Why The Anchorage Mayor's Amendment Veto Justification is Wrong

In July at the only Assembly meeting I’ve been to in a while, Mayor Dan Sullivan stood up after the Assembly voted on an amendment to an ordinance they were considering and said, “I veto that amendment.”    This post explains in excruciating detail why, after checking things out since then, I’m convinced he doesn’t have that power.   You can check my original post describing what happened that night and a follow up post with the memo the Mayor used to justify his veto.

Two basic premise of American government are in play here:
Checks and Balances
Separation of Power

Believing that Mayor Sullivan’s veto of the amendment violates both those principles, I got a copy of the memo the mayor used to justify his action and did some research. 

The Memo

The attorney's memo to the Mayor (ironically, it's not Sullivan's attorney, but his predecessor Mark Begich's attorney, Fred Boness, who wrote the memo) traces things back to a memo from Mayor George Sullivan (Dan's father) in 1975 when the City of Anchorage and  the Greater Anchorage Area Borough (GAAB) merged.  The question then Municipal Attorney Garner addressed was whether the new Municipal mayor was a strong or weak mayor.  Attorney Garner justified his claim for a strong mayor several ways including asking Charter Commission members but also citing the state statute 29 which says a mayor can veto "ordinances, resolutions, motions, and other actions." 

Then, in 200?  Municipal Attorney Boness used that to claim the Mayor had the right to veto amendments to ordinances, but only right after they were passed and before the ordinance was passed because the mayor did not have line item veto for passed ordinances except in the area of budgets and appropriations.  

I wrote my response originally in early July, but it's been held up as I tried to find a copy of the Charter of the Greater Anchorage Area Borough (GAAB).  Ultimately, I've concluded there was no charter.  None of the places I checked - UAA Archives and Alaskana collection, the State Archives in Juneau, Loussac Library's Alaska room, the Anchorage Boundary Commission, Community and Regional Affairs, Jack Roderick (former GAAB Mayor), the Anchorage Municipal Clerk's office, and a few other people and place - had any record of a GAAB Charter.  Finally, the Clerk's office could produce the ordinances of the GAAB which included a section on the Mayor's veto power which was much more limited than the State Statute originally cited. 

So, in this post I will explain why I think the attorney’s opinion that the Mayor of the Municipality has the right to veto amendments to ordinances before the ordinances are passed is wrong.  I think it fails for three different reasons which I briefly summarize here and will explain in more detail below.

Overview of the three lines of argument
1.  Using the Boness document which cites the power of the GAAB mayor as coming from Alaska Statute 29,
    a.      There’s a problem with the jump from “other actions’ to power to veto amendments
    b.     It ignores the separation of powers issues by having the mayor interfere with legislative activities before they have completed their work.

2.  The Boness memo uses the wrong sources to identify the veto power of the GAAB mayor.  The GAAB Code specifies the veto power of the GAAB mayor, which is specific and limited and does not include vetoing amendments.

3.    But both of those sources would seem to be moot because the Municipal Charter was amended in 1990 and that amendment affected the section of the Municipal Charter which outlines the Mayor’s veto power very specifically.


Details of the arguments

1.  The Boness Memo

An  earlier post included the memo from former Municipal Attorney Fred Boness to former Mayor Mark Begich.  This memo was offered by the current mayor, Dan Sullivan, as proof that he could veto an amendment to an ordinance before the ordinance itself was passed. 
As part of the documentation, Boness included a 1975 opinion from Municipal Attorney Richard Garnett III to then Mayor George Sullivan (father of current Mayor Dan Sullivan.)

Garnett says he wrote the memo because:
"A question has arisen as to the scope of the Mayor's veto power.    Some members of the Assembly have asserted that the Charter reduces the Anchorage mayor's veto power below that exercised by the mayor of the former Greater Anchorage Area Borough. For a number of reasons I believe that the Charter did not have that effect."
The Greater Anchorage Area Borough and the City of Anchorage were merged in 1975.  They became the Municipality of Anchorage.  This memo was written in 1975 to the new Municipal Mayor - George Sullivan - who had been mayor of the City, which had a weak form of mayor.

The question being addressed then was whether the Charter Commission intended to reduce the veto powers of the Mayor.  That's a far different question from the one addressed in Boness' memo to Begich - whether the mayor can veto an amendment to an ordinance.  Boness' response says the Mayor can veto an amendment, and if he only wants to veto the amendment and not the whole ordinance, he needs to do it right after it is passed, but before the ordinance is passed. (You can read his exact words in the earlier post which includes the whole opinion.)

A.  Extending the language to include vetoing amendments is an unwarranted leap that isn’t justified by logic or by common  sense

This seems like a huge leap from what Garnett wrote (in part):
The Commissioners knew that the mayor of the Greater Anchorage Area  Borough exercised a veto power  over  "any ordinances, resolutions, motions, or other actions of the Assembly" AS 29 -23.170 (a). The form of executive was the most hotly debated issue before the Commission, the "strong mayor" or "weak mayor".    All of the Commissioners, and the public, knew that the choice was essentially between the mayor as he operated in the borough and the mayor as he operated in the city. The debate frequently was couched in terms of "Jack Roderick" or the "George Sullivan" form of mayor.    It is inconceivable that the Commission would have chosen the strong mayor form, but drastically reduced the veto, the key feature of the strong mayor form, without so much as a word of intent or debate on the subject.

