United States Senator Lisa Murkowski

For Lisa Murkowski America's growing dependence on foreign oil for our nation's energy needs is one of the most pressing issues facing this country. This dependence, in addition to volatile energy prices, makes it critically important that Congress develop a comprehensive energy strategy to decrease U.S. reliance on foreign energy and keep prices stable. She has long advocated a "three pronged" approach that includes renewable and alternative energy, additional domestic oil and gas production, and additional energy conservation. To that end on June 17, 2009, the senator guided comprehensive energy legislation through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee - the American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009, S 1462 - where it still awaits floor consideration.

The bill that was passed by the Senate Energy Committee includes a provision to create a national Clean Energy Deployment Administration to speed financing of renewable and alternative energy, provisions to improve siting of interstate electricity transmission infrastructure, improvements in the energy efficiency of appliances, strengthened building codes for commercial buildings and homes, new programs to conserve water supplies, and many other programs to better train workers to develop new energy infrastructure.

• Energy workforce development - provides assistance to institutions of higher learning and community colleges that place an emphasis on energy jobs and help train the energy workers of the future;
• Energy efficiency - establishes new efficiency standards for several consumer products and makes changes that will allow standards to be updated more often and be market driven;
• Nuclear - provides a clear statement of the federal government's support for nuclear energy and expresses a desire to resolve the spent nuclear fuel issue;
• Transmission - addresses planning and siting of electrical transmission infrastructure by encouraging states to develop plans and giving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) backstop siting authority, and by tying cost allocation to benefits;
• Cyber security - increases authority for both FERC and the Department of Energy to protect the nation's electrical grid from cyber security threats and vulnerabilities;
• Carbon sequestration - allows for the financing of up to 10 demonstration projects;
• Modification of Section 526 - allows the government and the military to purchase Canadian tar sand oil.

Alaska-related provisions in the bill include major changes to the federal gas line loan guarantee program to rejuvenate efforts to finance and build an Alaska natural gas pipeline project. Specifically, the changes include a provision to raise the loan guarantee first approved in 2004 from $18 billion to $30 billion, plus inflation. The bill also allows use of the federal Financing Bank to guarantee financing of the line, likely reducing the administrative costs and interest rates on a loan by hundreds of millions of dollars. Additionally, it clarifies the 2004 law to make it clear that government will provide a 100 percent loan guarantee for up to 80 percent of the costs of a total project. Lastly, the bill includes a series of technical amendments to the 2004 act to make the loan guarantee easier to administer. In addition to the provisions beneficial to the main line, Sen. Murkowski also won committee approval of a provision to grant a right-of-way through Denali National Park and Preserve for a smaller diameter "bullet" gas line to bring natural gas from the North Slope foothills into Southcentral Alaska. The right-of-way provisions for a line along the Parks Highway will allow either a Parks route or a Richardson-Glenn Highway route for a bullet line, and it will require the right-of-way to follow established environmental approval procedures. This provision could shorten permit reviews by two to three years.

The proposed comprehensive energy bill awaiting Senate consideration also includes a series of provisions to increase domestic oil and gas production. The bill creates a combined federal permitting office in Alaska to regulate oil and gas exploration and production activities in the Alaska outer continental shelf (OCS). The office would help reduce costly permitting delays, which will also help protect the environment by bringing more federal manpower from the Department of the Interior, National Marine Fisheries Service and Environmental Protection Agency to process permits in a timelier manner.

Other provisions include:
• Opens the Eastern Gulf of Mexico to OCS oil development, including the natural gas-rich Destin Dome area off the Florida Panhandle that contains 3 trillion cubic feet of dry natural gas. Additionally, an amendment would require leasing in the area within six months after environmental reviews are finished.
• Requires new data to be collected to create an inventory of the nation's offshore oil and gas reserves, providing funding to pay for part of the work.
• And exempts the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline system from a section of the national historic preservation law in order to ease design issues for an Alaska natural gas pipeline that must run inside the pipeline's right-of-way corridor for nearly 500 miles.

