Sen. Tom Wagoner introduced a bill last week that would strip state and federal agencies of voting power on the Kenai River Special Management Area Board.
The measure also would add some 500 acres to the management area. That land currently is owned by the state.
Senate Bill 190, introduced Jan. 21, would allow agencies to name ex-officio members to the board, but those representatives would no longer have a vote in management decisions.
As currently constituted, representatives from state and federal agencies and three municipalities fill eight of the board's 17 seats. Under Wagoner's bill, representatives from the cities of Kenai and Soldotna, as well as the Kenai Peninsula Borough would retain their voting powers.
However, representatives from the Alaska departments of Natural Resources, Environmental Conservation, and Fish and Game, along with those from the U.S. Forest Service and the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, would no longer have a vote.
"We want to make it a real citizen's advisory group, not just a bureaucratic, multiagency working group," Wagoner said in an interview Monday.
Although the board is weighted toward the public, at-large membership, it may not always control an outcome. Public members are more likely to be the ones missing meetings because of business or personal commitments, thus changing the voting dynamics. It is rare for government agency representatives to miss meetings, Wagoner said.
"They're always there. That's their job," he said.
Eliminating agency votes would leave final board decisions in the hands of the public members who represent user groups, residential property owners and municipalities, Wagoner said.
That is not meant to indicate agency representation is unnecessary. Far from it, he added.
"They will still have every bit as much input as they do now, and that's a good thing," he said. "They're needed (for their expertise). At the same time, control of the advisory board needs to be with the public members, not bureaucrats who may have an entirely different agenda then Joe Q. Public."
Wagoner also suggested that some at-large members might feel a bit intimidated by the perceived expertise of agency representatives. With no vote, those experts would become what Wagoner thinks they should be ‹ a pool of experience, a resource.
"(The bill) would make them advisers to the advisory group," he said.
Ted Wellman, an Anchorage attorney with Davis Wright Tremain LLP who has been on the board since the mid-1990s, disagrees with Wagoner's aim. There are several good reasons, he said, why agencies should retain a vote on the board. But Wellman, a past board chair, said he didn't always feel that way.
"I started out thinking agency people should not have a vote," he said. "I have since changed my mind."
Having voting agency representatives directly involved in decisions makes it far more likely that the agencies themselves will "buy into" those decisions, Wellman said.
That was evident, he said, when the board adopted the area's comprehensive plan back around 1997. If agencies had not had the vote back then, the agencies might not have signed off on the plan, Wellman suggested.
Another reason for retaining agency votes is for the stability they provide to the board. They prevent the board from being controlled by special interest groups, he said, adding he could not remember a case when a vote by agency representatives actually controlled the board.
He said the agency representatives have integrity. They abstain from voting when decisions directly involve their own agencies.
Wellman said he would have no objection to eliminating the vote of the Department of Natural Resources because that is the agency the management area board directly advises.
"I'm really interested in retaining the votes of the federal agencies. It ensures they buy into the process of working cooperatively with the state on this park. They control land on a substantial part of it."
That they have a vote also affords the rest of the membership a measure of influence on those agencies," Wellman added.
"The world is not going to end if they are (become) ex-officio nonvoting members," Wellman said. It would, however, increase the chances that absences among at-large members might leave board decisions in too few hands, and that could lead to the adoption of bad policy.
Another refinement of state law regarding the board make-up proposed in Wagoner's bill would limit municipal membership to municipalities actually adjacent to the management area. There are no municipal representatives currently on the board from Seward, Homer or Anchorage, but other appointed advisory boards do include broad geographical representation. Wagoner said he wanted to make sure board seats continue to be held by those most directly connected to the management area.
The Kenai River Special Management Area covers more than 105 linear miles of rivers and lakes, including Kenai Lake, Skilak Lake and the Kenai River from river mile 82 downstream to four miles above the river's mouth on Cook Inlet.
Adjacent to these waters are 15 state park subunits and land owned by cities, the borough and the federal government, as well as private and Native lands.
It was created in 1984 by the Alaska Legislature as a unit of the state park system in response to increasing threats to the river system's health.
