Mark Begich

I come from Alaska, which is very rural. We utilize video-teleconferencing quite a bit from hearings to medicine to education.

We all want to improve it, that we want to make it more efficient.

I am one of those believers that think we need to have a controlled environment.

Our concern and my concern specifically is sustainability, of being able to have that access to Deputy Secretary levels

Unless everybody is successful in this operation, none of us will be successful, and that success has to extend to economic justice inside the communities as well.

I just saw a great programming that KIC is doing, and it's exactly what you just described.

We believe that tankers are riskier than pipelines.

I also agree with you on the Law of the Sea. This is a critical piece, for us to understand our own sovereignty.

I think that's important for the North Slope Borough and the communities of the North Slope to have access to high-level people that make management decisions about what's happening in the OCS.

If I'm here or someone is here talking about how we are doing on development, that we will have a great story to tell.

I appreciate this panel for their recommendations from a community perspective.

Congress must make every effort to allow North Slope Borough and other organizations to have a seat at the table.

I agree with what everyone said in regards to revenue sharing. That is a critical piece.

You need to be at the table.

I have pending legislation that makes that permanent, and I want to just see if that's where you were headed

What I hope is, as we move forward on oil and gas issues, that kind of opens up the discussion on many other fronts.

A millions of dollars question.

We have a bad habit, to be very frank, with in the Senate... we always need to respond to some incident.

And that satellite gap, how will you handle that, or do you think it's minimal to a point where you can still feel comfortable with what information is going to be flowing, especially in the Arctic?

I will put that on the House in Congress, who didn't fund it, as the Senate wanted to do, in that 1 year.

Will you have a presentation at some point, or maybe we can encourage it, something that occurs that says, OK, if we had XYZ additional, it would help us...

This is a critical moment that is going to define the Coast Guard's presence in the Arctic.

As you know, exploration is just a piece of the puzzle, and that's an important piece because we have to figure out what's there and how to manage it in that process.

I think, that the work by being up there, the activity between you, the local community, as well as industry, well, because of the Coast Guard's presence I think nine lives you were able to identify that you had saved because of that…

We like good news like that. I bet Shell likes good news like that.