The proposed energy bill still awaiting full Senate consideration also authorizes a $90 million federal grant program to fund construction of repositories for surface rock samples, oil and gas well-core drilling samples, well logs, micropaleontology samples, well cuttings and geochemical samples - all vital to further scientific understanding of soils. This is designed to jumpstart federal efforts to save the geologic information that is increasingly vital for oil, gas, geothermal and carbon capture and storage projects in the future, especially in Alaska.

Methane hydrates
• The bill would also extend federal research of methane hydrates as an energy source and increase federal funding for such research. Alaska likely leads the world in methane hydrate resources with undiscovered potential reserves of up to 200,000 trillion cubic feet.

Ocean Energy
• The bill also increases new federal aid for expansion of marine and hydrokinetic energy projects, which will help utilize our tides, currents and waves to generate electricity. The bill also would increase the federal spending authorization for ocean research for the next 11 years.

The proposed comprehensive energy bill still pending in the Senate also includes a host of additional Alaska provisions.

For example:
• Permanently authorizes the Arctic Energy Office, which has been in operation at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks for the past eight years, expands the research mission of the office, allows it to fund research on renewable energy in northern climates, and expands the authorized funding for the office from $3.8 million to as high as $22.5 million.

• Establishes a national renewable electricity standard (RES) with a qualifying threshold high enough (4 million megawatts sold) that Alaskan utilities would be exempt while allowing Alaskan utilities that generate renewable energy to sell RES credits equal to the power they produce from renewable sources to utilities in the Lower 48. Alaska Native corporations and tribes would qualify to gain double credits from any generation of renewable energy, which would help finance renewable projects in rural areas (homeowners and businesses generating excess renewable energy would gain triple credits to sell to utilities). Lastly, the provision allows lake-tap hydro of any size, hydro projects up to 50 megawatts in size, and pumped storage projects to count as renewable energy under the RES

• Changes the definition of renewable biomass to allow more wood fiber from the Tongass National Forest to qualify for use in biofuels and to be used to satisfy an RES. The new definition would allow any material that does not meet saw timber size or utilization specifications to be qualified, including dead trees, tops, slash, brush, sawmill, veneer and pulp mill. Lastly, inventoried roadless areas and most private lands would now qualify for the RES standard.

The 2009 energy bill is a follow up to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that the Senator helped craft. The 2005 energy bill authorized energy aid to the Denali Commission, included leasing and royalty changes for the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska, funded initial research into methane hydrates, provided loan aid to start the Healy Clean Coal plant, provided research and federal purchase and tax incentives for wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy, provided aid for coal gasification technology and created the Barrow Geophysical Research Facility. The 2007 act improved incentives for biofuels, increased the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFÉ) Standard to increase vehicle gas mileage, boosted energy efficiency standards for a host of appliances and lighting, increased research and aid for ocean energy, contained the Renewable Energy Deployment Grant and High-Cost Geothermal Grant programs authored by Senator Murkowski to provide construction aid for renewable projects in Alaska and elsewhere, contained tax breaks for companies that design and build dual-fuel appliances that run on both conventional and renewable energy, another provision by Senator Murkowski, and made improvements to the Alaska gas pipeline coordinator's office to speed construction of an Alaska gas pipeline project. Potentially the biggest benefit to Alaska of the provisions was the Renewable Energy Deployment Grant fund to provide federal aid for renewable energy projects in Alaska and geothermal projects in high-cost areas nationwide. While the Senator was blocked in February 2009 from providing $180 million to implement initial funding for the program, she will continue to try to gain funding for the grant in the future.

In early 2009, after years of sponsoring basic legislation to open the surface of the 1.5-million-acre Arctic coastal plain to environmentally sensitive oil and gas development, Senator Murkowski introduced a bill to allow for the extraction of oil and natural gas from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) without any surface disturbance (S. 503). Specifically, it would enable the oil reserves beneath ANWR to be explored and produced through directional drilling from locations outside the exterior boundaries of the refuge. Drilling would take place on state lands and in state waters, and there would be no pipelines, buildings or development wells permitted on the surface of ANWR itself. Eventually more the refuge could be developed using future potential subsurface technology. The bill serves as a compromise that the Senator hopes will bridge the differences among lawmakers since it eliminates any possibility of environmental damage to the wildlife in the refuge. The bill would allow for our Nation to increase its domestic supply of oil, a critical need in this time of volatile prices, especially now that oil prices are once again on the rise having nearly doubled from their low point in fall 2008. The Senator did secure a hearing on the status of directional extended reach drilling technology in fall 2009 and is awaiting consideration of the bill in 2010.

