How Do You Know Who's Been To Pebble Mine?

When you go into the front door of the Capitol, just to the right of the stairs, there's this wooden board with little packets of papers.  New ones are added several times a week.  If you are a legislator, the new packets get delivered to your office.  Well, I'm not sure if Representatives get stuff for the Senate and vice versa.   There's a variety of topics covered.  Some of the regular ones are the House and Senate Journals, which tell you what has happened, and the House and Senate Committee Announcements, which tell you what is scheduled to happen. (You can double click the pictures to enlarge them.)

  

 Most of this stuff (probably all) is available online.  I'm still learning where to find specific things.   BASIS has more than you can read, so you don't have to be in Juneau to see this stuff.  Here are some of the links from the BASIS link:

• Bills
  
  
  • Statistics
  • Actions by Date
  • Awaiting Action
  • Governor's Vetoes
  • Passed Legislation
  • Bills in Committee
  • Sponsor Summary
  • Requestor Summary
  • Subject Summary
    
• Committees
  
  
  • Member Information
  • Minutes and Audio
  • Hearing Schedules
  • Conference Committees
    
• Session
  
  
  • House and Senate Calendars
  • Journal Text Display
    
• Session Laws
  
  
  • 2009
  • 2010
  • 2009-2010
    
• Tools
  
  
  • Statute Information Retrieval System (SIRS)
  • Bill Tracking Management Facility (BTMF)
  • Executive Orders Current
  • Executive Orders Archive
  • Gavel to Gavel
    
• Archive
  
  
  • The 25th Legislature (2007-2008)
  • The 24th Legislature (2005-2006)
  • The 23rd Legislature (2003-2004)
  • The 22nd Legislature (2001-2002)
  • The 21st Legislature (1999-2000)
  • The 20th Legislature (1997-1998)
  • The 19th Legislature (1995-1996)
  • The 18th Legislature (1993-1994)

So, the other day, as I was checking if there was a new committee schedule, I came across this document.  I've been going through it in short spurts when I've had time. 

  

It lists various kinds of information about legislators and their staffers.  Were I still a volunteer staffer,  and because I'm on a couple of steering committees, my name would be in here as well.  (Actually, I would have had 30 days from start of 'employment' to file, so it probably wouldn't be in the 2009 Report.)  For the record I'm on the Statewide Steering Committee of DELTA and on the Steering Committee of Healing Racism Anchorage both of which I've mentioned at various times in the blog.  

There are several categories of information published in the Disclosure Report:

• Memberships on a Board of Directors
• Close Economic Associations (basically in some sort of business relationship from employee, to website consultants, to renters)
• Gift of Travel and Hospitality (By far the most entries)
• Gift Received by Family Member Because of Legislative Connection

Here's what one of the entries looks like for travel (I blurred out the names because I didn't want to highlight just one person, in this case it's the information in general that's important):

 

I figured I should be able to find these reports on line, and probably they are out there.  I checked at the APOC (Alaska Public Offices Commission) but the best I could do there was reports through 2007.  I'm sure more recent stuff is there, but I couldn't find it.

(The other day I had trouble finding a list of the Legislative Council members on BASIS.  I could only get an old list.  I called and they helped me.  I had somehow gotten onto a cached version and not the 26th Session, so there are a lot of ways to go wrong.)

So, I googled specific info out of the hard copy report and got

SELECT COMMITTEE ON LEGISLATIVE ETHICS
YEAR 2009 DISCLOSURES
Reported from January 1, 2009, through December 31, 2009

By playing with the URL I got, I was able to get to a page on the Alaska Legislature site that links to the annual disclosures, so you can see the 2009 disclosures here.   [I can't seem to open that file so if it doesn't work for you either, here's a google cached version.]  I'm not sure how one would get to this particular page from the home page. The ethics button on the bottom gets you into the ballpark. I'll have to try all the possibilities.





This has both more (it includes the Senate for instance) and less (it doesn't say which legislators the staff members work for nor does it break down the costs) information than the booklet I picked up.  But electronic means I can cut and paste the information to the blog.  Since the Pebble Mine is a major Alaska policy issue, I picked out all those people I could find who got trips to Pebble Mine.

And I don't mean to imply that if people fly to Pebble Mine courtesy of the company, that they've done something wrong.  This is a major policy issue facing the state.  Seeing the actual location is important to help someone understand the situation.  But the purpose of disclosure is to make it transparent for the public to know and then follow this down the line.  So, you can ask your legislators, if they're on the list, if going to Pebble with a Pebble Mine advocate changed their minds in any way and what they got out of it. 

A key problem with getting information from one side of an issue in a non-public setting is that the other side doesn't have a chance to challenge what is being said.  So if a person is swayed by such an encounter (and this could happen at a private meeting in an office just as well) the other side doesn't know what was said and can't say, "Wait a minute, you left out the fact that two weeks later the company went bankrupt" or whatever else was unsaid.