Three things to notice in this passage:
"exercised a veto power over 'any ordinances, resolutions, motions, or other actions of the Assembly'"  (from Alaska Statute 29 on Municipal Governments )

Strong Mayor v. Weak Mayor ("Jack Roderick" or the "George Sullivan" form of mayor
"inconceivable Commission would have chosen the strong form, but drastically reduced the veto, the key feature of the strong mayor form. . ."
1.  Extent of Veto Power - [Note, I will challenge using Title 29 to establish the Mayor’s power in the next two lines of argument, but here I will accept it for the sake of argument and outline why Boness’ argument is still questionable.]  Garnett says that the Borough mayor's veto power is over "any ordinance, resolutions, motions, or other actions of the Assembly."  This language comes from the Alaska Statues, not specifically from the Borough  Charter or ordinances.   I can see how Boness could have construed 'other actions' to include anything else the Assembly did.  Does 'other actions' mean 'all other possible actions' or does it mean 'some other actions?' It's ambiguous and could mean either.  To be sure, one has to look for other evidence.  But as I read the Boness memo, this is the only real basis for making his case.  Everything else may be relevant to Garnett's claims that the mayor's power wasn't reduced, but not to Boness' claim that it included vetoing amendments.

Garnett wasn't arguing for power to veto an amendment, only that the mayor was 'a strong mayor' and had the same veto powers of the GAAB Mayor.  

Garnett's memo goes on to argue that there was no weakening of the veto power.  From that to power to veto amendments is a giant leap.  Let’s look at the words:
1.  Ordinance - this is a completed action
2.  Resolution - this is a completed action
3.  Motions and other actions - this is more ambiguous.  One possibility was that they wanted to cover other sorts of motions, beyond ordinances and resolutions, or to avoid having the legislative body use a different name for an ordianance, perhaps a bill, an act, or an appropriation, or a proclamation. 
To say the Mayor can veto ‘any action’ by the Assembly flies in the face of common sense.  Can the Mayor veto the Assembly’s choice of Assembly Chair?  What about their choices for Assembly officials - ombudsman, attorney, etc.? 
But let’s take it further.  If the mayor can veto any action the Assembly takes, then he could veto every motion any Assembly person made and prevent the Assembly from getting anything done.  So, while I acknowledge that “other actions’ could be seen to open the door to anything, common sense shows us that could not be the case.  It would mean the Mayor could prevent the Assembly from doing anything. 
B.   It ignores the separation of powers clause that is the basis for democracy in the United States.  The President of the US cannot interfere in the legislative debate of Congress.  Governors do not interfere with the legislative debate of their legislatures.  Mayors tend to have a closer relationship to their legislative bodies - city councils or assemblies.  Some mayors are members of the council.  But Anchorage’s mayor is not.  While it is traditional for the mayor to be at Assembly meetings and to ask and answer questions, I can’t find anyone who remembers an Anchorage Mayor vetoing an amendment to an ordinance that hasn’t been passed. 
The role of the Assembly is to create legislation.  The Mayor can veto that legislation, but only after it has been passed by the Assembly.  To interpret the language as broadly as Boness did in the memo, would obliterate the separation of powers and give the Mayor the power to prevent the Assembly from doing anything.

2.   The Boness Memo Uses the Wrong Source of Power  - A

The Boness memo follows the Garnett memo of using the Alaska Title 29 as the baseline for the Mayor’s veto power.  But the GAAB Mayor’s veto power was spelled out in the GAAB Code. 

The Mayor can veto ordinances and resolutions  [Get the exact]

The GAAB mayor was a strong mayor compared to the old City’s mayor, but his veto power was spelled out in the code and it did not include the power to veto amendments to ordinances that hand’t yet been passed. 



Because it was spelled out in the ordinances, there was really no need for Garner to go to Title 29 of the Alaska Statutes.  The GAAB Ordinance was the

3.  The Boness Memo Uses the Wrong Source of Power  - B

In 1990, the voters of Anchorage approved charter amendments which included new language concerning the mayor’s veto power.  The  intent of the original charter commission at that point became moot.  The new language spells out the veto power of the mayor.  It’s clear, precise, and doesn’t include the power to veto amendments.

"If a 2 g shrew has a reasonable volume of blood to support its metabolism, say 0.1 g, a 2 ton elephant will require 100 tons of blood, an obvious impossibility."

Just reading this announcement, I know I have absolutely no idea what it means. Well, I might get a vague sense of what it means, but clearly the little description of why means nothing.

