Anchorage Assembly: Worksession re Meet-and-greet with Assembly Youth Representative Candidates

Daniel Voland. Anna Brawley. Yarrow Silvers. And do we have any members on the phone, Assembly members? Okay, we don't have any right now, we may have in a bit.

And then I'll also note that we have, okay, we have Assembly Counsel in the room, Legislative Services, one of our former Youth Rep members, Mr. Lavarias, and Clerk staff. And then we also have our youth candidates. So we will get to introductions of you all. I will note for everybody, that we have 6 folks that we've invited to be here. Looks like we're still waiting for one of them, and then one is on the phone.

And so just to note, those are our folks. We'll hear from them shortly, and I'll walk through some, some pieces of our business before we get to that. So thanks, everybody, for being here today. It's once again time to select our Assembly Youth Representative or representatives. And then, as I've said in the past, we've had a cohort of folks.

So we are considering multiple, potentially multiple candidates for this role. The purpose of this work session is to get to know our candidates to help inform the selection decision for our 2026 to 2027 cohort. While this program doesn't require a specific number of representatives, we found that a cohort of multiple students has worked well for our business and for the youth reps themselves. So at this point, our assumption is we're going to be selecting multiple people. So and we'll move into that.

The selection responsibility ultimately falls to the Chair, so this is not a body vote or decision technically, but in following the process that we've set out and that we've used in the past, we have invited candidates to spend time with the full Assembly so that you can hear from prospective candidates, and I definitely will welcome feedback sent through Legislative Services staff, Jen, who's been managing this process, and she will compile members' comments to help us make that decision. So we had 13 applicants this year, which was really amazing. It was really tough to narrow down candidates for the second round of the selection process. I'll just note that in that process, 3 assembly members—. Myself, myself, Eyster-Voland, and Member Silvers— participated in that review and selection process.

So that, that's kind of how we got to the list we have today. So we have 6 candidates before us today. They represent or are from 5 different Anchorage area high schools. And as a reminder, youth representatives will be serving during the upcoming school year, seated with the assembly during meetings, beginning with our first meeting in September, which is September 1st, and running through the end of April. They may also join committees and participate in work sessions and informal meetings, community events, things like that, as they're able.

The youth representatives receive the same materials presented to assembly members for regular and special meetings, and their role is to give a yes or no preferential vote on each item that's up for the assembly with some exceptions such as alcohol and marijuana, which are things that are related to things that you have to be 18 or 21 to consume. The selected candidates will receive training and orientation from Legislative Services and the Clerk's Office. We hope to match them with an assembly mentor. So assembly members, if you are interested in being a mentor for one or more of our folks, please let me know or just think about it and let me know as we do our selection. So to our youth candidates, and I see we've been joined by Miss, is it Katone or Katoni?

Katone. Katone, okay, thank you. So we have all 6 of our folks represented here. To our youth candidates, thank you so much for making time in your final days of summer vacation this year to join us. We understand it can be intimidating to sit up here, so we want to assure you this is a welcoming space.

We want to encourage you guys to be yourselves, do your best, no right or wrong answers here. And really, we are just trying to get a sense more of who you are and what you're about. Very few of us up here were actually involved in our local government to this extent at your age. So I think I can speak for all of us. I say we really admire what you're doing, that you've put yourself forward and that you've applied for this position.

So thank you for your interest. We'll start this session by giving each candidate a few minutes to share a bit about themselves and what they feel they can add or bring to the assembly. And then once you've had a chance to respond to that question, we'll go through a set of additional questions and then we'll also be opening the floor to colleagues to ask questions as well. At the end of time allows, we'll ask you to make a final statement, again, just to kind of wrap up the conversation. So I'll also note, when it's your turn to speak, you each have a microphone before you, and Rebecca, I know you're on the phone, so for those in the room, you just press the button on the microphone to turn it on, the little light here will turn green, and then when you—.

So you just press it, it turns on, and then when you're done, please turn it off. When we have too many microphones in the room, it creates an echo. And so we can make sure each of you are comfortable with that.