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MEETING MINUTES CITIZENS' ADVISORY COMMISSION ON FEDERAL AREAS OCTOBER 3, 4 & 5, 2013 LEGISLATIVE INFORMATION OFFICE 716 WEST 4TH AVENUE, SUITE 220 ANCHORAGE, ALASKA Thursday, October 3, 2013 9:00 a.m. CALL TO ORDER Representative Keller - What I'm going to ask you to do when we get to the work session is to be looking at your notes and the notes you've been given to refresh your memory of what happened at the Summit. And I want you to pick action steps in that that you want to prioritize and defend. And we're just going to try to go through and comprehensively cover the play book, if you remember the challenge that was laid before us, what we're going to do with it, what our next steps are going to be. I think we all have preconceived ideas, but the discussion I think will help us both prioritize and clean up the act, so that's the intent. With that, with the new agenda that you have in front of you, and I understand that it's been posted, but it wasn't posted till this morning because of the changes that happened there because of the federal shutdown. So look at your agenda and if you're okay with that, I'll retain a motion to approve the agenda. Commissioner Arno - I just have one concern. By eliminating the Saturday part of the agenda where there's a few Alaskans that maybe wouldn't have been able to participate even over the phone, as far as if they had any comments that they wanted to put in, were they assuming that they would be able to go ahead and speak on Saturday? And now that that option is precluded, that concerns me. Representative Keller - Thank you. And I share that concern and I'm glad you put it on the record. And I want to say, repeat it, if anybody out there that was going to testify on Saturday, that you cannot, or it's a hardship to testify at a different time today or tomorrow, please let us know, because that is a priority. I really appreciate you pointing it out. That's what we do, we hear the concerns of the people and compile the concerns and give reports on it. And that is not meant to be a slight and I'm going to blame it on the feds again, but if anybody is out there that intended to testify in public participation time on Saturday, please let us know. Contact either myself or the CACFA office and we'll make special accommodations if we possibly can. Commissioner Arno - I make the motion to adopt the agenda as written here. Unidentified - Second. Representative Keller - All in favor say aye. Opposed, same sign. I guess then the minutes, we're going to skip over that one. We put staff on making sure we have a real good transcript of what happened at the Summit. We'll have that before the end of the day tomorrow. Citizens' Advisory Commission on Federal Areas DRAFT Meeting Minutes Anchorage – October 3, 4 & 5, 2013 Page 2 COMMISSION MEMBER OPENING COMMENTS Senator Coghill - Thank you, and good morning. I thought the meeting that we had was well done, so I really appreciated all the people that came forward to testify. Probably to me the sense of frustration was very difficult for me to kind of keep down, but since you put a microphone in front of me I had to keep some calm, but there's just lots to do. And so what we chose to do in our office is to take on a couple of things that we could do to help maybe this commission and the rest of Alaskans understand. We thought we'd start compiling the MOUs that the various different departments have gotten with the federal agencies and look at some of those in their substance and try to compare where we're at in some of what we would see as the compliance with what has been made law, rather than policy issues that sometimes veer off of the law. So we're just in the process of compiling them. Chad (Hutchison) in my office is the workhorse and we're well underway to do that. The critique of them has not really begun to any great degree. And this is not to go on a great hunt to make our departments look bad, it's just to help us understand what is actually going on out there with regard to how we manage the day-to-day activities and does the policy line up with what our expectation of the law is, and if not, why not. So you'll see us doing that. I think if you have your little sheet here you'll see that there are a couple of things that we're going to be working on. Certainly, kind of one of the big ones is going to be the ANILCA review. I'm going to take that on personally, anyway, so it's something I thought that my office could help do. That's no small task and so we're working on the MOUs, so we haven't gotten to the ANILCA review yet. But that is something that as long as I still have staff that's willing to work with me, we'll just kind of plug along on that. And we have been writing, trying to mirror some of the things that Stan has done on writing to the different CSU planning issues. We have tried to add comment that is outside of the CACFA comment, and there's no way we could do as thorough a job probably as Stan does. He gets into much more detail. But I think from a policymaker's perspective, trying to talk about the policy issues probably a little more broadly, but still understanding the issue as thoroughly as we can. So once again, I tasked Chad with that. It's a big learning curve for him; it's a big learning curve for me. It's a lot of reading, Stan. That's a lot of reading, isn't it? It's just amazing. So I did, at a couple of the meetings that I've gone to, Chamber, Miners' are two probably that I attend regularly, encourage them if they had testimony to get that into this Commission. We had that issue happen up there at Chicken and that created no small stir. And we still don't know enough of the details really to make a case for anything yet, but everybody's watching to see what comes of it, myself included. So in the newspaper today I saw where our own NSA, National Security, just drives me crazy, has been getting pretty easy access to private information, and I think is way overreach as well and I intend to do some snooping into that. To me, it's good to watch out for bad guys. It's bad to snoop in on everybody's business, and I see that that's something that they can do administratively. They don't have to have any due process issues and personally I see that as a huge overreach issue. I may come with some formal recommendation to this commission, but I can tell you that's something that my staff and I have talked about on how to address those things. Part of my responsibility as the Chair of the Judiciary in the Senate and those issues we've debated quite intently in Alaska just on criminal issues when there's a formal charge and somebody is under investigation, how far can you go without a court order and good due process? And here we have a national agency that has been able to get your private information based on their own recommendation, so it's something we're Citizens' Advisory Commission on Federal Areas DRAFT Meeting Minutes Anchorage – October 3, 4 & 5, 2013 Page 3 going to have to deal with. So just watching those kinds of things is what I'll be doing, so I may bring a recommendation to this commission once I've put together a thoughtful process. But if I can't get it done between now and the time the legislature gaggles in, I will probably do something along that line. So without reading every little word on the Senator Coghill's actions, those are at least three of the things that I'll be paying attention to. I really appreciated the way that the members asked questions and got involved in the last discussions. I was really glad that we were able to get Mr. Horn up here. I thought that was just good history and it probably wouldn't hurt if we got him to do something when we do a title review, to actually have him walk through it with us as well. So just a suggestion and thanks for the commission member’s attention. Representative Keller - Thank you, Commissioner Coghill, and thank you. From my perspective I would welcome the recommendation on personal information. That would be really helpful. And also when you do your work on the MOU stuff, it's okay to assume that you're going to report back to the commission after you get the evaluation done so we can -- because that was a -- I really appreciate you taking that one on. Senator Coghill - All the things you see that we're going to take on, we would expect to bring that information back to this commission and certainly work with Stan all along the way.

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