So, some choices are:

1. Do something else that night
2. Go, and laugh at how ridiculous the talk is because, well, because I don't understand it, so obviously it isn't worth knowing anyway, after all I got this far without understanding it
3. Go and understand as much as a I can and be reminded how much I don't know and appreciate that humility is appropriate here
4. Go and pretend I understand so others will be impressed
5. Go and stretch my mind as far as it will go

As I'm reading this, and thinking about the quote in the title, which is from a 2008 article in the online Journal of the Royal Society Interface on which Dr. Moses was the lead author, some of it is making a little sense. 

OK, here's what I'm guessing:

It's about scaling.  How big things are, and can be.  Things can work at one size, but if you make them too big using the same scale for things, like the shrew/elephant example, it won't work.   And it sounds like she's applying this to organizations and humans.  Is there going to be a lesson here about if organizations that worked when they were shrew sized keep the same scaling, they'll get unworkable like the elephant with 100 tons of blood? 

And are there implications from that about banks that are 'too big to fail?"  Or maybe "too big to succeed?"  Am I reading too much into this? 

I guess I have to go on Thursday night to find out.  

Since Thursday evening at 7pm is a public lecture, my guess is that it will be aimed at the general public and not at an audience of computer science/biologist types.

The Complex Systems group at UAA has been presenting lectures that deal with complex systems for at least seven or eight years.  People from all disciplines present an application of complex systems relevant to their own fields.  I went to the first ones with some trepidation.  But I quickly saw that if I paid close attention - taking notes helps - I could get the gist of things if not every detail.  And the ideas of one field could transfer into another field.

 I made a map to the Theater Arts Bldg. for Sunday's concert.  A friend was coming from Tudor and Bragaw (the red line).  You could get to that turn off (east end of Prov or just past the UAA library) from Lake Otis and 36th/Providence too.  You can click the map to enlarge it.

Alaska Redistricting Board Gets Pre-Clearance Approval from DOJ

I just talked to Alaska Redistricting Board Executive Director Taylor Bickford who told me the Board was notified today that their Voting Rights Act (VRA) submission to the Department of Justice Voting Rights section has been approved. While I've been critical of the Board now and then, it was usually on publicity and participation issues, not their efforts to comply with the Voting Rights Act. People can quibble about whether they made the best districts possible, and I've fussed that they seemed to use the VRA requirements as a way to mess with some Democratic incumbents in Fairbanks. But from what I learned this spring, it seems like this approval was deserved and getting it is a good thing. It allows the State to move on toward the 2012 elections without having to go through a massive and expensive process to find even better districts. There should be more information up on the Redistricting Board website later today.

Both of you out there who were holding your breath over this can exhale now. :)

[UPDATE 4:50 pm:  While I was out raking leaves, this email came in:

U.S. Department of Justice Approves
Alaska Redistricting Plan

Anchorage, Alaska - The Alaska Redistricting Board announced today that its final redistricting plan for the redrawing of Alaska's state legislative districts has received "preclearance" from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Under Section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act, a number of states - including Alaska - are required to submit new redistricting plans to the U.S. Department of Justice for review in order to ensure that the proposed change is free from discriminatory purpose or effect and will not result in retrogression. An Alaska redistricting plan is retrogressive if it is drawn in a manner that worsens Alaska Native voting strength as compared to the previous district configurations.

Alaska Redistricting Board Chairman John Torgerson issued the following statement this afternoon:  

"Receiving preclearance from the U.S. Department of Justice is validation that the Board was successful in drawing a redistricting plan that maintains and protects the ability of the Alaska Native community to participate in the electoral process. This is an important milestone for the Board and a necessary step before Alaska's new legislative districts can be implemented."

 

A copy of the preclearance letter is available for public download from the Board's website.  Detailed information about the Section 5 review process can be accessed at http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/sec_5/about.php. ]

Below is the letter.  Note the last line.  It "does not bar subsequent litigation to enjoin the enforcement of the changes."

Hard Core Camper Visits Glen Alps Parking Lot

When I started blogging I could just post something without thinking too much about it.  No one was reading anyway.  Nowadays I feel like I have to do some real homework before posting.  But the blog also needs to stay fun.  So sometimes, like this post, I'm just putting something up and I'm leaving it to someone else to take this further.  After the hike yesterday, I just wasn't in the mood to ask this guy what this vehicle was all about.  But it sure was an eye-catcher.  Did the ship it over to the US?  Or did they drive it over the North Pole or the Bering Sea?  And how do they keep it so clean?  Nobody keeps such a clean vehicle in Anchorage.  Does it have some dirt teflon surface we don't know about yet?  I called it a camper, but who knows?  Maybe they have some sort of laboratory inside?  Do you think it gets more than 3 miles/gallon?

Moose Paparazzi at Powerline Pass

When I posted July 11 about a short walk in Powerline Pass, I learned that wildlife photographers around the world, apparently, know that Powerline Pass is a great place to shoot moose pictures. It's easy to get to and the moose are right there. Especially in the fall rutting season.

Today is Monday. It's October 10 - long past tourist season. But the parking lot was 3/4 full. (It is also Columbus Day so a number of folks had the day off.) And it was a spectacular day.   Foraker (left) and Denali* dominated the northern horizon - 120 air miles away.

