The people in charge of spending the $900 million settlement the state got as a result of the Exxon Valdez oil spill are steering a deliberate, and different, course toward a July 2006 deadline for deciding whether to ask for more money or shut down scientific research and restoration efforts it has funded for more than a decade.
Most of the membership of the six-person Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustees Council -- three federal executives, three from state agencies -- is new since Gov. Frank Murkowski was elected in 2002. In a series of steps over the last year, they have:
• Substantially ramped down emphasis on science and research, abruptly dismissing the organization's science director last winter and leaving the position vacant.
• Shifted money from long-term monitoring projects focused on Prince William Sound's fish and marine life to short-term efforts to consolidate what's already been learned of the effects of the 11-million-gallon spill.
• Drawn less on the efforts of in-house staff and scientists and more on "liaisons" -- people within their own state or federal agencies who are assigned to track and plan what the spill council does.
• Isolated from new decisions the advisory committees of scientists and members of the public who have helped guide its activities over the years.
Eventually, the trustees will decide whether to advise government leaders and attorneys to seek additional damages of up to $100 million from Exxon, now known as Exxon Mobil, or to just dissolve the spill council.
One trustee, Alaska Commissioner of Fish and Game McKie Campbell, said as much during a testy exchange at a council meeting in Anchorage last week.
It came during a "dialogue" scheduled on the agenda, as two officers of the public advisory committee complained about the trustees' new strategy of using money from the spill settlement to pay their own government agencies for the cost of the employees designated to "liaise."
Campbell defended the spending. But he said he agreed with the need to contain spending on administrative functions.
"Maybe we should think about how we should wrap this thing up and shut it down," Campbell said.
"What do you mean?" asked Stacy Studebaker, a former Kodiak science teacher and a member of the public advisory committee. "Can you even do that?"
"Sure," Campbell said. Jobs and research performed by the council now could be farmed out to other federal or state agencies, he continued. "We could say, 'Here, you do this. Here, you do this.' "
The exchange was quick, but it illustrated the growing chasm between the new trustees and the members of the advisory committees, many of whom, like Studebaker, have volunteered on them for years.
Most of the $900 million the state received from the settlement in the early 1990s is gone, $750 million of it spent on scores of studies of the biology and ecosystems of the Sound and of how fast, or whether, they are recovering from the dramatic damage wreaked by the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
What's become of those studies is another bone of contention among the new trustees, the advisory committees and the scientists who did the work.
Kurt Fredriksson, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, is especially focused on the problem of 78 reports he labels "missing."
Most of those apparently aren't literally missing but were turned in by researchers in formats not compatible with the organization's computer programs, making the information they contain difficult to use or access over the Internet. In fact, the trustees later the same day set aside money in their 2006 fiscal budget to fix that problem.
Under the 1991 legal settlement between the state and Exxon, a short "reopener" period was created for summer 2006 to allow state lawyers to file for additional damages that might not have been clear 15 years ago.
Preparing for that deadline has preoccupied the trustees at least since August 2004, when a proposal from an Oregon consulting firm that had never done any Prince William Sound spill research suddenly surfaced at the organization's annual budget meeting. Neither of the advisory committees had even seen the proposal from Integral Consulting.
The company was assigned a new task. It was to "synthesize" the products of existing studies -- essentially, to tell the trustees everything learned about the oil spill's aftermath.
The deal brought swift criticism from the advisory committees. Members said it made no sense to hire scientists who have never studied the Sound to analyze the work of those who have studied it for years. In reviewing the latest round of contract proposals, however, the public advisory committee acknowledged some value in a set of fresh eyes looking over the work.
If any doubts remained about how much the trustees plan to micromanage the council over the next year, they were erased at Wednesday's meeting. After the organization's executive director -- former state House Speaker Gail Phillips -- and others introduced a detailed draft "interim action plan" for the next 18 months, Campbell and other trustees dropped a surprise.
Instead of the plan submitted by Phillips and her staff, Campbell and trustee Pete Hagen of the National Marine Fisheries Service offered a distinctly different version:
• In the staff's draft, the advisory committees were assigned important roles; in the trustees' plan, they were stripped of most specific responsibilities.
• Long provisions stressing the importance of seeking public review and comment as the council moves toward next summer's deadline were eliminated in favor of brief assertions that the organization's public outreach efforts will continue.
• The staff's draft included this sentence in an early section describing the trustee council's focus: "The obligation to consider the status of injured resources and services to determine whether or not restoration has been achieved -- or even (if) it can be achieved -- is critical." It is deleted in the trustees' new "Guidance Document."
Phillips was clearly surprised, and clearly not pleased, with the late-arriving Guidance Document. As Campbell began to describe the new proposal, Phillips interrupted.
"Madam Chair," Phillips said to the trustees' chairwoman, Drue Pearce, who is a former state Senate president and current senior Alaska adviser to the U.S. interior secretary, "we don't have a document like that before us ... I would really appreciate having a copy of that. If we are going to consider that, I have not seen it."
Phillips got her copy but not her plan. Minutes later, the trustees adopted their own, unanimously.
Daily News reporter Don Hunter can be reached at dhunter@adn.com.