Alaska has 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas ready to go to market from the Prudhoe Bay fields, gas that may be worth well over $150 billion. It is also expected that another 150 trillion to 200 trillion cubic feet of conventional gas can be found under the ground and oceans of northern Alaska, gas that could spur petrochemical development and meet Alaska's energy needs for decades into the future. Thus, it is vital that Alaska redouble its efforts to get that gas to market as quickly as possible, before alternative technologies such as shale gas in the Lower 48 or liquefied natural gas from elsewhere in the world fills the niche for Alaska's gas in domestic markets.

The Senator continues to look for ways that the federal government can aid construction of a large-diameter gas line to move North Slope gas to the Lower 48 States. In 2004 the Senator sponsored and won approval of an $18 billion federal loan guarantee (plus inflation) to help pay for the construction of a gas line and $750 million of tax subsidies to help defray the cost of installing the actual pipeline and of building a North Slope gas conditioning plant. The 2004 bill also provided for expedited permitting and accelerated court reviews and established a Federal Office of Pipeline Coordinator to oversee construction of any future line. In the 2007 energy bill, she provided the Office of Pipeline Coordinator with greater flexibility to hire staff more quickly and gain funds to pay for oversight of the pipeline. In the 2009 energy bill she is attempting to raise the limits on the loan guarantee to $30 billion plus inflation to better reflect the inflationary cost hikes in construction of a pipeline, to allow the Federal Financing Bank to make the loan guarantee that should reduce the interest rate and cut the cost of financing a line by several hundred million dollars, and to guarantee that the loan guarantee will cover 80 percent of the total cost of a project up to the loan limit, and not some lesser percentage. Most of the incentives will be available either to an overland pipeline project through Canada or an "All-Alaska" LNG project, to the extent that the gas would be utilized in the Lower 48 States.

The Senator, to aid construction of an in-state gas line to bring gas to Southcentral Alaska more quickly than a main line project, in 2009 introduced legislation to grant a gas line along the Parks Highway a right of way through Denali National Park and Preserve. The bill, which would help the park by allowing its buildings and vehicles to be fueled by clean-burning natural gas, will simply allow the decision on whether to follow a Parks Highway or a Richardson-Glenn Highway route for a spur or "bullet" pipeline to be made not on right of way problems, but on what is best for all Alaskans and Alaska's economy.

Alaska has two-thirds of America's outer continental shelf, with the Chukchi Sea holding an estimated 15 billion barrels of oil and 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and the Beaufort Sea holding an estimated 8 billion barrels of oil and 28 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. To help Alaskans benefit from these abundant resources, in 2009 the Senator along with Senator Mary Landrieu introduced legislation to guarantee a fair share of offshore oil and natural gas revenue to coastal states, including Alaska. This bill (the Domestic Energy Security Act) provides coastal states 37.5 percent of the revenues from energy development off of their shores. The bipartisan bill will serve as the foundation for Alaska and other states to balance local economic and environmental concerns with national energy security. Considering the economic and energy challenges we as a nation face, now is the time to increase domestic oil and gas production.

Of the portion that would be allocated to Alaska, the State would receive 47 percent of the funds, Alaska Native regional and village corporations would share 33 percent, and the remaining 20 percent would be given to coastal borough and community governments. The bill also would require oil produced in the Beaufort, Chukchi and Norton Basin planning areas to be transported to onshore facilities by pipelines in order to better protect whales and other marine mammals vital to the cultural and subsistence needs of Alaska Natives.

