Alaska Legislature: Senate Community & Regional Affairs, 4/7/26, 1:30pm

Good afternoon. I call this meeting of the Senate Community and Regional Affairs Committee to order. Let the record reflect it is 1:30 PM on Tuesday, April 7th, 2022. May 26th. Present today are Senator Olson, Senator Dunbar, Senator Gray Jackson, Senator Yunt, myself, Senator Merrick. We are joined also by Senator Tobin and Senator Clayman. Thank you for being here. We have two items on the agenda today. We'll have a short meeting because we have floor at 2 PM, but first we'll have an introduction of Senate Bill 265, criminal negligent homicide failure to assist, by Senator Clayman. This is our first hearing on this bill. Senator, if you and your staff would like to come forward, place yourselves on the record and begin your Introduction to Senate Bill 265.

Good afternoon and thank you, Madam Chair and members of the Community and Regional Affairs Committee. I'm Matt Clayman, Senator for District H in West Anchorage. Thank you for hearing Senate Bill 265. Senate Bill 265 will improve public safety by establishing a specific crime for the failure to stop and render assistance when a motor vehicle operator acting with criminal negligence causes the death of another person, fails to stop and render assistance, and is convicted of criminally negligent homicide. Today, Alaska statutes make no difference between the failure to render assistance when the operator causes a physical injury and failure to render assistance when the operator causes death. We believe that increasing the penalty for failure to stop and render assistance will increase the likelihood that every Alaska operator will stop and render assistance. In particular, stopping to render assistance may be the difference between an accident that causes an injury and an accident that causes death. EMTs, paramedics, and physicians all know about the golden hour, which is when they can save lives with their emergency medical care in that first hour. Quite literally, if medical providers never learn of the opportunity to provide medical care, the time that passes between an accident and when medical assistance arrives at the scene of that accident may be the difference between life life and death. In 2014, a drunk driver hit and killed my friend Jeff Dusenberry. Jeff was out on a morning bike ride with friends. That driver failed to stop and help. Ever since that day, I have wondered, if she had stopped, would Jeff Dusenberry be alive today? But I only know one thing: she did not stop, and Jeff is not alive. Senate Bill 265 creates a new penalty for the failure to render assistance if the crime resulted in death under AS 28-35060. Under current law, if the operator fails to render assistance after a vehicular accident that results in death, they will be charged with the same provisions of those who fail to render assistance after a vehicular accident that results in an injury. In both instances, the crime carries a penalty of up to 10 years. Under Senate Bill 265, the failure to render assistance when an injury occurs is a Class B felony, and failure to render assistance when death occurs is a Class A felony with a presumptive sentence for first-time offenders of 7 to 11 years. This presumptive sentence for a Class A felony of 7 to 11 years is an enhanced presumptive sentence for first-time offenders. Without the enhanced penalty provision, the presumptive sentence for a Class A felony is 4 to 7 years for first-time offenders. The presumptive sentence for a Class B felony is 1 to 3 years for first-time offenders. A Class B felony has a maximum sentence of 10 years and a Class A felony has a maximum sentence of 20 years. A person convicted of a criminally negligent homicide under AS 1141.30 faces a separate penalty from the failure to render assistance under AS 2835.060. Criminally negligent homicide is a Class B felony with a maximum sentence of 10 years. Vehicular manslaughter under Alaska Statute 1141.120 is a Class A felony with a maximum sentence of 20 years. I will now hand it over to my intern Aspen French who will provide the sectional analysis.

Hello, for the record, I am Aspen French, legislative intern to Senator Matt Clayman. Through the chair, I want to thank Chair Merrick and members of the committee for hearing our bill today. If it is the will of the committee, I will go through the sectional analysis. Yes, please. Section 1 provides conforming changes for the provisions in Section 2 and 3 of the bill. Section 2 amends AS 28-060(c) to specify that the penalty for failure to render assistance when an injury occurs is a Class B felony under the sentencing provisions in Title 12. Section 3 creates a new subsection, AS 28-35060(d), that specifies that the penalty for failure to render assistance when death occurs and the operator is convicted of criminally negligent homicide under AS 41-130 or AS 11-41-170 is a Class A felony under the sentencing provisions in Title 12 with an enhanced presumptive sentence for first-time offenders of 7 to 11 years. Section 4 provides the effective date. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. French. Great job. Do we have questions for the sponsor or his staff? Seeing none, Senator Clayman, Ms. French, thank you for being here. We will take this bill up at a future hearing when we can have invited and public testimony. Thank you. Take a brief at ease.

I call the meeting back to order at 1:36 PM. Next, we will have an introduction of Senate Bill 250, Data Centers Utilities, by Senator Tobin. Welcome, Senator Tobin, and your staff, Louis Flora, to the table. If you could place yourselves on the record and introduce your bill. Well, thank you, Madam Chairwoman. For the record, my name is Lukey Gail Tobin and I represent Senate District I.