The Powerline Pass was dressed in its muted fall colors.

 Just at the point where the trail from the parking lot gets to the PP trail, there was still sun.  But soon we were in the nippy shade.  Fortunately there was not even a noticeable breeze.

 But there were broken panes of ice in the the puddles.  And there were moose.  Here and there, near and far, scattered around the pass.  Many near the trail.

 

And people packing big cameras were there too.

At this spot there were five moose that I saw enjoying the easy food supply before the snow makes everything much harder for them, though it does put the bears away. 


The sharp divide between sunny and shady landscape added a significant challenge (of course, opportunities too for those with a better eye than mine) to my much smaller pocket powershot. 

So, do camouflage pattern designers just fly over places like this and take pictures?  [Of course, when I ponder such questions I have to go look for the answer.   The answer seems to be no.  There's a lot out there about hunting camo and military camo.  Digital camo designs seem to be the way to go these days.  See this Atlantic Article for a brief history and look at camo today.]

Some things were a little easier to photograph.

This is one of the more remote bike racks I've ever seen.  We're probably about 2 miles from the parking lot.  But the brown sign in the bushes, to the left of the trail, says no bikes.  

 



Another iced over puddle.

On our way back we briefly talked to Lori and Richard who make great use of that huge lens.  They've got amazing pictures up at ImagingNature.







*I sometimes forget that some people only know the highest peak in North America as Mt. McKinley.  Alaskans tend to call it Denali, its original Native name.  (Or so we think.  Maybe we've been fooled too.)  It's 20,320 feet (6,193.5 meters).

Anchorage Sunny Sunday - Moose, Writers, Beach, Trombone, and the Moon

It's Alaska Book Week and some writers were gathering at Out North.  What do writers do when they gather?  I thought I'd take advantage of the beautiful fall day and ride over to find out before heading to a trombone concert at UAA.

On the way, a not too unusual Anchorage event,  I waited a bit for the moose to get out of the road.

Then on through the neighborhoods, a short stint on the bike trail to Out North.


It was quiet, there were writers working in the gallery.  I didn't want to disturb them and I hadn't brought a computer to join them, so looked at the fabric exhibit with the incredible lace I posted about earlier.


  How many 'women's' activities have been delegated to 'craft' while the men made 'art'?   There was a huge coffee table book on lace.  I wonder what all I might find out reading it?  Did women make lots of money making lace for the wealthy?  Why am I skeptical?  But I really don't know.  [Well, of course I had to see what I could find out:  footguards.tribpod.com gives a long list of 18th Century prices in England:

"13s 10d
A yard of Mechlin lace.

16s
A pair of men's lace ruffles."

That would be a similar kind of lace, I think.  The site gives lots of other items to compare prices with.  A bottle of champagne at Vauxhall was 8s (shillings) and the weekly wage of an unskilled laborer was 9s.  A half a loaf of bread was 1/2d (half a penny - 12 pence made a shilling) and you could get 'enough gin to get drunk on' or a 'day's allotment of coal' for 1d.

But the lace artist in Anchorage said one of the pieces - less than a foot square - took three years to make.  So I'm guessing it took more than a week to make a yard of lace, thus these women would have earned less than an unskilled laborer, probably significantly less.]

Sorry for the diversion.   I hadn't known how much time I would spend at Out North and it turned out to be not much.  But the sun was warm and Goose Lake was on the bike trail route to the UAA Theater and Art Building.  So I sat on the beach and enjoyed the fall sunshine.

Yes, the aesthetics of our public works people is pretty low.  This beautiful lake with a great vistas of the mountains has power lines punctuating the view.  Bothers me every time.  I guess I'm supposed to be inspired by man's ability to exploit nature.

At least Alaska doesn't allow billboards on any of the highways.  That's a big plus.  We aren't all without appreciation of Alaska's natural splendors.

Then to UAA for the trombone concert.  Anyone ever been to a concert that focused on the trombone as the main instrument for all the pieces?  My quick count says there were 100 - 125 people there on a sunny Sunday afternoon - temps still in the 50's at a time when people know the next weekend could have snow.  Based on my NYE (New York Equivalency) there'd have to be 3,100 New Yorkers to have the same proportion of the population attend such a concert. 

Christopher Sweeney played five pieces.

• Dances of Greeting (1995) by Norman Bolter - accompanied by Brady Byers on the snare drum and Eric Bleicher on the finger cymbals.  (Actually there was only one.)
  
• Sonata for Trombone and Piano (1993) by Eric Ewazen - accompanied by Dean Epperson on the piano.
  
• Extase for Trombone by Emmett Yoshioka
  
• Aleutian Sketches (2011) by Philip Munger (who was there) accompanied by Linn Weeda, trumpet, Cheryl Pierce, horn, and Dean Epperson again on the piano
  
• Sonata for Trombone and Piano (1967) by Donald White, accompanied by Dean Epperson

My knowledge of music theory is pretty close to zero.  I can just tell you if I like something or not.  That was brought home when I asked Phil about the limits of composing for the trombone compared, say, to the violin or the trumpet.  He said something about the trombone being first to be able to do something with the slide, but then the others improved on that.  If you see this Phil, maybe you can explain it in the comments.

