By EDDIE GRASSER

Late in President Obama’s final term, the National Park Service (NPS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) circumvented Congress by effectively revoking the State of Alaska’s long-standing authority to manage game within national preserves and wildlife refuges.

In doing so, rural Alaskans, including those who practice millennia-old harvest strategies to feed their families, found their age-old traditions criminalized.

While the USFWS portions of this overreach were promptly overridden by the next Congress, the federal rule for national preserves required presidential intervention.

Earlier this week, President Trump did just that, by finalizing a new National Park Service rule which restores game management authority in preserves to the State of Alaska.

The midnight regulations from the previous administration represented just one of many assaults by federal bureaucrats seeking to erode Alaska’s self-governance.

In this case, federal authorities justified their overreach by claiming they were acting to protect Alaska’s ecosystem from the State’s attempts to manage big-game populations.

As we noted in our 2018 response, this is a work of fiction. The practice of “denning,” which Alaska Natives have used for thousands of years to feed their families during the harsh winter months, is unrelated to population control efforts.

After the Board of Game recognized this practice in 2008 for the express purpose of respecting long-standing cultural traditions, black bear harvests decreased to less than 10 animals per year in the Denali National Preserve. Similar results were observed in other bear populations. 

The State of Alaska has always sought to maintain sustainable predator population densities that match local ecosystems. As we carefully documented, any harvest increases as a result of traditional practices were not expected to have any impact on sustainable wolf, bear, or prey population densities.

In stark contrast, the federal government provided no scientific data or analysis to support their dubious claims. They even neglected to scientifically define the “natural” population densities they allegedly sought.

Worse, supporters of this overreach have waged a public opinion battle that is seemingly intended to vilify Alaska Natives’ heritage. Of the nearly 300,000 public comments received on both the original rule and the recent reversion, nearly a quarter million were form letters. Out-of-state groups like the National Resource Defense Council, whose president earns over $500,000 a year, fundraised off outrageous statements about donuts, orphaned cubs, and “gassed” wolf dens.

Members of Congress joined in by accusing Alaskans of supporting the “Puppy Killing Act,” and comparing traditional hunters to barbarians. One representative claimed Alaskans desperately want to shoot animals from helicopters, suggesting we should instead go play “video games.”

“I hear virtual reality headsets these days make it just like the real thing,” she joked as she spoke on the House floor.

If they were to set aside their vitriol, they would discover that traditional hunts like those conducted by the Koyukon Athabascan often involve traveling to 100 dens to locate a small number of harvestable bears. Dens with bear cubs are avoided whenever possible.

Other outrageous claims like the “gassing” of wolves or shooting animals from helicopters for sport are quickly dispelled by reading Alaska’s wildlife management regulations which expressly prohibit these activities.

Clearly these arguments are red herrings, meant to drum up support for a decades-long campaign to transfer state authority to Washington, D.C. The tragedy is that no state or federal authority is better equipped to sustainably manage natural resources than Alaska. 

Since statehood, we have consistently shown the world that resource management and conservation go hand in hand. In the early 1900s, unregulated fishing resulted in the routine over-harvesting of salmon throughout the Lower 48’s Pacific coastline.

Mere decades later, pollution and infrastructure projects, devoid of conservation considerations, compounded this tragedy. Perhaps the worst example is the mighty Columbia River which sees only three percent of the salmon it once supported.

Meanwhile, 207 million salmon were sustainably harvested in Alaskan waters last year. Despite challenging ocean conditions, that amount has increased by 70 million fish in the past 20 years. Likewise, our wildlife continues to flourish. The Fortymile Caribou Herd recently exceeded 80,000 animals – numbers not seen since the 1920s.

Alaska’s success is no coincidence. It’s a collaborative effort between our wildlife scientists, conservationists, hunters, and subsistence communities. In fact, many Alaskans would consider themselves members of multiple categories. Just last week, our department received a $100,000 check from hunters and conservationists working together to conserve Dall Sheep populations in Alaska.

The bottom line is that when Alaskans are free to manage our fish and game using the proven principles enshrined our state constitution, our wildlife flourishes and all Americans reap the benefits. Let’s respect the law and keep D.C. politics out of the Last Frontier.

Eddie Grasser is the director of Wildlife Conservation for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

By ART CHANCE

Both the 5^th and 14^th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution guarantee that a citizen, and in some cases a person who is not a citizen, cannot be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.   

The Constitution does not establish a substantive right to any particular process, but rather guarantees that any process that stems from the Constitution itself, from statute, or ordinance, or by contract must be afforded before a citizen or a person can be deprived of life, liberty, or property.   

Due process is going to become very important and likely very much lied about in the coming weeks and months as we endure the lynching of the officers associated with the deaths of George Floyd and Raychard Brooks.

