Right-wing assembly leader tries PR spin to disguise attack on climate change committee

Aaron Lojewski says he dumped the members of the Fairbanks assembly Climate Action Committee right after he was named the assembly presiding officer because he didn’t approve of draft recommendations under review by the committee.

His story doesn’t add up.

Former members of the committee say assembly member Lojewski never contacted them about draft recommendations and he did not participate in the process over the past year. Or submit comments about what he claims are unidentified “radical” ideas. The reason the report is called a draft is that it has not been approved.

Lojewski opposed the creation of the committee, with members chosen through a public process, and has now filled it with people he chose secretly. Most of the new committee members appear eager to complain about anyone who talks about climate change.

Lojewski is a climate-change denier, though he will deny that. When he ran unsuccessfully for the Legislature in 2016, he said there was not enough evidence about climate change to draw any real conclusions. “There should be no Alaska policy to combat global warming,” he said at the time.

In an interview this week with KUAC-FM, Lojewski tried to make it appear that dumping the committee members as soon as he had the power to do so over the alleged “radical” draft content and not telling anyone was a reasonable and normal thing for him to do. It wasn’t.

The assembly named him presiding officer at a meeting late Thursday. The committee members received email notices Saturday dismissing them because Friday was a holiday. The ordinance that set up the committee last year gives the presiding officer the power to name the members.

One of those he got rid of is UAF Professor Emeritus Terry Chapin, an internationally recognized scientist. The others have a wide range of experience and knowledge.

Lojewski chose his friend, former City Councilman Aaron Gibson, to be chair of the Climate Action Committee. He also named former assembly member Frank Tomaszewski’s wife, Harmony, Vivian Stiver, Fred Vreeman, Kevin McKinley and Barbara Haney, an assembly member who works for Rep. Mike Prax.

“By putting in a new committee, we’re able to put in new recommendations or edit the recommendations that are there,” he told KUAC-FM in a damage-control interview. “Like I said, there’s a very good start, but come up with a climate action plan that is much more likely to be acceptable to the borough assembly and in line with what I would view as community values.”

The presiding officer of the assembly needs to learn more about community values and open government. One community value for a government official is to listen to people who care enough to be involved.

He should have read the draft reports, made comments about the substance, reviewed the hundreds of public comments made by borough residents and talked to members of the committee. He should never have dumped them in a sneaky fashion and replaced them with a group he recruited to agree with him.

KUAC-FM needs to try again on its coverage of this incident and cut through the public relations spin from Lojewski, who claims the draft report he claims to have read and claims to find so radical and objectionable is a “really solid first draft.”

All the documents that Lojewski and his new committee haven’t read can be found here.