The bill would also open parts of the eastern Gulf of Mexico to offshore energy production and would extend revenue sharing to Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. In 2006, Congress allotted 37.5 percent of OCS rents, royalties and bonuses to five states largely along the Gulf of Mexico, an arrangement that mirrors long-standing revenue sharing with states for development on federal lands, Alaska state and local governments gaining more than $40 million in Coastal Impact Assistance Funds over the four years. The Domestic Energy Security Act of 2009 follows on the precedent set by the 2006 law. The 2009 Energy bill, still pending full Senate approval, also requires an inventory of all OCS waters to determine how much oil and natural gas lie off shore, and creates a consolidated permitting office to speed a careful review of environmental permits.

The Senator in 2005 co-sponsored legislation that aimed to provide $200 million a year in aid for projects to utilize the nation's coal resources, with the aid especially intended to help construction of clean-coal gasification combined cycle power plants. Alaska with an estimated 160 billion short tons of coal reserves, was intended to benefit from the bill. In 2007 the Senator also supported legislation to increase funding for carbon capture and sequestration research and demonstration projects to prevent carbon emissions from coal -fired power generation from reaching the environment and limiting coal production.

The high cost of fuel oil continues to present tremendous challenges to those living in Alaska's rural communities. Governments, tribal offices, schools, hospitals, health clinics, corporations and families are still being squeezed by the record high cost of fuel when rural communities had to purchase it for delivery last summer and fall. It is hard for anyone to survive economically when they are paying $8 to $10 a gallon for heating oil and gasoline, and when electricity generated from diesel fuel reflects those sharp price hikes. High energy costs also affect everything from the price of airfare to villages to the cost of buying groceries at stores, from the cost of running health clinics to the cost of preparing for subsistence hunts. As all commodities are flown into communities, the prices our rural residents pay for the necessities of life are unjustifiably high. Every aspect of rural life has become a challenge with the high cost of fuel.

In an attempt to lessen the pain, Senator Murkowski has worked on several fronts. As ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee she helped lead an effort that doubled federal funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and that allowed more Alaskans to qualify for the aid. Also when it became clear that not all those in need were able to qualify for the aid quickly enough, Senator Murkowski worked with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington to get the BIA to send additional general assistance to struggling communities. For the longer term, Senator Murkowski also worked in 2007 to win funding for a renewable energy deployment grant program to increase federal aid to help rural villages and utilities afford to install renewable energy projects, such as more money for wind turbines or more funding to install geothermal projects or biomass projects that offer the promise of lower electricity costs for years ahead. It is the Senators hope that the recent economic stimulus act will provide money for more of these projects to be built statewide. Senator Murkowski is concerned that as the world experiences a drop in oil prices, Alaska's rural communities are still locked into old prices until fuel can be purchased at the new lower market rates and shipped up via barge during the short summer months.

In August 2008, Senator Murkowski conducted a Senate Committee on Indian Affairs field hearing to receive testimony on the high cost of fuel in rural Alaska, and explore sustainable energy solutions. She intends to continue to aggressively seek a long-term solution, perhaps helping to increase the stockpiling of fuel in regional tank farms that could be purchased when prices are lower. But the ultimate solution is that Alaska is blessed with an abundance of renewable energy resources; we just need to make them more available and affordable for Alaskans.

Last September, Chairman Dorgan of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs released a draft Indian Energy and Efficiency Concept Paper for public comment. On October 22, 2009, the Committee held an oversight hearing on Indian Energy and Energy Efficiency. Currently, a draft bill is being prepared by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and is available on the Indian Affairs committee website.

The very existence of the Alaska Native way of life is threatened by the impacts of recent climate change. Communities such as Shishmaref, Kivalina and Newtok are literally being swept away into the sea because of coastal erosion. It is necessary that our rural communities have adequate evacuation routes in case of emergencies, but also help to deal with remediation costs and perhaps with village relocation costs. For years Senator Murkowski has been working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to attempt to increase aid for villages. Several years ago, the senator sponsored and won passage of legislation that is allowing Newtok to relocate to a new village site. The ultimate solution, however, is to attempt to tackle climate change at its source. Senator Murkowski has led efforts to increase funding for renewable and alternative fuels that will emit no or less carbon dioxide, in case carbon emissions are leading to a Greenhouse Effect raising global temperatures. In 2007 Senator Murkowski co-sponsored a carbon emissions "cap-and-trade" bill that would have resulted in carbon emissions dropping 60 percent by 2050 from today's levels. But the bill also would not have harmed the nation's economy or hurt our lifestyles by increasing the cost of energy so quickly that we could not afford to live on this Great Land. Senator Murkowski will continue to fashion a climate bill that will work to reduce carbon emissions and help develop renewable and alternative fuels while protecting Alaska's way of life and the state's fragile environment.

