State Government

Organizers of a citizen’s ballot initiative to restore Alaska’s coastal management program have well over the number of signatures required to put it on the statewide ballot.

“We’ve exceeded 30,000 and in terms of overall numbers it’s approaching my level of comfort,” Juneau Mayor Bruce Botelho says.

Twenty-six thousand are required. Volunteers started gathering signatures less than a month ago. The signatures must be filed with the Alaska Division of Elections today.

Botelho says volunteers stopped the petition drive at 6 p.m. Monday to determine if they have the required district distribution, which is 7 percent of registered voters who voted in the last election in each of 30 of 40 house districts.

Botelho and Kodiak Island Borough Mayor Jerome Selby are among several local officials who formed the Alaska Sea Party to bring back a coastal management program. The Parnell administration shut down the program last summer, after the legislature and governor’s office failed to reach a compromise to renew it.

Sea Party organizers will hold a news conference today to update the initiative’s progress.

If the Legislature enacts substantially similar legislation this session, the initiative would not appear on the statewide ballot this fall.

Juneau Representative Beth Kerttula believes the Legislature will take it up. She says collecting more than 26,000 signatures in record time is a powerful message.

“Legislators will sit up and take notice that the state’s pretty much spoken on it and we need to get back to work and get our program back,” she says. “We lost it by one vote last session and now we’re the only coastal state in the union not to have a coastal zone program.”

Alaska has nearly 40 percent of the entire coastline of the United States and has no program to coordinate management.

The legislative session begins in Juneau today (Tuesday), with a lot on the plate of lawmakers. Casey Kelly spoke with Juneau Senator Dennis Egan and has this preview.

Juneau Senator Dennis Egan is feeling good heading into the 2012 legislative session.

He’s in the second year of his first full term, after being appointed to the seat on the last day of the 2009 session. More importantly, Egan starts off the year with a clean bill of health, after undergoing heart surgery just two and a half months before the start of last year’s session.

“I didn’t have a medical procedure this year,” says Egan. “I feel great.”

In addition, Egan is the only Senator who won’t have to run for re-election this fall due to redistricting, or the redrawing of legislative boundaries every 10 years according to the U.S. Census.

Under the Alaska Redistricting Board Plan, Egan won’t run again until 2014, though next year his district will pick up several new communities, including Skagway and Petersburg. Egan says the extra time will help him to get to know those communities a little better, but he doesn’t expect it to change the way he serves.

“I’ve always represented Southeast, and people from those communities have always come in to our office, and we’ve worked very hard in trying to get their issues resolved, and their requests for capital projects and issues that directly affect their communities,” he says.

Egan is squarely in the middle of the biggest issue facing the Senate this year: The governor’s proposal to cut taxes on oil companies. The bill ended last session in the Senate Labor & Commerce Committee, which Egan chairs. During the interim the committee held four days of hearings on the bill in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Egan says the Senate still has concerns about the lack of Alaskans employed on the North Slope.

“The people own the resource,” says Egan. “And we as a Senate Bipartisan Working Group think that we should get something in return. We’re not opposed to providing some kind of an incentive for the industry. But we need something in return.”

To get a better handle on employment in the oil industry, the Senate hired Juneau-based McDowell Group to do a study. Egan expects the analysis to get at least one hearing early in the session.

“It shows there is a lot of non-resident hire, and we want to address that issue,” he says.

Egan is one of six co-sponsors of a bill that would exempt a proposed natural gas pipeline from property taxes during construction. He says the idea came from discussions Senators had with the industry.

“Trying to reach some sort of a conclusion to providing an incentive for industry and Alaskans to increase our portfolio,” Egan says.

Another bill Egan worked on during the interim would give public employees the option of choosing either a defined benefit or defined contribution retirement plan. Alaska was the first state to do away with a traditional pension, or defined benefit for state workers. Since 2006, all new hires have been set up with a defined contribution plan, similar to a 401(k) savings account.

