Mark Begich

If we need more, we need to know that.

If there's a law prohibiting it, we should think if the law is logical.

We, maybe, lack the ability to market our product. Without marketing, people don't know about it.

If they could advertise, should they?

One thing I learned about coming here, a year and a half ago, is, we make the laws.

The national parks is--what I understand, there is one person--and I don't know who could answer this, but I--there's one person who actually handles, within National Park Service, all the tourism activities, or is in charge of it.

We have the product. That's the good thing.

We have--62 percent of the fresh-caught fish in the country comes from Alaska, so we have a huge interest in the issue of climate change or acidification of waters.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. And I'll try to go through my questions, here, and then I've got to get back to another committee.

Because in the perfect world, everything is good, but I used to chair the Student Loan Corporation for the State of Alaska for 7 years, Post Secondary Education Commission.

I would love that. If you could get those numbers for that office, specifically for the last at least 6 months.

If you do not have a time table--I do not want to say nothing gets done, but it sure does take a long time.

Ideally the student should not have spent it, but they probably did not realize that they had that payment.

If I can interrupt for a second, that is to get them connected to know what those benefits are.

I think the Coast Guard has done something on the national level.

My understanding is the Coast Guard has developed a program to do that.

Do you coordinate with the Direct Student Loan folks within the Federal Government to determine...

Let me just do a quick run. So people who have received an overpayment, are they being requested to pay back?

My view was the consumer should not be the one penalized at the back end.

Last question because my time is just about up.

Anything that distracts them from being able to study and graduate is not a good thing.

The customer is the student.

It is never a good situation for veterans to be in an overpayment status.

You want to fix the overpayment, yes, no?

Excellent, great. In that vein, do you--to step once more on what you are talking about with the stakeholders, with universities--and I am going to walk through just a couple concerns from our University of Alaska because they have some…