If you are smart and a critical thinker, such a trip shouldn't be too problematic.  But if you aren't a critical thinker, especially if you are ideologically predisposed to favor the development of the mine, having just the mine owners' take on things could distort your ability to evaluate this objectively.

So, based on setting my search function for "Pebble Mine" here's the list of people I got who have visited courtesy of the company in 2009.  If they're legislators, it will say Rep. or Sen. before their name.  The others are legislative staffers.  I'm not going to go through all the records to pick out which legislators the staffers work for.  Sorry, I'm not quite that anal.
[I think the first dates are when they reported (they have 30 days) and the second date is when they traveled.]

SENATE

• 08-19 07-28 Michael Rovito $800     The Pebble Partnership-tour of proposed Pebble Mine site; airfare and meals; Iliamna, AK
  
• 08-19 08-09 Patricia Walker  $800     Pebble Ltd. Partnership-helicopter tour Pebble mine proposed site; airfare  and meals; Iliamna, AK
  
• 08-19 07-28 Sen Menard  $800     Pebble Partnership-tour of the proposed Pebble Mine site; airfare and meals; Iliamna, AK
  
• 08-25 08-18 Matthew Moser  $800    Pebble Limited Partnership-site tour of proposed Pebble Mine; airfare and meals;  Iliamna, AK
• 10-13 09-21 Andy Moderow  $694 Pebble Partnership; tour the Pebble job site in Iliamna, AK; airfare and meals
  
• 10-23 09-23 Sen Olson  $694   Pebble Limited Partnership; visit and inspect Pebble Mine core drilling sites and related processing facilities; airfare, lunch and helicopter tour; in and near Iliamna, AK
  
• 10-23 09-23 Tim Benintendi  $694   Pebble Limited Partnership; visit and inspect Pebble Mine core drilling sites and related  processing facilities; airfare, lunch and helicopter tour; in and near Iliamna, AK
  

HOUSE

• 08-19 08-09 Charles Heath, Jr.  $800   Pebble Partnership-tour of the proposed Pebble Mine site; Iliamna, AK
  
• 08-21 08-18 Jennifer Senette   $800    Pebble Limited Partnership-tour of Pebble Limited Partnership site; airfare, meals, ground transportation; Iliamna, AK
  
• 08-21 07-28 Rep Holmes   $800   Pebble Limited Partnership-on-site helicopter tour of proposed Pebble Mine area; airfare and meals; Iliamna, AK
  
• 08-21 08-18 Rep Olson  $800  Pebble Limited Partnership-overview of proposed mine site; airfare, lodging & meals; Iliamna, AK
  
• 08-24 08-18 Rep Petersen   $800   Pebble Limited Partnership-helicopter site tour of potential Pebble mine and Pebble operations; airfare and meals; Iliamna and Newhalen,
  
• 08-24 07-28 Konrad Jackson   $800   Pebble Limited Partnership-tour of proposed mine site; airfare and meals; Iliamna, AK
  
• 08-27 08-28 Rex Shattuck  $800  Pebble Limited Partnership-onsite briefing/overview of project; airfare and meals; Iliamna, AK
  
• 08-28 08-18 David Dunsmore  $800  Pebble Limited Partnership-helicopter tour of Pebble operations in Iliamna and potential mine site; airfare and meals; Iliamna and Newhalen, AK
  
• 09-08 08-09 Mike Kelly  $800 Pebble Ltd. Partnership; tour the proposed mine site; airfare, helicopter tour and lodging; Anchorage – 200 miles SW in Bristol Bay region
  
• 09-08 08-09 Rep Coghill  $800 Pebble Partnership; tour of Pebble Mine; airfare and lunch, Iliamna, AK
  
• 09-08 08-09 Rep Wilson   $800 The Pebble Partnership; tour Pebble Mine area; airfare and meals; Iliamna
  
• 09-22 09-11 Nick Henderson   $743.98 The Pebble Partnership; Legislative tour; airfare and lodging; Iliamna, AK

This is just one destination.  The disclosure list has lots of trips.  Now, in some cases legislators and staffers may just be taking advantage of the donor's largess to see different parts of Alaska, the US, and the world.  In other cases, the accumulation of trips from donors of the same ideological perspective, might well seal a legislator's or staffer's brain from taking in opposing ideas.  In other cases the traveler will learn a lot about issues facing the legislature and will be more informed when making decisions.  Probably, there are differing aspects of all three of these outcomes in most trips.

While I suspect that all who went on trips would agree that some people could be unduly influenced, I doubt any see themselves as vulnerable.

Again, here's the link to the 2009 Disclosures.