News Feed Archives - Alaska Public Media: Recent Episodes
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Investigators say those trying to repeal Alaska's voting system routed a $90,000 political contribution through a church group, among other alleged violations of campaign laws.
Supporting the cause is just one reason the well-connected pay thousands of dollars to fish with a Congress member.
As a Democrat running for re-election in an oil-producing state, she’s setting herself apart from the mainstream of her party on energy.
Alaska's national parks saw 2 million visitors last year. Their spending is down from the pre-pandemic high of $1.5 billion.
The secretary of Transportation will visit Kotzebue, Anchorage and Juneau next week, his office announced.
“This will be one of the most competitive races in the country," says a National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman
Murkowski says "clear evidence" showed Trump tried to overturn the election, and it's only gotten stronger.
A 5.2% pay raise and provisions to help Alaska Native Corporations win defense contracts are also in the bill.
The EPA “confiscated state property and created a de facto national park," the state argues.
Sens. Joe Manchin and Murkowski, are centerists and allies, particularly on energy issues. He hasn’t announced he’s running for President, but he participated in a forum Monday in New Hampshire for a group called No Labels that is pushing the idea of a “unity ticket,” or a third option for president.
The federal court decision blocks a possible avenue for forcing a solution to a decades-long problem.
Service members deserve reproductive freedom, says Peltola, who missed 30 votes Thursday due to illness.
Darin Schilmiller posed online as a rich man, claiming he’d pay millions of dollars for sexually explicit photos and video of Cynthia Hoffman's murder.
Republican Nicholas Begich III is taking another run at becoming Alaska’s next member of Congress.
Wilderness safety instructor Deb Ajango says adventurers can make thinking errors that, in some cases, make an uncomfortable situation much worse.
Alaska is one of the only places in the world where peony flowers grow in the summer months. But the unusually cold, wet weather this year is delaying the blooms by weeks. And peony farmers say they have had to cancel the bulk of their early season orders, leading to lost revenue.
In Lithuania, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan stressed that other NATO countries need to pay more for their defense.
McParland is Rep. Mary Peltola's chief of staff and campaign manager. No aide is closer to her.
The $513,000 would have looked into the origin of salmon caught by the Bering Sea pollock fleet.
Vetoes total more than $200 million, including half of the one-time boost the Legislature added for schools.
Fish valued at several hundred million dollars are able to evade the ban by diverting to China first.
(Hannah Lies/Alaska Public Media)A state regulatory agency has fined Hilcorp $267,000 for making unauthorized equipment changes at Milne Point, one of its North Slope oil fields.
The Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission order says that Hilcorp’s drilling permit for a well called I-27 allowed for the use of an electrical submersible pump. An investigation later revealed the company had substituted a jet pump, without notifying the agency of the change.
The order says Hilcorp has a track record of regulatory non-compliance that includes more than 60 enforcement actions. Regulators found problems at Hilcorp operations in Cook Inlet and on the North Slope. Several of them were for making changes to a permitted plan.
At Milne Point, three workers nearly died in 2015 after Hilcorp pumped nitrogen down a well without authorization instead of the seawater it said it was going to use. The nitrogen leaked into a trailer where the men were working.
Hilcorp said it launched an investigation as soon as it learned of the unauthorized pump substitution and has already begun revising procedures and training.
“An important part of Hilcorp’s culture is to get better every day, and we look forward to continuing to work closely with AOGCC to ensure compliant, safe and responsible operations,” the company said in an email.
The Alaska Oil and Gas Commission order says the steps Hilcorp has taken are too narrowly focused and are unlikely to prevent a similar re-occurrence.
More than 60% of America’s wetlands are in Alaska. This is from Pinky’s Park Boardwalk in Bethel. (Liz Ruskin/Alaska Public Media)The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued a decision limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority over wetlands, and the implications for Alaska, home to 63% of the nation’s wetlands, could be substantial.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy applauded the ruling.
“This ruling stands to promote the kind of responsible development my Administration is working to bring to Alaska,” he said in a news release.
The case, called Sackett vs. EPA, is about what constitutes “waters of the United States” — meaning how far, inland and upland, the Clean Water Act applies.
One project that could be affected is the proposed Pebble Mine, upstream from Bristol Bay. In January the EPA used its veto authority under the Clean Water Act to block the project.
“While we don’t know what impact this decision could have on the project, it has been our position that the EPA exceeded its authority with its preemptive veto of Pebble,” Pebble CEO John Shively said by email. “We also believe that this decision is in line with moving the EPA closer to the original authority it was granted under the Clean Water Act.”
Until now, property owners have needed a federal permit, for instance, to fill a bog or stream, if there’s a “significant nexus” between the area and a larger waterway that’s considered navigable.
With the Sackett decision, the court says the federal law applies only if there’s a “continuous surface connection” between the area and a navigable waterway.
Attorney Bridget Psarianos at the environmental law firm Trustees for Alaska predicts it will be a tough test to follow in Alaska.
“We have these big braided rivers that tend to shift and move,” she said. “There’s many, many places that are suffering from a lot of erosion … And so it’s changing where a lot of these waterways are.”
Pebble Mine opponent Alannah Hurley, director of United Tribes of Bristol Bay, said the Sackett case isn’t a threat to the EPA’s determination blocking the mine.
“The decision is still incredibly concerning, as it narrows the range of waters protected by the Clean Water Act and will severely limit protections for critical wetlands, rivers and lakes,” she said.
Mary Peltola, on the Kuskokwim River, in 2022. (Liz Ruskin/Alaska Public Media)Alaska’s subsistence fishing advocates want to change the nation’s primary fishing law to crack down on the accidental catch of salmon by the Bering Sea trawl fleet. Changing the law is looking increasingly unlikely, but there might be another way.
Congresswoman Mary Peltola focused on revising the Magnuson-Stevens Act since the start of her campaign. But she said it’s not in the cards now.
“I think everybody recognizes that there’s a very slim chance that Magnuson-Stevens will be authorized this year” or next, Peltola said in a recent video call arranged by a public affairs firm called Ocean Strategies.
Rather than change the law, the new strategy is to change a set of guidelines for the law that’s already on the books.
It’s a fallback position. It’s not likely to yield quick results. But this year is shaping up to be another grim one for chinook and chum runs on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Peltola and other salmon advocates say it’s important to take some kind of action now to preserve the possibility of a return to salmon abundance.
Magnuson-Stevens is a complex law. It includes 10 national standards, akin to fundamental management commandments. They say things like fish allocations must be “fair and equitable,” and bycatch must be minimized “to the extent practicable.” The guidelines refine those standards.
Last week, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced it’s begun revising three of the guidelines, dealing with fairness, community dependence on fish and minimizing bycatch.
Peltola sees an opportunity. She calls it a “workaround.”
“If the only change we can make in the 118th (current) Congress is to take another look at these national standards, we’ve got to do it. And we’ve got to do it now,” Peltola said.
By one means or another, she and other advocates hope to rein in the ocean-going trawl fleet. The trawlers catch thousands of king and chum salmon in the Bering Sea in their nets as bycatch – unintentionally – while they fish for pollock.
Meanwhile, along the Yukon, Alaska Native communities that have relied on salmon for thousands of years weren’t allowed to take a single chinook for the dinner table last year or the year before. And 2023 is shaping up to be another dire one for subsistence chum and chinook fishing on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers.
Getting at the problem by changing the guidelines is “totally wonky” and will take a while, said Hannah Heimbuch, a commercial salmon fisherman and a consultant at Ocean Strategies.
As Heimbuch sees it, the process allows for a “conversation” about bycatch, among other things. She said new guidelines could reset the priorities for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council so that it’s more responsive to near-shore and in-river fishermen.
“I think that it’s an opportunity to kind of be frank about some of the ways that the management plans, as they exist now, aren’t able to manage bycatch in a way that is sustainable in the long term,” she said.
