Good afternoon. I'll call this meeting of the House Finance Committee Department of
Law some committee to order. Let the record reflect that it is 12.03 p.m. on
Monday February 9th, 2026. Present today are representative Underwood,
representative Aisha, representative Costello, Representative Mina,
Also present today are our Alexander Schroeder, my committee aide, our committee
aide and moderator Kailah Tupo from the Legislative Information Office. As always
please remember to meet your cell phones in today's meeting we will hear the
Department of Law's Civil Division present on its FY27 budget statehood
defense and child welfare. With us today from The Department's Corey Mills
Deputy Attorney General also online is Amber LeBlanc, Administrative Services
Deputy Attorney General Mills here with us, I see that please put your name on the
record and begin your presentation. Thank you, Chair, Josephson. Again, Corey Mills,
Deputy attorney general overseeing the Civil Division at the wonderful Department
of Law. And this morning I am going to kind of give an overview, just remind
people a little bit about the department and the civil division in particular.
and then go over kind of how our funding works
because it is a little bit different than some departments.
And then I'm gonna move on to talk a
little about prior appropriations
and what we're doing with those appropriations
and how they've helped,
and go for state of defense
and the child welfare reform case as well.
So.
Let's start again. I just always like to bring us back to our mission as a department. We have an overarching mission that involves public safety and then also
providing high-quality legal representation to executive branch agencies for the benefit of all
Alaskans. And when it comes to the Civil Division, this is mainly what we do. You will see we
do have some public safety components to work. We do consumer protection, occupational licensing,
child protection. But overall, all of that is being done in relation to other agencies where
them the legal support that they need.
So just to step back a little bit,
and I had something similar to this graph last year,
this pie chart.
Just a reminder that when I say we provide legal services to the executive branch,
it is the entire executive brand.
And this breaks down by the number of hours that we're billed per agency in FY 2025,
kind of what that breakdown looks like.
And you'll see the four highest here are the Department of Family and Community Services.
Commerce, Department of Administration, and Department
of Health.
That is not surprising.
As you will, as I go on, you'll see kind of where those,
why those agencies in particular take up kind
of the largest chunk of our work.
Civil Division, so FY 2024 to FY 2027.
This shows you kind
of FY2024 actuals in comparison to 25 actual's
For the year we're in as well as the governor's budget at the end
Really, the thing to note here is for, for example,
for FY 2025 and FY 2026,
those increases have a lot to do
with the multi-year we were getting.
So you have to back out money that you get
and then you put it back in.
And that's why you'll see that increase,
but it's not really an increase to our base budget.
But that why, you see the decrease from 26 to 27
because 26 has the multir in it
in addition to the fact that most of those multi-years,
as we will see when we get to state-hit defense,
have also dropped off, or this is the last year for those.
So unless there are questions on this, I'll move on,
because I'm gonna get more
into specific budget components as you go on.
Okay, next slide.
Yeah, so.
I wanted to kind of just represent a little bit more
about what the Civil Division does.
And so this breaks us down by what we're calling
mission statement categories.
So we have protecting the public, legal representation,
so that's your think about going to court.
going to administrative proceeding, we're representing an agency, and then providing legal advice.
And those are kind of the three main chunks within the pie chart.
This is mostly what we do.
And then another way to look at it is hours billed by our budget components.
So we have seven, I think we ended up with eight, eight budget
components, the deputy attorney general piece is a very small slice, as you'll see.
not a major part of our budget. So seven major budget components here. And again, the total
you see at the bottom is the number of hours billed within the department. We do have attorneys
and paralegals keeping track of their hours.
And we do bill other agencies for that work or keep track for purposes of example attorney's
fees in a case.
And so this does represent the majority of the work without taking into account any
that were taken during the year.
And so again, the major components here,
health, safety and welfare.
child protection, Department of Health,
API, mental commitments, all of that falls under health safety and welfare.
And then you have labor, business, and corporations. You know, that work
involves our occupational licensing work, for example,
where we're going and assisting boards when they're looking to revoke
licenses because something happened that was not safe
or they violated different parts of their licensing.
that falls under that component,
as well as our work with elections,
Department of Labor, so workplace safety,
things like that, and then resource.
The green slice is our resource development
and infrastructure,
so that's all the work
with Department
of Transportation,
Department
of Natural Resources,
and the Department
of Fish and Game.
So, yeah,
so litigation over the past seven years.
This is just to highlight kind of,
how we're doing. We did this analysis just to see what's happened in terms of trends.
I'm not going to go over each of these, but I think some of the ones to note are when we look
at our appeals, we had 263 appeals over a 73 year, over our seven year period. And we
had an 84% success rate when We took all of those appeals into account. So this is just some
child in need of aid, you have to consider what winning is, right, because the goal of child
in the need is reunification. And so it's really, do we come to a resolution that's
successful for the child and gears towards reunifcation when that is possible? And
We had around 13,800 child protection cases over the past seven years and we
one succeeded, I guess, in good resolutions and over 95% of them.
