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Commission finds general satisfaction in survey of customers Consultants hired by Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission surveyed agency’s customers in December, found AOGCC generally respected Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
Customers are generally satisfied with the work of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a survey done for the commission in December has found, but there are some “rubs” in the process that need work.
Feb. 11, before new commission members were named (see story page 5 this issue), then-commission Chair Cammy Taylor, Commissioner Dan Seamount and former-Commissioner Mike Bill updated Petroleum News Alaska on the results from the agency’s customer survey.
Taylor said companies raised the issue during the budget process of how many people were needed.
“And Dan (Seamount) has asked since the first day he came here (Jan. 13, 2000), what do the companies think about that we’re doing?”
The immediate trigger for the survey came last year, she said. The commission thought it “proactively addressed some issues with a particular company — and we learned later that from the company’s perspective, it was very different.” The company, which Taylor did not name, saw roadblocks and hurdles where the commission did not.
The commission decided it needed try to understand how people outside the agency viewed how it was doing its job. An outside firm, PGS, was hired to interview the agency’s customers and compile a report.
“What was important to us was to find out candidly what people had to say,” Taylor said.
Decision-specific questions The questions that PGS asked about the commission’s work were “tailored around the kinds of decisions that companies generally get from us: permit to drill, application for sundry approval and assorted conservation orders,” Taylor said.
In January, commissioners and senior staff participated in a workshop where PGS rolled out survey results.
Seamount said recommendations and comments from the commission’s customers — as well as commission and staff knowledge — were used in what PGS called a “process design workshop.”
“We diagrammed the business process,” Bill said.
Diagrams were done “for three different processes that we have: one was sundry applications; one was permit to drill; and the other one was the conservation orders,” Seamount said.
Survey results were added to the diagrams of work flow, identifying “what they called the rubs,” Taylor said. “Either because we internally had identified them as a problem. Or the companies had identified a problem.”
Unfamiliarity, who to contact Rubs, said Seamount, included such things as “unfamiliarity with the regulatory requirements,” not knowing who to contact at the commission and “insufficient clarity of permit requirements.” Sixteen rubs were identified for sundry applications, 26 for conservation orders and 21 for permit to drill applications.
“The results of the survey were generally really positive,” Seamount said.
The survey firm has “done work for other state agencies and other regulatory agencies,” Taylor said. “And I think what impressed them was that for a regulatory agency, the response was very favorable.” PGS found that the commission “compared very favorably with regulators in other jurisdictions with which those interviewed had had experience,” she said.
The survey results also included “a number of comments recognizing significant improvements made over the last year or two,” Taylor said.
Examples, contacts requested Seamount said that one of the agency’s performance measures is the time it takes to issue a drilling permit (see chart in Feb. 16 issue of PNA). That has been tracked per quarter for the last three years, he said, and has gone down from 17-21 days to 10-14 days. Bill said the commission’s process takes longer for conservation orders because of the public process: the commission has to publish notice and set a hearing date.
Drilling permit requirements are very specific, Taylor said: “But if you were asking for a conservation order for pool rules, there’s nothing in the regulations that says you must give us the following information.”
That could be solved, she said, with examples on the commission’s web page.
Another request which could be solved on the web page is information on the right contact at the commission for a specific thing, she said.
The survey also found a conflict between “almost too much written guidance” and “not specific written guidance.”
Taylor said this is “fairly common in the regulatory world: some people want to make sure that they have very specific guidelines … (and) some people perceive that as being too restrictive” where a variance may be appropriate for new technology or a slightly different kind of project.
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