Unalaska, AK – The Minerals Management Service will hold a public hearing in Unalaska Thursday on its plans to lease parts of Bristol Bay for oil and gas development.

Agency representatives were in Anchorage yesterday for the first in this round of hearings on the controversial plan.

"Any spill's going to have some damage--not only possibly to the resource, but possibly to the reputation of the fish," Unalaska's Pete Hendrickson, who was at the meeting, told APRN. "So it would be an economic disaster for sure, as well as an environmental one."

The MMS's proposed five-year offshore oil and gas leasing program would put the area known as Lease Sale 92 on the auction block for drilling, probably in 2011. Shell Oil hopes to get the lease, and wants to pipe natural gas from the Bristol Bay site to a liquefaction terminal on the Pacific side of the Alaskan Peninsula, from which liquid natural gas would be transported by tankers to the West Coast.

For that reason, Aleutians East Borough administrator Bob Juettner hopes the leasing will bring jobs to communities in the area.

"The communities are just hanging on," Juettner told APRN. "If we can't find some alternative, have another economic egg in our basket, the outlook for the region is not very good. It's bleak."

Some Unalaskans are optimistic about what gas development could mean for jobs in Dutch Harbor, the nearest deepwater port. But because of the potential impacts on fisheries, the idea met with a cool reception during an earlier Unalaska public hearing in 2006. Environmentalists have also opposed the idea because of the possible damage it could cause to the habitat of the North Pacific right whale, the most endangered whale in the world.

Robin Cacy with the MMS said that she hopes that comments from residents near the drilling area at these hearings will yield information that can be of use to the agency's environmental impact statement for the project.

"What we're looking for are comments and ideas on topics that should be included in the [EIS], potential studies that they think we should do, areas we might need to mitigate--anything that will help us write an EIS that will adequately describe the area and provide good information for decision makers to use."

Tomorrow's public hearing will be from 7 to 9 p.m. at City Council chambers in City Hall.