Yesterday afternoon I attended a hearing in House State Affairs. It was frustrating. I had hoped that the legislature could get the draft. They did ask, but I don’t get the impression that the administration will be forthcoming. Unlike in the Federal system, our legislative body cannot subpoena documents, and may only have the same recourse as we do via the Alaska Public Records Act (APRA, our closest equivalent to the Federal FOIA).

We are continuing to pursue the APRA process for getting the first results of the study that were due to the state last June. We are currently waiting for the state to respond to additional steps that we have taken.

We will continue to keep you updated as we take additional steps. If you would like to discuss this further, please email from a personal account. If you don’t have time to listen to the meeting, here are some short excerpts that I think give a feel for how it went.

Notable Quotes

Rep Vance:

[Director Sheehan]: “They go out and do surveys and check with communities there are other data sources that they also use that we as a state of Alaska actually don’t have access to so I think they understand the importance of it and are talking with them regularly to make sure they understand the importance of this data is going to be accurate”

[Rep Vance]: “You’ve had continuing conversations that this is more about accountability, I think, um, that gives me peace of mind that this isn’t an intentional delay because you know I’ll just be open here, publicly. All the stir around this has been one of controversy that there’s something to hide but if you are not satisfied with the contractor saying, ‘Hey, we need you to be more aggressive’ that paints a different picture and I appreciate just that insight. You’ve been meeting, saying this is what we need, um, and we weren’t satisfied before so go back and do it again. That changes a little bit of the picture.”

Rep McCabe:

[Rep McCabe]: “I don’t see this as a as a huge deal; I just see this as the normal way that, uh, that business has done when you’re a state contractor operating with an RFP and you have change orders or holes in in what you need, or, um, something happens that in the DOT’s case it would be a, you know, they find a big pit of clay that needs to be dug out that necessitates a change order. You found something that needed to be fleshed out, so, I don’t know, mean is that kind of, kind of what happened? For total layman’s terms, I mean we’re we’re talking in the weeds here a bit and I think Alaskans need to understand exactly what happened”

Commissioner Vrana:

[Commissioner Vrana]: “Through the chair representative McCabe, that was a very nice um analogy and summary and way to put it um um In a different understandable package so yes”

Rep Himschoot:

[Rep Himschoot]: “If the anticipated release of the data is March 31st, first of all I’m calculating in my head the sixty-day January 21st, February 21st, March 21st. So ten days after the sixty-day [deadline for wage data from collective bargaining agreements] we get the information. How quickly could this release to the public or what is your timeline for release to the public assuming they actually make the deadline of March 31st.”

[Commissioner Vrana]: “Through the chair, I am not sure that we can make a commitment at this point on on what those dates would be.”

Rep Holland:

“Looking at the amendment [to the contract with Segal], I’m really curious why the scope of the amendment is redacted. What was it that we couldn’t know about in terms of this amendment? I’m also aware of a separate document that I’ve seen suggesting that there was already an agreement that the revised report would be done by the end of October. I’m trying to understand why we are where we are because this information would be so valuable, but it seems like we’ve rationalized not getting this done because things change. Yet we know right now with new contract negotiations that things are changing yet again. To suggest that there’s some moment in time where we will finally be caught up and there are no changes to have a final report in March, we’re actually going to already have new contracts coming along with more changes. I’m really curious why the report that was going to be done in June, we couldn’t see it. Even though yes, I understand there are a bunch of changes, there’s always changes. The data—I assume the models were built and the spreadsheet was done—we could have known where we stood as a snapshot in June at this point.”