SITKA, ALASKA
The Alaska Coastal Management Program is about 35 years old, and it does two big things: First, if you want to develop a project along Alaska’s coastline, it helps streamline the regulatory process. All the agencies you need to talk to get the same information at the same time. And second, if you’re one of those agencies — say, the state Department of Natural Resources, or the City and Borough of Sitka — it provides a mechanism for you to communicate with the other agencies about the project. In short, it ensures your plans are consistent with federal, state and local policies for the coastline.

“We feel that it gives us a much stronger ability to have some input into the permitting process for the City and Borough of Sitka, which is almost 5,000 square miles,” said Marlene Campbell, Sitka’s director of governmental affairs. “It’s not just downtown Sitka.”

And now that the Coastal Management Program is going away, Campbell says it’s going to be much harder for Sitka to have a voice in projects. Policies the city set forth that were enforced by the state and federal governments could be lost, too.

“What that means to us is, for example, policies that don’t allow the proliferation of float houses anywhere people want to put them privately … that will all go away as of July 1,” she said.

July 1 is when Alaska coastal management will fall under federal control. And Campbell says major questions have yet to be answered: What do offices like hers do with projects currently under review? Will they still be able to help local developers who are unsure how to navigate government regulations?

“Right now, we’re still trying to figure out exactly what it means,” said Brian Templin, city planner for the City of Craig, where the demise of the coastal management program is equally unclear.

For him, the big loss is that local and state agencies won’t be looking at the same information at the same time.

“I think there’s the possibility that there will be effects or impacts of projects that weren’t anticipated that were easier to catch when all of the agencies were looking at the same time,” he said.

There also are implications at the state level, says Kurt Fredrikkson, a former commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, who was once project coordinator for the state’s Office of Coastal Management.

Fredrikkson says the program required the federal government to work with the state government.

“And I fear if we lose that at a time when we’re trying to get the federal government to pay more attention to Alaska’s concerns and Alaska’s priorities, losing coastal management will just undermine our authority to do that,” Fredrikkson said.

Templin, the Craig city planner, says he’s heard talk of re-starting the program from scratch, but says estimates of doing that in 18 to 24 months are optimistic.

“My personal opinion is I think it’s going to be longer,” he said. “We went through a major program change and new coastal district plans and that process started in 2003. There are still districts in the state today that have not resolved their coastal management plans based on those changes, 8 years later.”

After a session of negotiations among the Alaska House, Senate and governor’s office, the reauthorization of the Coastal Management Program failed in the House by one vote.

KTOO's Rosemarie Alexander contributed to this report.

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