JANIE LEASK: Yes, Pat.

PAT LUBY: Ken, what's the next role then for 20/20 just following up on that?

DR. KEN OSTERKAMP: We are trying to get the document out to public policy decision-makers and to Alaskans in general through our website. You can download the document free from our website. It'll always be free on the website. And we also are pursuing some civic events this year. We're looking at partnering with the Alaska Health Care Roundtable and some other organizations as I mentioned, Commonwealth North being one of them, to put on a citizens forum later on this year to talk about health care. It being a good topic because it's one of the critical issues facing Alaska.

What we'd like to do is bring together Alaskans to talk about competing solutions to some pointed health care problems facing Alaska and to drive towards consensus around one of those solutions. Whether we'll reach consensus probably not, but being very active trying to reach it will force you to make choices about what's important in your public policies regarding health care.

And what we'd like to do, and this is all preliminary but this is the gist of our discussion at the moment is to invite legislators and officials from the Executive Branch to the conference as observers only, so they have a chance to hear what Alaskans think, to watch them think through the problems as they're presented with different solutions to the problems and not have to feel like they have to attack or defend their points of view or other's points of view. And by that we hope to close that loop, give the information to Alaskans to make some decisions about where they want to go regarding health care in Alaska and have the decision-makers in the room to leave and go back to the session better informed about what Alaskans think of those issues.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Is this the first one?

DR. OSTERKAMP: It is the first one where we're actually bringing together Alaskans to talk about solutions. We brought together Alaskans throughout the process since 1999 to talk about problems and the priorities and what public objectives should be included in the progress report, but this is the first event where we'll actually be engaging Alaskans to talk about where they think the right path is in terms of following solutions.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: I got -- actually is this the first 20/20 report.....

DR. OSTERKAMP: Oh. No, this is the second one. Actually you could argue it's the third one. There was a publication put out by the Institute of Social & Economic Research which has a great website and lots of good information on public policy. And they put out something we called the green book, and I think the title was Status of Alaskans, and it contained a number of indicators of progress in Alaska. And then we put out the first official Alaska Progress Report at the end of 2004. And this is the second one. And we'll be doing the next one, hopefully, every January.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Okay. Looking at your last chart, public debt, (indiscernible - away from microphone). Where did you get that from, the revenue going down or (indiscernible - away from microphone)?

DR. OSTERKAMP: That's from bonds being -- the state is bonding a number of different projects. We had a number of years, as a state, where we had no general obligation bonds outstanding, I think in 2000 and 2002. But then that changed I think just this last year if I'm not mistaken, so that's why the debt service is going up.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: What process are you using to get this into the hands of policy makers? what kind of feedback are you getting, are they using it extensively? Is there anything we can do to help?

DR. OSTERKAMP: Well, you can start. I brought 120 copies, I think there's about 40 or 50 people here, so take two more when you leave and give them to somebody who you think will read it. Other than that you can direct people to our website. We do a lot on our website. Every month we update it with different public policy events which are opportunities for Alaskans to get engaged and also in public policy research opportunities for Alaskans to be educated about some of the issues facing us. Updated every month. We have about 350 or 400 people who get that every month as an electronic newsletter. And we have probably another 1,500 or 2,000 hits per month on the website, so that's how we do a lot of our public outreach since we're essentially a one person operation with a 12-member board. So that's -- reaching out to the public that's what we do.

In terms of reaching out to decision-makers, public policy professionals, we would like people to use some of these measures in their work. We are driving towards partnerships with some critical organizations like the Denali Commission, for example. They do a lot of work out in rural Alaska and they're very concerned about measuring the performance, their performance as an organization in rural Alaska. So we're discussing various performance measures.

I know that First Alaskans Institute is starting to get involved in that effort as well. I believe towards measuring community development -- or economic development?

GRETA GOTO: Economic growth.

DR. OSTERKAMP: Economic growth and poverty reduction in rural Alaska and I think is hiring a full-time staffer to do that. So the idea of performance measurement is becoming more and more important every year, I think probably because we're becoming a more and more data rich society every year so you have that ability to track performance.

In terms of getting the information into the hands of decision-makers through our website, through our citizens forum later this year, in terms of what folks can do to help just get the word out. People who read the document, legislators and the general public alike seem to really respond positively to it.