Renewable Energy and Other Environmental Provisions

As ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and a former member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Lisa Murkowski has pressed hard for legislation to help Alaska and the nation's environment. As a life-long Alaskan who has lived in Southeast, Southcentral and Interior Alaska, Lisa understands the importance of protecting the land and the wildlife that call The Great Land home.

She understands that the federal government needs to protect the health of Alaska's lands and waters both to protect the beauty of the Last Frontier, but also because a sizeable number of Alaskans, about 60,000, earn their living from the seafood industry, because more than 20,000 earn their living from tourism that often is centered around the wildlife and the scenic wonders of Alaska, and because subsistence hunting and fishing is vital for the economic survival of so many in rural Alaska.

To protect the environment the Senator has worked to promote renewable and alternative energy that would help to reduce carbon emissions that may be affecting temperature and causing the acidification of coastal waters. She has pushed research and funding for wind, geothermal and ocean energy: wave, current and tidal generated electricity, and supported tax breaks for all forms of renewable energy. In 2007 she authored legislation to create a Renewable Energy Deployment grant program to help fund construction of renewable energy, including small hydroelectric power in the state. In the 2009 energy bill (S. 1462) still pending in the Senate she authored changes to a proposed Renewable Electricity Standard that will provide extra aid to build such projects in rural Alaska. The Senator in 2008 co-sponsored successful legislation to impose a ban on the export of mercury overseas to reduce the danger that it will burned and find its way by air currents into Alaska waters increasing the mercury levels of seafood that cause health impacts. In 2007 she won passage of the Alaska Water Resources Act to study the availability of good drinking water throughout Southcentral Alaska. She has annually co-authored Clean Beaches Week to help clean coastal beaches nationwide. In 2009 she won passage of the Omnibus Lands Act that resulted in the probable addition of more than 61,000 acres to the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge to help waterfowl habitat. And she also won adoption of the Kenai Mountains-Turnagain Arm National Heritage Area to enlist the National Park Service to help protect the history of the Kenai Peninsula. For the future she continues to work on legislation to protect the Arctic, to aid fisheries in the ocean environment and to continue the requirement that oil tankers in Prince William Sound receive dual tug escorts.

Enhancing Alaskans Access to the Great LandKey Lands Legislation

As the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Lisa Murkowski takes seriously her role of overseer for how the federal government manages its lands in Alaska. She especially takes seriously her role of keeping the federal government from adopting needlessly restrictive land use regulations that could deprive Alaskans of our ability to hunt, fish and recreate in The Last Frontier. As an inveterate outdoorswoman, a fisherman, skier and hiker of everything from the Chilkoot Trail in Southeast to Flattop in Anchorage, Lisa Murkowski understands the importance of protecting Alaskans access to federal lands. She also understands that as a natural resource-rich state, federal lands are vital for timber, mineral development, tourism, fishing and a host of other economic activities.

The federal government clearly has unique land responsibilities to Alaska. More than 60 percent of our 365 million acres of lands remain in federal ownership. The Bureau of Land Management controls nearly 86 million acres, the National Park Service nearly 53 million, the Forest Service 22.5 million and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 72.4 million acres of refuges, plus another 2.3 million acres controlled by the military. More than 50 years after Statehood when Alaska was promised 104.5 million acres and 39 years after passage of the Alaska Native Settlement Act when Alaska Native corporations were promised 45.39 million acres, the government still needs to convey 6.1 million acres to the State and 4.2 million acres to the Native corporations, about 6 and 10 percent of the total entitlements respectively. Management of that land is more complex because 1980's Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act contained special provisions to guarantee Alaskans more access to federal lands - special regulations not seemingly always understood by federal land managers in the State.

