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Therriault introduces bill to overhaul state’s complex permitting system Senator says he’s not expecting final action on Senate Bill 361 this year, wants input from agencies, regulated industries and watchdog groups for work during interim Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
It’s time for a complete review and overhaul of Alaska’s permitting system, Sen. Gene Therriault, R-Fairbanks, said in introducing Senate Bill 361, which has a short title of permit coordination and coastal zone management.
He said the Legislature has increasingly heard that the state’s permitting system, built up piecemeal over 43 years since statehood, is cumbersome, lacks adequate coordination between agencies and has some duplication.
“We have been trying to deal with some of these problems sort of piecemeal and I thought that it was perhaps time for the Legislature, as the policy setting body for the state, to look at the entire system and see if perhaps it is time to start from scratch and just sort of put together a new better coordinated system,” Therriault said at an April 23 meeting of the Senate State Affairs Committee, which he chairs.
The bill, Therriault said in a sponsor statement, is based on proposals that have emerged, over the years, “from the front-line permitting staff, division directors and commissioners at our resource agencies…” He also noted that the governor had introduced a bill addressing these problems several years ago.
The senator said he does not expect action on the bill — introduced April 12 — this session. What he is looking for, he said, is input from agencies, regulated industries and watchdogs so that he can work on the bill with these groups between sessions. No consensus in 1997 Patrick Galvin, Director of the Division of Governmental Coordination in the governor’s office, told the committee that the administration sponsored a streamlining workshop in 1997. There was a consensus out of that workshop that there were valid issues which needed work — but no consensus approach on how to do that.
After the governor’s 1997 bill didn’t move in the Legislature, Galvin said, the administration has continued to look for ways to achieve streamlining without the Legislature. SB 361 includes a coordinating agency, the division of project assistance, in the Office of the Governor, and Galvin said one concern of the administration was the lack of specificity of authority of this coordinating agency in relation to permitting agencies. He also said timelines were not specific enough in the bill.
Galvin noted that the administration is “encouraged to hear that both of the leading major party candidates for governor have committed to making this issue one of the priorities of their possible administrations and we are more than willing to commit the time necessary to continue these discussions in the interim between the sessions.”
Some projects may not need coordination
Deputy Commissioner Kurt Fredriksson of the Department of Environmental Conservation told the committee that one of DEC’s concerns about SB 361 is with small projects. Coordinating permitting is not a panacea for all permitting, he said, and small project applicants can sometimes work with a couple of agencies more efficiently than through a coordinated review process.
Fredriksson also said DEC has been working on its appeal process, incorporating an informal conflict resolution process. DEC would like to see the bill include flexibility for formal appeals when needed, but also allow parties to use mediation when that will work.
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