AO 360: – DOT&PF, Measurement Standards and Commercial Vehicle Compliance, Regulatory Revisions

Okay, and you guys should be able to see the screen now. I think we have all here except for Andy, so we'll wait till he appears. And we're 2 minutes after, which means let's get this thing started if that sounds good with everyone. Um, thank you all for being here today. Uh, it looks like it's great.

We have about 14 of you from the public that are tuning in. So thank you for jumping in and taking the time to listen. Um, Today we're here to focus on AO360. We'll talk a little bit about what that is. But our focus is really on measurement standards and commercial vehicle compliance.

So the department has been doing a ton of these. And today this is really our focus area and, and what we'll be looking into. Just to give you a brief overview of what you can expect, we will be here for the full hour. So 10 to 11. We're going to start things off.

We've got a really great team here today. Part of us are the communication team, but most of it are your experts. And so we'll, we'll do some introductions here in a moment. You know, from there, our legislative liaison will most likely join us, or someone from our comms team will share just a little bit about big picture of what AO360 is. Just a few slides on that, just so you kind of have an understanding of what it is we're doing and why we're doing it and where we're going with it.

And then from there, you know, with these, with these types of meetings, it's all about public comment. So we're here to share information and then listen. And so we'll go over that process, you know, with, if you've called in, I don't think I see anyone on a phone. There's certain ways you can raise your hand. And so we'll go over some of those logistics.

And then really, we're here to listen. And so we'll just open it up for comment after we give a few presentation slides.

And so with all good presentations or public meetings, you know, it's, it's good to understand who's on the call, who's in the room, and, and so we just want to kick things off with introductions, and, and I'll go ahead and start. My name is Danielle Tessen. I'm part of our communication team at DOT. We've got two other communication folks that I'll pass it to real quickly before we go over to others. So Shannon.

Shannon McCarthy, also with the communication team, and I'll pass it on to Angelica.

Hi everyone, my name is Angelica. I am the PIO for Northern Region, so you might know me from my emails about the Dalton Highway. Angelica is the one behind the scenes sending all the messages, and she's who you call if you have questions or concerns. Yeah. And so what our team will be doing is monitoring— there's a Q&A feature, so we'll be looking at that.

We'll be working through the public comment, and from there we also have Andy Mills, who's our legislative liaison. He will be joining us shortly, and when he does, we'll just pivot and we'll let him introduce himself and, and move over to those things. But from there, I'd like to start it with Director Smith, with your team. So if you want to kick it off. Okay, thank you, Danielle.

I'd like to welcome everyone today to the regulation Reform Public Meeting for Measurement Standards and Commercial Vehicle Compliance. We appreciate everyone for taking the time out of your day to attend. I'm Dan Smith. I'm the division director. I've been in this position since May of 2012.

Previous to that, I'd started inspecting vehicles in 2004. Um, to get a, get a brief background of the division, Measurement Standards and Commercial Vehicle Compliance is comprised of two sections. Measurement Standards is responsible for the annual inspection of weighing and measuring devices. That are used in commerce and trade throughout the state of Alaska. We also have the Commercial Vehicle Compliance Section, and they're responsible for commercial motor vehicle size and weight enforcement and safety.

Under the section, we also have the Permitting Office. We're here today to start the process of collecting and understanding your input on issues you hope to address. We're seeking to clarify and understand what you would like to see changed or improved. I would like to turn the meeting over to the MSEA team members that are online, give them an opportunity to introduce themselves also. Thank you.

Hello, I'm Carlos Rojas. I'm the Chief of Commercial Vehicle Compliance. I've been with the department since April of 2000, and I hope to hear some interesting and exciting questions that we can look at for reform for you. I'm going to hand it over to Stephanie. Thank you.

Good morning. My name is Stephanie King, and I serve as the Chief of Permits. I manage both the permit office and the planning section. I've been here with the division for 10 years, and I've had several roles here. I started in the permit office, was a compliance inspector, and various supervisory roles.

Um, I've worked with these regulations for— on a daily basis for almost 10 years. So I am happy to be a part of this and look forward to hearing everyone's input.

My name is Travis Garding. I'm the Chief of Weights and Measures. I've been with the state for about 7 years and very similar background to everyone else who's spoken. Started as a weights measures inspector, moved to the metrology lab. And I want to point out too that we are always here as a resource for any questions on, on anything weights and measures related.

That if you have questions outside of this forum, I'm more than willing to, uh, to act as a resource. Thank you.

All righty. Hello folks, my name is Alex Cernan. I'm a CBCI-5. I'm lieutenant here for the division. I worked here since June of 2014.

I started off as a trainee as well, uh, so it's nice to see there's a lot of you guys on the call, and I can't wait to hear from all of you. Thank you.