In the Senator's more than seven years in the U.S. Senate she has sponsored and won a host of land legislation, from 2009's Izembek Wildlife land trade to allow the possibility of road access between King Cove and Cold Bay on the Alaska Peninsula - a key public safety issue - that also added some 61,000 acres of key waterfowl habitat to protected status, to 2003's Newtok land exchange that is allowing the southwest village battling river erosion to move to a new site. Along the way the Senator has won land exchanges involving Craig (2003) and Coffman Cove (2009). She's won legislation to allow more time to develop the Reynolds Creek hydroelectric project on Prince of Wales Island and legislation to help federal workers, "Lucy's Law" in 2003 to help the next of kin of federal workers killed on duty to local hire promotion rights for National Park Service employees (2009). For the future she is working to complete a land exchange in the Bering Straits region near Salmon Lake to complete State and Native land conveyances on the Seward Peninsula. Besides energy-related legislation, she also is working to finish Native land conveyance issues involving the Sealaska Native Regional Corp. in Southeast, and land bills involving other "landless" villages in Southeast. Click here to read more about the Sealaska Land Bill.

The individual bills in the package include besides the Sealaska bill:

Landless Natives/Unrecognized Southeast Alaska Native Communities Recognition and Compensation Act:
The Senator introduced legislation to right the equity that Native residents in five villages in Southeast: Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, Tenakee and Haines were the only Alaska Natives not to benefit from the operation of both regional and village or urban corporations when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was approved in 1971.

The Senator introduced the bill because for reasons that still defy clear explanation the Native peoples of the ``landless communities,'' were not permitted by ANCSA to form village or urban corporations. The communities were excluded from the benefit even though they did not differ significantly from other communities in Southeast Alaska that were permitted to form village or urban corporations under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. For example, Ketchikan had more Native residents in 1970, the year of a membership census, than Juneau, which was permitted to form the Goldbelt urban corporation. This finding was confirmed in a February 1994 report submitted by the Secretary of the Interior at the direction of the Congress. That study was conducted by the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska.

Under the legislation Native in the five towns will be able to form `urban" corporations. The corporations would be offered and could accept the surface estate to 23,040 acres of land - one township as granted all other village corporations. Sealaska Corporation, the regional Alaska Native Corporation for Southeast Alaska, would receive title to the subsurface estate to the designated lands.

The urban corporations would each receive a lump sum payment ($650,000) to be used as start-up funds for the newly established corporations. The Secretary of the Interior would determine other appropriate compensation to redress the inequities faced by the unrecognized communities, perhaps access to the federal surplus property ownership account.

Southeast Alaska Timber Industry Retooling and Restructuring Act:

The Senator also has introduced legislation to help the Southeast Alaska timber industry modernize into new types of timber operations and to help some firms in the industry to branch out into new activities as a way of stimulating employment in the Panhandle.

The bill authorizes up to $40 million in grants to long-time timber and timber-related companies in Southeast Alaska to help them either move into modern value-added processing or perhaps to convert to take advantage of new opportunities, not dependent on timber resources.

The timber retooling act is a measure that calls on the federal government to finally acknowledge its role in the reduction of economic activity in the region. By the act, the government would on a one-time basis, allow the Secretary of Agriculture to provide economic development assistance/grants to allow existing timber facilities to retool either to adopt new timber production practices that can operate profitably on smaller harvests or to convert timber plants to totally new types of manufacturing/business operations.

Firms - sawmills, logging companies and road construction companies involved in timber work for at least a decade -- that seek funding for "retooling projects" must submit business plans and demonstrate the likelihood of success. More importantly they must commit to the "extent practicable" to continue to employ substantially the same number of employees for a "reasonable" period after completion of a retooling project. To limit the impact of the aid, grants may only go to businesses that operated in the Tongass for not less than 10 years prior to Jan. 1, 2009. And the program sunsets within two years with the maximum authorization of aid being $40 million.