So money's collected.
This is another, just I'd say, result of the civil divisions work in all of our areas.
There are different ways in which we collect.
revenues for the state. So you'll see all of those added up here, totaling around 43 million
just for last year. And then the other item I like to highlight is mitigation.
So yes, we bring money into the State, but we also keep money from going out of the
mainly in the tax arena.
So this is where someone paid taxes, they protested them.
And then we successfully ensured that those taxes
remained with the state if it was appropriate.
And the transportation as well,
this in condemnation context,
where we
successfully convinced the court
that
We only owed so much for someone's land, whereas they thought it was worse more.
Another area that's not on here because it's just hard to represent is our tort cases.
So slip and falls or something happens where a car goes over and
they say there should have been a guardrail.
Any case where there was some sort of injury and someone is seeking damages,
you know as an employer or as
Just an entity just like you would a corporation and so we get a lot of torts cases against the state and we are very successful at
getting those cases dismissed when appropriate or
settling those case for reasonable amounts and
Ensuring that we're not paying damages that. We shouldn't and I don't have those numbers here because they are hard are
Hard to quantify, but that work is happening every day
Deputy Commissioner, a question from Representative Gray.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, through the Chair
to Deputy Attorney General Mills.
Question about the 90 million that we got back
from oil and gas.
How does that compare to years past?
That's a great question.
I would have to go back and look at that,
but I can find that information.
I, one of the, I guess, initiatives I've started
Division is to really look at how do we quantify what we do and gather this data?
I don't know that this mitigation data has been gathered previously, but I can look if we can find out.
We always gathered what We collected. We weren't gathering what
We actually successfully defended against leaving state coffers.
But I'll write a note on that.
Just a follow-up of my own on That. So
the numbers the legislature is privy to suggest that settlement dollars that
generally would go to the CBR have dropped off substantially and that tells
me that either there is a meeting of the mind on technical regulatory language
changes I think to House Bill 111 or 247 these are two oil bills since SB 21
But of course, there's controversy about why they've dropped off and the legislature passed a bill as a consequence
Can you can you explain just a little bit more you did it sort of quickly?
Yeah, you say that we've mitigated
$90 million that would have left the state and so I I think you mean to the home office of
Conoco Phillips in Bartlesville or Houston or somewhere. I but
Can you just explain, again, what that number represents?
Yes, Chair, Josephson.
Yes it's, so when you pay your taxes,
they'll usually pay whatever the assessor says is owed.
And you can pay under protest,
at which point there is a contested hearing
and there's a process, that process can
end and be resolved in multiple ways, settlement is one of them. The other is that we see it through
to the administrative appeal stage. You can then appeal to superior court, so you can take it all
the way up, right? So this amount just represents what the assessor determined was owed and was paid.
90 million less than you're saying overall, and we successfully got to the point where the court or the administrative officer said, no, the state is correct on that amount.
I mean, what surprises me about this is if it had the number 10 instead of 90, I would say, oh, that's pretty consistent with what I've heard in the hallway or in some document that came across my eyes.
it belies what I'm hearing.
It suggests that someone in the department
is standing firm on oil tax returns
and being aggressive and saying no,
you'd not entitled to that refund
or absence of penalty or something.
So if this is a single year's mitigation,
it should be spoken of more.
Because otherwise legislators just think what I thought which is we're getting five percent of what we used to get
Chair Josephson, I think you bring up a really good point and one of the reasons this is
the type of data I want our sections and our supervisors to track because I
think this information that's really hard to quantify usually and usually all you
see is money coming in or money going out. You don't hear about money that was
effectively saved and so I would say this I don' t think
this IS abnormal. I can go back and look I just don t
Okay, I mean just a real sense point you're making the number public here
Mm-hmm, and our auditor couldn't get any information. Well, she presumably got some but not nearly enough to her liking
It seems like you are ready to give us more information
Chair Josephson all of this is available. She was specifically seeking
So that is kind of a different bucket, but overall numbers have always been given.
It was more being able to get into what we consider attorney client or
attorney work product information.
In the end, I think we've come to a resolution with the legislative auditor and I
think you'll be seeing that.
Okay, all right, slide 10.
So I didn't want to belabor this point but I think it's important we have great people
who work for us and they are the ones who make all of this work happen.
It is not me, I have a huge team and just happen to be the spokesperson for that team.
We have a couple of changes on this slide.
So Susan Sonneborn, you'll see at the bottom,
she's the new head of our public corporations
and government services section.
Unfortunately, the prior supervisor passed away last summer
and we had to go through the process
of getting a new supervisor,
but she has represented the Department of Education
for quite a while and were really excited to have her.
And Stephen Bookman is our new human services supervisor.