Brett Paine, executive director of United Catcher Boats, believes the focus on the trawl fleet as the culprit is unwarranted.
“The amount of salmon, in terms of numbers, relative to the numbers of pollock we catch is de minimis,” he said.
His organization represents about 70 trawlers working in the Bering Sea, Aleutians and Gulf of Alaska. He says the Bering Sea fleet is already successful at limiting bycatch.
“For us to catch 1.2 million metric tons of pollock, and to only catch 6 (thousand) to 9,000 chinook, I say, we’ve done a pretty good job,” he said.
Paine acknowledges that a bycatch of 6,000 chinook sounds like a lot to Yukon River fishermen who can’t catch any. But he points to research showing that a lot of those fish weren’t bound for the Y-K Delta, and not every fish was going to survive to maturity anyway. He says trawl bycatch is not to blame for the collapse of Western Alaska salmon runs.
Salmon advocates say several factors are harming salmon populations, chiefly climate change. But they say that makes it even more important to take action where possible, like against bycatch.
The National Marine Fisheries Service is accepting public comment on new guidelines through Sept. 12.
First lady Jill Biden speaks at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium in Anchorage on July 21, 2021. (Hannah Lies/Alaska Public Media)First lady Jill Biden will be in Bethel Wednesday, on a mission to highlight the achievements of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021.
Her focus is on the expansion of broadband in the region.
Biden also visited Alaska in July 2021, stopping in Anchorage on her way to the Olympic Games in Tokyo. She met with military families and spoke at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.
According to her office, this will be the first visit to Bethel by any spouse of a sitting president.
Melania Trump, as first lady, visited Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in 2017 and also met with military families.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that Biden will highlight authorizes more than a $1 trillion in spending over 10 years. Alaska’s share includes at least $3.5 billion in highway projects and $100 million from one of its broadband programs.
All three members of the Alaska congressional delegation voted for the legislation, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski helped write it.
Abdirisak Abdulahi (left) and Mohamud Muhumud (right) hold a sign that reads “Police accountability Bishar Hassan” during a rally in April 2022 in Anchorage. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media)A judge has thrown out a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of a Black man shot and killed by Anchorage police officers in 2019.
Three officers shot Bishar Hassan, a 31-year-old Somali American, when he walked toward them and pulled out a handgun, later determined to be a BB gun, according to a report by the Alaska Office of Special Prosecutions. The officers had responded to 911 calls about a man with a gun walking into traffic.
The report said Officers Nathan Lewis, Brett Eggiman and Matthew Hall were justified in their use of deadly force. But Hassan’s family disputed the reports’ findings and sued the officers and the city of Anchorage in 2021.
The family’s lawyer, Rex Butler, said in a 2022 interview – shortly after he released video of the shooting – that the officers did not have a valid reason to have contacted Hassan, because Alaska does not have a law against carrying a gun. Butler also said the police dashcam video showed about two minutes had passed from when the officers shot Hassan to when anyone checked on him or attempted to render aid.
Hassan’s shooting was the focus of a rally shortly after the video’s release that was attended by more than 100 people.
On Monday, a U.S. District Court judge sided with the city and the officers. Judge Sharon Gleason threw out all 11 of the Hassan family’s claims, citing video footage of the shooting.
“In sum, the responding officers’ conduct was objectively reasonable because Mr. Hassan posed an immediate threat to the safety of the officers when he pulled his gun out of his waistband and pointed it at the officers,” Gleason wrote in her order tossing the claims.
Butler, the family’s lawyer, did not respond to a phone call Wednesday, nor did the municipality’s lawyer on the case.
Anchorage Health Department public health nurse Marguerite Leeds prepares to administer the COVID-19 vaccine in February 2021. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media)The COVID-19 federal health emergency ends Thursday, though it will be months before some of the special emergency benefits end and most Alaskans won’t notice a drastic change.
SHOTS: COVID-19 vaccines will still be available at multiple locations. There’s no cost to most people, through insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid, and through a children’s vaccination program.
TESTS: Private insurance plans no longer have to cover COVID-19 testing at no cost. Free testing for uninsured people will continue, though the testing locations may change, the state Department of Health says.
TREATMENT: COVID treatments, like Paxlovid, will still be available. Medicaid recipients can get the medication at no cost until at least October of next year. Those with private healthcare and on Medicare may be subject to copays and deductibles.
TELEHEALTH: Some changes brought by the pandemic are more lasting. During the health emergency, Medicare loosened the rules for telehealth. That flexibility will continue until at least the end of next year. Meanwhile, in 2022, the state Legislature passed a bill to permanently lift some restrictions on telemedicine delivery.
Mary Peltola chats with voters at the Blueberry Arts Festival in Ketchikan, Alaska on August 6, 2022. (Eric Stone/KRBD)Congresswoman Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, and other House Democrats say they’re worried the U.S. Supreme Court is about to weaken the Indian Child Welfare Act, to the detriment of Native children and their tribes.
Peltola, the first Alaska Native person elected to Congress, previously worked as a tribal court judge. She said child custody cases were a mainstay. She stressed the importance of keeping children with their families or placing them within their tribe
“I think for every single human group, ever in existence, children, our precious children are our future,” she said at a congressional roundtable Tuesday. “And certainly, for Natives, it is no different.”
The roundtable discussion was similar to a hearing but was called by Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz. He lost the chairmanship of the House Resources Committee when Republicans became the majority party and can no longer set the agenda.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on a challenge to ICWA brought by the state of Texas and a group of non-Native parents trying to adopt Indigenous children. Their lawsuit says the Indian Child Welfare Act makes unconstitutional distinctions based on race. Supporters of ICWA say it’s based on tribal affiliation.
Congress passed the law to reverse the wholesale alienation of children from their tribes.
“During the 1950s and 1960s, a terrifying national picture emerged. Native nations were losing children to state welfare systems at extraordinary rates,” New York University Law Professor Maggie Blackhawk said at the roundtable. “State governments separated over 100,000 of the estimated 400,000 Native children from their parents and placed those children in homes with no political, cultural or linguistic connection to their nations.”
The case is called Brackeen v. Haaland. The justices heard arguments in November. A ruling is expected by the end of June.
Rob Welton of Douglas testifies against House Bill 4, which would repeal ranked choice voting in Alaska, on Tuesday, May 2, 2023. (Gavel Alaska screenshot)A bill that would repeal ranked choice voting in Alaska drew a lot of public opposition at a hearing in the House State Affairs Committee Tuesday, but its passage in the final days of the legislative session seems unlikely.
The sponsor of the repeal bill, Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, said getting rid of ranked choice voting was the No. 1 issue her constituents wanted to discuss last year.
“For many years, voters have highlighted the lack of trust in our election process,” she said at the start of the hearing. “Ranked choice voting has exacerbated that, because it must be counted by the use of a computer, using an algorithm instead of people being able to simply count and tally a vote.”
Alaska voters adopted the new voting style by ballot measure in 2020. Candidates no longer compete in a partisan primary. Instead, all candidates appear on the same primary ballot and the top four advance to the general, where voters have an opportunity to vote for their favorite and rank the others, according to their preference.
Vance presented the results of a Dittman poll showing 51% of Alaskans want to repeal ranked choice.
But among nearly 50 members of the public who spoke at the hearing, the testimony ran 3-to-1 in support of ranked choice voting.
“I think RCV is working,” said Rob Welton of Douglas. “You look at where (Mary) Peltola and (Lisa) Murkowski were recently elected – moderates who can reach across the aisle and they’re already decreasing the national temperature at the Congress level, which is good.”
Welton said he could easily sum up his argument in favor of ranked choice: “Two words: Cathy Giessel. She’s doing a great job in the Senate.”
Giessel is a Republican senator from Anchorage. In 2020, she lost her Republican primary. Two years later, with the partisan primary gone, she easily won the seat back. She’s a fan of ranked choice voting and she’s now the Senate majority leader. That’s one reason the repeal bill stands a slim chance of becoming law.