Good morning. I am Jennifer Gray. I am the program coordinator for the Oversized/Overweight Permitting Program for the state of Alaska, and I've been here with Measurement Standards and Commercial Vehicle Compliance for almost 12 years now. Thank you.

Hi, I am—. My name is Cynthia Antigua, and I am the research analyst for the division as well as the regulation coordinator. I've been with the division for almost 8 years, and I started out as permit tech. And then made my way up to a research analyst. And I'll send it back to Danielle.

Awesome. And our legislative liaison has joined us. So, Andy, if you're able to, we're just wrapping up our introductions. Yeah, very good. Andy Mills, the special assistant legislative liaison, assisting with AO 360 across the entire department.

Thanks, everybody.

Awesome. Thanks, Andy.

Okay, so with that, Andy, if you're able to, uh, we will start things off with just about 3 slides on, on kind of that big picture of what, what are we doing here, what is AO360, um, before we kind of dive more into the subjects. Absolutely. Yeah, so, um, thank you, Danielle, and everybody else. Uh, sorry that, uh, I'm in transit, uh, legislative session. It's that time of year, right?

Folks. I'm sure many, many of you are engaged as well. So Administrative Order 360, signed in August by Governor Dunleavy, is really aimed at doing reforming and modernizing regulations in a way that has been attempted before, but with limited success. And that, that I think is something that there's been a desire for some time to resource a comprehensive regulation review. And so AO 360 has been a priority of not just the Governor's Office, but given to his entire cabinet.

And so fortunately, every agency has really dug in on this, and I see a ton of work across all state agencies on Administrative Order 360. So the purpose of this is for us to review our regulations, and in doing so, we're, we're going through, we have to measure, and we'll show you a slide here that kind of quantifies that, how much regulation we have as far as the requirements and the content, and to make inroads with targets. So as you can see on here, we have a purpose of reducing regulations that are outdated, redundant, or even again, modernizing them in some way if they're unclear or there's things that through the passage of time. I mean, a fax machine is, some people still have them, but we can certainly look to reform regulations in ways that modernize them to the benefit of the agency and the public. And in this review, we have reduction targets at the end of this year, where there's a reduction target for every agency to reduce their regulations by 15%, and then another cumulative 10% to get to 25% by the end of next year.

And again, the, the whole process starts with stakeholder engagement. That's part of the guidance that was issued as part of Administrative Order 360. So stakeholder engagement is exactly this, where we sit down and we listen. We have our staff on here to listen to comments you have about the existing regulations. So this is a bit unique in regulation processes.

Normally we're maybe talking to some user groups and talking to internal agencies and putting together a regulations package. And then we're taking those changes out to the public in a regulation review for public comment. In this case, there's multiple sort of stage gates to the review, and it starts with engaging with stakeholders. And so we're starting on the existing language in this session. We want to hear from, from stakeholders what is their What are they bumping up against?

What do they see are improvements? And we're going to take those into our agency review rather than having the agency sort of, for lack of a better word, in a silo reviewing any changes they think are best and then getting public input. We're going to start with some public input, take that into changes and reforms, and then do another round of engagement on the changes that are made. Right? So you can see on the right-hand side here, as far as pages of content, that DOT is in the sort of lower half of agency quantifiable regulations.

If we go to the next page, you can sort of see that there's— in our agency, we have a series of regulations in 17 AAC Quite a few of those we've gone through and marked up the baseline requirements. Baseline would mean how many shalls and shall nots and what are the actual requirements in those regulations. Then we've also quantified, of course, the word or character count just so you can see the volume of content versus the regulatory requirement content. The purpose here is not just to reduce the number of words but keep the same administrative burden, it's to lower the overall regulation so that it's clearer, it's modernized, and it lowers the administrative burden. So, in our effort today, it's going to be hearing from you all.

What are you seeing and hearing? What is your experience with regulations so that we can take that into our deliberations? And I'll wrap it there for a minute. I'll let someone else cover the ground rules. Thanks, Andy.

Just a quick moment to spend on this part is we are, as Andy said, here to listen, and that's the whole purpose of today. We do have a couple of slides of just sharing information, but really we like to focus on 2 minutes per comment. That doesn't mean you get one comment for 2 minutes. It just kind of keeps things rolling. And so kind of try and focus on having that 2-minute time frame.

We do appreciate if you can start with your name and your community. That just helps us for the record know where this comment's coming from. And then from there, if you have some specifics, maybe if you don't even have them right now and you want to follow up through an email, that, that is absolutely an option as well. So if you just want to start that comment period here but then follow up with a more formal where you can have that, that would be helpful for us. We will be here the full hour, so if you know of someone that wanted to be here but maybe they're busy, you can go ahead and let them know.