My name is Louis Flora and I'm staff to Senator Lukey Gail Tobin. Thank you.

Well, thank you again for, uh, allowing us to introduce to you Senate Bill 250, and I want to start with some just basic information before we go into the heart of our legislation and a very brief PowerPoint presentation. This bill at its core is really a consumer protection bill. Data centers, which is the core focus of this legislation, provide critical infrastructure. They provide things like cloud service and healthcare records, uh, retainment and transmission, and of course support for things like autonomous vehicles. There are many types of data centers that have been deployed across the United States, ones that focus in on single entities or multi-tenants. There are ones for telehealth and robots, which are often typically referred referred to as micro data centers. There are modular data centers you often see deployed during national emergencies. And of course, the data centers that many talk about today are the hyperscale data centers. Those are used by places like Google and Meta, particularly for their cloud computing and their large-scale language model AI systems. Now, the impetus for this bill before you today was really after listening to President Trump talk about the impact that data centers have had in many communities across the United States. And at that time, President Trump proposed a new rule, which is to require data centers to pay for their own transmission lines. Many communities saw their own ratepayers footing the bill for this critical infrastructure being built in and around their neighborhoods. Now, as this new rule is being considered, one of the pieces that became very apparent is that Alaska has no protections for consumers. And without those guardrails, there's a real potential that ratepayers here in Alaska would have to pay for the transmission line upgrades and also some of the other types of infrastructure that are needed or necessary to ensure that data centers are able to connect into the grid and continue to be able to operate. So within this piece of legislation before you, we add a few specific pieces to ensure that the consumer is ultimately protected. The first part is that we want to ensure that there are no negative impacts to building these hyperscale facilities or potentially even micro or modular centers. We want, uh, the business, we want these enterprises to come to Alaska. However, we want to ensure that Alaskans aren't going to have to pay for that particular, uh, development. We have talked to many stakeholders, including Chugach and the Center for Energy and Power and We recognize that to ensure that there is ample consumer protection, but also a good system and structure so that data centers have confidence that Alaska is ready and prepared for their business, we took a few specific steps into guaranteeing that they would be responsible for their transmission lines, that they'd be responsible for the utility connections, they would be responsible for their backup generation, that they would be responsible to ensure that they are connected to the broadband system and do not pay do not put those responsibilities onto the ratepayers or the taxpayers. And most importantly to me, that they're responsible for removing any of their e-waste at the end of the life of any of their GPUs or their systems, so that Alaskans and our landfills are not having to bear the brunt of that potential impact to our systems. The last piece before we go through the PowerPoint, I just want to mention the version before you doesn't take one key piece into consideration, and that's water usage. We recognize that that is missing in this legislation, and we will look to committee members to assist us in potentially drafting a committee substitute that does take into account the possibility that although we have a cooler climate, these hyperscale and some modular data centers do require significant cooling, and that means significant water usage, and that could be passed on to the consumer when it comes to connection and usage of that resource. Additionally, there's a significant amount of wastewater that's produced by data centers, and we do not want that to negatively impact Alaskans as well. So with that, Madam Chairwoman, we're happy to go through this brief PowerPoint presentation or through a sectional analysis. The PowerPoint presentation would be great. Thank you.

Thank you. Um, again, my name is Louie Flora, staff to Senator, uh, Lukey Gail Tobin, and this is just a brief PowerPoint on Senate Bill 250, Data Centers on Alaska Terms. So the argument for why the bill is needed now is that nationwide the US electrical demand for data centers is exploding. It's one of the fastest growing sectors of energy use in the nation. And so there has been a lot of backlash against some of the reliability issues and some of the impacts of the data centers in the lower 48. And so we want to get out ahead of that in order to incentivize economic development on our terms. And we do believe we have a real opportunity with data centers. We have a lot of renewable energy potential. As everyone knows, we're, you know, sit at the forefront of renewable energy production likely in the nation. But right now we have a peak load on the rail belt of 750 megawatts, and a single hyperscale facility can demand about 100 megawatt minimum. So we're— and they're variable in size, obviously, but some of the hyperscale ones are really what have been problematic in the lower 48. And the biggest risk we're really trying to identify is the spikes in power cost shifting and consumers having to pay the cost to subsidize some of the energy use there. And we just think the large load consumers require a fundamentally different regulatory framework than households and small businesses that are now covered under the current regulatory Commission of Alaska framework. And so we need to adapt to what is a new business in the state and a new source of energy use. So the real core tenets of Senate Bill 250 is that the data center pays its own way, and there's a but-for-cost rule where the data center cannot be rolled into the The costs that would not exist but for the data center cannot be rolled into the general utility rates. And we have it going through a commission-reviewed contract at the regulatory commission before they can begin, and a direct cost assignment, infrastructure costs and variable power costs and gas costs are directly assigned to the data center. And then we have an explicit rate firewall. So a service to a data center is explicitly prohibited from increasing cost of power or gas cost adjustments for other consumers. And why is that important now? Because the Alaska-specific fuel and reliability risks, we're all fairly aware that we're entering a gas shortage time in our history. And so we want to be able to protect the fuel supply. And we want to have a, you know, bar contracts that increase the risk of an inadequate fuel supply for any other utility in the state. Protecting homes and businesses. And then of course with the backup power plans, they must prioritize renewable energy storage and demand response. And that's important because the renewable energy uses— we look to data centers to increase the uptake of renewables in Alaska, which can benefit the rail belt in the long run. And we— another heart of the bill is the protection for communities. And you can see in this graphic here, we're having a— putting a community benefit agreement into place that communities would then enter into the benefit agreement with the utility, with the data center. Prior to data center moving forward. And so the community would identify all the risks that they wanna cover in that community benefit agreement. And largely, waste heat recovery is one thing that we discussed as kind of a unique model of subsidizing or potentially creating district heat programs for communities. And then Senator Tobin really was interested in broadband interconnection creating digital equity so that areas underserved by broadband would be a consideration for, for the data center community benefit agreement.