Opponents of the new system often cite voter confusion, as did Jan Morrison, who testified from Soldotna.
“I’m having people tell me that they will never vote again if it’s quote-unquote, the funny voting,” Morrison said.
House State Affairs Chairman Laddie Shaw, R-Anchorage, has scheduled another public hearing on the bill next week.
Meanwhile, leading opponents of ranked choice voting are putting their energy into a voter initiative. Art Mathias, a sponsor of the campaign, said they have more than half of the signatures they need to get on the ballot.
U.S. Supreme Court (Liz Ruskin/Alaska Public Media)A partisan slugfest broke out at the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, when the panel met to consider an ethics code for the Supreme Court.
“Last month we learned about a justice who for years has accepted lavish trips and real estate purchases worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from a billionaire with interests before the court,” chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in his opening statement.
Republicans accused Democrats of ulterior motives.
“Very directly, this is a political campaign designed to smear Justice Clarence Thomas,” argued Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Federal ethics laws require justices to file financial disclosure forms but Democrats say they should have to follow a binding ethics code like other federal judges and lawmakers do. Several Republicans argued that for Congress to impose a code would diminish the independence of the judicial branch.
Neither of the Alaska senators is on the Judiciary panel. But last week, Sen. Lisa Murkowski sponsored a bipartisan bill offering what she sees as a middle way — having the Supreme Court write its own rules.
“Making sure that the highest court in the land has a judicial code of conduct – as all other courts do, as the legislative branch does, as the executive branch does – I think that this is important for the overall credibility and trust of the court,” she said Monday.
Murkowski said she was reluctant to have the legislative branch tell the Supreme Court what rules it has to live by. Instead, she and Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, are backing a bill that would require the justices to draw up their own code and appoint an ethics officer to oversee it.
Murkowski said the bill has been in the works since before news broke that Justice Thomas has accepted expensive vacations from a billionaire real estate developer without disclosing them.
It’s not likely that the King-Murkowski bill can bridge the fierce partisanship of the Senate. A week after its introduction, they remain the only two sponsors.
The Alaska Supreme Court hears arguments in a 2018 case. (Elizabeth Harball/Alaska’s Energy Desk)Candidate Al Gross shook up last year’s special election for U.S. House when, citing personal reasons, he withdrew from the race in June. By then he was one of four candidates who’d won a spot on the special general ballot. The Alaska Division of Elections decided to remove him from the ballot but not to replace him.
Friday, the state Supreme Court confirmed that the Division of Elections was correct “because the Division properly applied a statutorily mandated 64-day time limit” for replacing a candidate’s name.
The court’s opinion isn’t a surprise and has no impact on the special election results, the first conducted under Alaska’s new ranked choice voting rules. That’s because the high court issued a bare-bones ruling in June to the same effect, allowing the special general election to take place in August with only three names on the ballot. The 30-page document is the justices’ effort to explain their reasoning for that call.
While they affirmed the division’s decision not to advance fifth-place finisher Tara Sweeney, the justices faulted the division for removing Gross’s name. A strict interpretation of the 64-day window would’ve required election officials to leave his name on the ballot, despite his withdrawal, the court said. It was slightly off point, since the voters who filed the legal challenge didn’t try to stop the removal of Gross’s name.
Mary Peltola ultimately won the special general. Her spot on the ballot wasn’t at stake in this lawsuit. She came in fourth place in the special primary, behind Gross and ahead of Sweeney.
She went on to win the regular election, too, and now holds Alaska’s sole seat in the U.S. House.
A digital simulation of what the proposed Pebble Mine’s foundation would look like, if federal authorities allow it. (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will reconsider its decision denying a permit for the proposed Pebble Mine.
In 2020, the Army Corps rejected Pebble’s application for a large open-pit gold and copper mine upstream from Bristol Bay. But now the company has partially won its administrative appeal of that decision.
The announcement suggests that one barrier to the controversial mine is not as solid as opponents had hoped.
In an 81-page ruling Tuesday afternoon, the agency’s reviewing officers conclude the Alaska District made a few mistakes, particularly in how it dealt with the possibility of a catastrophic failure of a dam that would contain waste rock from the mining operation. The permit denial was in part based on the potential damage to fish and water quality in the event of a catastrophic dam breach, even though the Army Corps concluded a catastrophic event isn’t “reasonably foreseeable.”
“My decision to remand the permit application denial back to the Alaska District is not a permit authorization,” Gen. Kirk Gibbs, the commander of the Pacific Ocean Division, said in an emailed statement. “The District has been asked to re-evaluate specific issues in the administrative record to ensure that the decision is well-supported.”
Pebble faces other obstacles, beyond the Corps permit. Earlier this year the Environmental Protection Agency, at the urging of tribes and others that fish the salmon-rich waters of Bristol Bay, concluded the mine was incompatible with the Clean Water Act. The EPA decision effectively vetoed any proposal to develop the Pebble deposit that would have a similar impact on the same rivers.
The Corps’ administrative ruling sends the permit application back to the Alaska District for reconsideration of particular aspects.
There was no immediate response from the Pebble Partnership, which has been pursuing the project for more than two decades.
Alaskan author Don Rearden (Joe Yelverton)Alaska writer and poet Don Rearden has been experimenting with artificial intelligence. He gave it a writing assignment. The result, a Rearden-style poem, both impressed him and freaked him out. Alaska Public Media’s Liz Ruskin talked to him about it.
Listen here:
Here is a lightly edited transcript of what happened when Liz Ruskin and Don Rearden sat down together in a radio studio. Read on to see why the experience was trippier than she expected.
…
Liz Ruskin: So, Don, you recently participated in an unusual experiment. You submitted some of your poems to an artificial intelligence program that analyzed your style and voice and then generated a new poem in your voice. How did that happen?
Don Rearden: Well, it was a bit of a surprise, actually. I was contacted by a researcher from Microsoft Bing who said they were working on a project to create poems using AI. They asked me if I would be interested in providing some of my poems as input for their program. I was curious and intrigued, so I agreed.
Ruskin: And what did you think of the result? Did the AI capture your voice?
Rearden: Well, it was certainly an interesting experience. The poem that the AI produced was not something that I would have written myself, but it did have some elements of my style and themes. It was kind of surreal to read something that sounded like me but wasn’t me.
Ruskin: Can you share the poem with us?
Rearden: Sure, I have it right here.
The Last Salmon
I remember the last salmon
I caught with my grandfather
On the Kuskokwim river
Before he passed away
He taught me how to gut it
With a sharp knife and steady hand
How to smoke it over alder wood
And store it for the winter
He told me stories of his youth
When the fish were plentiful and fat
When the river was clean and clear
And the people were happy and healthy
He warned me of the changes
That were coming fast and hard
The dams, the mines, the pipelines
The diseases, the drugs, the violence
He said we had to fight for our land
Our culture, our language, our way of life
He said we had to respect the salmon
They were our brothers and sisters
He said we had to remember who we are Where we came from, what we stand for
He said we had to stick together
We were stronger as one
I remember his last words to me
As he handed me his knife and smiled
“Take good care of this salmon, son”
“It might be your last one”
Ruskin: Wow, that’s quite impressive. It does sound like something you would write.
Rearden: Yeah, it does have some similarities with my work. I often write about Alaska and its culture, history and environment.
Ruskin: Do you think AI can be creative?
Rearden: That’s a hard question to answer. I think AI can mimic human creativity to some extent, but I don’t think it can replace it. There is something unique and irreplaceable about human creativity that comes from our emotions, experiences and values. AI can learn from us, but it can’t be us.
Ruskin: Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts and your poem with us, Don. It was a pleasure talking with you.
Rearden: Thank you for having me, Liz. It was a pleasure talking with you too.
Ruskin: And now Don, it’s time for you and I to come clean with the listeners.
Rearden: Yeah, I think it is. Moments before this actual interview, I asked Microsoft Bing to write our interview for us. So we could just, you know, be done and go have coffee or something.