He has worked there for a number of years,
but we needed to fill that slot as well.
With Stacy Crayley stepping out,
you may know she was our director for quite a while.
And Chris Robeson, who took over from her,
this was the spot that was left.
And Steven's doing a great job.
His kind of background is in the mental commitment arena,
with the Alaska Psychiatric Institute before taking the job.
We've taken the Civil Division and divided into more like too many divisions, I'd say.
This was done just because of resource strain and needing more coverage.
Our director had 17 direct reports, which was just a lot to manage with a
lot of different topics.
So this is something the legislature thankfully approved for us to do,
I think, two years ago.
And I will say that from my perspective, it has done what it
getting people more substantively up to speed so that we can make decisions faster and more effectively.
So Charles Gartland is our new director of our natural resources infrastructure appeals and litigation arena and
In this area, Kevin Dilge is one of our new supervisors for corrections, helping with our corrections work.
And everyone else on here, I believe, oh, Georgia Smithy is also new Torts Workers' Compensation.
So two great attorneys who have been with us quite a while, and really glad to have them step up to become leaders within the division.
So, moving on to our Civil Division budget components.
First, I want to say what's not on this slide.
What's on the slide is the Deputy Attorney General's Office budget component.
As I said before, it's a very small component of our budget, so it didn't seem worthwhile
to include.
And then the other one I left off is legal support services.
law office assistants and paralegals,
they have been put under one budget component
because we spread out their help
and they help all the other budget components.
So basically the budgeting you see in this slide
with the Other Budget Components
just mirrors what's in legal support services
because they do all of the work to support
all work in these budget opponents.
So that's why those particular bars
are not included on the slide.
What I want to highlight here is that the Civil Division, as you know, we talked about this last year, is paid for mainly through I.A.
Interagency Receipts, that's the gray part of these bars, and through Undesignated General Fund, which is the blue.
part of the bars. So when it comes to the gray portion of those bars, that is
money we are getting from other agencies. We build them for our work, they pay us.
So if there needs to be a change in the legal services provided to any particular agency
and it's in a gray bar, we have to go to them and work with them on getting a budget increase
or they can use their existing funds to increase their what we call reimbursable services agreement
to pay us. So the IA, the gray part of the bar, is paid for by other agencies.
The blue part is really what really we're talking about here with our subcommittee.
That is our Undesignated General Fund. And you will notice that there is Unde designated
general fund in each of our budget components. I just want to briefly highlight kind of what
parts of the bar mean, what is the work that happens
that's paid for with undesignated general fund?
So first, in the first bar you see civil defense,
that really our corrections work.
Our corrections has been kind of shifted over
so it falls within our budget,
instead of falling within the Department of Corrections.
Next, on the government services, that's a lot of our public records work.
We provide advice to all agencies.
Sometimes that is billed to agencies, sometimes it's advice going to places that don't pay
us with I.A.
And it is our work for the governor's office.
For example, falls throughout this, the Governor's Office falls within our budget.
When we advise them, it falls in our budgets.
legislation work, work for the lieutenant governor's office, and elections that
falls under labor business and corporations. The next health safety and welfare,
that's really child protection. Most of that that blue bar is our work on child
protection
And then we have Labor Business Incorporations, I already said, kind of the elections,
Lieutenant Governor's Office, Governor s office, but we also have our Labor Relations
work within that part of our budget as well.
And the Labor relations work was transferred last year to the Civil Division.
And so that is now represented as Undesignated General Fund.
And then, lastly, you have the resource development and infrastructure, and that's really our
work asserting the state's resource and land rights.
So that is the work that has traditionally been known as statehood defense.
That is, the general fund we use for that.
Most of the other work is Board of Fish.
They pay us for, so this is really work around our land and the management of our lands.
Special litigation and appeals, they kind of do work coming from all the
different sections, so again they're really represented by these other bars.
They take on the constitutional cases, the complex cases and they do a lot of
the child protection appeals and so a
lot that a designated general fund actually pays for those child
protection appeal. Any questions on that?
ABC lawsuit would have come out of or out
of health safety and welfare.
No, it came out
of a special litigation.
That was the section that handled that case.
Representative Costello.
Thank you, and it's good to see
the Attorney General of Deputy Mills.
So my question has to do with an update
on the RS24777.
Yeah, through the chair,
Representative Castello,
that's still an effort.
We're undergoing.
We filed,
we've kind of shifted our
I'd say our strategy on that front to be similar to what we've been doing with navigability.
So instead of going after one trail, we're trying to find a set of trails that all interconnect
and go for all of those trails at once so that we are hopefully not litigating trail
by trail.
One effort underway, it has not come to fruition yet.
We're still working to get all the evidence we need.
And that is another topic, I believe,
that Department of Natural Resources will also be discussing
with the Federal Administration,
seeing if that's something we can make some inroads on
without litigation.