We'll stay on till 11 even if there's no comments. We are here to do that, so we'll stay the whole time. And then, as stated before, there's this dot [email protected]. That is a good email to send in comments to. So that's the framework in which we're kind of setting today up for, and then from there, we'll just spend a little bit of time going through a couple topics.

I do want to just highlight, and I know Shannon dropped it in the chat, there is a Q&A feature. And so if you want to just start putting in some of those inquiries or questions or comments into, into there while we're talking, we welcome that and we'll be monitoring that as well. So from here, we'll just spend a little bit of time learning on a couple of topics.

All right. Thanks, Danielle. For those of you who might have just joined, I'm Alex Cernan, CBCI 5 here from the CBC side. Kind of want to talk a little bit about the map that's here in front of us. So a little bit about the CBC section here is we're kind of comprised of 9 of the fixed weigh stations, and those are the weigh stations that you might be driving by on the highway, be it on the Seward Highway or the Sterling Highway or the Glenn Highway, and you'll see some of our folks kind of are outside either weighing some trucks, doing some inspections, And they'll obviously have the scale house that have the fixed sort of scales as well.

So 9 of those here throughout the state. So I'll start kind of here at the bottom of the map here. So there's the Sterling weigh station that's near the bottom left here of the map. That's located at about 82.5 miles up the Sterling Highway there. So, and then kind of as we'll go up you know, towards the Anchorage area.

That's where we have the Potter Way Station, about 114 miles up the Seward Highway, just prior to the Potter's Marsh there. And it's a northbound into Anchorage way station there. Then we'll kind of move on to the two-way stations on the Glenn Highway, just north of Anchorage, mile 11 of the Glenn, southbound and also the northbound there as well. The Hansrohe Waystation, which is northbound, is one of the busiest waystations in the state. It usually does see the most of traffic out of all the waystations as well.

Kind of going up to the Fairbanks area here, there's the Esther Waystation that's on the Parks Highway, probably about mile 355 or so of the Parks Highway, kind of 10 miles outside of the Fairbanks area there. Then we'll go up to the Fox Waystation It is sort of the last, you know, weigh station on the Dallin Highway corridor there, about mile 11 of the Steese Highway.

Two weigh stations on the Richardson Highway there, they're between the Fairbanks and the North Pole area there, about mile 358 or so. The Richardson weigh station going Inbound towards Fairbanks also has sort of separate facility. That's an indoor way to actually do some inspections with the pit. It makes it a little bit nicer both for the drivers and some folks that work that weigh station as well. Then we'll go on to the Tokio weigh station.

That is kind of the port of entry. It's located about 90 to 100 miles away from the Canada border. So a lot of traffic that enters Alaska by land.

That is the first weigh station they'll see as they come into Alaska there. So those are the fixed facilities. In addition to that, we also have what's called a weigh-in-motion. That's not a facility, but if you've ever driven on the Glenn Highway in Anchorage, or maybe on the Steese Highway over by the Fox weigh station, or anywhere else, where you kind of see in these blue boxes right here, and you've driven over what looks like a metal sort of a strip in your lane of travel. That's what the weigh-in motion is, and what that is is that is a scale, and it does gather some data on the weights of the vehicles.

And we have several of those here sort of around the state here as well. There's one that, that's near the Sterling, um, about 88 miles or so, so near the weigh station there on the Sterling Highway. There's several in Anchorage here. So one next to the Port of Anchorage is next to the port here near the bridge over the railroad yard. There's one that's going northbound on the Glenn Highway.

There's one on Tudor Road just as it turns into Muldoon Road there on the east side of Anchorage. And there's one on each direction of travel off of Minnesota Drive over by Strawberry Road there.

And a couple more there too. There's one up at 53 Mile of the Gunna Highway, so just north of the Palmer area. One on the Steese Highway there by Fox Way Station, and then one over on the Alaska Highway in between the town of Tok and the actual Tok Way Station as well. The newest one we have as of spring of 2022 is located in the southeast portion of Alaska over by Skagway, and that's about 2.5 miles off the Klondike Highway just before you cross that bridge to actually get into the town of Skagway there.

So what this means for us is the folks that man all these weigh stations. We use them to conduct weight and some inspection as well. And then the next slide, we'll talk about some of the facts here about what we've done here in the past year. So if somebody could change to the next slide, that'd be great, please. And Alex, I might, just because we have 15 folks on right now, probably should have paused before we jumped into this.

Maybe I'll just take us back real quick. And I wasn't seeing anything in the Q&A or in the comments. Um, but I think we'll just pause for a brief moment in case we wanted to open up that public comment period now, um, and then if we have no comments, we'll, we'll continue. So those 15 of you that are on right now, if there's any comment, uh, feel free to raise your hand. I don't think we have anyone on the call.