Trombones have such rich sounds that it was a pleasure to listen.  It made me think of yesterday's post where I quoted Charles Wohlforth about how one thinks differently in the wild.  One also thinks differently in a musical performance. One focuses on the sounds in a way one doesn't normally in life,  and time too, as in the wild, is different.

Composer Phil Munger after the concert

The Aleutian Sketches debuted in Unalaska on May 13 this year.  Today, composer Phil Munger heard it live for the first time Sunday and seemed satisfied.  The audience was clearly satisfied.  (Disclosure: Munger is also a blogger who I've come to know through blogging.)

It was a delightful concert and J and I and a friend then met up at the Thai Kitchen for dinner.  And then I watched the almost full moon come up from behind the sun pinked Chugach as I biked home.

 

 

I took some video. Here's the end of part IV of Aleutian Sketches, called Volcano Woman II. There's some extra meaning in this piece for me. It was inspired by John Hoover's sculpture, Volcano Woman, which is in the Egan Center lobby on 5th Avenue in downtown Anchorage. That has always been a favorite of mine. And to top it off my friend Joe Senungetuk married Martha Hoover one of John Hoover's daughter's last summer and we attended the wedding in Cordova. Unfortunately, I never met John Hoover who passed away this summer in his 90s.

I apologize, as always, for the sound quality on my tiny Canon Powershot, but you get a sense of the music.

"Decisions in the sound are creations, not selections from a menu of choices."

Author Charles Wohlforth and his orca studying hosts in Prince William Sound leave their boat anchored  to paddle ashore in small kayaks to pick blueberries:

The silence of deep moss rendered hypnotic the repetitive process of grasping one bright blue orb and then another and the gradual increase of the blueness in a plastic bag - the only contrast from universal green.  The sound erases the rest of the world in a few days  Being is different here.  Time smoothes, pulsing slowly with the tide, losing the quantized, mechanical tick it has in the city.  Decisions in the sound are creations, not selections from a menu of choices.  Cognition, or thought, is different here too.  It's continuous, not suited to boxes.  Whole ideas grow up, long thoughts leading to unexpected destinations - unlike the flitting of city thinking, which is mostly reactions to questions, messages, lines and squares.  From this perspective, the city life, if remembered at all, looks like a mechanical complex of herky-jerky activity, as incoherent as a hazily remembered dream.  Both mental frames are real - urban or outdoor - but the continuity that arises in this environment makes it easier to feel connected to other living things.

I'm reading Wohlforth's The Fate of Nature for my next book club meeting.  He writes with a magic wand that lets complex ideas shine through stunning wordscapes.

It's easy to be seduced by his prose, so I've copied the paragraph above to think it through.

Does one really think so dramatically differently in nature than in the city?  Minute and hour hands organize time very differently than tides and migrating birds.  Alarm clocks regulate our lives differently than sunrises, crowing cocks, and cats mewing to be fed. (I had to look up the word 'quantize.' (see below))

"Decisions are creations . . ., not selections from a menu of choice"

This sounds beautiful, but how much is this more novelty, than a condition of man in nature?  If one is in a new environment one has to create ways to cope. One hasn't yet made habits of living in the new surroundings. This includes a person used to living in the wilds learning to cope in the city.  True, you don't choose your meal from a written menu, but you do choose it from a natural menu of what's available.  And just like you have to know where that great little Korean restaurant is, you have to know where the caribou or moose are likely to be found.

Uninterrupted time does give one space to think deeper and longer.  But I had that luxury as a child walking 20 or 30 minutes each way to school.  I'd hone fantasies or trace possibilities to fill the time.  I think on the whole, though, I agree.  The natural world affords longer more frequent uninterrupted moments for the brain to spin out ideas.   Nature, not the newspaper,  offers the weather and other news necessary to survival.


Below, he paints a profound ecological cycle tapping every human sense in three breathtaking paragraphs. [Update:  I found a good way to describe this passage.  It's like filming for Imax from a helicopter, swooping down the mountainside into the sound and down under the water and then back up again - all on this giant screen.  But he does it with words.]  I'm skipping an opening paragraph that moves the water from the skies to the mountain top glaciers, and downslope where "the perpetually damp temperate rainforest grow enormous trees" and eventually flows back into the sea.

"There are mountains and canyons under the sea also, along the ragged-edged continental shelf, the fringe between land and the abyss.  At the center of the gulf's arc, vertical rock confuses the waves and wind, with contradictions offered by fjords, islands, channels, and spires, and within the unfathomably complex inland sea of Prince William Sound, which encloses a world of its own, water-floored corridors walled by brooding spruces leading to secret, fecund gardens of mud and flashing fish, prey for eagles.  Winds funnel and focus through these mazes.  Currents twist in baroque patterns, changing with each turn of the tide or season.  Intricate forces, entangle ecological stories into as many digressions and surprise endings as there are eddies and tide-pools.  But the tempo of every tale comes from the beat of the storms and the timing of the moment in the spring when the sun emerges warmly on stilled waters.