Senator Dunbar.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I apologize that this is spelled out clearly in the bill. I just haven't had a chance to see it yet. But if a community benefit

agreement can't be reached for the locality, whether, you know, maybe they have— maybe they're a small city government, they don't have the people, or maybe there's some kind of sticking point, does it default to sort of the data center's position or to them not being able to go forward?

Uh, through the chair, Senator Dunbar, this is Louis Flora, staff to Senator Lukey Tobin, and my understanding of the language is it would be worked out contractually, but there is no It's not spelled out in the legislation whether it would default to either position.

Follow-up, Madam Chair?

Yes, Senator Dunbar.

I think then, and this might be what Senator Tobin is indicating, then if they couldn't reach an agreement, then it would be as if there is no agreement in place. There would be no legal restrictions on the data center from that particular section. Is that correct? I mean, other than the other ones. Removed from the bill?

[Speaker:COMMISSIONER TOBIN] For the record, Luki Tobin, Senate District I. I think if you look on page 3, starting on line 20, there is a possible dynamic that if an agreement is not reached and the entity continues to pursue a data center, there is legal recourse for the municipality to stop development or action by that particular producer or that particular contractor or that particular developer of the data center.

Okay. I'm sorry, you said it was page 3?

Starting on line 20 to line 24.

Okay. So they can— they could get an injunction for not reaching the— data center. Is there any— so are there protections for the data centers or the companies themselves? You know, if you have a particular— let's say you just have a wealthy community that just does it just as opposed to development, you know, classic kind of NIMBY stuff. And that's not what most folks are. But let's say you did have that. What recourse or appeal is there for the data center? They can get it— so they can seek an injunction. Is there any way that the data center can demonstrate that the, you know, that their project isn't going to be harmful, but the community is sort of just opposing it for, you know, because they don't like the way it looks in their community or whatever?

For the record, Lukie Tobin, Senate District I. Through the chair, Senator Dunbar, I think this gets into some dynamics around local control and states' rights dynamic of where we have the ability or choice to determine what should be within our community space. And there are many dynamics of home rule and first-class borough powers that I am unaware of when it comes to if and when a community wants a particular entity. The first thing I think of is like bottle shops or alcohol stores. There are rules within our state that prohibit a particular alcohol entity from just arriving in a community and making a bar if the community does not want that. And we call those dry and wet communities, and we give those powers to local decision makers. So I think this would fall in a very similar dynamic. If local decision makers do not want a data center, they have within their right to decide not to have that.

Okay. Yep. Makes sense. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Flora?

Thank you. Sorry, Louie Flora, staff to Senator Lukey Tobin. And this slide just shows that a majority of the states are adopting laws related to data centers. So we're kind of right in the middle of the pack. This is a pro-development legislation, and we just want to create clear parameters, and we want to create it so the industry and the local communities work in tandem. And so this, you know, last slide here, just development can happen on Alaska's terms. We want the contract first, cost assignment, local benefit agreements, and then finally in the back end, lifestyle— lifecycle responsibility first. And that's all. That's all we have. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Flora. Any questions from committee members? Seeing none, thank you, Senator Tobin and Mr. Flora, for being here. We will set Senate Bill 250 aside for further consideration when we can have invited and public testimony. This concludes our agenda for this afternoon. Our next meeting will be Thursday, April 9th, at 1:30. We will continue considering Senate Bill 247, generated obscene sex, child sex abuse material, and bills previously heard and scheduled. So at 1:51 PM, we are adjourned.