Initial Report and Recommendations - Alaska Department of Law

Date Location Date Location10/27/04 Anchorage 02/23/05 Nome11/10/04 Fairbanks 02/24/05 Kotzebue12/10/04 Anchorage 03/15/05 Barrow01/05/05 Sitka 03/16/05 Fairbanks01/06/05 Juneau 04/06/05 Bethel01/26/05 Anchorage 04/26/05 Mentasta01/27/05 Anchorage 04/29/05 Kake02/09/05 Dillingham 50Business meetingsThe Commission held business meetings that were open to the public, 51 frequentlypreceding or following the public hearings. During the business meetings, discussionsincluded such issues as arranging for future public hearings and the ways in which theCommissioners would receive the options developed by the four workgroups, reviewthem, adopt or revise them, and incorporate them into the Initial Report andRecommendations to Congress and the Alaska Legislature.As mentioned earlier, at the Commission’s November meeting in Fairbanks, fourworkgroups were established. Three of the four were composed of approximately 12individuals who were selected because of their current and/or prior experiences andinvolvement in the topic area. The fourth, to address the wide range of problems relatedto domestic violence and child abuse, was larger, which was a result of the expectation onthe part of the Commissioners and support staff that that group would choose tosubdivide into two smaller groups, one to address domestic violence and the other toaddress child abuse.A list of all of the workgroup members is included in Appendix D of this report,and the majority are shown in the photograph in Appendix E.D. Workgroup ActivitiesThe workgroups met for the first time in Anchorage on January 27 and 28, 2005.After a charge from Co-chairs Burgess and Renkes, the workgroup members commencedto devise ways in which they could tackle the problems and issues that lay before them,as established by the language in the Act. Following this two-day face-to-face session,the workgroups met by telephone conferences once weekly for nine weeks. 52 Thesessions for some of the workgroups routinely lasted at least two hours, while the alcoholimportation workgroup meetings were more often than not about one hour in length. Thediscussions centered around the language in the Act and also the task-and-topic-area505152Conducted telephonically after flight conditions made it impossible for the Commission to attend thehearing scheduled in Dillingham on February 8, 2005.With the exception of occasional executive sessions during the public meetings.Workgroup 2, Judicial, held eight telephone conference meetings but had one additional face-to-facemeeting.Alaska Rural Justice and Law Enforcement Commission - Page 37