Nope, no phones. Just, we'll just hang out for a quick minute in case there's comment.

I see someone wrote in the Q&A, are we muted until called upon? Correct. Yes.

But if you raise your hand, that's how we can keep it moving.

Sometimes public meetings can get pretty fun if everyone has the ability to have cameras on and Mic's on.

Okay, and I see Kayla has her hand up. Angelica, do you want to promote, uh, go ahead and open up? I've got this actually. Okay, perfect. Kayla, we're just asking you to unmute and you are allowed to go ahead and give your comment.

Go ahead.

Curtis Spencer with STR. Okay, thank you. Couple, couple topics. Axle weights at minimum north of, more north of Fairbanks.

Getting to that instead of using the bridge formulas is a super high topic.

Can we just get out of the dark ages and just make it simple? And, uh, go to axle weights going north. And then, um, as we continue with our degradation of the 40-year bridge conditions that just continue to go downhill when we move big loads, um, some more, some more, uh, info from everybody at DOT in regards to improving or coordinating and bringing out information to the public, right? We do see some, but we need to be in— we need to see more. And like plans for, for future, you know, bridge updates and things like that would be really important.

Right, thank you for that.

Do any of our subject matter experts want to make a comment yet at this time?

Right, hearing none, Danielle, I'll turn it back to you.

Okay. Thanks, Curtis. Good to hear from you. We'll just pause for another moment in case there's other folks that want to raise their hand, or Curtis, you're welcome to raise your hand again and provide more comment.

Okay, it looks like we have a— Hand raised again.

Curtis, I've unmuted you. You may go ahead and give your comment. Yeah, following up on information that you guys sent out regarding the permitting process, we don't necessarily— I just want to say that we're not having issues with the permitting process. I think it's progressing. There's always improvements being made, but we're not having any issues whatsoever with the permitting process.

Um, we're super excited to see it working as well as it is compared to what's been in the past. And, you know, I think that, uh, is a credit to your team. And the team that's managing it. So it continues to make improvements year after year after year as little bits and pieces get removed and added on.

Weights and Measures, we don't have any issues there either. It's just from the STR perspective only. And then I think everybody in DOT in general has been really easy to work with over the last few years. We do have haul road issues, but everybody's focused on fixing those and trying to make things better all the time. And that's all we can do is just keep trying to move forward with that.

Right. And with all the crazy things that are going on in the state, we'll have to figure that out pretty quickly now. But I just want to say thanks to Weights and Measures, and, and the permitting process is awesome for us. That's all I got. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Back to you, Danielle.

Okay, thanks, Curtis. I'll just remind folks that we do have the Q&A, so you're welcome to type in a comment, and if you do want to raise your hand at any time to provide comment, that's, that's why we're here. So I'm not seeing any more hands up, and so with that, Alex, I will probably pass it back to you and we can use this opportunity just to educate or share on some of the slides we have. But our whole purpose of being here is to listen. So if you have a comment, please raise your hand or use the Q&A and we'll be monitoring.

Okay, sounds good. Thanks, Danielle. And also thanks, Curtis, for all your comments as well. So just to move on here, some of the facts about some of the works that we did. In the previous fiscal year.

And I will say that the fiscal year here that we're kind of talking about is fiscal year of 2025. So that ran from October 1st, 2024 to September 30th, 2025. So these are, um, some things that some of our folks did roadside here. So we'll start with the safety inspections here. Um, so we're kind of going to break it down by truck, which also means, you know, trucks with trailers, maybe cargo tanks, anything with cargo.

And basically property carrying as well. So 8,747 inspections there. And just over to the right here, there's a little tanker here for the hazmat inspections, 553 of those. Those are actually part of the 8,747 number as well. So beyond those, we can also talk about the passenger vehicles, and that is a little sort of a lot of motorcoach here.

So 86 inspections of those, those are pass-through vehicles that are done either at some of the terminals or some of the other places where we can contact them when they're not loaded there. So basically, all in all, in the federal fiscal year of 2025, We conducted, um, 8,833 of those safety inspections. Um, that also does include some of our law enforcement partners that we have, um, here with us around the state of Alaska here too. Um, so out of that number, um, 9,195 safety violations were discovered. Uh, that ranges anything from weight, um, to brakes, to registrations, to cargo securement as well there too.

So, and again, sort of go back to some of the weigh stations here. So obviously one of their purposes is to weigh the vehicles. So the fixed scales there, in the same time period, we did 78,902 fixed facility weighs there. Sometimes for those of you who are out there and driving around on the highways of the state here, you might have seen some orange signs basically on the roadside. Those are actually some of our mobile sort of weigh stations.