Egan’s bill has 10 co-sponsors – including two Republicans – who feel the defined benefit is a better deal for Alaska’s retired public employees, because it guarantees them a pension check every month.

Egan’s office is currently trying to get the Parnell administration to agree on a cost estimate for the bill. The administration’s actuary says it would cost the state more to offer a defined benefit option. Unions and other backers of the bill hired their own actuary, who says it would not increase costs. At a hearing during the interim the two actuaries were asked to work together to settle the discrepancy.

“We’re trying to make it as close to revenue neutral as we can,” Egan says. “We want people to retire in Alaska, and I think Senate Bill 121 allows those folks to do that.”

Egan says he’s happy with Juneau projects in Governor Parnell’s proposed capital budget, especially ongoing funding for the State Library Archives and Museum, or SLAM project, as well as renovations or repairs to the Douglas Island Office Building, the State Office Building parking garage, and the Juneau Pioneer Home.

He says other priorities for the Senate Bipartisan Coalition will be affordable energy, expanding Alaska’s infrastructure and pre-kindergarten through post-secondary education.

Another item has been added to a list of possible state funding requests the Juneau Assembly plans to submit to the legislature this year. Meanwhile, another item is a candidate to come off the list.

City Manager Rod Swope distributed his draft suggestions to the assembly on Monday. It was only later – he told the Finance Committee last night (Wednesday) – that Police Chief Greg Browning suggested adding the Police Crisis Intervention Specialist to the list.

Federal funding for the two-year-old position in the amount of 111-thousand dollars a year is due to expire on June 30th. Swope said he thought it was worth having the assembly consider it as part of its package of state funding requests.

“It’s been really valuable,” Swope says. “The person works with victims of domestic violence directly after an incident of violence and until that person can get back to normal and get in a safe situation. We’ve never had one in the past. There are no funds. The federal program has been eliminated. And I thought, since it is I think a good community service, fairly important particularly to victims, that I would ask you if I could go ahead and add that onto the list.”

The assembly agreed to add the position to the list.

Meanwhile, Assemblyman Jesse Kiehl – an aide to state Senator Dennis Egan – expressed concern about a possible request of 1.3-million dollars for Centennial Hall roof replacement. A 2009 assessment concluded the roof needed to be replaced immediately, and while the legislature has funded it three times in recent years, Governors Palin and Parnell have vetoed it each time. Kiehl says it’s time for the city to move forward on its own.

“Despite the fact that we absolutely need to do it, I have concerns about going around for a fourth try,” said Kiehl. “I think it may be time for us to look within the city’s own capital improvement project, and sales tax, or whatever other fund sources we need to look at. Just the history of this convinces me, that despite the best efforts of all concerned, this one’s going to have to be funded elsewhere.”

The list of funding requests needs to be finalized by the end of the month. Each assembly member will rank the projects on the draft list and submit their recommendations to the city clerk who will prioritize them based on those rankings. Further discussion will be held before the assembly submits the list to the legislative delegation.

Backers of a citizen’s initiative to re-establish the Alaska Coastal Management Program have unleashed a full-court press to collect nearly 26-thousand signatures needed to put the measure on this year’s statewide ballot.

Juneau Mayor and initiative sponsor Bruce Botelho got into the act at the Alaskan & Proud supermarket Tuesday afternoon. He says volunteers are mobilized in every corner of the state.

“We’re of course trying to collect the required signatures before the legislature convenes, so that we have a chance to have the 2012 legislature deal with the issue,” says Botelho. “And absent that be able to have it on the ballot in August.”

Initiative sponsors are operating under the Alaska Sea Party moniker. Statewide numbers were not available, but as of Tuesday the group had collected about 10-thousand signatures in Anchorage and 11-hundred in Fairbanks, according to Botelho. He didn’t have a count for Juneau, but said interest has been strong.