…
Ruskin: That’s right: This whole conversation – everything in italics – was scripted by Bing. Rearden asked Bing to write an interview between journalist Liz Ruskin and Alaska writer Don Rearden. The questions artificial Liz asked were close to what I intended to ask, so we just read the script Bing wrote for us.
But then we had a real conversation. So here we are just talking, using our own brains.
At least, I thought that’s what we were doing.
…
Ruskin: Does some part of you worry that Bing is a better writer than you are?
Rearden: It’s probably going to make a lot more money than I’ve ever made at writing. (Laughs) I don’t think so. I think there’s the human part. And I guess what’s a little bit scary about that introductory material that Bing wrote – that part is really how I feel about it, that it can’t replace us. It doesn’t have the heart that we do.
…
Ruskin: This makes my head hurt: Real Don Rearden is saying AI won’t replace us, but he’s quoting artificial Don, because he thinks AI said it better.
Whether we’re ready or not, our replacements have arrived.
ExxonMobil’s Point Thomson project is approximately 60 miles east of Prudhoe Bay. (Photo by ExxonMobil)ExxonMobil told shareholders last week the company doesn’t expect to expand its activities in the Arctic.
“Our current investment plans do not include exploration activity within the (global Arctic) region, and we plan relatively limited investment to sustain our existing interests in the region,” it said in an April 13 proxy statement.
Exxon has been a major player in Alaska since the dawn of the state’s oil industry. It has a stake in some of the largest oilfields in Alaska, including Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk, as well as Point Thomson. Exxon also owns a 21% share in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
Environmental groups trumpeted the news as a sign that next year’s lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will be a bust.
“I think it shows that oil companies are losing interest in the Arctic and recognizing that it’s a bad investment and it’s bad business,” said Tim Woody, a spokesman for The Wilderness Society in Alaska.
The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and other groups have been trying to make the Arctic unattractive to oil companies, in part by pressing major banks and insurance companies not to support industrial activity there.
Kara Moriarty, president of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, said Exxon’s statement does not indicate any change in the company’s strategy for the region.
“And it does not say that they have no interest, because if they had no interest, then their assets would be up for sale,” she said.
A tax law Congress passed in 2017 requires the federal government to hold a second lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by the end of 2024. The first generated few bids and only a fraction of the revenue that was projected. The only bidder that has kept its leases in the refuge is a state-owned entity, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority.
Screenshot from YouTube video posted by Sen. Joe Manchin.Sen. Lisa Murkowski met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv his week and said she’s more determined than ever to provide assistance to help that country defend itself from Russia.
“The United States’ commitment is an investment. It’s an investment in the democracy of the free world,” she said, standing in view of St. Michael’s Monastery, named for the patron saint of the Ukrainian capital, as shown on a video distributed by her office.
Murkowski traveled to Ukraine and Poland as part of a bipartisan delegation that also included Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz. Murkowski, a member of the Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations, said she was there in part on an oversight mission.
The U.S. has given more than $35 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February of 2022.
“What we have put forward into this fight to support Ukraine is worth every penny,” she said.
Surveillance footage showed Aaron Mileur and his cousin in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. (From DOJ sentencing memo)A Wasilla man sentenced for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 is asking a judge to loosen a condition of his probation.
He wants to be allowed a firearm, to protect himself from moose.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C. sentenced 43-year-old Aaron James Mileur to two years of probation last month. He pleaded guilty to a charge of demonstrating or parading in the Capitol building. Three other charges were dismissed in exchange for his guilty plea.
Not possessing firearms was a condition of probation.
But Assistant Federal Public Defender Eugene Ohm wrote that, within days of his sentencing hearing, Mileur saw a moose on his property. Moose can be dangerous, the Washington, D.C.-based lawyer wrote, citing two commercial websites.
“Mr. Mileur thus respectfully requests that the conditions of his probation be modified so that he may defend himself and his property against potential moose on his property,” Ohm wrote.
He included two photos of Mileur’s backyard moose.
Federal prosecutors oppose the request. They wrote that Mileur lives in a suburban neighborhood, not the wilds, and that moose rarely need to be shot in self-defense.
“Many residents … consider a visiting backyard moose to be a pleasurable diversion; a cause to pull out a camera and boast to friends and neighbors when a particularly majestic specimen appears,” they wrote.
The question is pending before U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss.
Mileur was arrested after someone called an FBI hotline to report that he’d posted video and photos on Facebook showing himself inside the Capitol during the riot.
His attorney did not respond to an emailed interview request for this story. But the sentencing briefs shed more light on the case. They say that Mileur, an Air Force veteran who installs rain gutters, was on vacation in Baltimore on Jan. 6, visiting a cousin. They decided to go to then-President Donald Trump’s rally protesting his election loss, but they arrived too late and instead went to the Capitol.
By their own account, they were among the first throng to enter the building from the East Plaza of the Capitol.
The riot interrupted the certification of the Electoral College vote.
The judge also ordered Mileur to pay $500 to compensate for damage to the Capitol Building.
U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola joined host Lori Townsend on “Talk of Alaska” for a discussion about the issues facing Alaskans on April 4, 2023 (Matt Faubion/AKPM)Congresswoman Mary Peltola declined again Tuesday to pass judgment on the case against former President Donald Trump.
“I personally feel like, as a member of the legislative branch, it’s not really my place to comment on things in the judicial branch,” she said on Talk of Alaska, a weekly call-in show produced by Alaska Public Media.
Trump pleaded not guilty in a New York courtroom to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Peltola said she trusts that the case against Trump will be decided fairly in court. But she says the loud ruckus outside the court today discouraged her.
“I think it’s a bleak day for Americans, because this is just one more divisive issue,” she said. And we’re such a deeply divided country.”
Two callers asked about gun violence and banning assault rifles. Peltola reiterated her support of the Second Amendment. She says she’s open to solutions but is leery of supporting bills that don’t have a chance of passing.
When news of the indictment broke last week, Alaska’s two U.S. senators issued statements, before the charges were made public. Sen. Dan Sullivan, like many other Republicans in Congress, denounced the prosecutor and said he didn’t have “credible, airtight evidence” of a serious crime. Sen. Lisa Murkowski remained more neutral.
This 2019 aerial photo provided by ConocoPhillips shows an exploratory drilling camp at the proposed site of the Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope. (ConocoPhillips)ConocoPhillips can begin construction immediately on the Willow project in the western Arctic, a federal judge ruled Monday.
U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason denied requests for an injunction that would have stopped the company from working in the final weeks of the winter construction season, which will likely end in late April, when the tundra becomes too soft for heavy equipment to travel on.
Environmental groups and local residents who oppose the project filed two lawsuits last month, claiming the decision to allow ConocoPhillips to develop its leases in the National Petroleum Reserve was made contrary to environmental laws.
Those cases are still pending. But the judge declined to stop work on Willow in the meantime, saying the plaintiffs did not convince her that the company’s winter construction plans would cause serious and irreparable harm.
Her decision frees ConocoPhillips to embark on its plan to build ice and gravel roads, open a gravel mining site and begin hauling and dumping gravel in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Noise and vibration from blasting at the mine site won’t cause permanent harm, the judge wrote.
The Wilderness Society, one of the groups that is suing, issued a statement vowing to continue to fight the project.
The Alaska Legislature is more than halfway through its regular session, and as with many recent sessions, discussions largely center on the state’s finances, while a number of social issues have come up as well. Alaska Public Media’s Kavitha George reports.
Sen. Dan Sullivan in Anchorage in July 2021. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media)U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan issued a full-throated denouncement of New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his decision to indict Donald Trump.
“Any criminal indictment of a former president should involve a serious crime with credible, airtight evidence,” Sullivan said in an emailed statement Friday morning. “From numerous press reports, this sealed indictment fails this test. Now, a local partisan prosecutor, well known for being soft on violent crime, has moved our country into banana republic territory — a sad day for our nation. The American people will see through this abuse of the rule of law.”