When I went to pick them up at the Anchorage Daily News there was a guy dressed in Carhartts with a typical Alaskan look of the big bushy beard and a pipe and he was heading away from the loading dock as I was picking up a pallet full of these reports and he was clutching a stack of them in his hands. And I thought that was great that people would see it and say, hey, that looks interesting, I should read that. That's kind of the dynamic we're trying to get to is where people know it's coming out every year and will read it and will realize that when people are talking about priorities that there is a measure of progress out there that they can use to talk about how they might do things the same or different.

MS. LEASK: In section 42 which is public opinion, when they talk about the 2001 Alaska Value Survey there's a paragraph in there urban/rural divide is very much an issue with 65 percent of Alaskans agreeing that city people will never understand village people, has that gone up, gone down, remained the same?

DR. OSTERKAMP: We have not repeated that survey. That survey was done to support the 2001 Conference in November of 2001. The Conference on Alaska's Future. And it was targeted -- it was designed to identify what the areas of commonality were between various segments of Alaskans. I don't know what the status of Alaskans' opinion is towards the urban/rural divide. I don't know that there are any surveys out there. I'd ask Greta, Greta, do you know if there's any recent research on the urban/rural divide?

MS. GOTO: I haven't seen any.

DR. OSTERKAMP: Yeah. I don't think anybody's really working on that issue from a research perspective.

I suspect it's still a very real divide in terms of the fact that costs in rural Alaska are much higher than they are in urban Alaska. Jobs are more scarce. And the communities are struggling with the whole idea of whether they're going to be around in 20 years so -- a lot of them. So there's major issues in rural Alaska and we don't tend, I think or my personal opinion, to really cue into those living, for example, in Anchorage or even in Fairbanks and Juneau. They're simply not a dynamic that we have to face on a daily basis so I suspect that if you surveyed people, it's just my suspicion, it's not (indiscernible) data, that divide would still be there.

I should make a point, and then I'll get to you Carol, about public opinion surveys. Surveys are a pretty powerful tool for -- when done right towards finding out what the collective people think, but the problem is that they're done wrong a lot of the time. We did one wrong. You'll never see it because I buried it, but we had an internet survey that we did that we opened up to all Alaskans. And people would log on to our internet site and respond to all these questions about whether or Alaskans should do this or do that, where our priorities should lie. And it was a fairly low cost effort because you simply put out the survey on the internet. And we had something like 1,500 respondents. And it was useful in terms of getting the qualitative sense of what people were thinking because there was a lot of comments about why people thought we should measure things, so that was very valuable.

But in terms of going out there and saying 65 percent of Alaskans think we should have an income tax. You can't do that from an internet survey. I see people doing it all the time. The reason you can't do it is it's not a random sample. People are choosing to go to the website. And a great illustration of that is Gene Storm who was administering the survey for us logged on one morning, told me the story that suddenly he saw that we'd had 200 survey responses overnight which was a big increase because it'd been out there for a month or so. And he went in and looked a little closer at it and it turned out that somebody between 3:00 o'clock and 4:00 o'clock in the morning had logged onto the survey was responded to only one question and got a few hundred responses to that question. The question, can anybody guess what it might have been? Do you want a state income tax? The answer, no, no, no, no, no. So it wasn't -- the rating was kind of destroyed on that particular question, but the qualitative answers we got were pretty good.

The other reason that public opinion surveys are useful and important. When done right they are the best, most economical way of being able to say this is what Alaskans want. You can't do that with a conference because you simply can't get the random sample, the population you need there, but you can do it with a well constructed public opinion survey. And one of the things that we're looking at doing this year is putting out an RFP for an ongoing public opinion survey to compliment the progress report.

That's important because you're talking about two different sets of perspectives there. The progress report has a lot of data in it. And data is great, but people are naturally suspicious of statistics. As Homer Simpson said you can use statistics to prove anything, 14 percent of people know that, but you can lie with numbers just like you can lie with words. And that's not really the issue here, but the issue is having a good, solid ongoing representation of what Alaskans think that compliments the data that's coming from organizations that might have a stake in producing data of one type or another.