So we do have the capability of having the portable scales to weigh those vehicles roadside as well. So we from the weigh stations. And in the fiscal year of 2025, we have conducted 239 of such weighs. So these are portable weighs, could be at any pullout all around the state here. So these are just some of the numbers here.

Obviously for this year, we're still working hard, federal numbers as well here. So that's it here. For my portion, I appreciate you guys listening and watching. Thank you.

I covered this slide. Are we gonna see if there's any more comments? Yeah, I think if anyone wants to raise their hand at any time, we'll just kind of leave it open, but we can pause for a moment and see. If there's any AO-360 comments.

But not seeing anything in the Q&A or the chat or hands raised, so we'll hand it to you, Stephanie. Okay. So to talk a little bit about the Commercial Vehicle Customer Service Center, it's located in Anchorage, and it's a small but efficient team of 4 permit techs. Um, they serve as the first point of contact for many of our customers. They handle a call center, have a shared email inbox, and assist walk-in visitors.

Um, they also work a staggered schedule so we can remain available for the public through the entire business day. And as a team of 4, they process roughly 13,000 permits each year. And just to highlight the volume and importance of their work in preserving infrastructure, and they're truly living out the mission of keeping Alaska moving. The lead of those techs is Jennifer Gray, who's on the call. She is consistent and has a lot of commitment, and she definitely maintains operations day in and day out.

But with that, I'll let Jennifer talk a little more details about The permit office. All right, thank you, Chief King. Um, like mentioned, the permit office issues oversized overweight vehicle permits for non-divisible loads. The permit technicians will analyze these requests against the requested routes to determine if there's any possible impacts to infrastructure due to size or weight. Bridge analysis is performed on overweight loads to ensure that bridge capacity is not exceeded.

These oversize overweight permits are issued to the trucking industry to move 400,000-pound modules across the state, as well as to everyday Alaskans who may need to move their overweight boats. Our new statewide oversize overweight permitting, also known as SWOOP, system is a web-based upgrade that was launched in September of 2024. Like Curtis mentioned, it is quite an improvement to our last system and we are continuously working on improvements for it. Uh, the new system can be accessed at akswoop.com and requires a My Alaska user account to access. Uh, the permit technicians are available to answer any questions and provide assistance for these requests, and they can be reached at [email protected].

Thank you.

Who made the name up? We did. We're very clever.

Very clever.

We'll just pause again for any comments other than, how'd you get that name?

Okay, seeing no comments so far.

We'll just keep scooting along.

Okay, Travis, I think potentially this is you. Absolutely, thank you very much. Yeah, my name is Travis Garding again. I'm the Chief of Weights and Measures, and I want to just go over a few things here about what Weights and Measures looks like in Alaska. Specifically, we, we are called Measurement Standards, and what that, what that consists of is actually two kind of smaller subdivisions.

We have our State of Alaska Metrology Laboratory laboratory, which I'm very proud of. That is both a recognized and accredited calibration laboratory, only one of 18 in the world that has these two levels of recognition. So pretty, like I said, pretty proud of that. And then we have our Weights and Measures program, which is by all accounts from everyone I speak with on a national stage, one of the most unique and challenging programs to, to kind of oversee with the logistical challenges and just the, the crazy amount of space and lack of resources sometimes to get out to some of these very remote communities. So with our Weights and Measures program, they're tasked specifically with helping to ensure equity in the marketplace.

Place. That's the lofty, lofty language that we use. What that means though is that anytime you buy or sell goods or services based off of a weight or a measure, we want to make sure that both sides of the transaction are, are equitable. They're on equal footing. So we don't want people giving away product when they sell, you know, gold or produce at a store, and we don't want people getting product that they did not pay for.

We want to make sure that there is equity on both sides of the equation. So specifically on this slide, on the, on the left-hand side there, you'll see a picture of what our State of Alaska Metrology Laboratory looks like. That is an approximately 2,000-square-foot facility that is both temperature and humidity controlled. We control the environmental conditions so that any measurement we make is very stable and consistent time to time to time on these different iterations that we, that we make for the activities that we perform in the laboratory. And on the right-hand side here, on the top picture, there is one of the very unique types of inspections that we perform.

We're actually inspecting a railroad scale using— you can see that little yellow cart hanging down off of the crane. That is a 3,000-pound weight cart. Very unique system, very unique setup, and there's only two rail scales in the entire state. So even if there's only two types of devices, we do have a program and inspection procedure to test those types of devices to ensure equity in Alaska's marketplace. And we can probably move on to the next slide.

Thank you.

And moving on into the, a little bit deeper dive into the metrology lab. If you're not familiar, metrology is the science of measurement or science of precision measurement. And so the state of Alaska operates this metrology laboratory that, like I said, is both accredited and recognized. We are accredited by a an accreditation body called NAVLAB. That's the National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program.

