Communications Committee: Meetings & Calls

Committee Conference Call Minutes
July 18, 2000

NEXT MEETING:

Conference call on Wednesday, July 26 at 2:00 PM MDT. agenda: review preparations for the August public meetings.

PRESENT:

Al Zemsky, Barry Aarons, Dan Clark, Ruth McCormick, Pat Murdo, Karen Deike, Kathy Van Dame, Pauline Sampson for Pat Port, Kirsten King, Cyra Cain, Paul Mountcastle, and Jan Miller. Welcome to Kirsten and Paul as new interim members of the Committee.

JUNE COMMENT PERIOD:

Jan reported that Kathy Can Dame, Colleen Delaney and Melanie Dean summarized comments on July 10-11, made copies of all comments, and distributed notebooks with comments and summaries to the Market Trading Forum meeting on July 12. (Dennis Haddow was prepared to help, but we decided he wasn't needed since we had only 32 comments.) Most of the comments addressed only the milestones and expressed inability to comment properly without the analysis of economic and visibility impacts which are not yet complete. A few more comments have arrived this week; as soon as the summary is complete it will be posted on the Web site. The Market Trading Forum held a lengthy discussion about the outreach effort and plans for the August outreach effort; Jan will prepare a summary and distribute it before our next meeting. Jan is also preparing a report on the June outreach for distribution to the WRAP--a draft will be circulated shortly.

AUGUST OUTREACH PLANS:

All meeting details should be firm by Friday, July 21. All meetings are set except for Colorado and a tribal meeting; Kirsten will talk to Dennis Haddow about getting that scheduled ASAP. California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota are not planning to have meetings. Those scheduled so far are:

Santa Fe, August 22

Phoenix, August 24

Flagstaff, August 29

Salt Lake City, August 30

Casper, August 31

Boise, September 6

Those responsible for the state meetings should distribute complete information to the Communications Committee--time, address, building and room number.

We need a flyer which Al can attach to a paragraph for the Federal Register notice; it should list the meeting information, directions for submitting comments, and perhaps a complete list of the materials on which comment is sought, since that seemed to be a confusing matter during the initial comment period.

Karen Deike will put a notice in the next WGA newsletter going out shortly. Its circulation is about 10,000.

After some discussion, it was agreed that we will ask states to send out flyers again. Ruth and Jan have some ideas for flyers but anyone who wants to try drafting a flyer should distribute for review on next week's call. Jan mentioned some information from the Market Trading Forum which will help attract attention in August: The preliminary economic analysis indicates that cleaning up sulfur dioxide from large sources will cost $50-100 million less with a market trading program than with imposition of BART because the BART approach would require installation of scrubbers which is very capital-intensive, while the market approach would lead to switching from coal to natural gas.

Kirsten will work with Colleen to ensure that materials on the Web site are user friendly. She also is investigating use of a list-serve so that anyone who wishes to receive updated materials will do so automatically. The list serve sign up information can be included in the flyer, as well as the Web site information.

WEB SITE:

Cyra reported that while she was on vacation last week and WGA was in the midst of moving to new offices, an old, old Web page was retrieved. Now we have to decide when to move to the new server--there was general agreement that should be as soon as possible. Al noted that Pat Cummins gave out Jennifer Lodder's email to all forum co-chairs at the Planning Team meeting in Denver yesterday, and Al encouraged the co-chairs to send everything to Jennifer as soon as possible, especially meeting information. Cyra will send another email to the co-chairs with that information to be sure those not present Monday are reminded. Paul Mountcastle is presently maintaining the Web site at ITEP and will join our Web site subcommittee.

CC MEETING AUGUST 10 IN SEATTLE:

Deb Kinsley at WGA is making arrangements for the meeting room, including a speakerphone for those unable to attend in person; hotel information has been distributed. Anyone with agenda items, please circulate, and Al will prepare an agenda that minimizes conflicts with other WRAP commitments.

PBS BROADCAST:

Dan Clark reported that the Wyoming and Utah stations agree that we might best do a broad perspective piece regarding WRAP in general, and Pat Murdo has prepared a brief storyboard. Dan will have more for our August 10 meeting. Meanwhile, we should encourage commercial TV coverage of the August public meetings and ask those stations to save the tape so that we can use clips from it later.