So you want a two way conversation; the data from the organization saying here's how we're doing regarding crime, then you want the public opinion, here's how I feel about crime in Alaska. And crime is a good example because nationwide you'll see the fear of crime going up frequently while crime rates are going down. And the reason is that people are watching the evening news and you've all heard the old news adage that if it bleeds it leads. You'll see a lot of bad things on the evening news and so your fear of crime goes up even though that might not be related to the actual situation with crime. It may be going down and frequently -- or has been in the past.

So we want to have that two way conversation so that when people like me stand up in front of a group of 500 teachers as I had to do a couple of years ago and I say, you know, this is about education. And someone raises their hand, yeah, he says well, that's fine, but I think this, and then I'm stuck. What can I say? I have to say, you know, well, you're wrong or you're right or be quiet, you're just a teacher. And Carol won't let me do that, so -- but it's a legitimate question to ask.

If people have a feeling about how public policy is going in an area, then they deserve to know whether Alaskans share that feeling. That's a useful thing as a researcher to know as well, so we like to get a public opinion survey that closely matches the progress report so that when someone stands up and says your indicators say that K through 12 education does pretty well in Alaska, but my kids are in K through 12 and I don't think it's doing very well at all. I need to be able to say well, you know, most of your peers agree with you, this is a hypothetical, so I think maybe we might be tracking the wrong thing, or we are doing a good job and we're not doing -- the school districts are not doing a good job of publicizing their success so they have a communications problem.

Or, alternatively, I might say your peers don't agree with you. The indicators say it's going well. Most Alaskans say it's going well, so that's the best available data, we need to go with that. But it's important to have a true two way dialogue there and that will require a public opinion survey at some point, I think, to really do that justice.

Carol, you had a question? You're not going to harangue me about my teacher comment, are you?

CAROL COMEAU: I was skimming through this. We have been using Scott Goldsmith's information a lot on the Anchorage at 90 study from ISER because it's really a reflection of our community and that for us as a school district that's how we're dealing with the increasing diversity and complexity of our new students, many of (indiscernible) Is that trend discussed in here in any depth at all? (indiscernible - away from microphone).

DR. OSTERKAMP: I think that's reflected in the disparity section at the beginning when you look at various subgroups and how they're doing, whether they're Alaska Native or Hispanic, or limited English proficiency would be a group I think that you directly referred to. If they're -- I'll just refresh my memory before I say something horribly wrong. Limited English are the second worst performing group on the high school graduation qualification exam. So I think that would speak directly to your point. Obviously we need to be doing a better job there. More resources would probably help. Perhaps better strategies. But the idea is that you could look at the disparities, pull that out and say we need to have a conversation about this, so it's dealt with there. It might be dealt with under the students' measure. I think with drop-out rates or performance on standardized tests, for example, you would probably see some more of those, some more of that divide.

PATTY GINSBURG: A follow-up question to Carol's. Maybe it does somewhere, but I didn't see -- it seemed to follow this along over time, it would have seen the disparity grow, but you would not see -- I think what Carol was getting to which is a change in population and how that is driving this.

DR. OSTERKAMP: The state does a good job of tracking demographic trends and again, Carol's question and your follow-up encompass those two general indicators that we use. The demographics that drive a lot of the other measures, whether it's the school age population or senior citizens, and then the disparities that fall out. So you can look at the demographic information in two places. You can go to the Alaska Department of Labor's research website which has a great demographic section including dynamic charts that are basically little movies that you can watch change in front of you on the screen. That website is -- I think it's almis, a-l-m-i-s.labor.state.ak.us. And we cite that in a number of places here, probably mostly in the economic section, maybe even in the demographics.

If you look at the bottom of every page there's a more information section. Yeah, the second link down there is almis.labor.state. They have an excellent demographic section with data and analysis, too. Every year I believe they put out a Alaskan Demographic Trends publication so you can read that and find out where, perhaps, we're headed in the future. And the Bureau of the Census also has a lot of great studies. You can go to the census.gov website and pretty much lose yourself there. It's so big. It's unwieldy. I would start with the almis site and then once you know what you're looking for go to the census site.

WENDY LINDSKOOG: I'm Wendy Lindskoog, the current Chair of Alaska 20/20. I would just like to thank Ken publicly for this outstanding piece of work. He pretty much put this together by himself and just brilliant. (Indiscernible - away from microphone).