Salmon Lake, Bering Straits Land Exchange Bill (S. 522):

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski in an effort to settle land conveyance issues in Northwest Alaska in 2009 introduced a bill to resolve a property dispute in Northwest Alaska, involving the Bering Straits Native Corp. and the State of Alaska. Murkowski, joined by fellow colleague Senator Mark Begich, introduced the Salmon Lake Land Selection Resolution Act. The bill, which underwent hearings in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in fall 2009, is still pending full Senate consideration.

Shortly after Alaska became a State in 1959, Alaska selected lands near Salmon Lake, a major fishery resource in the Bering Straits Region. In 1971, Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act to resolve aboriginal land claims throughout the 49th State. Bering Straits promptly selected lands in the Salmon Lake region overlapping state selections, because the lake and the waters upstream and downstream from the lake spawn and contain fisheries resources of significance to Alaska Natives and also offer land suitable for a variety of recreational activities.

By this bill the Corporation will gain conveyance to 1,009 acres in the Salmon Lake area, 6,132 acres at Windy Cove, northwest of Salmon Lake, and 7,504 acres at Imuruk Basin, on the north shore of nearby Imuruk Basin. In return the Corporation relinquishes rights to another 3,084 acres at Salmon Lake to the federal government, the government then giving part of the land to the State of Alaska for it to maintain a key airstrip in the area. The federal Bureau of Land Management also retains ownership and administration of a 9-acre campground at the outlet of Salmon Lake, which provides road accessible public camping opportunities from the Nome-Teller Highway. The agreement also retains public access to BLM managed lands in the Kigluaik Mountain Range.

The bill fully protects recreation and subsistence uses in the area, while providing the Corporation with access to recreational-tourism sites of importance to its shareholders and which might some day produce revenues for the Corporation. The measure is supported by all groups as a just solution to the long-standing conveyance issue in Northwest Alaska.

The legislation, introduced as Alaska's Mt. Redoubt volcano began erupting in March 2009, has been highlighted by the eruptions of an Icelandic volcano in spring 2010 that has caused significant economic disruption for the global aviation community.
The volcanoes in Alaska make up well over three-quarters of the U.S.'s 169 volcanoes - about 57 in America believed to be still active. According to the United States Geological Survey about 50 volcanic eruptions occur around the world every year. The United States ranks third, behind Indonesia and Japan, in its number of historically active volcanoes. That is why it is so important to fund volcano monitoring.

On December 15, 1989, a Boeing 747 flying 150 miles northeast of Anchorage encountered an ash cloud erupted from Redoubt Volcano and lost power in all four jet engines. The KLM plane, with 231 passengers aboard, lost more than 10,000 feet of elevation before the flight crew was able to restart the engines. After landing, it was determined the airplane had suffered about $80 million in damage.

The FAA estimates that more than 80,000 large aircraft per year, and 30,000 people per day, are in the skies over and potentially downwind of many of Alaska's volcanoes, mostly on the heavily traveled great-circle routes between Europe, North America, and Asia. Volcanic eruptions from Cook Inlet volcanoes (Spurr, Redoubt, Iliamna, and Augustine) can have severe impacts. The last major series of eruptions of Mt. Redoubt were in 1989-90. The total estimated economic costs were $160 million. After Mount St. Helens this eruption was the second most costly in U.S. history. The Redoubt eruption also damaged five commercial jetliners, and disrupted air traffic as far away as Texas.

The bill authorizes $15 million a year to better fund the nation's five volcano observatories that cover Alaska, the Cascades, Yellowstone, Long Valley in California, and the volcanoes of Hawaii where Kilauea continues its long-standing eruption. The bill authorizes another 20 high priority volcanoes such as Mount Adams in Washington, North Sister field in Oregon, Clear Lake in California and Mt. Spurr in Alaska to receive remote instrumentation. Besides funding replacement equipment for adding remote monitors, it sets up a "24-7" watch center to monitor all volcanic activity, will help to improve aviation forecasts and help make volcanic data more standardized and inter-operable among the observatories.

The bill, the Federal Land Avalanche Protection Act of 2009, is similar to a bill introduced in the last session of Congress by Congressman Young and co-sponsored in the Senate by Senator Murkowski. The bill would require the Department of Agriculture's U.S. Forest Service to identify the potential for avalanches on federal land, to inform the public about the probability of avalanches, to carry on new research to improve avalanche forecasting and to reduce the risks and mitigate the effects of avalanches by ensuring the availability of artillery and explosives needed in avalanche control programs.