Thank you.
So remember, during a previous Attorney General's confirmation
proceedings,
I did a huge amount of work on the Clutina Lake dispute.
in part in RS2477 dispute and I'm only bringing it up because the indigenous folks were prepared
to make an argument that their rights were better because they're 10,000 years ahead.
And that introduces a complication in that litigation, am I right about that?
So, Chair Josephson, there's been Clutina Lake,
there has been Chicken,
there was an RS-2477 case surrounding the Chicken area,
and then there have been an Iditarod,
the historic Iditorod Trail.
And I would say it is
they are difficult because you are always looking at all the different land ownership,
all different rights and how they were transferred, who had the rights first.
So to your point, I think there's always questions of that. I know in the chicken
case, we actually ended up going to the Ninth Circuit over some of those rights
and settling kind of, that part of it. And then we were able to come back with the vast majority
complicated the case. Okay slide 13 okay so I just wanted to go over a few of
the areas where we have seen budget increases or budget transfers to the
Department of Law Labor Relations was one of those that happened last year.
When we first received the positions over I think they were only half we had
a 50% vacancy at the time. We have now gotten up I
think we're now down to just one vacancy in this area. I
we're getting a team sorted and together, I will say that it just takes a while to kind of take
something that had so few people in it and really train them up and get them prepared in this area,
which is not an area a lot of people. You don't find people that just come into the labor relations
Over calendar year 2025, since we really started the transfer
about a year and a half ago, it seemed better
to focus on a calendar.
So we've resolved 62 grievances.
We resolved four class actions.
These totally affected 642 various employees within the state.
And we had one arbitration
that successfully defended a grievance.
where we're constantly, you know, trying to work with the unions as well as represent the state as
an employer and try to come to good resolutions and avoid some of these arbitrations, frankly, is
our goal over time. And I think we are getting there. We're improving in this area and I've been
impressed with these employees that have come on and learned a lot in the last 12 months.
It's like 14 consumer protection. This is another area that I think two years ago the legislature gave us additional funding
For positions. this is an area where we really see
quite a bit of money come back to the general fund,
as well as pay for the work that they do.
And you'll see those numbers.
It can vary wildly by year,
because it kind of depends on what cases we have going
and what they're worth.
But these also bring restitution back
to Alaskans, so one of our goals
is to get money back in the hands of Alascans
when they've been wronged by a business.
What this slide does not have on it
so successfully brought in in settlements around $100 million
for opioid remediation.
Those were efforts that have been ongoing,
I think for the past 10 years,
and we're finally wrapping up kind of the end of those cases.
I thing we have one case remaining that we are litigating.
It's currently at the Alaska Supreme Court.
So that's money that has been given to the Department of Health
to give out.
different grants. And those settlements are giving money over a 10 to 20 year time span.
So you're not going to see a hundred million all at once. It is kind of coming in in you know
10 million dollar increments every year. But over the course of 10-20 years we will see about
But this team has been very successful, and they're still maxed out, there's still cases that they cannot review because I think they have gotten more engagement with the Alaskan public.
They now know that we have a consumer protection unit, so we're actually seeing a lot more complaints, which is what we wanted to see.
Yeah, Chair Josephson, so.
We have that bill, of course, to tax the vape products.
The vape product is relevant to that.
Yeah. So I can't remember. This case may have been brought.
This was also a long, ongoing case five to seven years ago,
but the allegations in the case were about the deceptive marketing practices of Jewel.
They're not the only ones,
kind of had started with Jewel because they were the ones that were
the most apparent, but it was deceptive marketing, especially towards
children, and marketing their products in such a way that they
were attractive to children and more accessible to
children. So we successfully completed that case
this last fall and were able to settle. We actually went all the way through
trial and then there was a mistrial and we had to come back around
a good amount of money with Jule.
Slide 15.
So child protection, this is another area.
There was a attorney in paralegal added specifically
because our Fairbanks office was really stretched at the time.
So just wanted to give you an update here.
This is a section that I think is
Attorneys, they're one of our best onboarding sections.
We get comments all the time from new attorneys,
how much they appreciate the onboard-ing process
in this section, and just thinking creatively
about how to do a lot of work, but keep people
from being burned out.
And this has been an ongoing focus of ours,
and I think we're finally stabilizing the system.
Ramp it turnover, and I think we've really stabilized.
And I owe that to Carla Erickson,
who's the head of that section.
But the note, just as additional positions
from previous legislative years have allowed the section
to move away from a crisis-driven case management.
I that's a good way to do it, or to explain it.
And again, our goal is always reunification, so we've been able to advocate effectively
in court to keep cases moving forward so that you can find permanency faster, helping children
achieve safe and permanent homes without unnecessary delays, because that's never good for the child,
and it's ever good the parents who may want to adopt, and that it is never
good to the parent. So I think this is an area where we have really made improvements,
have also found some stability in our team here.
