BARROW-- House by weather-beaten house, it's almost possible to count votes by driving the gravel streets and tallying up the political signs in this town on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.

The campaign signs -- tacked to buildings because the permafrost is too mucky in late summer to sink in a yard stake -- may be a better indicator of allegiance than polling. Yet they signal far more than just a vote for the mayoral candidate who will best fix the potholes and chase the polar bears from the high school football field.

Offshore in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, oil companies, chiefly the Dutch oil giant Shell, have paid billions of dollars to explore reserves that could rival the oil and gas discoveries of the Gulf of Mexico. Whoever wins the Oct. 7 election as mayor of the North Slope Borough will help shape the future of offshore drilling in the nation's Arctic waters -- as well as that of a community where ancient whaling traditions still dominate daily life.

"The oil industry, if I don't win this election, I think they'll be jumping up and down for joy," said Edward Itta, 63, the current mayor and opponent of offshore drilling. He faces a challenge from his former boss and the borough's previous five-term mayor, George Ahmaogak. Both men are whaling captains.

"The oil industry has been the lifeblood of the economy up here. The North Slope Borough is pro-development," Itta said. "But offshore ... now that is totally different."

SHELL'S PAYING ATTENTION

Worried that noise from oil exploration and, ultimately, drilling will drive off the bowhead whales hunted by the Inupiat Eskimos of the North Slope, Itta's administration, in concert with several environmental groups, sued the Minerals Management Service. So far, the unresolved lawsuit has succeeded mostly in slowing the company's exploration. Shell has continued to conduct seismic surveys, including offshore work this summer, but the lawsuit has kept the company from drilling exploratory wells.

Ahmaogak says he, too, opposes offshore oil and gas development, but he also believes that national security interests make it inevitable. He is skeptical of the borough's lawsuit, and has said "it's good to protect the environment, but not to go to bed with (environmentalists)."

"The federal government is pushing forward with leasing no matter whether we object to it," said Ahmaogak, 59. "I'm not saying I'm in bed with the industry, it's simply that I've got a job to do protecting subsistence resources, protecting whaling. The mayor's office should be right there, and they're not."

The borough, the equivalent to a county in most U.S. states, is the biggest municipal-type government in the country. The sprawling territory bigger than all but nine states, is home to 6,600 people -- about 70 percent are Alaska Natives. Most of the people are clustered in Barrow.

Whaling is so important to the community that the borough's wildlife department employs scientists to research the bowhead whales and other marine mammals that have fed, clothed and even sheltered the people who have long inhabited the coastline.

Shell has been paying attention. One of its top executives, Marvin Odum, has been on a whaling expedition with crews from Barrow. The company signed a conflict avoidance agreement pledging to avoid interfering with traditional subsistence hunts. It spent millions helping the community upgrade its communications system so whalers and the oil company can communicate any potential conflicts as well as safety alerts. Shell has also poured thousands of dollars into other community projects, including $250,000 for an Inupiat language program at the local college, said the company's spokesman in Alaska, Curtis Smith.

Shell's time in the community doesn't just demonstrate respect to North Slope stakeholders, Smith said, but it also "frames for our Shell leadership the importance of a centuries-old subsistence lifestyle and the concerns that some residents have about offshore development."

Many feel the company still has some work to do.

"We as a people are asked to take all the risk for no major financial return," Itta said. "The stress and anxiety that gives us as a people ... we don't even know what to expect. ... We don't want to learn the hard way."

NOISE AND OIL SPILLS ARE CHIEF CONCERNS

Many in the borough would at least like Shell to slow down and fully examine the potential impacts, said Robert Suydam, one of the senior scientists for the borough and an expert in bowhead whales.

"It's inevitable that oil companies are going to move offshore," Suydam said. "Our job is to make sure what decisions the federal government makes and the oil companies make are the best possible. We're trying hard to make sure there aren't risks."

He and other scientists in Barrow were irritated by a recent study by the federal Minerals Management Service that shows noise has little effect on the sperm whale population in the Gulf of Mexico. They fear the study will be extrapolated to the Arctic, where, unlike the Gulf of Mexico, there is a subsistence culture dependant on hunting whales for food.

"They don't have bowhead whales and walrus and ice seals in the Gulf of Mexico," grumbled Harry Brower Jr., the deputy director of the wildlife department as well as a whaling captain who heads up the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission.

Sperm whales are not filter feeders, like bowheads, and they process sound differently, Suydam said. Native hunters know to walk softly on the ice when they're hunting them to avoid scaring them off, Suydam said, and studies they've conducted with BP in the Beaufort Sea show that when it's noisiest, bowheads are farthest from shore.

Eventually, whales may learn to avoid drilling platforms because of the noise. That may be "OK for the whales," Suydam said, but it's not good for the subsistence hunters who depend on limited hunts for cultural and nutritional reasons.

"Noise has potential to scare whales away and make it harder to hunt whales," Suydam said.

But by far, the biggest concern is oil spills. No oil company has been able to prove conclusively that they have effective methods to contain spills. For Alaskans, who remember the lingering psychological, economic and environmental effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, it is an important consideration.

"We haven't seen that they have the capability to clean up oil in ice-infested waters," Brower said. "They haven't proven that ever in open water."

WORKING FOR THE PEOPLE

The borough has long supported onshore drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where they would be able to tax the infrastructure. But offshore drilling in the federal waters off Alaska has no guarantee of revenue sharing with local or state governments, and it's unclear yet whether Shell will have onshore infrastructure. The company is too early in the exploratory process to determine how they'll extract oil or gas -- one option is an underwater pipeline that would be taxable once it moves onshore.

Both Itta and Ahmaogak understand fully how important the oil is to their future -- Itta got his start 40 years ago as a roustabout in Prudhoe Bay and until recently, Ahmaogak worked for Shell. But it's clear they will have very different approaches to what happens next with offshore drilling.

"I understand that we are at a critical time, and I will work to my death to protect our way of life up here," Itta said. "As an Inupiat people, we were here before oil and we must work so that we are here after oil."

When Ahmaogak's last term as mayor ended in 2005, he went to work for Shell as a community affairs manager, a job he left six months ago to run for mayor again. His time with the oil giant exposed him to "first-rate" management, Ahmaogak said, and he believes he will be able to "use that knowledge to my advantage." He brushes off criticism he is too close to the industry to be an independent advocate for the borough.

"I'm not bought off by the oil industry," he said. "I don't have any collaboration at this point with the oil and gas industry."

But he does have complicated loyalties. His wife, Maggie Ahmaogak, was fired as the executive director of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission after a dispute over her potential conflicts. Now, she works for an offshoot of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, the Native-owned regional corporation that is actively bidding on offshore support contracts.

For its part, Shell has been fastidious about staying out of the election, said Smith, who previously worked as a spokesman for Sarah Palin's 2006 bid for governor.

"We're not involved at all," Smith said. "No matter who is mayor, Shell expects to be treated the same as any company that has a relationship with the North Slope Borough. Whomever's chosen as mayor, their job will be to represent the people of the North Slope communities, not Shell."

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