Many of the petition gatherers, like Botelho, are local government officials. But he says other groups have stepped forward as well.

“Some Alaska Native organizations, fishing organizations, conservation organizations, and just individual volunteers have said ‘We think this is a good program. We should get it back,'” Botelho says.

The Alaska Coastal Management Program provided one-stop state and federal permit coordination for developers seeking to build along Alaska’s coastline. It closed in July after lawmakers failed to reach a deal to reauthorize it last legislative session. The Parnell administration and House Republicans fought efforts to give local communities more of a voice in the program.

The group behind a citizens’ initiative to re-establish an Alaska Coastal Management Program plans to have signature gatherers in every corner of the state.

Lt. Governor Mead Treadwell approved the Alaska Sea Party’s initiative application yesterday. Organizers expect to receive petition packets in about a week, and will need 25,875 signatures to put the measure on next year’s statewide ballot.

Lead Sponsor, Juneau Mayor Bruce Botelho says the group wants that many signatures before the start of the legislative session on January 17th. That would give lawmakers an opportunity to adopt “substantially similar” legislation instead of putting the issue to a vote.

“We are organized. We await the booklets and we will have a presence in every district in the state,” Botelho says.

He declined to say how “substantially similar” any potential legislation would need to be to meet the group’s approval. But he said the initiative language would “set a benchmark.” Botelho said the Sea Party will likely spend about 150-thousand dollars on the petition gathering effort.

The Alaska Coastal Management Program provided one-stop state and federal permitting for developers seeking to build projects along Alaska’s vast coastline. It also gave local communities input during the permitting process.

Without it, initiative co-sponsor, Kodiak Island Borough Mayor Jerome Selby, says more communities will resort to litigation.

“If we don’t have a coastal zone program, we then have react to a decision that has already been made. And as everyone knows, that’s a much more difficult task to try to change a decision that has been made and finalized by the federal government. And realistically about the only effective way of doing that is through lawsuit,” says Selby.

The coastal management program shut down this summer after legislators and the Parnell administration failed to reach an agreement to reauthorize it during the regular and special legislative sessions.

The governor’s office says it will not introduce a bill to re-establish the program, and in an e-mail pointed to a permitting office within the Department of Natural Resources that “allows communities to weigh in numerous times for each project under review.”

An icebreaker in the Arctic is key to the United States’ position as an Arctic nation, according to the Commander of the 17th Coast Guard District in Alaska.

But Rear Admiral Thomas Ostebo said even if funding were available now, it would be 10 years before a Coast Guard icebreaker could be operating in the Arctic.

In a speech to the Juneau Chamber of Commerce Thursday, Ostebo said an ice breaker in the region may be even more important as ice recedes.

“Less ice in the Arctic, or an open Arctic, does not mean an ice-free Arctic. In fact you could make the argument that you really need more ice breakers now than ever, because you don’t know when the ice is coming in and out,” he said. “Every time you go up there you have the opportunity to run into ice that has broken off from somewhere else. The margins of the season up there are always going to be in flux and the opportunity for somebody to get stuck in the ice is there.”

As more traffic moves into the Arctic, requiring a greater Coast Guard presence, Ostebo said an icebreaker has to be part of the solution. He said he’s often asked if the Coast Guard should build an air station and a port in the region.

“My answer to that is if I have an icebreaker I almost don’t have to do that. Why? Because if I have an icebreaker with a flight deck, I can put helicopters on it. I don’t need a port if I have a place where I can take care of a whole lot of our folks. If I have the ability to respond from offshore and move that response capability around, that may actually be better,” he said.

Ostebo said the Northern Sea Route into the Bering Strait seems to be getting the most traffic. He called it a very busy area with poorly charted waters and no formal vessel traffic separation schemes to manage the traffic.

He said some of the largest ore and chemical vessels he’s ever seen are transiting the passage. Some are carrying more than a million gallons of fuel and would pose huge problems if there were ever a collision or grounding, he said.