SB 309-ADVERSE POSSESSION  CHAIRMAN STEVENS announced SB 309 to be up for consideration. MR. JOE BALASH, staff to Senator Therriault, sponsor of SB 309, said that the Department of Law had some concerns at the last hearing and representatives from Sealaska Corporation have met with them, but were not able to resolve their differences. However, the Doyon Corporation sent a letter of support. Other corporations had been contacted and had no objections, but he had nothing more in writing. MR. RON WOLFE, Corporate Forester, Sealaska Corporation, said: I think the doctrine of adverse possession is one that is problematic for our corporation with the rural ownership that we have where survey boundaries have not been well established or may not be in existence yet. Land is interspersed with other land owners, such as the Forest Service, coastal areas and these sorts of things where someone could in essence squat on Sealaska land and it would be very difficult for us to police that and control that. He said they contacted the Administration, but were unable to resolve differences. They have contacted other regional and ANCSA corporations and have learned of their support. MR. JON TILLINGHAST, Counsel for Sealaska Corporation, added he had two phone calls with Mr. Cummings and unfortunately there is simply a philosophical disagreement between the state and his client on the extent to which the government ought to be taking private property without paying for it. He thought the state overstates the impact in that he didn't believe there is a danger of the state loosing any existing right-of-way or any existing rights to any existing right-of-way under this legislation because of the grandfather clause in section 4. It protects any adverse possession rights that have vested before this law takes affect. It will grant the state that if this law were to pass, that if the state wishes to impose a right-of-way on a piece of private property in the future, they will have to pay the private property land owner for that right. The state thinks that that's a bad thing; we think that's a good thing. MR. BILL CUMMINGS, Assistant Attorney General representing DOTPF, said that he did have conversations with Mr. Tillinghast over the last couple of weeks. He proposed that AS 9.10.030 be amended to lengthen the period to 15 years. In other words, you would have 15 years in which to go forward and deal with people who were "squatting on your land." He would also like to delete sections 2 and 3 of the bill. He wanted to correct one apprehension that Mr. Tillinghast has about where the state is coming from. They are not talking about going out and building highways and deliberately imposing the state's facility on property. If the state builds a road that inadvertently goes on to private property and the property owner comes forward, the state has an obligation to pay. They are concerned where people make mistakes between private owners and the government. He gave them two examples from Southeast Alaska where public facilities weren't built where they were supposed to be. One of them is on the Haines Highway where the state had been since 1944 when the United States built the Haines Highway as part of the WWII effort. "Under this statute, the state wouldn't have been able to protect its investment over time on the Haines Highway and would have had to pay for it again." The second example is a right-of-way out by Eagle River in Juneau where the Unites States in the 1930s built the road and tied into another road that allowed access to the Boy Scout camp at Eagle Beach. The road was built about 400 feet from where it was supposed to be and that was quite obviously a mistake. Without the statute as it's currently written, the public could have been dispossessed of that road. "In the context of DOT, what we're looking at here is an ability to correct mistakes and to prevent, as we illustrated in these two examples, an injustice from occurring." Last time he testified he talked about a case called Veasey V. Green where a woman could have been dispossessed of her house, but because of the doctrine of adverse possession, she was able to keep it. He recommended, therefore, that the statute not be changed at all or if they want some relief granted, they could change AS 9.10.010 to a 15-year period and make the other deletions in sections 2 and 3 and delete section 4(a). SENATOR LEMAN said the last time they heard this, he flagged the change from 7 years to 20 years on page 2, line 6, and asked what was done with that. REPRESENTATIVE ROKEBERG replied that 20 years was used because it is the longest period of time in any other state in the United States that this doctrine is used. Senator Therriault is not wedded to a particular number of years. He thought it should be bumped up a little bit from 7. SENATOR LEMAN said he agreed, but he thought 20 years was a bit long unless they could come up with some good reasons for having it. He would like it changed to 10 years. CHAIRMAN STEVENS noted that the brief in their packets shows the further west we go, the more the number shrinks. It started at 60 years and now it's down to seven. MR. BALASH said he is correct. The historical explanation for that is that large land grants were given to the railroad corporations as they moved across the country. They were kind of sitting on the land and not getting it into productive use. In Alaska we have large corporations such as Sealaska who are holding large tracts of land that don't necessarily need to be put into productive use to meet the original intent of granting the land to those corporations. They are holding them for cultural purposes and preserving land for the purposes of harvesting fish and game and things of that nature. SENATOR LEMAN responded that section 2 has a fairly substantial list of things that someone is going to have to meet and he thought there was added protection there. SENATOR LEMAN moved to amend 20 years to 10 years on page 2, line 6. SENATOR DAVIS said she wanted to hear what Sealaska thought about changing it from 20 years to 10 years. MR. TILLINGHAST said they didn't object to that amendment. There were no objections and the amendment was adopted. SENATOR LEMAN moved to pass CSSB 309(L&C) from committee with individual recommendations and the accompanying $0 fiscal note. There were no objections and it was so ordered.