House Community & Regional Affairs, 4/30/26, 8am

Good morning. I call this meeting of the House Community and Regional Affairs Committee to order. It's Thursday, April 30th, 2026, and the time is 8:03 AM. Members present this morning are Representative Kai Holland, Representative Steve St. Clair, uh, Representative Carolyn Hall, co-chair Donna Mears, and myself, co-chair Rebecca Himschoot, and Representative Mike Prox. We have a quorum to conduct business.

I'd like to remind members to please— and staff to please silence your cell phones before we get started. I'd like to thank Susan Quigley from the Juneau LIO assisting us with the meeting recording, and Sophia Tenney from House Records who is here documenting today's meeting, and of course our wonderful aides to the committee, Talia Ames and Thatcher Brower. On today's agenda, we have one item, SB 192, evacuation designation levels. This is the second hearing on the bill and we did not receive any amendments by the deadline. Senator Bjorkman and staff member Laura Asche, would you please come forward, put your names on the record, provide us with a brief recap of the bill?

Thank you very much, Co-Chair Himschuh, Co-Chair Mears, and members of the House Community and Regional Affairs Committee. For the record, my name is Senator Jesse Bjorkman and I represent the northern and central portions of the Kenai Peninsula. The bill before you, just as we heard on Tuesday, codifies a standard level of practice and communication visually on maps so that the public will know and understand that when an area is red on a map, it means danger is here, danger is close, get out now, leave. Yellow means danger is in the area, and green means you should be ready to take action. Um, as you kind of look at what it is that we have communicated here, this comes from a broad agreement of emergency response folks and emergency managers across the state.

This is a work product of many months, uh, and years really of collaborative work between those emergency managers, and this is a system that they are agreeing to use to.

Communicate with the public in their localities about what to do in response to a hazard. So thank you for your consideration. Thank you. And I'm looking to the committee for questions. We also have online Brenda Ahlberg, the emergency manager for Kenai Peninsula Borough.

And I just was so impressed with, um, Ms. Ahlberg's depth of knowledge and the ability to field our questions. So you're lucky to have her there in the Kenai Borough. Are there questions for Ms. Ahlberg? And I'd like to welcome Representative Garrett Nelson 806. Are there questions for Ms. Ahlberg or the bill sponsor?

Representative Holland. Great, thank you. Just a brief comment. I just want to thank Ms. Ahlberg for the collaboration yesterday on this, and the bill sponsor. I enjoyed working on exploring some ideas and following up on the bill.

So thank you to everybody and the discussions we had yesterday. Okay, Representative St. Clair. Thank you, Madam Chair. And this is just a comment, not necessarily for the bill sponsor, but I contacted DMVA and they were neutral on this, as are most of the governor's cabinets and organizations. However, they stated that this is the standard, um, for a lot of different states.

I guess my— the point of contention I had is this is common sense, but I guess common sense isn't so common. So I have no issues with this. It's just codifying in law something that is already being done and making sure that they do it right. Thank you. Any other questions or comments from the committee?

Then I will entertain a motion. I move SB 192, work order 34-LS-0863/i, with attached fiscal note and individual recommendations. Are there any objections?

Seeing none, SB 192, work order 34-LS-0863/i, moves from committee with attached fiscal note and individual recommendations. Senator Bjorkman, did you have any closing comments even though we already moved it? Thank you very much. I'd appreciate you all signing my cheat sheet before we leave. Thank you.

Yeah.

What is the next committee? Is it Rules? Yeah. Yes, ma'am. All right then.

Okay. That concludes our business for today. Next week's schedule will be announced by the end of the day today. And I'm going to just ask the indulgence of the committee for great flexibility in the next few weeks. It's going to take all of us to get through assignee die, end of session, and I'm grateful for everybody being here early today even though we had a short agenda.

Please expect some bumps in the road, but we'll work through it together. So appreciate all you guys do. And seeing no further business before the committee, this meeting is adjourned. It is 8:08 AM. Dang, that was fast.