DR. OSTERKAMP: We would actually take people who wanted to author specific measures. A lot of this is drawn from state or federal reports. We do have a few individuals that write the sections, but we're always looking for people who might have an area of expertise, for example, in education, Carol, to perhaps step up and write some areas for us. But another way, you do all belong to organizations of some type of another and if you have electronic newsletters or print newsletters it's always a great help if you can provide a brief description of what we do and the fact that we have this report, maybe concentrate on the section that's of interest to your constituents, but let people know through your regular communications, electronic or otherwise, that our website is out there and we do have a lot of useful information on it.

MS. LEASK: Any other questions? Jo-Li?

JO-LI SELLIN: (Indiscernible - away from microphone).

DR. OSTERKAMP: That's funny you mention that. There was just a study that came out, I think it was done by a bank or a large financial services firm, on savings rates across states. And we put that on our website as a link and I put a note in my copy of the progress report to update that in our note section. So you're right, savings is definitely another perspective on how well we're doing, in terms of investing in ourselves.

MS. SELLIN: (Indiscernible).

DR. OSTERKAMP: If I recall correctly from just browsing the study I think we look pretty good as a state, but you know, pretty good in America is not that great. We as a country don't do so well in terms of savings compared to other industrialized countries.

GRANT HUNTER: One of the reasons is that Lord Keynes said that savings is a dead weight on the economy and lot of Americans particularly in the Democratic party still believe that. Of course, Keynes I think was really talking about people who just put money in a mattress and don't deposit it in a bank or something like that. But the other thing is I'm wondering if maybe we have to seriously consider down-sizing the public sector in this state because it's always been known, if you read the records of the fight for Statehood, Egan and Governor Hickel and everybody else always conceded there's no way Alaska could be -- could fund itself over time as a traditional tax and spend state. They always said that. And maybe the problem is we've got too many people up here who want to create a Portland, or dare I say it, San Francisco on Cook Inlet. Maybe that is our real problem.

DR. OSTERKAMP: Well, the data is in here to support or deny any position you care to take. We're just trying to provide information to have that conversation, so I'll duck that.....

MR. HUNTER: And I was very disturbed.....

DR. OSTERKAMP: ..... that's a value judgment on that.

MR. HUNTER: .....about the rating of the state corporations, the Industrial Development Corp. and the Housing Finance Corp. The only reason they haven't (indiscernible) railroad as I unders- -- (indiscernible) there's a federal statute that prohibits them from rating the railroad.

DR. OSTERKAMP: You know, that is -- I'm going to segue a little bit from your comment, but not too much, I hope.

The 48th measure is net assets. That turns a lot of people off when they look at that. Net assets sounds like accounting, sounds like green eyeshades, sounds like time to take a nap. But net assets and accounting in general are pretty important to the state. You can look at net assets as a measure of how wealthy we are as a state. That goes to our ability as this gentleman said to fund our public priorities through the budget. We are a fairly wealthy state.

What we've done is locked up a lot of that wealth in the Permanent Fund. And that's not a value judgment on whether that's a good or a bad thing, but it is locked up, so we're essentially house poor. We've got all these assets locked up and no way to tap into them when we need them. And we will in all likelihood need them at some point.

You can get a good look at -- net assets is an all encompassing measure of wealth so it captures public corporations. And we did, in fact, liquidate a public corporation a couple of years ago in the form of the Alaska Science and Technology Foundation which I think had 100 million dollar endowment or so. We have a lot of public corporations in Alaska including the Railroad, Alaska Housing Finance Corp. which is one of the reasons we have an increased rate of homeownership that just finally hit the national average last year. And if people want to use those assets they do, all those corporations, I think pay in back to the state in some form or another. I don't know if the railroad does. Wendy, do you.....

MS. LINDSKOOG: You mean pay back the state?

DR. OSTERKAMP: Yeah, do you pay any portion of the proceeds back to the state?

MS. LINDSKOOG: Not in the way of money but by way of investing in public infrastructure.

DR. OSTERKAMP: Okay. So there's a lot of various mechanisms in place for the public corporations to not only receive funding from the state, but to pay back into the state coffers. Were you to liquidate an asset it would show up under the public corporation net assets, which is one of the bars in that chart. That would go down and one of the other bars would go up. If we do what we did with ASTF and put that money into the operating budget, then that money goes away, but presumably it's invested in some social effort in Alaska. But it's certainly a legitimate conversation to have and this is one of the best barometers of how we're doing. Patty?