They are an organization that accredits thousands of different types of testing laboratories across multiple different disciplines nationwide. They do a lot of things for, like, crime labs. They will accredit them to an FBI standard. They accredit things for laboratories for asbestos testing, or different types of, like, asphalt testing laboratories, concrete testing laboratories. So the NALAP accreditation is a, a pretty high standard to achieve.

And then as far as recognition goes, we are recognized. We maintain a Certificate of Metrological Traceability from NIST. That's the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Their Office of Weights and Measures is tasked with providing training and resources to all 50 state laboratories. Now, not all states operate a laboratory, but we are one of 44 active and open and operating state laboratories.

We are one of 38 that is currently recognized. We have a 2-year recognition certificate certificate, which means that basically we are authorized by NIST OWM to claim metrological traceability to NIST. And I'll explain in a later slide why that's important. For any time we take a measurement, or when our field inspectors perform inspections on devices, we want to preserve this concept of metrological traceability. And like I mentioned, I'll move into that a little, a little more deeply here in a minute if we, if we have the time and we don't have any comments pop up.

But another thing I want to point out is kind of what the services the State of Alaska Metrology can provide. We are accredited and recognized to perform mass, volume, frequency, force, thermometry, and a few other provisions, uh, so that we can then certify the standards that are used in Alaska in industry. So basically what that means is anytime there is a, a business operating like a large fuel plant or, um, a truck scale at a gravel pit, um, the, the items that are used to verify the accuracy of the devices at those locations pretty much typically come back almost exclusively through our lab. Now they do have the option of sending things out of state, but when you try and send a single 1,000-pound weight out of the state of Alaska, very expensive. So we offer these services in, in our laboratory in Anchorage.

We're in the same building as our customer service center for permits, a building right across the street I should say, but same location, Huffman's Huffman Business Park. And what I wanted to go into a little bit too is the kind of the bulk of what we do. You can see the pie chart on the bottom left there. On an annual basis, we perform about 1,000 mass calibrations. We perform about 1,400 frequency calibrations and a number of volume calibrations as well, usually in the realm of 50 to 75.

State fiscal year '25 is a busy year for volume on us. And then we perform a variety of what we call miscellaneous calibrations, including what you'll see in that top picture there. That is our state metrologist performing a calibration on a 5,000-pound weight cart. So that cart is then loaded up with, um, probably about, uh, 16 1,000-pound weights and is driven across a truck scale to verify that that truck scale is accurate, not only on the amount of weight it's indicating, but it's consistent across the length of the truck scale. So that's the type of field standard that we would use to inspect your typical vehicle scale.

A few of the other pictures we have here are— that middle picture is actually the exact State of Alaska primary standards. And what's interesting there is there's one of them, it's not marked, you can't tell which one, but one of them is a 1-pound standard. And what's unique about that is that anytime you buy a pound of roast beef from the deli or a pound of grapes from the produce section, every single measurement made at that grocery store has traceability back up to this exact artefact you're looking at in this picture. So for all intents and purposes, for the state of Alaska, that is 1 pound. And, uh, like I said, I'll explain a little bit why, um, that metrological traceability, that traceability is such an important concept, right?

Um, so there is, uh, a definition of what 1 pound is, and that definition is made up by a bunch of very, very smart people, scientists, from the world over. They get together and come up with a consensus value. And that consensus value is then pushed out to what are called NMIs, National Metrology Institutes. I mentioned NIST earlier, National Institute of Standards and Technology. They are a National Metrology Institute.

So they are responsible for defining and realizing what 1 pound is in the United States. What 1 kilogram is, or what 1 gallon is. And so when they define that at NIST, they then disseminate that information, uh, and through the NIST Office of Weights and Measures, they disseminate that to our state metrology lab. And through a series of documented, unbroken chain of calibrations, we can then basically transfer that definition and that realization that's made up at the that high lofty level into our program in the metrology lab, which then calibrates weights for our Weights and Measures Division, and which then our Weights and Measures inspectors will use to verify at a grocery store. If we want to move to that next slide, it'll have a nice little diagram on exactly what I'm talking about here.

This particular metrological traceability hierarchy Helps explain that concept that I just introduced you to. So like I said, the International System of Units is the definition. It's just a math equation or, some words written on a piece of paper. So how does that become a real weight? You know, if they define a pound or a kilogram, how does that become real?

That's the role of that NMI, that National Metrology Institute. So NIST, will perform a series, and they have teams of scientists doing this year-round. They perform a series of calibrations on their, what they call their prototype kilograms, and from which they then provide lower echelon measurements. And that's what I want to point out here. As you see, the International System of Units is the top.