Sullivan’s criticism is in line with many other Republicans in Congress but also notable since the charges haven’t been made public and no one outside of the grand jury process has seen the evidence against the former president.
Sullivan’s statement also illustrates how thoroughly his position on Trump has changed. In 2016, he called for Trump to step down from the presidential ticket when the Access Hollywood tape emerged of Trump speaking crudely about grabbing women. Sullivan called it “reprehensible” and considered it proof Trump was unfit to be a national leader.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski responded more neutrally to word of Trump’s indictment.
“No one is above the law in this country, but everyone deserves a fair legal process,” she said in a written statement, adding that the case is unprecedented and must be handled with utmost integrity.
“Instead of rushing to individual judgment, we must also evaluate the evidence as it becomes available and use it to inform our opinions and statements about what is actually happening,” Murkowski said.
Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola made it clear she’s holding the matter at arm’s length.
“I am aware of the indictment that has been issued against former President Trump and will entrust the legal system to adjudicate this matter,” Peltola said in a written statement. “As a member of the legislative branch, I will continue to focus on advocating for Alaskans in Congress.”
The indictment against Trump is expected to be unsealed Tuesday, when Trump appears in court for the first time in the case.
Ted Stevens attends the commissioning of the USS Alaska in 1986. (U.S. Navy)By the time U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens left office in 2009, he had amassed a huge collection of documents, enough to fill 4,800 boxes. Now that collection has found its final resting place, at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Stevens’ widow, Catherine Stevens, the Ted Stevens Foundation and the university made the announcement this month.
“It was always Sen. Stevens’s desire to have the collection go to the university. He really wanted his papers to be open to the public,” said Karina Waller, executive director of the Ted Stevens Foundation, which has been archiving and organizing the collection for years. “Obviously, as a student of history, he knew that understanding our history was important in informing decisions that we make today and in the future.”
Before Stevens died in a 2010 plane crash, he agreed to deposit his papers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Waller says he always wanted them to be in Anchorage, but when he was preparing to leave the Senate, UAA didn’t have room.
Now, UAA Chancellor Sean Parnell says the plan is to create an Alaska Leaders Archive at the university’s Consortium Library.
Beyond the documents, photos and videos, Waller said the Foundation also has a warehouse full of Stevens’ memorabilia, like awards the senator received and books he kept at home and at the office. The university doesn’t have space for them, Waller said, but she’s hoping the archive will take some of the more historical objects, like a pen President Richard Nixon used to sign the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971.
The university still needs time to prepare a space for the papers. Waller figures the conveyance of the papers is about a year away.
Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola in the halls of the Capitol in January. (Liz Ruskin/Alaska Public Media)While the Nashville school shooting has some congressional Democrats renewing the call for a ban on weapons like the AR-15, Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola spoke Tuesday of her support for the Second Amendment.
“I just appreciate the opportunity to put a plug in for the many, many, many Americans who are responsible gun owners,” Peltola said at a subcommittee hearing of the House Natural Resources Committee.
The subject she was responding to was the Pittman-Robertson Act, a 1937 law that taxes guns and ammunition and sends the revenue to the states for hunter education, shooting ranges and wildlife conservation.
Gun ranges, Peltola said at the hearing, give kids a chance to learn gun safety, and to be ethical hunters.
“You look at some of the tragedies that are occurring, and those aren’t hunters, those aren’t kids that have grown up with hunting and the good values that, I think, hunting and hunting families provide,” said Peltola, who was raised in western Alaska on subsistence hunting and fishing. “So I just … like the opportunity to give a plug for Second Amendment rights and good values.”
Peltola is a Democrat serving her first full term. Her predecessor, Don Young, was a fierce protector of the Second Amendment and a board member of the National Rifle Association.
Peltola has struck a more moderate tone on gun control, saying during the campaign that she supports “common sense” gun rules and a bipartisan committee to propose new legislation to Congress. As with many of the moderate positions she taken, her stance on firearms disappoints some of the Alaskans who voted for her.
Juneau retiree Ben Muse got a letter Monday from Peltola’s office – a response to a letter he sent weeks ago, asking her to support a ban on AR-15-style weapons.
“It was very vague,” Muse said. “She sort of did some hand-waving about the Second Amendment.”
Peltola wrote that she supports encouraging safe gun storage and enforcing laws already on the books, as well as prioritizing behavioral health.
As you know, three nine-year-olds were shot to death today, along with three adults, at a school near Nashville.
Oddly, today my representative chose to send me this in response to an email I'd sent in early February, urging her to support a ban on AR-15 style weapons. pic.twitter.com/jCE22JoXm4
— Ben Muse (@benmuse) March 28, 2023
Muse, dissatisfied, posted the letter on Twitter. He said he doesn’t regret voting for Peltola. But her letter hit him hard, especially coming on the same day as the Nashville school shooting.
“I understand the need to balance, to compromise in a state like this, the different interests. And sometimes compromise involves compromising on things that are painful to compromise on,” he said. “But the letter she sent me was just totally inadequate to the day.”
Peltola’s position on guns isn’t wholly satisfying to Second Amendment advocates either. The Gun Owners of America lobby gave her a D rating last year.
Workers inspect pollock offloaded at Unalaska’s UniSea processing plant in 2018. (Sarah Hansen/KUCB)Gov. Mike Dunleavy has nominated an executive at Coastal Villages Region Fund as his top choice to serve on the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council.
Ryuichi “Rudy” Tsukada is the chief operating officer at Coastal Villages. That’s one of six western Alaska nonprofits that own catch shares in the Bering Sea fisheries, through the Community Development Quota program. Tsukada’s employer also owns a Bering Sea factory trawler.
The nomination, if approved by the U.S. secretary of Commerce, would continue the tradition of seating members on the North Pacific council with roots in the pollock industry, which the council manages.
The selection disappointed subsistence advocates and small-boat fishermen who are calling for more diversity of experience on the council.
Dunleavy, in his nomination letter, said the state makes an effort to seek out women, people of color and people from historically underrepresented communities. He said Tsukada is known in sportfishing circles in Southcentral Alaska for helping to popularize kayak angling – fishing for halibut and salmon from a kayak.
The Magnuson-Stevens Act requires the governor to nominate a preferred candidate as well as two alternate nominees. Dunleavy proposed two directors from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game as alternates.
Pete Kaiser with two of his eight dogs who raced to Nome. (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media)Eddie Burke Jr. at the Rainy Pass checkpoint (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media)Alaska Native mushers took the podium in the 2023 Iditarod, with the Knik Kid, Ryan Redington, winning his first championship and Bethel’s Pete Kaiser and Aniak’s Richie Diehl mushing into second and third place. The race’s top 10 were all into Nome by Wednesday morning, and we have an update on Rookie of the Year honors, as well as three Dogs of the Day, two listener questions and a story about collecting dog pee. Also: This’ll do it for Season 7 of the Iditapod. Thanks for coming along with us on this thousand-mile journey!
RELATED: Kaiser and Diehl round out ‘almost unheard of’ all Alaska Native Iditarod podium
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Ryan Redington and his mom, Barbara, hug at the finish line in Nome on Tuesday, March 14, 2023. (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media)The 40-year-old Ryan Redington has won his first Iditarod and the first championship for the Redington family, on his 16th try (and after six previous scratches). “I’ve just been on pins and needles,” said his mom, Barb, at the finish line. We’ll hear Redington’s finish itself in this episode, and from Alaska Public Media’s Lex Treinen about the finish and how Redington arrived there first. The dog friends that did the leading into Nome — Sven and Ghost — are our obvious picks for Dogs of the Day. And we have a listener question about dog-human friends, with a fun answer from a friendly musher.
