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Date Posted: 04:53:56 04/28/04 Wed
Author: Don Johnson
Subject: SB 69 Special Interest Bureaucrat

SB 69 Special Interest Bureaucrat

SB 69 Special Interest Bureaucrat, SIB
IP: 24.237.250.150
Posted on April 15, 2004 at 05:40:15 AM by Don Johnson

Posted by Don Johnson on March 25, 2004 at 21:49:28:

I see Senator Wagoner has been up to no good by sponsoring SB 69 which is a Board of Fisheries Conflicts
of Interest Bill. SB 69 attempts to get us to desire to have persons and groups with special interests sitting
on our Alaska Boards. SB 69 desires to allow board of fish members to have personal or financial interests
in the issues they will be voting on.
This attempt to allow conflict of interest within our Alaska boards is a very large part of the reason we have so
much contention when our boards make decisions for the public. The general public sees these
special interest persons or groups as not representing them or the common good. Drafters of SB 69 are
not working for the common public good but instead for special interest groups.

Take a look at the special interests sitting on the Kenai River Special Management Area Board.
I have been observing KRSMA board members come and go for years and there is one thing which most
of them appear to have in common, most of them are Special Interest Bureaucrats, SIB.
I define a SIB as a person who is very good at talking, ax grinding and avoiding the common good.
Anyone can be a SIB they just need to be more interested in their own personal agenda than the common good.

When I go into a KRSMA meeting I expect to see about 17 board members actively grinding an equal
number of "special interest axes". I expect to see sparks flying everywhere as each board members
attempts conceal their true hidden & personal agenda while they work to "make the world a better place".
The annual agenda appears to be to locate a group of people who stand between them and the Kenai River.
If the target group is not well represented on the KRSMA, the board then declares open season on them.
All the freshly sharpened axes then become sound science "management tools" as they attempt to manage
away at the unfortunate target group.
A favorite SIB management tools is to send out surveys asking if you dislike the targeted group.
These surveys seems to never mentions that they are tainted with misleading questions.
That is bad science in anyones book but that is how SIB target people for "management".
SIB write a bunch of tainted survey questions and then gives them to a bunch of locals who would
love to be the only persons using the river. These questions ask if the river is crowded?
I could also stack the polling deck if I wanted to prove my position. I have been fishing the Kenai River for
22 years and taken thousands of people fishing in my boat. I have never heard a single person in my boat
claim that the river was crowded. That is around 10,000 persons without a single crowding complaint.
That would be about twice the total population of Soldotna claiming to be more interested in fishing than
complaining about alleged crowding. I guess that removes the crowding issue, right? My point is that
anyone can manipulate an issue to work in their favor but that is what special interest groups do.
They grab only the sound science on their side of the issue and make-believe the sound science on the
other side does not exist.

Surveys which ask tainted questions attempt to place created problems into your mind and then force
you to address them. I told these bad science survey writers of their survey error but they did not care if their
survey was corrupted by forced issue questions.
This was the beginning of the "great crowding non-issue". The Kenai River Capacity Survey was and still is
corrupt as are the motives of many KRSMA, SIB board members. If you start to really look at many KRSMA,
SIB's you begin to see the real reasons they are on the KRSMA. Each member basically has some kind
of personal special interest which allows them to somehow benefit from being on this board.

It really does not even matter what the truth of an issue is, most of these SIB's are pure special interests
which may discover what is good for themselves but they have little chance of locating the common good. I claim that many KRSMA board members place
their own personal agendas before the common good. I claim that many of these members have huge personal
specail interest axes to grind and many times those axes are much more important than the public good.
If the KRSMA board really wanted to look for the truth on an issue it needs only put together a working group
"without special interest axes to grind".
This is no doubt impossible because the KRSMA SIB's believes that only people with a special interests qualify to decide Kenai River issues.
This SIB belief forces a real catch 22 situation. This desire to have only special interests decide Kenai
issues produces so much personal ax grinding that most of the time the common good takes a back seat.

Alaska deliberately does not place special interests like cops or criminals on our juries because we
believe them to reduce the chances of justice. Alaska currently and deliberately places special interests like river bank owners, sport fishermen and gill netters on our State boards to increase the chances of justice?
Does this make any sense to you? It makes little sense to me. I suggest that we remove all KRSMA board
members with special interests and give justice and our natural resourses a chance.

I have a real and simple solution for anyone looking for a way to avoid crowding on any lake or river.
Just generate a specific lake or river public access stamp. Once a Kenai River access stamp were available the only thing left to argue about would be its price. The price of a Kenai River access stamp could be adjusted for total access. This would be a very simple and fair solution but that may be the real problem.
It could be so simple and so fair that a special interest bureaucrat could never think of it.

SB 69 will be having a teleconferences on April 28, Wednesday, 8:30am.
THE PURPOSE OF SB 69 is to require members of the board to participate in issues that come before the board even though the members have a personal or financial interest in the matter by virtue of their participation in a fishery.

On April 28, Wednesday, 8:30am., you will have your chance to say what you think about having special interest bureaucrates on our Alaska Board of Fish.
Legislative Information Office at 283-2030


Thank you.

Don Johnson
Soldotna, Alaska 99669

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