That is the literal definition. And each time we move a step down, there's a couple things that happen. And the best way to explain this is to back up a little bit. One of the first things I tell everybody when they come into the State of Alaska Metrology Lab is there is no such thing as a perfect measurement. However, there are some very, very, very close to perfection measurements.

And that's what NIST provides. They are very, very, very close to perfection. They have a very low, what is called uncertainty of their measurement. Every measurement that is made anywhere has some sort of associated uncertainty, meaning that no one can ever really account for and factor for every possible thing that would affect that, you know, that weight of the, you know, the grapes that you're getting on the grocery store scale. So that level of uncertainty, as we move down the chain, increases.

But I want to point out that that level of uncertainty will never affect you at the retail level. And the reason it doesn't is because of the existence of our program. Um, we ensure that the level of uncertainty, those wild factors that could potentially happen, they, they never get down to the retail level, the consumer level. And so you'll see here the National Metrology Institute provides a really high-level calibration for a— what is called a primary reference laboratory. There are a number of primary reference laboratories throughout the nation that provide also very high-level calibrations, but maybe not quite up to the standard of NIST.

And then you have below that an accredited calibration supplier. Like I mentioned earlier, the State of Alaska Metrology Laboratory is an accredited calibration calibration supplier for the very specific scope of activities that we do. Like I said, mass, volume, frequency, those types of things. We, we don't do everything. We do certain things that really support equity in Alaska's marketplace.

So we then supply calibration services to the field standards used by our weights and measures inspectors. Those are then used to go out to the grocery store, to the gas station, to the fuel load rack, to the vehicle scales, and provide inspections that meet a criteria. And then when we— our weights and measures inspectors inspect these devices, they test them. They not only check for accuracy, but they check for correctness. And what that means is Just because you have an accurate device may not mean it's the appropriate device.

Right? So think about, like, a vehicle scale. That is a, you know, a large device has a capacity of maybe a quarter million pounds and reads in 20-pound divisions. Would that be appropriate to, you know, buy 2 pounds of bananas at the store? Probably not.

Right? So they not only make sure it's accurate, but that it's correct for its intended purpose. And they make sure that every function of that device is correct. So as these moves down this traceability chain here, this hierarchy, we have basically a direct line back up to that literal definition of what a pound is or what a second is. And then it goes down to you, the end user.

When you put that, that bunch of bananas on the scale at the grocery store and it says, you know, that's 1. £2.50, You have very high confidence as long as you see weights and measures sticker on there. You have very high confidence that you're getting exactly what you're paying for. And where this might, we can go ahead and move on to the next slide if we want to keep rolling here. I'm not seeing any comments, but we can certainly pause.

Yeah, we'll just pause for a quick minute and see. We have 10 minutes left. We have more information to keep sharing, but just want to pause because we're here for, for comment.

Okay, not seeing any in the Q&A, no hands up.

Tell us about the pumpkin. Again, I got to show a picture of a really unique inspection earlier on, and this is another one. This is one that is probably one of our more high-profile activities that we perform for a couple of reasons I'll explain. But yes, we do have a weights and measures inspector that attends the State of Alaska State Fair on an annual basis and helps facilitate the weighing of our giant pumpkins, our giant vegetables in general. There's usually a state weights and measures official that will help for any of the measurements associated with large vegetables.

So we in the state of Alaska, we do hold a couple world records, not necessarily on pumpkins, we're close but not quite there. But we do have like the world record long gourd, I believe. And if you don't know what a long gourd is, I don't either. I don't know how to explain it, but I can tell you that it's over 17 feet long and that is a world record. And what's unique about our participation with, at the Alaska State Fair is there is typically Guinness Book of World Records official present in case any new world records are set.

And when a new a world record is set, kind of the background of the Guinness World Record is they want to make sure that it is on a not only legal for trade but on a device that has been recently inspected and calibrated and certified. And so you can see with that, that jig to lift up that, that pumpkin, there's a scale underneath. And so our inspector will actually test and inspect that scale before these pumpkins are weighed on it so that if Guinness Book of World Records, you know, has an opportunity to maybe provide Alaska with a new world record, it's a buffer approach. And so that is a fairly unique thing that, that we participate in. Like I said, there's usually international media there as well.

There's usually news crews from Japan have been there in the past. And it is a very unique Alaskan thing to have some of these very large, very large not only pumpkins but cabbages, and like I said, the long gourds, and there's a handful of other things that Alaska grows that are at or near world record sizes. So on the bottom there, on that bottom picture, is kind of the continuation of that previous picture we saw on the, on a few slides ago, but that is the facilitation of that rail, rail scale inspection. So again, this is one of two rail scales, and you can see how we stack our 1,000-pound blocks on that cart and then kind of nudge it into place over that scale to verify that it is accurate as well. And when you think about rail, goods are sold on rail in the millions of pounds.

