Alaskans weighed in on the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher at a public meeting in Anchorage on Wednesday night, some calling for drastic changes to the federal government's handling of oil spill response.

University of Alaska Anchorage Chancellor Fran Ulmer called the meeting at the university because she was recently appointed to a seven-member national commission tasked by the White House to determine the root causes of the Gulf oil rig explosion and figure out how to prevent future disasters.

Ulmer said she wants to be a bridge between the commission and Alaskans who have expertise or experience in oil-spill response. Many Alaskans worked on the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Prince William Sound and many of them still are monitoring that spill's impact on the environment and their coastal towns.

Roughly 20 to 30 people attended Wednesday's session, though many did not testify.

Longtime oil-industry and government critic Tom Lakosh told Ulmer during the meeting that she should push for more effective spill-cleanup regulation. He said state and federal agencies routinely approve spill-response plans that overstate the ability of oil companies and cargo shippers to remove the oil from the water.

"There's no incentive for the industry to put in more (cleanup) measures because the regulators are derelict in their duty," he said.

Geoff Merrell, a long-time Alaskan spill responder, disagreed.

"There's always a natural tendency to heap on more regulation," Merrell told Ulmer.

He said it would be better to give oil responders as many tools as they can use without having to deal with a lot of bureaucracy.

Merrell, who now works with Shell Oil, which is seeking to explore offshore leases it purchased in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, said he thinks the federal Oil Pollution Act passed in response to the Exxon Valdez spill was poorly written and it took years for oil responders to "make heads or tails of what (the act) was telling us to do and how to comply with it."

He said now would be a good time to reexamine the law, keeping the good parts and discarding the parts that don't work well.

But Lakosh contended that federal regulators are ignoring the act's requirements in favor of weak spill-contingency plans that don't work.

"If I destroyed public property, illegally (hurt) endangered species, I'd be handcuffed," he said.

Several scientists who spoke during meeting raised concerns about monitoring the long-term impacts of the Gulf spill.

Robert White, the UAA vice provost for research, said the commission should review the "excellent files" on Exxon Valdez scientific research and it should push for a detailed examination of how the Gulf organisms will respond to the oil contamination.

"It will change how and what they eat. It may or may not affect reproduction. We're going to need to know a lot more," White said.

John French, a retired University of Alaska Fairbanks aquatic toxicologist who worked on the natural resource damage assessment of the 1989 Exxon spill and assessed the impacts of the spill on subsistence food, told Ulmer he is worried that ongoing spill response efforts in the Gulf, including burning the oil and using chemical dispersants to dilute it, will also have damaging consequences.

"We have this knee jerk reaction -- do something -- even if it is going to do more harm," French said.

Dave Harbor, a former state utility regulator, told Ulmer that the commission should not recommend changes that lead to "unnecessary delay" of drilling projects. He said that only the "total expulsion" of the oil industry from U.S. waters would eliminate all of the risks from offshore drilling, but the impact of that on American jobs would be "too horrible" to contemplate.

Ulmer did not share any of her own opinions or reactions to the comments made during the session, which was recorded. She said she plans to hold additional "listening sessions" at other university campuses in Alaska and she plans to share the information with her fellow commissioners, who will convene their first meeting next week in New Orleans. She then plans to tour the Gulf region.

The spill commission's co-chairs are former Florida Sen. Bob Graham and former federal Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly, who ran the EPA during the Exxon spill.