RELATED: Redington notches family’s first Iditarod victory, a childhood dream
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Richie Diehl arrives with his team in Unalakleet on March 12, 2023. (Ben Matheson/AKPM)Ryan Redington has a secure hold on first place in the 2023 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, heading into the final 100 miles of trail. Meanwhile, one rookie musher had some trouble holding onto his dog sled, after falling asleep, falling off and getting a fortuitous lift. We have a listener question, not about losing a dog team, but about losing stuff along the Iditarod Trail. And it’s a twofer of Dogs of the Day: Riley Dyche’s smart and mellow Elway and Mike Williams Jr.’s smart and hyper Viper.
RELATED: 3 Alaska Native mushers lead the charge to Iditarod finish line
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CD5, ConocoPhillips’ first oil development within the boundaries of NPR-A. (Elizabeth Harball/Alaska’s Energy Desk)The Biden administration says it intends to seek “maximum protection” for sensitive areas of the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska, though it hasn’t yet said whether it will grant a permit for Willow, ConocoPhillips’ massive project in the NPR-A.
Multiple news agencies, citing unnamed sources, report that the administration will approve the permit. If so, the unusual Sunday night announcement of new Arctic protections seems aimed at softening the blow to Willow opponents. Environmental advocates and younger voters are urging the administration to move the country away from fossil fuels to avoid a catastrophic climate crisis.
Several conservation groups responded immediately to say the protections are good but don’t outweigh the impact of granting the Willow permit.
“No matter what they’re doing with all of these protections, in terms of the special areas or the offshore drilling, it’s not enough if they’re going to permit Willow,” said Karlin Itchoak, Alaska director for The Wilderness society.
The announcement says the administration will propose a new rule seeking additional protection for 13 million acres – more than half the refuge – that are already considered to have high natural and historical value.
It’s not clear if any of the limits will apply to the 2.5 million acres that are already under lease in the NPR-A.
Willow has widespread support from Alaska’s political and business establishment. It’s been a top priority of Alaska’s congressional delegation. The Alaska Legislature passed a unanimous resolution asking the Biden administration to approve it. Support is particularly strong in the North Slope Borough. The borough and local governments in the region would gain millions of dollars a year in payments and taxes.
At peak, Willow would boost Alaska’s oil production by 40% over today’s output. It’s projected to remain in operation for 30 years.
The green section show the area President Obama put off-limits to oil and gas drilling in 2016. President Biden proposes to withdraw the area in brown from consideration as well. (Map: BOEM)The tribe and city of Nuiqsut, the nearest community to Willow, oppose the project. They cite concerns about pollutants, industrial noise and disruption to the wildlife central to their subsistence way of life.
The administration’s announcement also says President Joe Biden will use executive authority to withdraw 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea from potential offshore oil and gas leases. In 2016, President Barack Obama removed nearly the entire Beaufort and Chukchi seas from consideration for leasing. Biden’s action would remove the remaining section – a strip of ocean near the NPR-A.
John Suter sits in his dining room in Chugiak. (Rashah McChesney/KTOO)In this extended interview, we hear more from John Suter, an Iditarod finisher who famously had a team that included poodles. Suter ran the Iditarod with poodles in 1988, ’89, ’90 and ’91, finishing each year ahead of other teams racing more traditional sled dogs.
RELATED: The champ has scratched. Long live the champ.
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Brent Sass speaks with checker and Iditarod veteran Lev Shvarts in Iditarod on March 9, 2023. (Ben Matheson/Alaska Public Media)Reigning Iditarod champion Brent Sass has scratched from this year’s race, due to what race officials described as “periodontal health” issues. So 31 teams remained in the race Saturday, and in this episode we hear from the chase pack-turned lead pack about how they were feeling about heading up the Yukon River, plus more from the top rookies in this year’s race. We have a powerhouse Dog of the Day with a funny, uh, pungent name, and a listener question about sled dog breeds that led us to the famous poodle musher.
Select audio compliments of Iditarod Insider
RELATED: Reigning Iditarod champ Brent Sass drops out of race over health concerns
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Pete Kaiser arrives in Iditarod on March 9, 2023. (Ben Matheson/Alaska Public Media)Iditarod teams are passing through the village checkpoint of Anvik and onto the Yukon River. We have that, as well as stories from earlier on the trail about how mushers were setting their teams up for these runs earlier in the checkpoint of Iditarod and about the tiny village of Takotna reopening as an Iditarod checkpoint this year, after closing down due to COVID. Then there’ll be an update from Jason Mackey about carrying his brother Lance Mackey’s ashes along the trail, a Mackey Dog of the Day named COVID and a listener question about what the mushers are listening to, if they’re listening to anything at all, aside from, you know, dog feet and sled runners.
RELATED: Jessie Holmes wins Iditarod’s First Musher to the Yukon Award
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Ryan Reddington leaves Takotna on Wednesday evening after taking his 24-hour rest. (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media)In this episode, we hear from Iditarod mushers in the midst of their required 24-hour layovers and from our current Red Lantern musher. We also have a chat with a former top 10 musher who’s returning to the race and running a team of mostly rookie dogs, plus a look at the Iditarod’s new pilot program for tracking dropped dogs. And as always we have our Dog of the Day — not a new dog but a dog who got a new name — and a listener question with answers from several mushers this time. (Hint: This one might make you hungry).
RELATED: It’s eat, rest and repeat as Iditarod teams take their 24-hour stops
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Dan Kaduce approaches Nikolai. Kaduce arrived with two dogs in his sled, which he left with veterinarians. He said the run from Rohn was one of the hardest he’d had in a decade. (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media)Iditarod mushers are making decisions about where to stop for their mandatory 24-hour rests, some opting to take that break earlier than planned, as the teams continue to contend with warm weather. The village of Nikolai is also fully open to visitors for the first time in three years of COVID-19 restrictions, and that’s where some mushers were dealing with busted sleds and their own bruised bodies. In this episode, we also get into how the race shapes up after those 24-hour layovers and how the weather is expected to change for the cooler. Plus, we have a speedy Dog of the Day, Matt Failor’s Mach 10, who’s learning to slow down, plus a listener question, a musher answer and a follow-up to yesterday’s question about adopting retired sled dogs.
RELATED: After mud and moguls, Iditarod teams recover in Nikolai
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Eddie Burke Jr. snacks on Kuskokwim River dried salmon. Jessie Holmes received the salmon from the Alexie family in Bethel and passed some on to Burke. Burke says he also enjoys sweets. “I just ate a couple packages of Oreos and some Reese’s,” he said. (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media)Iditarod teams are contending with warm weather in the thousand-mile race, many choosing to run in the cool of night as much as possible. We’ll talk about that in this episode, plus a little about what other sports some mushers have participated in outside of mushing. We have another Dog of the Day — this time, a trusty leader named JoAnna — and, as always, a listener question.
Select audio compliments of Iditarod Insider
RELATED: Iditarod mushers cope with warm temperatures as they arrive at Alaska Range
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For more Iditarod coverage visit alaskapublic.org/Iditarod and click here to subscribe to our free Iditarod newsletter, sent daily during the race. Also, listen to our prior episodes of the Iditapod at alaskapublic.org/Iditapod or wherever you get your podcasts.
KatieJo Deeter’s leaders appear to be in good spirits in the race chute in Willow for the official start of the 51st Iditatrod. (Elyssa Loughlin/Alaska Public Media)Iditarod sled dog teams are into the first 200 miles of trail, after the race clock started ticking Sunday. Mushers are pacing their dogs and there’s a lot of leapfrogging going on out there, as they follow their own run-rest schedules. In this episode, we have a look at the competitiveness of the small field, and we have our Dog of the Day — a big boy named Boomer — as well as a listener question about day jobs, for those who do not list their fulltime occupation as “dog musher.”
RELATED: This year’s Iditarod field is the smallest in history. Could a bigger prize and more races boost interest?
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Slater (right) and his brother Pink are Brent Sass’s lead dogs. 7-year-old Slater led Sass’s team to victory last year. (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media)Iditarod mushers took their sled dog teams on an untimed, celebratory fun run from downtown Anchorage on the city’s trails, with hundreds of fans cheering along the way. We hear from mushers and fans – maybe the pitter patter of little dog feet – as well as a joyful bride, a grumpy bear, a curious moose (or three), a former Miss Alaska and her mom, who had a fox on her head, and more!