MS. GINSBURG: Yeah. Apart from the problem of scale on this bar chart how can you not include the Permanent Fund on this?

DR. OSTERKAMP: Because it's so big. It goes way off the page and I don't want to have to deal with that formatting issue, Patty. That's why.

MS. GINSBURG: Well, that's why I said, apart from the issue of scale, but isn't there a little symbol to use to say not to scale?

DR. OSTERKAMP: I could. I could put a break in it or something, I suppose, but would you like to see, I'll put it in.....

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Well, it's just -- it's -- I mean any discussion of public assets, obviously, I mean I guess you do (indiscernible - away from microphone) but it's so huge that even a distorted scale would seem to absolutely mandate it be a part of that.

DR. OSTERKAMP: We can. We do discuss it first thing in the narrative of the fact that it's not subject to appropriation, and the fact that it varies so wildly due to market conditions we chose not to put it in there, but it might be useful to see a 30 billion dollar column next to everything else. It dwarfs our other assets.

She brings up a great point. If you put it on there it'd be up on the 30 billion mark. And the next one, of course, is net assets less than the Permanent Fund is under nine, so -- or I guess under 10 this year.

MS. LEASK: One more question and then we have to call it a morning. Yes, Grant.

MR. HUNTER: Okay. Perhaps you should put a separate page about the Permanent Fund as a separate section. I question though if we had not locked up the Permanent Fund I seriously question whether those assets would still be there because let's face it, this state has a very bad history of starting big projects and not finishing them. I mean remember the great rye farming ventures somewhere up further to the north, Delta Junction. As I understand basically the way it's turned out it's great if you want to go buffalo and moose shooting up there because the rye attracts a lot of moose and buffalo, but actually that's about it.

DR. OSTERKAMP: I couldn't speak to the performance of all the investments that Alaska governors have made over time, but I know we've had some successes and some failures. How we compare to other states in that regard I don't know. The important thing is how we're doing as we move into the future.

And just in closing, it's important to look at everything in here as a trend over time. We want to compare ourselves not only to our own historical performance relative to how we did last year or the last 10 years preferably, we like to compare ourselves to how the rest of the country is doing. So if we see under-performing a national average it's probably time to look a little more closely at why. And there might be some better strategies out there, some best practices we could adopt as a state, so that would be, I guess, my closing comment about the document. It's a long-term document.

MS. LEASK: A long-term document. It's a good report. Thank you. We have a little delicious gift that I'm sure that won't add any calories to you.

DR. OSTERKAMP: Well, that destroys one (indiscernible - laughing). Thank you.

MS. LEASK: You're welcome. And thank you. And you do have extra copies of reports here or.....

DR. OSTERKAMP: We do. There's a box there. And like I said there's probably enough that everybody could take a couple more. And if you ever need any for a meeting or any type of function that we've having we have a couple thousand copies, printed copies. And we're happy to provide them for relevant events if you think they would do some good.

MS. LEASK: Great. U

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Just a quick question. Is this available on your Web site?

DR. OSTERKAMP: Yes, it is. It's available. You can download it as a PDF in its entirety or by section. (The Alaska 20/20 Web site.)

MS. LEASK: If you are a guest here this morning, we welcome you and encourage you to join Commonwealth North as we are a membership organization. And your memberships help support the activities that we undertake and the studies that we undertake. And we hope that you will consider becoming a member. And there is information by the door.

We have several upcoming events which are on this sheet of paper. To review them just briefly, on January 30th we're going to hear from ISER's Fran Ulmer and Scott Goldsmith on their report of Anchorage in the Next 90 Years. That's going to be back at the Cook.

On Tuesday February 7th is the February forum and that is going to be the Private Sector Solutions to Global Climate Change. And that should be a very interesting discussion, again, at 7:00 a.m. at the Hilton, so we're kind of jumping back and forth. And all of these are on the website, so be sure to check the website.

And then Friday, February 10th we have an Extra Event in conjunction with the World Affairs Council and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference Chair, Sheila Watt-Cloutier is speaking to both Commonwealth North and the World Affairs Council. That is going to be noon at the Hilton Hotel here in the Chart Room so there's a number of events that are coming up. Please feel free to take this with you. We encourage you to come and attend. Thank you all for being here this morning.

(END OF PROCEEDINGS)