The Joint Committee on Transition Facts still has unanswered questions. It also says it has enough material to begin writing.
That distinction is contained in a new preparation notice filed with the National Record System. The committee says the reconciled submissions, title records, operating records, maintenance schedules and cost material now before it are sufficient to prepare the preliminary compilation it promised when it organized. Several archival title references, contract amendments and cost-allocation questions remain unresolved and will be marked that way rather than filled with estimates.
Nothing in the notice recommends a map. Nothing chooses merger, statehood or division. The committee's target remains internal and non-binding.
But the political effect of the filing is difficult to miss: the Convention is running out of procedural reasons not to argue from the same record.
The facts do not choose a disposition
That has been the committee's most persistent warning, and it appears again here. Present ownership does not decide future ownership. A road serving two areas does not prove those areas must remain together. A facility whose users live mostly in one part of Korda does not become evidence of where a future boundary belongs merely because someone can color it on a map.
What the records can do is make some claims harder to say casually.
The northern part of the certified lake corridor is more often tied into northward transportation and service arrangements. The southern lake districts show more obligations crossing back into interior Korda. Some shared facilities remain difficult to assign cleanly even as an accounting exercise. Those are descriptions of present conditions, not instructions to the Convention.
They are also now descriptions every delegate will have to confront.
Mire and Rell lose an excuse at the same time
Jalen Mire and Tomas Rell have spent much of the Convention insisting that the other side was asking the room to decide too soon. Mire wanted the certified corridor claim treated as something more than a historical footnote. Rell wanted the remainder of Korda tested against actual service and fiscal consequences before anyone treated a line on the petition as self-executing.
Both objections still exist. Neither can now be answered simply by saying the committee has not assembled enough evidence to compare them.
Mire said after the filing that the preliminary compilation should make clear where the certified claim can be given practical effect without pretending every district has identical circumstances. He stopped short of endorsing a particular territorial line.
Rell said the same document must make clear which obligations would remain with Korda under any proposal that changes the Territory's geography. He again declined to rule out every territorial adjustment in principle.
The two co-chairs are not negotiating a settlement through the committee. They are, however, increasingly describing the conditions under which they would recognize one as serious.
Orin's question is what happens after
Dessa Orin's response was narrower. She said the compilation should distinguish one-time transition costs from the recurring fiscal capacity of whatever Korda remains after the Convention acts.
That follows the line she has held throughout the process. Whole-Territory statehood remains her preference. But if the Convention adopts some other disposition, she wants the record to show whether the remaining Territory can continue on a credible statehood path rather than starting over politically because its boundaries changed.
The committee cannot answer that constitutional question for the Convention. It can make it harder to hide the fiscal assumptions underneath the answer.
The next argument will be harder to postpone
The preliminary compilation is not yet published. The committee has not set a publication date. Residual entries remain open, and a preliminary document may end up containing more caveats than conclusions.
Still, the filing changes the tempo.
Until now, anyone who wanted to delay the hardest conversation could point to missing title documents, unreconciled contracts or unlike cost schedules. Some of those gaps remain. The committee has now said they are no longer large enough to prevent it from putting the record into one comparable document.
That document will not tell thirty-three delegates what to do.
It will make it much clearer what they are choosing to ignore.