 20 years writing reports and lobbying state officials to revise the financial deal that Alaska made in the 1980s on the fees that the pipeline’s owner, Alyeska, a consortium of oil companies, could charge shippers to move oil through the pipeline.
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