Before the screeches of outrage begin, while there are lots of questions still to be answered, the only evidence we have in the George Floyd case are the videos. In the videos, it is graphically evident that Officer Derek Chauvin used excessive and unreasonable force against Floyd and is guilty of some degree of homicide.  

 I couldn’t be seated on a jury in the case because I have formed a conclusion as to his guilt and only a credible challenge to the authenticity of the video would dissuade me. 

The Brooks case is much more subtle.  The reason I style it “a cop lynching” is that none of these officers have been afforded due process and it is extremely unlikely that they can get a fair trial.   

The mob is going to demand their lives, or at least their lives in prison, or they’ll burn cities again and feckless Democrat mayors and governors will not oppose them.

In 1986, a case came to the U.S. Supreme Court involving the firing of a Mr. Loudermill, an employee of the Cleveland Board of Education. The Cleveland Board belatedly did a background check on Loudermill and found that somebody named Mr. Loudermill had a conviction in Texas.   

The Board assumed that the person in Texas was their employee, concluded that he had lied to them by denying that he had a conviction, and they fired him. 

If only the Cleveland Board had called Loudermill in and asked him, “Are you the Mr. Loudermill that has this conviction in Texas?”

Employment law is replete with cases that demonstrate the old saw of “bad cases make bad law,” and Loudermill is among the best, or worst, examples.   The board never did a thing to establish whether Mr. Loudermill was actually the person that had the conviction or to establish whether or not he had lied to them; they just fired him. 

He sued and changed the relationship between public employers and public employees.

Loudermill had successfully and uneventfully performed his duties for the Board. He had achieved “permanent status” by completing a probationary period. During probation, a public employee can be dismissed for “any reason, no reason, but not an illegal reason.” After probation, an employee becomes permanent and can only be removed for just cause.

The U.S. Supreme Court concluded that achieving permanent status confers a “property right” in a public employee’s job. Since permanent status is a property, that property can only be taken by due process of law.   Reasonable minds can disagree with this analysis, but I don’t really disagree with it.

Loudermill v. Cleveland Board establishes the Constitutional minima for due process for public employees threatened with discipline or dismissal.

At minimum, a permanent public employee must be given notice of the charges against him/her and in such specificity that the employee can form a defense. The employee, and in the union environment his/her union representative, must be given the opportunity to respond to the allegations and to point out any mitigating or obviating facts.

The employer must give consideration to the employee’s statements; the old “let them tell their story and then pull the dismissal memo out of the desk drawer” strategy is a tell; due consideration was not given. That is the minimum constitutional duty for due process.

Cops commonly have much more elaborate process as a matter of contract or ordinance. The Alaska State Troopers have a Byzantine Administrative Investigation process in their contract that they got in their first interest arbitration around 1980. They bedeviled the State with it until we in State Labor Relations decided we’d had enough of process problems causing discipline and discharges to be overturned by arbitrators. 

The straw that broke the camel’s back was an arbitrator overturning the dismissal of an Alaska State Trooper caught walking out of Long’s Drug Store in Anchorage with shoplifted merchandise. We vowed it would never happen again. First we vowed that arbitrator would never work in Alaska again, then we vowed to fix the problem.

In the Floyd and Brooks matters, there is no evidence that any of the officers were afforded any process. They were all fired on TV by mayors who were only pandering to the mob. We had a case like that here in Alaska a long time ago when an inmate escaped Lemon Creek Correctional Centers in Juneau and was later found under the bed of a Correctional Officer. 

Gov. Hammond fired everybody in Corrections whose name he knew on TV from Anchorage; he was angry. 

Nobody stayed fired.

In the Floyd and Brooks cases, the TV firings guarantee that the officers will get back pay up until a criminal conviction, and then the government will have to restart the dismissal and base the dismissals on the criminal conviction.   

The days of cops letting a DWI walk away ended in the MADD days of the ‘80s, so there was no way those cops were going to let Brooks walk away, get a ride, or give him a ride home; there is too much money in DWI charges for city governments. If you know you’re not safe to drive, pitch yourself into the back seat to sleep it off. But leave the keys in the ignition, you get hauled away for DWI. 

Young men, black and white, need to learn that if you resist a cop, and especially if you brandish a weapon or threaten his/her weapon, you are likely to die. 

You need to learn what we long-hairs of the Sixties learned: Say, “Yes, officer.” You can defend your constitutional rights later when there isn’t a gun pointed at you.

These mayors pandered and the TV firings will be like wetting your pants in a dark suit; it will give them a warm feeling and nobody will notice. If they can empanel an “OJ Jury,” they might get convictions, but few of them are likely to survive appeal. 

Unless the video is discredited, Officer Chauvin is likely to get convicted of something eventually, but I think Attorney General Ellison overcharged him in response to the mob; manslaughter was a reasonable and convictable charge. In things like this, if it is simple, you don’t yet know enough.

Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.