"The prodigious biological productivity of the Gulf of Alaska owes everything to that moment when the surface's crop of phytoplankton is perfectly prepared for growth.  The winter storms have stirred up organic nutrients from the seafloor, mainly nitrogen;  few other waters in the world are as rich.  The rush of fresh water from the mountains, more than the Mississippi River's annual flow by half, and all in a few months, disgorges atop the heavier saltwater.  Iron and other mineral nutrients arrive with the fresh water to mix with the nitrates.  As the storms die and the fresh water spreads, a surface layer develops to hold blooming plankton near the sun (when the sea is mixed, the plantlike organisms fall into darkness).  Now, in May, sunshine is high, gaining every day until it lasts almost all night, brightness reflecting off still-snowy shores.  Water is calm and rich in fertilizer.  Everything is perfect for an explosion of photosynthesis, and the phytoplankton blooms.

The energy that plankton capture from the sun over a few weeks will feed zooplankton by the billion - tiny creatures like krill and copepods, which look like shrimp, and larval forms of many other animals, such as crabs, barnacles, and other shellfish.  The water clouds with them, especially where tidal currents meet, fronts between waters of different temperatures or salinity that concerntrate matter like invisible walls in the ocean.  Forage fish such as sand ance and herring gather to feed on zooplankton in crowed schools.  Gulls find the schools from the air and dive on the water, wheeling and dropping straight down, as violently as spears, then hurriedly climbing up the air again to protect a catch.  Humpback whales lunge through the schools, bursting diagonally from the surface, occasionally catching a bird, too, before rolling over and sinking back again with a giant slosh.  Salmon, lightning fast and bright, blaze through the schools of forage, fattening for a single spawning journey upriver.  Rivers along the gulf cost reaching hundreds of miles over the mountains will receive salmon eggs and carcasses.  Salmon flesh will feed bears, birds, and scavengers, whose waste will fertilize the trees, moss, and grass.  Long before that can happen, during the spring, phytoplankton bloom subsides, having consumed the winter's mixture of nutrients, but that energy flows on through the system, from mouth to mouth, up the trophic levels of the food web, and up to the floppy tops of towering hemlock trees fertilized by bear scat.

Wow, he's woven a vivid word movie of the interrelationships that hold together the Prince William Sound ecosystem.  For those unimpressed, consider the stodgy prose of a text book explaining all this.  In comparison, these words fly off the page and take a (at least this) reader up in the flight.  [I wouldn't normally take such a long citation, but it needed to come  full circle.]

Does it help that I've kayaked in Prince William Sound and seen the whales leap, and camped in the fecund gardens - thick with ferns and skunk cabbage and countless other greens - dripping with recent rain?  Oh, I'm sure that helps light up his words for me.

In contrast, I offer a bit from a NASA website on a workshop held last week on similar topics. 

"NASA’s carbon cycle and ecosystems research provides knowledge of the interactions of global biogeochemical cycles and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems with global environmental change and the implications for Earth’s climate, productivity, and natural resources.
There are three major research objectives:
1)		Document and understand how the global carbon cycle, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and land cover and use are changing
2)		Quantify global productivity, biomass, carbon fluxes, and changes in land cover
3)		Provide information about future changes in global carbon cycling and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems for use in ecological forecasting and as inputs for improved climate change projections."

Of course, they have different purposes, but in any context, Wohlforth's prose and ability to conjure up words that make complex systems into a wild adventure leave me in awe and, as a blogger, enormously jealous.

I'm not even very far into the book, so you may be getting more samples as I go along.  But if I take too much time with individual pages like this, I'll never finish.  

_____
 Below
quan·tize
verb (used with object), -tized, -tiz·ing.

1.

Mathematics, Physics . to restrict (a variable quantity) to discrete values rather than to a continuous set of values.

2.

Physics . to change the description of (a physical system) from classical to quantum-mechanical, usually resulting in discrete values for observable quantities, as energy or angular momentum.  [from Dictionary.com]

Close Your Bank Accounts? - Follow Up

Yesterday I posted about moving your money - if you have any - from a big bank to a credit union.

Today there's a NY Times article which gives some details about the behind the scenes of checking accounts at big banks and credit unions.  Here's a bit:

But even as Bank of America and other institutions are adding fees and other restrictions, a company called PerkStreet, which you may have read about in this column before, is hoping that those Bank of America customers will run to its Web site. PerkStreet gives checking account customers as much as 2 percent back on their purchases when they use its debit cards.
Meanwhile, a company called BancVue works with community banks and credit unions to offer checking accounts that can yield more than 3 percent in interest on deposits for people who use their debit cards a lot. Soon, the company asserts, the total number of branches among all of the institutions that offer its rewards checking accounts will equal that of the 10th-largest bank in America.

 But it's not all that simple.  The perks to people with checking accounts and debit card holders at small banks and credit unions come from higher fees to merchants.  Read the rest of the article here.

