Pizza and politics: Town hall reveals overwhelming objection to SB91

WASILLA — On Wednesday, District 7 Rep. Colleen Sullivan-Leonard (R-Wasilla) and District 11 Rep. DeLena Johnson (R-Palmer) hosted a town hall meeting at the Mat-Su Legislative Information Office. There was pizza and salad served with some surviving Halloween candy for dessert.

More than a dozen community members gathered to share their thoughts and feelings about the heated topics of Senate Bills 54 and 91. Some citizens made short accounts and calls to action, while others gave impassioned speeches to implore change. Most of the participants agreed with each other, but some differed on methodology. There was a unanimous theme across the board that crime is a huge problem and it’s on everyone’s minds; something needs to be done; something needs to change.

As the meeting opened, the two freshman reps with extensive experience in municipal government, informed the crowd about the topics at hand — mostly updates from the fourth special session, still going on in Juneau.

“Mostly, we want to hear from you,” Johnson said.

“We don’t want to limit tonight,” Sullivan-Leonard added. “We want to hear your thoughts.”

The main question for the evening revolved around criminal justice reform, and more specifically, how Senate Bill 91 may or may not be working and is Senate Bill 54 a work in progress that could achieve the needed changes, or should the state repeal SB91 and start all over?

With the rise of crime around the Valley and Anchorage, there are major questions and concerns about how to move forward with SB54 and SB91. Johnson said that one of the major concerns she’s heard from numerous people is that the “property crime is out of control.” Another major point was that class C felonies get stiffer penalties which is what “SB54 attempts to correct.”

Johnson said that there are some “additional pieces” for funding for drug and alcohol rehabilitation while incarcerated.

“I don’t think that it addresses all of the things that need to be addressed in SB91. I think we’re going to see more and more of these fixes as we move forward,” Johnson said. ”I think we may have to retain and keep SB91 in place. As much as I’m not necessarily on board with it, I’m not sure the votes are there to repeal 91 in its entirety. I believe that I will probably be voting for repeal — I want to hear what you guys have to say — but I don’t think it will be. I’m just being honest.”

Sullivan-Leonard agreed with Johnson. She said that there are more than 130 pages in an omnibus crime bill that affects several different departments, including public safety, the court system, health and human services, and the department of corrections. The initial point was to reduce the number of prisoners in corrections. What she’s seen is a “cart before the horse system” and a “revolving door for criminals.”

“And we understand that,” the former Wasilla City Council member continued. “But part of that provision was such that they needed to have rehabilitative services for those that were short time inmates — but they needed somewhere to go for treatment. And unfortunately as they’ve gone through the RFP process and looked at ways to get funding out for those programs, it hasn’t been successful.”

Sullivan-Leonard said that she did some research and found that the governor had $11 million set toward drug treatment, then he vetoed $5 million of that. That didn’t make sense to her. She noted that the governor recently came out with a public safety action plan.

“Good on him, I guess,” Sullivan-Leonard said. “That probably should have come out last year and it’s here now; so we’ll look and see how that affects SB91 and what the outcome will be on that.”

After the introduction and updates, the first community member to speak was Nick Brockett from Big Lake. He gave a short speech with a pyramid analogy, tying in his experience working on the safety committee for Procter and Gamble and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s take down on crime, both using an bottom-to-top pyramid approach.

“They found out by using this pyramid system, that if they worked on the ones on the bottom, it narrowed the numbers down as it went up,” Brockett said.

His main point was to stick to simplicity, looking back to methods that already work and not “re-inventing the wheel.” He attributed Giuliani’s success in lessening crime to tackling the bottom of the pyramid, solving the smaller crimes to alleviate the larger ones.

Treatment for those who go in and out of incarceration was another common thread during the group discussion. Through collected data, it was clear that a vast majority of crimes, both violent and not, were attributed to drugs and alcohol. The room was somewhat divided between punishment and treatment.

One side argued that to give “hand-ups, not hand-outs.” To the assistance side, they believed the addiction problem needed to be solved with compassion and effective treatment inside the jail cells and out in society, and to break the stigma associated with addiction. They stated that most of the criminals out there are going out with untreated substance abuse and mental health disorders. The other side wanted stiffer penalties as a deterrent to criminal activities. Some didn’t want criminals to be “coddled.” They wanted to enforce harsher laws to lock up the offenders and send a message to future violators.

By the end of the meeting, everyone agreed the new bills weren’t working, and most thought SB91 should be scrapped completely, getting a fresh start. There was a general feeling of uneasiness in the room, with comments like, “the fabric of our society is breaking down.”

One woman muttered, “it’s all deteriorating” as she walked out of the meeting with 30 minutes still left to go. In spite of differing opinions, the host representatives undoubtedly took notice that the people in the room were of nearly a single mind on the issue. They all felt that the crime was out of control, most of it had to do with addiction, and something had to be done differently.

Towards the end of the meeting, Sen. Shelley Hughes stopped in. She just got back from the airport, arriving from Spokane, Washington, where she had been undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She mentioned to everyone that she will be hosting informal, “coffee talk” meetings at Vagabond Blues, 9 a.m., Friday and Saturday and another at the Chugiak café at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday.