Alaska Oil Triggers Yearly Buying Spree : Finance: Dividend checks from petroleum fund are sent to nearly every resident each fall. This year, that means $500 million, or about $950 per person.

Bruce Rexford is getting three round-trip plane tickets, Chuck King is buying a new all-terrain vehicle and Deena LaRue is buying a secondhand minivan.

It’s the annual fall spending spree in Alaska, courtesy of the state’s oil-wealth account.

The pot of expendable cash enters the economy every fall when the state sends dividend checks from the Alaska Permanent Fund to almost every Alaskan. It’s a dream come true for retailers. But there’s stiff competition for those checks.

This year’s dividend: $949.46. The state’s population: about 550,000. That means more than $500 million in cash goes into people’s pockets.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out how to get that $950 check away from people,” said Darcy Johnson, co-owner of Anchorage Nissan Jeep Eagle. “They tend to spend it as soon as they get it. Everyone’s offering a deal, from stereo shops to furniture dealers to banks.”

Delta, United and Alaska Airlines are offering three round-trip tickets to limited domestic destinations in exchange for one dividend check.

The Anchorage-based MarkAir, which started the airline war last year by offering four tickets per dividend to anywhere it flew, including Seattle and Newark, N.J., netted $18 million on the promotion, company president Mike Bergt said.

The Permanent Fund is a state trust created by voters in 1976 to ensure that Alaskans benefit from North Slope oil revenues long after the oil is gone. The fund’s $15.5-billion principal is invested and cannot be spent.

The state began issuing dividends from the fund in 1983, with amounts ranging from $331.29 to $1,000. In recent years, the checks hovered between $900 and $1,000.

The size of the check isn’t announced until the end of September, and people often spend the windfall right away.

Anchorage Nissan Jeep Eagle claims to have started the first Permanent Fund deal in 1985 by offering to double anyone’s dividend toward a down payment on a car.

Anchorage car dealers this year are offering to double, triple, even quadruple dividends put toward new cars. Banks are offering better CD rates, and one company is offering a deal for a cellular telephone with monthly service rates.

One Anchorage parent offered a dividend for anyone who could find his runaway son. Police arrested the boy the night before the offer was made public via the Anchorage Daily News. No one got the reward.

The checks are sent to almost every resident, regardless of income or age.

Rexford, 18, of Barrow, said he’ll go with an airline deal because he’ll be attending the University of Alaska Anchorage next year and wants the tickets for visits home to the nation’s northernmost town.

Some state policy makers have suggested phasing out the dividends and using the fund’s earnings to help pay for state government as oil revenues decline. But Alaska politicians are hard-pressed to support an elimination of the annual money giveaway.

“Nope. Don’t do it,” said LaRue, 36, whose family of five will soon have a new minivan to get around Juneau. “If we had a vote on it, I don’t think too many Alaskans would favor that.”