Close Your Bank Accounts?

From Josh's FB. Then to The Atlantic (for bigger version) which said it came from Mother Jones Jan 2010

I used the word 'predatory capitalism' recently and I should explain. Market economists tell us the market works because it is efficient, but only when there is competition. If your bank  and credit card company seem to treat you more as prey than as a customer - always looking for ways to take money from you - late fees, finance charges that never let go and lots of other automatic fees - then you know what I mean.  What about airlines?  Why can't you just buy a ticket at a fair price without looking all over the internet?  Why can't you give/sell your ticket to someone?  It seems the main reason is so they can charge you change fees. And cell phone companies?

This bank consolidation chart, which you can see better here, explains some of the reason - lack of competition. You don't have a lot of choices. And if you ever want to rent a car or buy an airline ticket online, you have to have a credit card. But scanning Facebook - I do this now and then - I found one feasible response.

Found this on Kelly's FB

Credit Unions are a great option.  We've been members of Credit Union One since they've been the Teachers Credit Union.  Ours doesn't mess with us.  They're local and they treat us well. But I have an Alaska Airlines B of A visa card.  Can I give up my Frequent Flyer miles?  Maybe I can limit my Alaska Airlines Visa use just to airline tickets.  What about you?

The way to make the market work is to not do business with companies that don't treat you well.  That may mean giving some things up that you think you can't live without.  But you can.

Make a list of the companies that you patronize that treat you badly.  Then start planning your exit.  Find alternatives.  The market doesn't work if consumers have no choice, or think they don't.

By the way, using Google's reverse image function, I was able to put the chart into the image box and trace my way back.

Comments on Alaska Redistricting Board's Submission to DOJ Voting Section

Alaska is one of 16 states required to submit its redistricting plan to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Voting Section for approval before the plan can be implemented.  I followed the board closely this spring (see the Redistricting Board tab above for a guide to the posts).  So, when the filed their submission, I was interested to see what they wrote.

The DOJ's main interest here, as I understand this, is whether the Board's plan complies with the Voting Rights Act (VRA).  I suspect that they will be approved on that level for three key reasons:

• They managed to have "no retrogression" meaning they came up with the same number of Native districts Alaska had in the previous plan, 
• Their Voting Rights Act consultant who works closely with the DOJ on VRA issues who guided them and then wrote an opinion saying she found the plan in compliance.
• No one filed suit over the plan based on VRA issues.

The section entitled "Publicity and Participation" caught my attention.  I'd had issues with the Board over this topic throughout the session.  Their attorney's job is to write a description that puts them in the best light.  I think their attorney did an excellent job.  But I thought it would be useful to fill in the shadows and other features that the attorney left out.


In that section of my comments, I take direct quotes from the submission and then offer my interpretation of what happened.  Here's the first quote:

1.  “. . . the Board conducted the most open redistricting process in Alaska history. The Board took full advantage of technology, social networking tools, and new methods of online outreach to ensure the public had unprecedented access to the redistricting process.” (p. 15)

a.  I heard this claim about the most open process several times.   I have no doubt that it’s true.  The bar was very low.
b.  “took full advantage of technology, social networking tools, new methods of online outreach. . .”  
The board had a website and a Facebook page, but used only the most basic functions.   It was like having an iPhone but only making calls on it. This was not a high priority of the Board chair and the sites were (more so in the first two months) not consistently updated and never gave the public a clear overview of the process.   A lot of data accumulated on the site.  But it was short on information useful to the general public.  There was nothing that succinctly and clearly explained key issues or would educate someone so they could testify usefully.  Their computer expert (Eric Sandberg) was a GIS expert dedicated to the plans and maps, not the website and Facebook pages.   They got their toes wet in new technology, but they were a long way from taking even partial advantage, let alone full advantage.   I’ll elaborate below.

There were 14 such quotes.  I've uploaded my letter to the DOJ at Scribd and it's below where you can read it if you're interested in all the details.

But here are my final thoughts on this from the letter:

Final Thoughts

The Board’s attempts at publicity were minimal.  Their participation efforts were ‘quantity, not quality.”  This is reflected in their report which tells you they logged 60,000 air miles, but offers you no materials that were used to prepare citizens to understand the process at hearings, and no summary or analysis of the feedback they got.   There are some notes - some handwritten, some typed - with data on 23 of the 32 public hearings.  I understand that they were only done for those meetings where only part of the board was present, so the other members could have an idea of what they missed.  This (and the correspondence log) is the only attempt I witnessed to document feedback.  But even these are just notes or the pile of letters, and there is no summary of the feedback or analysis.

The Board’s citizen participation efforts do not reflect the sophisticated techniques that have been developed in this field in the last 40 years.  Some examples of the very rudimentary way this was undertaken:

Determining where to visit was ad hoc.  They began with the places the previous board had been.  Then board members suggested other places and they agreed.  Or communities invited them and they agreed.  No suggestion for a new location at a public meeting was turned down.  Individual board members sometimes offered reasons - PeggyAnn McConnochie said they needed to visit Southeastern communities because they would be losing a seat and so there would be special problems.  But there was never an organized look at possible sites to visit, they just added and added and added new sites.