So it's great.
And as to the ABC lawsuit that was moved from May to August.
Mm-hmm.
And all of last year, so it finished.
Yes, and here's my slide on that child welfare reform lawsuit.
Question for the meeting yes through the chair. I know that last year one of the fiscal year 2025 goals for this area was to connect
Attorneys with the community directly with a community whenever possible. Could you give an update on that?
Yeah, through the chair, Representative Mina, that is still our goal.
That is a struggle.
It has been really hard to find.
In fact, unfortunately, we lost an attorney who was in Bethel.
She retired.
It was her time, but it's really been hard
to replace her and have someone go out there.
We're doing the work.
But we're having to do it from afar, which I just never think is the best result.
So that's still an area where we are trying to figure out how do we make inroads on that.
And I know the criminal division has similar issues with that, but yeah,
I would say that is still a area I think we need to grow in.
Thank you.
case, Chair Josephson, that you were mentioning, yes, the trial got moved. It was originally
going to be in May.
It got move to August, and I believe it ended up being a three-week trial.
It wasn't a jury trial, so it was just in front of the judge, but there was, um, it
was a very evidence-intensive case.
Last session, the legislature appropriated $4 million the year before the
legislature had appropriated 1.5 million, so the case ended up, we ended
up getting $5. 5 million for the
case. I did go back and find out that in total the
case cost about $7 million by the time we were all done.
So it did cost even more than the 5.
So, the good news is, this was a lot less than the 15 to 20 million that we saw in other
states that went and talked to.
So we were able to do the case fairly efficiently for what had to be done.
But it was still a very expensive case.
What we believe, which is that these sorts of policy decisions really fall to this body
and are not decisions that should be made, major reform decisions should not be
made and overseen by a court. And that was one of the points we were making here is
that
This is hard, child welfare is a difficult area.
It will remain a different area,
how to do it best is
a policy call and one left to this body,
and of course, the executive branch to implement the law.
Representative Gray for Deputy Attorney General.
Thank you. Through the chair,
it's more of a comment and you don't have to respond.
I want to say that as somebody who follows OCS very carefully and looks at this case and have read a lot about it,
it's a cookie cutter prosecution coming from other states.
In my opinion, the prosecution did not do their due diligence.
They did NOT speak with subject matter experts here in the state.
Given the audit that came out on June 30th of 2025 that OCS has a lot of work to do a
lot mistakes made, I just don't want the public to think that if this plaintiff
loses that somehow that's showing that ocs is doing well. I believe that
O CS has lot work
And I don't want the outcome of this case to, in any way, shape someone's opinion about the massive reform that we need at OCS. Thank you.
Representative, I should thank you, chair, Mr. Chair, through the chair.
I'm looking at why is this so expensive in the last line or so said the state successfully kept costs down by doing the bulk of the legal work in house.
So, I know that in other cases, we do retain outside counsel.
So what's the cost differential between in-house and open intended there?
I would say I, know it's going to vary based on the contract, but, you know,
just average, just to give me a sense as a non-lawyer.
That's through the, yeah, through
the chair representative Aishide.
Great question, and it is something we're always.
looking at, you're at least gonna double.
But I would say in the current climate,
you are more looking like triple the costs.
by using outside counsel. Now where outside council can be more cost efficient is if they have a
specific expertise that we don't have they can do it faster and so less hours but each of those
hours cost more it's it always a balance so you can't just do an hour for hour and that's where I
really find that the using Outside Council is helpful and where we do use it quite a bit is
needed or it's an area that for some reason we've had attrition.
and we're lacking the expertise right now but our goal is to if we have those circumstances we want
people to learn from the outside council so we really want our attorneys to partner with them
and that's been one of the things that we look for now in outside counsel because we find that
some want to just take the case and run with it by themselves and others are willing to bring us
in and were more like a first and a second chair and I find it much more effective because
work in house and this case I will tell you was an excellent opportunity. We had two very
young attorneys who were brand new to the practice of law who got to participate and help out
and that has now given them true trial experience that is essential going forward and it's great
example of being able to do the work in house, it ended up taking about five
attorneys and five paralegals. It was a lot. But we got it done and not only did
it save money but I think it gave us some experience that we didn't have.
Deputy Attorney General, what was in the prayer for relief from ABC? In other
So, Chair Josephson, this was actually one of our issues with the way the plaintiffs presented
the case because they basically just said we want more people working for OCS and it was very vague.
It was kind of we went the system to be better and we tried in our interrogatories to get more
got it. We never got specifics as if this specifically happened, you know, this is what we want to see.
And so it actually made that part of the case somewhat difficult because it felt like a shifting
target on what they were looking for. So I actually don't have a good answer.
that we have another one of these reform cases this time with the Department of Corrections.