The Senator believes the bill is needed since each year avalanches claims dozens of lives in the U.S. and Canada, a growing problem as more Americans build homes in the back country and hike, ski and snowboard in the back country. In the 2008-2009 season, 28 Americans and 26 Canadians were kills in 49 separate avalanches in 10 states led by Utah and Montana, but with Alaska, Colorado, California, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho and Washington just behind. Over the past decade 257 Americans have been killed in avalanches nationwide.

The bill specifically requires the Secretary of Agriculture to coordinate a program to ensure protection for recreational users of public land under the Secretary's jurisdiction, using the resources of the Forest Service's National Avalanche Center. It also requires the establishment of an advisory committee and requires the requires aid for state avalanche control programs. The bill also directs that priority to given to projects carried out in avalanche zones with a high frequency or severity of avalanches or in which deaths, injuries or damage to public facilities and communities have occurred.

Noting that three Alaskans have been killed in avalanches in winter 2010 along, the Senator believes the bill is needed to help reduce the threat of avalanche deaths in the future. The bill gained a hearing in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in March 2010 and is still pending committee approval.

Since the last revision to the law last decade, there have been a series of incidents where miners argued that they submitted their applications and affidavits of annual labor in a timely manner, but due to clerical error by BLM staff or for unexplained reasons the applications or documents were not recorded as having been received in a timely fashion - and that BLM has then moved to terminate the claims, deeming them null and void. While mining claim holders have argued that the law provides them time to cure claim defects, BLM has argued that the cure only applies when applications or fees have been received in a timely manner. Thus, there is no administrative remedy for miners who believe that clerical errors by BLM resulted in loss or the late recording of claim applications.

There have been a number of cases where Congress has been asked to override BLM determinations and reinstate mining claims simply because of the disputes over whether the claims had been filed in a timely manner. Congress in 2003 reinstated such claims in a previous Alaska case, and claims in another incident were reinstated following a U.S. District Court case in the 10th Circuit in 2009 in the case of Miller v. United States. The bill is intended to short circuit continued litigation and pleas for claim reinstatement by clarifying the intent of Congress that miners do have to be informed that their claims are in jeopardy of being voided and given 60 days notice to cure defects, including giving them time to submit their applications and to submit affidavits of annual labor, should they not be received and processed by BLM officials. If all defects are not cured within 60 days - the obvious intent of Congress in passing the original act - then claims still will be subject to voidance.

The transition rule included in the measure will solve two pending cases in Alaska, one where a holder of nine claims on the Kenai Peninsula, near Hope, Alaska, has lost title to claims that he had held from 1982 to 2004. In this case, John Trautner had a consistent record of having paid the annual labor assessment fee for the previous 22 years and the local BLM office did have a time-date-stamped record that the maintenance fee waiver certification form had been filed weeks before the deadline, not just a record that the affidavit of annual labor had arrived. In the second case Don and Judy Mullikin of Homer, Alaska, is in the process of losing title to nine claims on the Seward Peninsula outside of Nome in Alaska because the Anchorage BLM office has no record of them receiving the paperwork, even though the owners have computer time stamps of them having completed the paperwork five months before the deadline, but no other evidence of filing to meet BLM regulations in support of an appeal. These are claims that have been worked in Alaska yearly since 1937 and are the main livelihood for the Mullikins.

This legislation, supported by the Alaska Miners Association, clearly is intended to remedy a simple drafting error in congressional crafting of the small miner claim defect process. While only a few cases of potential clerical errors have occurred over the past decade, it still makes sense for Congress to clarify that claim holders have a right to know that their applications have not been processed, in time for them to cure application-claim defects prior to being informed of the loss of the claim rights forever.
The bill is still awaiting a hearing in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The bill is designed to give the museum more time to raise the estimated $80 million needed for construction. The museum had been on track in its funding raising until the fall 2008 economic slowdown reduced its pledged funding. The bill has been cleared by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and is awaiting full Senate approval.