Notice to communities they were visiting was minimal - the state public notices website, an obscure and hard to use site was the key location.  As things progressed there were regularl, but not completely reliable, notices on the Board’s website.  The board placed no ads in newspapers, sent out no mailers to the public, except to those who subscribed to their email list.  There was attendance at hearings only because interest groups notified their constituents and/or small communities themselves put out ads.  The media did cover local hearings, but no traditional media regularly covered the Board and  when they did, not in depth.



There was no attempt to educate the public on the process.  While a fair amount of data accumulated on the Board’s website over the three months, there was almost nothing that gave citizens a useful overview of the process, the issues, and particular questions for specific districts.  All that work was done by the special interest groups.  I tried to do a little of that on the blog a few times. Here’s my post for the Kotzebue public hearing for example:
http://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2011/03/kotzebue-today-bethel-tomorrow-then.html

And there was no analysis of the feedback they received.  So, when they were doing the maps, a board member might comment about someone who said they should do this or that.  But they had nothing to refer to which might show how many people agreed or not.  But even that would have only been the tiny percent of people who went to the hearings.

In sharp contrast the State Department of Transportation, for example, hires consultants to run their public hearings.  They come prepared with professionally designed visual aids that clearly outline the problems faced, the possible options, what those options would look like and cost, and how the participants can usefully participate.  They post notices in the newspapers and on the radio, send fliers by mail and email to affected citizens, and further information is available on their website for the public to study before the meeting.   They study all the feedback and publish  it using tables and charts. 

Nothing like that happened.  Instead they spread out across the state at great expense in money and time where they were met with generally small groups of people.  Often these were the professionals hired by the communities and Native organizations to represent their interests.


For example, they flew to Unalaska (pop, @3800) and Cold Bay (pop. @ 75).  Airfare to Cold Bay, via Unalaska, from Anchorage is about $900 round trip.  Three people went, so that’s about $2700.  Their notes say that nine people attended the Unalaska meeting and six the Cold Bay meeting. But only three people actually testified at each hearing.  The nine attendees in Unalaska were the Planning Director, seven people representing the City of Unalaska, one person representing himself, and the Legislative Information officer, where the meeting was.  The three people who testified were the planning director and two council members.

That’s $180 per attendee, not counting pay for the board members and staff,  and six hours plus roundtrip to Unalaska and Cold Bay and waiting time.  Or $450 per person testifying. 

There’s no doubt it is beneficial for the Board to see the different parts of the State and hear from people there how redistricing impacts them, and presumably the local attendees were pleased they took the effort, even if they were only in the hearing space and then quickly left town.  

Given the time and money they spent on these 15 people, six of whom testified, they could have sent a DVD with an explanation of the process  and maybe highlighted local issues and then called all the households in Cold Bay for feedack.  Would they have gotten less feedback?  I’m guessing they would have gotten more.  This is far beyond anything the Board considered.

How much of the board’s budget was spent on travel?  How much was spent on getting people to the meetings, on educational materials for the public, and on reviewing and analyzing the feedback?  I’d argue that 95% for the travel and 5% for the rest probably overestimates ‘the rest.’ 

Another contrast is to the huge amount the Board spent on the VRA expert and on the staff attorney who also had expertise in the VRA and the general redistricting process.  They had no one with any specialized expertise in publicity and public participation. 

I’ve gone into considerable detail here to make my point.  The submission’s facts are pretty much accurate, but the missing facts make the story they tell less glowing.  I’ve focused on the Publicity and Participation because it’s the section I know most about.  The submission makes the Board’s actions look very professional, when, in fact, they were ad hoc without any real expertise in this field.   I would suggest that those reviewing the Alaska Redistricting Board’s submission, carefully read between the lines in all the sections.   They did hire a VRA consultant and their staff attorney had experience with these things, plus they had a GIS expert.  But they were the only people who were applying professional technical knowledge and skills to this process.  The rest reflected a lay person’s understanding of modern management and analytic skills and techniques. 


Sincerely,

Steven E. Aufrecht, PhD


Note:  While these comments have focused on what I see as shortcomings of the Board, I must also reiterate that the staff were very cooperative and helpful throughout the process.  They worked hard under the pressures of deadlines,  of the grueling travel schedule, dealing with complex systems and voluminous data, and all this with a very short learning curve in an organization that did most of its work in a three month period.  I appreciate their responsiveness to my questions and requests during the process.

Letter to DOJ commenting on Alaska Redistricting Board Submission Sorry this took so long to get up. While the main thrust of my comments are directly relevant to Voting Rights Compliance, since they'd written out their version of the publicity and participation, it seemed like an easy way to address the subject and leave a record for the next Board to consider. Though ten more years of social media technology means that it will be a whole new world next time. But it was a whole new world this time compared to last time, but the Board just barely nodded to the new technology, and never attempted to seriously inform the general public about what was going on. At least that's how I see it.