I don't have as much information on this case at this
time because of the stage it's in, but this is another class action lawsuit.
And it is really about systemic reform of inmate health care in our prisons and jails.
And again, we kind of have the same concerns with this
case that had with The Office of Children's Services case.
Representative Gray, I think your comments were very appropriate.
It's never to say that there's not things that need to change.
The question for us is which branch of government is appropriate to help make those changes.
And if you get anything like this that ends up in a court proceeding and a judgment by
a Court, you can end up with years of a courtroom managing your health care system, your correction
system.
It ties the hands of the legislature because you no longer are able to use the dollars
and the way you think they should be used.
You have to follow the court's judgment on exactly what the judge thinks should
be done with those dollars.
And sometimes that means that another part of this system gets neglected.
So it's really about, is the Court the proper place to really be deciding these types of
major reforms?
It's not about whether reform is needed, it is about who should
So this is another one of those cases, the putative class is all prisoners who are now
or will in the future be subjected to medical, mental health, and dental care policies,
so it's a very large class of individuals. The current status is we did file a motion to dismiss,
that was denied by the court December 30th, 2025. We do have a
A very small portion of the case that's on appeal on interlocutory appeal, which means the whole case isn't done
But we think this issue should be decided and it just has to do with immunity
It doesn't really affect the rest of
What I will tell you what we know at this point
We're just getting into the discovery phase, so we haven't actually been asked for anything yet
But just gathering the information that we think is going to be necessary
We have ingested about five terabytes of data. So to put that in perspective
When you send, you know a photo a large photo and it's five megabytes sometimes you're
email would say that's too large. So five terabytes is a lot of data. We've got over 300 custodians
because it's health care records, it is personal records from different inmates.
So this is
Is going to be another really large case and we're getting our case assessment ready to figure out what is this going
To take can we do it to representative eyeshides point in house?
What do we need to do to get through what we?
Need to go through in this case
But that'll all have more to come on that but I just wanted to
Let people know that this was kind of the next the
Next large-case that I see coming down the pike representative gray
Thank you through the chair to Deputy Attorney General Mills.
I'll just point out the differences as I see them.
I believe that OCS is underfunded and therefore a lot of their mistakes are due to inability to pay enough to fill all their vacancies and to do better by having the appropriate staff.
Do you see on the other hand, I, believe is fully funded.
Last year we had the highest deaths and, we tied for the higher deaths in custody.
discharge. They don't count as a death in custody. It's very difficult to get
accurate numbers. No judging Alaska. Lots of states do that. However, with the
sort of egregious example of the inmate with an ear infection that did not
receive care and died, I think that there's a reason why the ACLU would take this
different case than the one against OCS.
Slide 19.
So I'm moving on to kind of looking at the funding that's been given
for asserting the state's rights over management and its resources of those
and it's management of the resources.
So first I wanted to give kind of an overview of our natural resources work and it really comes down to our Constitution
We have a very unique Constitution in the state of Alaska
Article 8 is all about how the State mainly the legislature is supposed to
manage our resources for maximum use consistent
with the public interest, sustained yield,
secure Alaska sovereignty over its lands and waters,
and safeguarding public access and sustainability.
So I would say our natural resources work definitely covers
all of these provisions within the Constitution,
and we have statutes that help implement all
of those provisions, but in terms of the work
to kind of defend our sovereignty and management
to these last two bullet points on the bottom of the slide.
But our natural resources work covers a lot of other issues
that, frankly, you probably hear more about
from the Department of Natural Resources
than you do from us,
but we're behind the scenes kind of supporting them.
So, recent successes to unleash Alaska's resource potential,
these were all matters that were
paid for funded by the legislature through the prior multi-year appropriations starting in fiscal
year 2021. So we won our major navigability case and just finished that case up in the last couple
of months. The federal government had we kind of reached a point where we got most of what we wanted
and then the federal Government just disclaimed so they gave us the rights to all of the rivers
So, that case is now done, which does save us some money because it was supposed to go
to like a three-week trial in March, and that is
now off the book, so that's really good news.
We also received the federal government put out notice on eight, what they call recordable
disclaimers of interest.
So these are other rivers that we have said we believe we own through the administrative
process.
They've been sitting for seven years.
So, our next steps here are to continue pursuing.
We still have two lawsuits that were filed on this front that we have not yet been able
to settle.
So we're going to continued to seek resolution on those while also seeking a streamlined
process so we don't have to spend the next hundred years litigating river by river mile
by mile.
Alaska case around the RS2477s, that was a case that
was also kind of we concluded and the funding helped us get to
conclusion on that case. I'm not going to go through all of
these cases listed where I call it clearing up unnecessary
regulatory hurdles. It's really things like defending
reasonable oil and gas development on the North Slope,
broad waters of the United States, the definition of that in the Clean Water
Act and how that impacts Alaska because we have more wetlands than the entire
lower 48 combined.