And so having an accurate representation of weight there is incredibly critical. Um, some stats on our Weights and Measures inspection program. Um, we do on an annual basis anywhere, uh, depending on what types of devices are available for inspection, anywhere around 12,000 inspections on individual devices on an annual basis. And kind of the, the pie chart here is broken down into what types of categories that we help sustain these sectors of economy and ensure that there is not only equity in the marketplace, but the ability to continue to provide these resources to Alaskan communities. You can see the big one right there, oil and gas industry.

We do quite a few, not only retail, but wholesale fuel inspections on an annual basis. So the thing that I tell a lot of people is we test every product on every gas pump at every gas station in the state of Alaska. We, we do that on an annual basis, and, and I wanted to bring that up specifically because in, as you know, in the last month or so, gas prices have gone through the roof. So as long as you see our blue weights and measure sticker on there, you should have high confidence that you are getting what you are paying for at the pump. The other industries that we really support— fishing industry is a very large one.

Many, many, many scales of different varieties— hopper scales, hanging scales, platform or bench scales— that help support the fishing industry. Again, lots of, lots of revenue in that sector. So we want to make sure that not only consumers are getting what they're paying for, but that these businesses in Alaska that are maybe exporting them outside of Alaska, they're also getting the, the proper compensation for what they're providing their customers. The other industries we support— retail industry. So that'll cover things like your grocery stores.

Grocery stores are kind of a unique thing where we get to, you know, test and inspect 40 to 70 scales in a single location. But if you think about it, your typical grocery store layout, there are, you know, every single checkout register, every single YouScan, so the self-checkout has a scale. Your meat department probably has between 3 and 10 scales. Your seafood department has a couple, and then your deli or your bakery, they have a couple scales as well. So when you go to a grocery store and you you buy these types of products, even if you don't realize it, it's probably gone over one of our tested, inspected, and approved scales.

But we, we do a number of other devices to help keep Alaska moving, and especially in the construction industry. A large portion of our attention and our activities in the summertime are geared towards testing and inspecting vehicle scales in a gravel pit. Bit, or vehicle scales on a side of a road for a, you know, a construction project. So other than that, our marijuana industry in Alaska, both on the cultivation and the retail side, every single cultivator must have a specific type of scale where they can not only weigh their product, but they have to use it for reporting for tax purposes. So like I said, every single cultivator and every single dispensary or retail side of marijuana industry has at least one, if not more, scales that we test and inspect on an annual basis.

But a large portion of what we do is ensuring that Alaskans are getting what they're paying for at the fuel pump. Or if you have ever had to fuel a boat, you know how many thousands of gallons that might take. We're ensuring that you're getting what you're paying for there as well. We could probably move to the next slide. We got a few minutes left.

And here is, one of the things I, I definitely wanted to put on here because I don't— I always find it difficult to communicate some of these topics and ideas to the general public. But everybody speaks dollars and cents. And so this is our attempt to put some of these concepts into dollars and cents. Think about a single grocery store with one scale that might sell 100 pounds of product, you know, roast beef or, you know, deli cheese or whatever, charges $12.99 a pound, and it is off by just 0.01 pounds. That's 1/100th of a pound will gain or lose the store over $4,741 in in 1 year's time.

That is a single scale at a single grocery store being off by a single count. That is the realistic type, you know, the allowable amount of error in a scale. Now, what's concerning is obviously that's a lot of money that they may be taking from consumers, right? Well, what's comforting then is that these types of devices, when they start to wear with age develop errors, it actually tends to start giving product away. So the consumer base isn't necessarily— and it's not 100% of the time, but it tends to start giving product away.

So the consumer base is typically protected and they're getting more than what they're actually paying for. But if you think about it, in a single transaction, if you get 0.01 pounds extra roast beef That's not— nobody's gonna, you know, blink at that. Right? But on a larger scale, when you start to scale this stuff up, you think about a grocery store. Right?

Like I just explained, they have sometimes 60, 70 scales in a single location. So that's where you can really see the financial impact of what we do is when we start to put things in dollars and cents. And I'll go ahead and pause here because I think we're about to hit our time. I wanna make sure everybody has an opportunity to comment if they have something. Thank you, Travis.

Yep, it looks like it's 11, but we'll just pause real quickly in case anyone had anything. And this isn't the last opportunity. As Andy shared in the opener, this is just the first iteration of public involvement and a first iteration of kind of looking at our regs. So If you have some ideas, please email them at [email protected]. There's a team that is monitoring that and taking all of the feedback that way, and we'll just continue the process.

So thank you all. It's great to have the attendance, and thank you for your engagement, and we will see you next time. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.