RELATED: Our 25 favorite photos from the 2023 Iditarod ceremonial start
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Tiny Dusty leaps into the air while leading her teammates. (Jennifer LaBar)That’s right, it’s Iditarod time, and we’re back with another season of Iditapod. In the first episode of our seventh season, host Casey Grove and trail reporters Lex Treinen and Ben Matheson discuss the smallest field in race history and how a quarter of the mushers in the 2023 Iditarod are rookies. We also recap last year’s race, talk about the legacy of the late four-time champion Lance Mackey and we even have a Dog of the Day, a spunky little leader named Dusty.
RELATED: The 2023 Iditarod starts this weekend. Here’s what to know.
[Check out more Iditarod coverage here and sign up four our new daily Iditarod newsletter here.]
Rep. Josiah Patkotak, I-Utqiaġvik, was among the Alaska Native leaders at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday to urge approve of the Willow oil drilling project. (Screen shot from livestream)The Biden administration is expected to announce soon whether it will approve the ConocoPhillips permit for Willow, a major oil drilling project in the National Petroleum Reserve.
Rallying for the project at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, Alaska Native leaders stood with the state’s congressional delegation and union representatives. They wore “Willow Yes” lapel stickers.
State Rep. Josiah Patkotak, I-Utqiaġvik, said revenues from the oil production will support rural communities and buy the fuel that makes subsistence whaling and hunting possible.
“When we talk about environmental justice and protecting the environment, us Alaska Natives, we’re part of that environment. We always have been and we always will be,” he said, at a press conference outside the Senate. “And that’s why it’s important to underscore the opportunities for a better quality of life, staying away from the third-world conditions that the generation immediately before me grew up in.”
Over its 30-year lifespan, Willow is projected to produce as much as $10 billion in revenue for the state and the North Slope Borough.
Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola said the administration should listen to her constituents, particularly the consensus opinion of the Inupiaq people of the Arctic.
“This is their region. This is their land,” she said. “This is about their sovereignty and their autonomy to go forward with their economic development, which will help the state of Alaska. It will help residents across our state.”
Environmental groups say approving the Willow project would be the wrong move for an administration committed to slowing climate change and moving to an economy based on renewable energy.
A decision could come as early as next week.
RELATED: What’s the Willow project? An explainer on the battle over the major Alaska oil proposal
Alaska Beacon reporter James Brooks covers the Alaska Legislature for the Alaska Beacon. (Courtesy of James Brooks)In Juneau, legislators are six weeks into their session. The big controversies so far are education funding and employee pensions and as always the size of the permanent fund dividend. Alaska News Nightly Host Pro Tempore Liz Ruskin interviewed Alaska Beacon reporter James Brooks to get a progress report.
This interview was lightly edited for clarity.
Liz Ruskin: James, is anything happening there at the Capitol? And how is the mood?
James Brooks: It’s actually pretty quiet in the Capitol this week. There’s a fair number of legislators who are headed out to Washington, D.C. this week in order to lobby support for the Willow oil project. It feels like we’re in the middle of the session. Legislators have had about 45 days now to get to know each other to get up to speed. Because remember: there’s a lot of new faces. More than a third of the legislators are new this year.
LR: Let’s discuss what the governor wants. Gov. Mike Dunleavy revealed a new budget plan in mid-February. What are the major elements there?
JB: Yeah, the governor has proposed a few budgetary solutions for some of the problems that Alaskans are seeing now. For example, the food stamp issues. There’s a lot of people who are going hungry right now, because they haven’t been able to get access to food stamp (SNAP) benefits. The governor has proposed funding for new workers to process those food stamp applications and move more quickly on that. He’s also proposing more funding for public defenders. (Providing attorneys for indigent defendants) is a constitutional requirement. But right now, it seems like some of those agencies might be falling short. He’s also proposed a Permanent Fund dividend of about $3,900 per person. At $2.5 billion, that’s the largest single item in the budget.
LR: Tell me about the proposed increase in per-student spending. Where’s that coming from?
JB: In the Capitol, we’ve heard a lot of presentations from school district officials, school superintendents, ordinary parents and teachers who have said that local schools are really suffering right now from the effects of inflation. School supplies, fuel and electricity, basic costs have gone up enormously for school districts. The state of Alaska pays much of the cost to run K-12 schools throughout the state, and one of the key components of that funding is what’s called the base student allocation. It’s how much the state pays school districts per student. There’s been a lot of talk about increasing that BSA, as it’s known, in order to compensate for inflation. We heard earlier this year that to match what schools received in 2015, the BSA would need to rise about $1,300. And that works out to more than $260 million statewide. So that’s a pretty big ask. There’s been some questions about whether the state is getting a good enough return on its money, particularly from Republican lawmakers who want more accountability measures. But we also heard today from Democrats and independents who noted that last year, the Legislature, at the urging of the governor, passed the Alaska Reads Act, which does impose some of those accountability measures but didn’t include much additional funding. And so they’re considering the BSA increase to be the second half of what’s needed.
LR: If you had to guess, where do you think the BSA increase will end up? Do you think a significant increase is realistic?
JB: I think the most likely scenario right now is that the Legislature includes a one-time bump in the budget, and any permanent increase seems like it would be an issue for next year.
LR: I was really struck by something Senate Finance co-chair Bert Stedman said when arguing that the state can’t afford a dividend of the size of the governor wants. He said: “We’re going to have to make a choice. Do we want to teach our kids to cash checks? Or do we want to teach them to read and write and do arithmetic?” Is that how it is, that increased education spending or any other big-ticket item will come at the expense of the dividend?
JB: It’s really turned into a tug-of-war. And you’re not wrong, because legislators so far have been unwilling to consider tax increases or new revenue that could be done quickly. So if you’re looking at the problem for this year, it’s a tug-of-war between the dividend and every other priority the state has. So if you, for example, were to take the governor’s proposed $3,800 dividend and cut $1,000 off of that, you could have a fairly large dividend and cover both the BSA increase and the spending that’s been proposed already.
LR: Do you have a sense of whether lawmakers have made progress on resolving these big issues?
JB: I think for the first part of the session, the weeks that we’ve seen so far, legislators are getting their hands around the problems. I think in the days to come we’ll start to see them grapple with solutions, looking at what ideas will work best to fix the problems that they now have a better understanding of.
This interview was lightly edited for clarity.
The Anchorage VA clinic was named after Col. Mary Louise Rasmuson on Feb. 24, 2022. In the front row is Alaska’s congressional delegation and Veterans Affairs Sec. Denis McDonough, second from right. (Liz Ruskin/Alaska Public Media)A new VA clinic opened in Fairbanks Friday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, while in Anchorage, the VA Medical Center was officially renamed after Col. Mary Louise Rasmuson.
Rasmusson was one of the first members of the Women’s Army Corps and rose through the ranks to become its leader. Born Mary Louise Milligan in Pennsylvania in 1911, she married Anchorage banker Elmer Rasmuson in 1961 and soon retired to move to Alaska, where she was a supporter of the arts and countless civic organizations.
University of Alaska Anchorage Professor Vanessa Meade spoke at the dedication ceremony in the Anchorage clinic’s lobby. She recalled meeting Rasmuson in 2012, a few months before her death.
“At her home when we met her, she was 101 years old. She was completely dressed to the nines. Hair perfect. Just sitting there with such dignity,” Meade recalled.
Meade said Rasmuson helped integrate Black women into the Women’s Army Corps and women into the regular Army decades later.
“When I asked her what was the best part about her service? She said, ‘why, being the boss, of course,'” Meade said.
Veterans Affairs Sec. Denis McDonough was on hand for the naming ceremony, as were all three members of Alaska’s congressional delegation.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she hopes having one of the few VA facilities in the country that is named for a woman will give Alaska’s female veterans a greater sense of belonging.