And there were other just rules that seemed to go beyond the bounds of of what the federal law was set up to do.
And we successfully defeated those rules, and again, appreciate the funding that the legislature had given that helped us achieve those successes.
Go ahead.
see an example where the state is taking a position of protection for anything other than
the rights of development. I just, I don't see that.
I, don' t see, for example, whether it's an issue related to one of the military bases
and encroachment that might impact critical habitat, maybe these facts don t arise. But
And maybe the examples are in the negative, that is, you're not litigating things where
you have that you are reflecting an interest in protecting untrambled spaces and air and
water and land.
But what I see here is always an interests in growing the economy and it seems like it's
And if nothing else just to keep it sort of honest,
if, you know, I'm using that term in quotes,
some balance might be, have merit.
Chair Jefferson,
I hear you and we,
some of this funding did go towards
ANXA contaminated sites.
where we were successful in getting $20 million in additional money to help
clean up sites that the federal government had actually left contaminated
before they were transferred to the native corporations. The other thing I
would just note I agree
And this funding has not been used for that purpose.
But I would also note in our resource development and infrastructure component, we have an entire section that only does environmental work.
And works with the Department of Environmental Conservation.
I don't have the slide here, I had it for our judiciary presentation last week.
I know we only got through five slides, so we didn't get to see that.
But the work of our environmental section does a lot of work to protect and
elements of Alaska, that's just that funded with the Department of Environmental Conservation
because they get a lot of federal funding and so by getting that money through the department,
we are actually able to take advantage of those federal funds to help push back on various,
you know, entities that may be taking actions that are not in compliance with our
environmental laws. And so I would just note that just because you see one
portion of the picture there is another portion it's just funded
differently. The reason the money we needed the
money to help us pay for the action against the federal government is because
of course we're not going to be able to use federal funds to sue the Federal
Government. They don't look kindly on that and so we had to
use the multi-year funding for that particular environmental effort and
we're still considering, is are there more actions in that area that should be pursued?
But those decisions haven't been made yet.
Again, not saying that you'll find a whole lot on here, but I did just want to highlight
the things that we have looked at.
And you know, as to the answer to contaminated sites, I'm pleased to hear about that.
I've been hearing about it since I arrived here in 2013.
And I want make a very cynical comment.
But it was couched sometimes not by any governor because this goes back before the current governor
but by legislators as sort of
it's mapped of the anti-federal and so therefore it is a comfortable space to occupy and
So it's still not quite what I'm looking for, but it has a good result, and I appreciate it.
Let's go on to the next slide.
Yeah, so I just wanted to kind of building off of these successes that we have had in
defending our ability to responsibly develop our resources, which I think has been the goal of
I just want to show you the progression and kind of the future as we see it.
So Alaska has challenged these federal actions in various ways and you'll see a list there.
That's not an exhaustive list.
you know, we have these successes, so Alaska succeeds either through new federal rulemaking,
uh, the case that we brought, um, and let's say a new rule is issued that's in our favor.
Well, then next thing that is going to happen is you're going have other parties challenging,
so you are just going change what side of the V?
the different parties are on so you're going to have third parties challenging
the federal government for whatever action they took and then Alaska has to
decide should we have a seat at that table or is it not necessary and that's
really where we're at in terms of the funding if we don't have additional
get a lot harder and we won't be able to be at the table, at all the actions that either the administration or the legislature may want us to
be. So that's the question that we're now asking.
And you see the areas on the left-hand side, all of those are ones I anticipate will have litigation that starts, and then the state will be in the position of asking, okay, do we have the resources to participate in this action?
So, last slide, I just wanted to give kind of where we're at on what has happened historically
on this funding.
So again, we said we started in fiscal year 2021, the legislature gave us $4 million over
That kind of money was added to, and you can see that the vast majority of it at this point has been spent.
All that is remaining, despite what you see on the Tongass, you'll see this little part on Tongess National Forest.
That ended in 2025, so it says on obligated, that's just the amount that had to lapse and be given back.
We only have around 135,000 and then 95,00 still encumbered through different contracts.
So that's the amount of money we really have to still spend on these efforts.
Because of the change in federal administration, we have seen a slowdown.
We have a lot of cases that stayed.
We had a couple that settled.
I think I went through the list, finished going through our list this morning.
And if you count them up,
we had nine successes, around six losses.
And then we still have the.
There's like 13 cases that are still ongoing.
So they're either in a state of being
stayed by the court to see what the federal government's
going to do or in what they call abeyance
until a new rulemaking comes out.
So 13 case that they are kind of sitting out there.
And then I anticipate we have about a list of six
in the next six months. Like I said, third parties will end up suing and then
we'll be in a position of asking that question. So that's kind of the state
of play in this area.
During general, if we treat this like a bank balance, what do you have today that
has been out of statehood defense?
So I would say it's the purple bar and the green bar.
added together, so you have around 235,000.
And what kind of replenishment are you seeking?
So the supplemental is asking for a million.
And over a three-year period.
Am I right that just a reminder for the committee?
Some of these dollars were re-appropriated in the legislature's view in FY26.
and vetoed and then re-spent for the purpose
for which the legislature sought a reduction?
Chair Josephson.
So in last year's budget,
there was an attempt to repeal,
well, I would say there, was a repealer.
You could call it a re-appropriation. Anyway, a repealer. Yeah, technical budget terms. I think those are a little bit different
Okay
and so
And then the governor did veto that repeal which then put in place the prior law
Which is what is represented on this slide and what remains?
Of those appropriations as of today. It does that so there's a repeater the Governor vetoed
And then this is what remains, if you take the veto as the existing law.
I think someone, I can think of five people, needs to clarify that for us, for both branches of government, represent Gray.
Thank you, through the chair to Deputy Attorney General Mills.
I know when we had our hearing last time in judiciary and Attorney General Cox was here,
that my understanding is that signing on to an amicus brief is basically free. It's not a big
expense for the state. Yet we have created this standalone position, the solicitor general,
because the belief is, that it actually does require a lot of time and energy in order to
I want to just draw attention to an amicus brief that we signed on to in January of 2026,
that's Trump versus Barbara. This is a Supreme Court case that
challenges the plain language of the 14th Amendment. It questions whether or not folks
actually do have birthright citizenship. I wanted to
just point out how important that is to Alaska. By illustrating its importance to two groups,
than any other state except for Hawaii.
And we've seen these cases of folks
who are unable to run for school board,
they get arrested for running for a schoolboard.
We've see folks try to vote for the schoolboards,
they got arrested, for voting for schools board.
But they're children who were born here can vote.
Another group of people are Filipinos.
They have been coming to Alaska for over 300 years.
I learned that through my colleagues,
Filipino History Month bill.
that is a pipeline that has supplied Alaska
with all kinds of workers for 300 years.
And the result of birthright citizenship
is that we have legislators serving in our body.
It's just very upsetting to me
that Alaska is signing on
because we want to take away birth right citizenship.
It would devastate our state and I know it's free,
but I wish we weren't doing it.
Thank you.
Deputy Attorney General, is my colleague right about the central
of verment, I guess is the legal term, in Trump versus Barbara, that it's a
signing-on and amicus brief to a presidential administration claim that
babies born here within the 50 states are not immediately naturalized. Is that
what we've signed down to?
because I'm not managing the amicus briefs.
I only know probably what the media has said about it.
And I want to go back and really read what is the question
before the court and what did the Amicus brief say?
Because I know that sometimes the devil is in the details.
And so I, I wanna make sure I don't misrepresent that,
but I am happy to get it back to the committee.
The representative has has it in front of him, but I don't have it
in in-front of me, so I
don t feel comfortable commenting.
I know that one of the, there are many, many concerns,
but one
of them is that it leaves human beings stateless.
They don
t have a passport because they have no country.
So I m concerned about that.
Any other questions on slide 22 on statehood defense?
Think that brings us to questions I did chair. I do have one slide.
I didn't get to go over because I kind of passed by it.
I know we're running out of time. So up to you whether I should go out over it, please go backwards.
Okay, yeah, I went to the child welfare reform case because
I realized it it went better, but I
did just want to highlight one other area where we've really seen an increase and
this actually goes to my other comments on the reform cases and the amount of
other comments from Deputy Attorney General Angie Kemp on what they're seeing on the criminal side.
So.
when you're talking about an increase in data and records,
it not only affects court cases,
it affects our public records requirements and compliance.
And so this just shows just for the department of law,
this is the billing that we, the hourly billing
that have had to devote, and you can see the increase.
And this has, it's been almost a 20,
to 40% increase over just the last few years. And then if you look over 10 years, it's even more.
But the more data we're creating within the state, that just adds to the number of records
and the amount of review we have to do. So
When you're looking at the court cases, litigation, when you are looking
at criminal prosecutions, and when your looking
at compliance by each agency within the public records,
just this is an area that you will see, I think, not just with us,
but with other agencies.
The number of records and the data we have is means you just have
to have more and more resources to review them,
figure out your retention schedules and deal with them.
just wanted to highlight that because it folds in with what you're seeing in other areas.
And that was it. So, if there are any other questions, please let me know.
I want to thank you for your presentation,
genuinely, and thank Director LeBlanc as well for being here.
Our next terrifying dance department of law subcommittee meeting will be scheduled for Monday
Apparently, the chair is brief.
If that meeting we will hear the permanent laws criminal division present on its FY27 budget,
its new solicitor general position and quality of life initiative and an update on pre-trial
delays.
We will adjourn this meeting at 106, thank you.