The renaming took an act of Congress. President Joe Biden signed the bill last month.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski addresses the Alaska Legislature on Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2023. (Gavel Alaska staff/KTOO)U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski listed a string of accomplishments in her address Wednesday to a joint session of the Alaska Legislature, as she does every year.
Murkowski spoke about the millions of dollars coming to the state from the federal infrastructure law, and from the Alaska-bound earmarks — “nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars” — she requested in the yearly appropriations bills.
And then she pivoted.
“It’s a beautiful day in Juneau. And as sunny a day as it is, there’s also this next part of my speech, which is perhaps not so sunny,” she said, adding that she previewed the speech for her son, who called it the “tough love” portion.
She spoke of a decade of outmigration and economic stagnation in Alaska, as well as a slower recovery from COVID-19 than almost any other state.
“Alaska needs to be the place where people want to move to and want to stay, because they have good jobs that support their families, they have a good place to live, they have good schools, where their kids can excel, they have a quality of life that cannot be matched anywhere else,” she said. “Where we take care of our fellow Alaskans when they hit rough patches.”
Murkowski, 65, has been in the U.S. Senate for 20 years. This was her first address to the Legislature as the senior member of the state’s congressional delegation, and she strayed more than she usually does into the Legislature’s remit. The theme of her address seemed aimed at Republican lawmakers who are unwilling to solve the state’s fiscal crisis, except by shrinking government services.
Murkowski challenged lawmakers to have a vision and reach for it, particularly in the area of transportation. She invoked former Rep. Jeannette James of North Pole, who sought a rail link to Canada, and her own father, former Gov. Frank Murkowski, a champion of “big ideas” like rail extensions.
“We need to be thinking big about how we move our people, our resources, our freight, our trash,” she said. “Let’s not lower our sights here.”
She told lawmakers they can’t rely solely on federal money and need to step up with the state’s share of the cost.
“I hope I didn’t step on anybody’s toes with some of my perhaps more direct comments,” she said as she wrapped up. “I didn’t necessarily stay in my lane today.”
A classic ice dam has formed on the roof of this Airport Heights home in Anchorage. (Valerie Kern/Alaska Public Media)In Anchorage, snow is piled high on many rooftops and homeowners are wondering if they should shovel it.
Acting Anchorage Building Official Ross Noffsinger said the snow load in the city is about 60% to 80% of the designed maximum for residential roofs.
“We really wouldn’t be recommending getting up and shoveling a roof right now, given the potential to fall off the roof,” he said.
Still, some homeowners might want to consider it, said longtime home inspector Dave Mortensen from Discovery Home Inspection.
“The snow storms have produced so much snow at once that roofs that had never performed poorly before are performing poorly now,” Mortensen said.
Mortensen said owners of old houses could have cause for concern about the weight on their roofs. That goes for homes built before building code enforcement began in the 1970s or with recent changes to insulation or attic ventilation, which can cause a roof to hold more snow than it used to.
Anchorage residents work to clear a roof after almost 2 feet of snow hit the city on Dec. 12, 2022. (Elyssa Loughlin/Alaska Public Media)For homes built in the 1980s or later, the issue isn’t so much the weight as the ice accumulating on the eaves. Atmospheric conditions have been ideal for ice dams, Mortensen said.
Ice dams occur when the bottom layer of snow on a roof melts. Water runs under the snowpack until it reaches the edge, where it freezes. Ice dams have been building this winter, blocking more snowmelt from draining and forcing it up under shingles.
Homeowners across Anchorage report leaking in their homes.
Mortensen said removing snow above an ice dam is a good idea, to halt the growth.
“If you can stop that pattern by removing that fuel, basically then the ice dam will stop in that area,” he said.
Throwing granulated ice melt on the ice can help, Mortensen said, to give a path for the water to run down. He cautions against using metal tools, or scraping down to the shingles, to avoid damage to roofing material.
If homeowners want to remove snow because of problematic ice dams, the Anchorage Office of Emergency Management warns to beware of where the snow and ice will land. The office recommends doing the work with a partner or consulting with a licensed and bonded professional.
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Congresswoman Mary Peltola addresses the Alaska Legislature on Friday. (Andrés Javier Camacho/KTOO)Congresswoman Mary Peltola returned to the Alaska House Chamber Friday and told her former colleagues that their reputation for bipartisanship is a source of awe in the U.S. Capitol.
Peltola said she was at first confused when members of Congress and reporters would ask her about the “Alaska model.” She was happy to learn they were referring to the Legislature’s long experience with bipartisan coalition leadership.
“I think people asked me about this Alaska model because they realize that business as usual in D.C. isn’t working anymore,” she said. “Slowly and surely, the partisan rancor from recent years is losing its appeal. People are remembering that politics first and foremost should be about fixing things and not just launching cable news careers or racking up retweets.”
This was Peltola’s first address to state lawmakers since becoming the only Alaska Native person elected to the U.S. House. The speech was an opportunity to shape the image she wants to convey statewide as the newest member of the state’s congressional delegation.
Peltola is a moderate Democrat in a U.S. House now led by Republicans. Bipartisanship is her motto, and this speech was on-brand. She kept it to 16 minutes – much shorter than the U.S. senators usually run – and devoted a lot of that time to the value of working across the aisle.
She passed along wisdom she said she learned watching former Alaska House Speaker Ben Grussendorf when he was negotiating the final finance bill of the year.
“There were people who wanted, you know, revenge, in these end-of-session deals,” she recounted. “And he said, ‘No, no. Everybody has to save face.’ And I think that’s a real valuable lesson. It really stuck with me as a legislator.”
Peltola served in the Legislature from 1999 to 2009, as a Democrat from Bethel. She helped revive the Bush Caucus, a bloc in the Legislature that pressed for the needs of rural Alaska.
She is also credited with the establishment of “kuspuk Fridays.” Legislators and staff in the state Capitol still wear kuspuks – cotton hooded jackets with front pockets –to mark the end of the work week and give a nod to the Native people of Western Alaska, where kuspuks originate.
After her speech, she told reporters she’d rather be remembered in Juneau for more significant deeds. But she said she’s come to appreciate that kuspuk Fridays have helped change the culture of the Legislature and made rural residents feel welcome.
“I’ve heard stories of people who were scared and terrified to be here, and then felt a lot more comfortable when they saw that everyone had their kuspuks on,” she said. “So I’m thrilled that the tradition continues and to have been a part of it.”
Her predecessor in the U.S. House, the late Don Young, regularly met with legislators individually but passed up invitations to give a formal address.
Congresswoman Mary Peltola addresses the Alaska Legislature. (Andrés Javier Camacho/KTOO)
Art Matthias speaks to voters at an Alaskans for Honest Elections event on Feb. 16, 2023. (Elyssa Loughlin/Alaska Public Media)A few hundred people met at a south Anchorage church Thursday night to kick off a signature drive aiming to get rid of ranked choice voting and go back to the way Alaska used to elect candidates.
The new system, which Alaskans used for the first time last year, pairs an open primary with a general election that allows voters to rank up to four candidates.
Art Mathias, a longtime Anchorage resident and founder of Wellsprings Ministries, is a sponsor of the repeal effort. He told supporters that ranked choice puts the entire country at risk.
“Literally, seriously at risk,” he said. “If we don’t replace rank choice voting, we will never elect another conservative, and we will only have Outside corporations coming up and buying our candidates and buying our elections.”
Mathias said he’s donated $100,000 to the effort, and the campaign has raised $400,000 from out of state.
Fans of ranked choice say it empowers citizens to vote their conscience, without worrying that two candidates they like will split the vote.
The system tends to favor consensus candidates and lessen the power of political parties. It’s not clear, though, that ranked choice puts conservatives at a disadvantage to liberals. Last year, Alaska re-elected its Republican governor and elected 32 Republicans to the 60-seat Legislature.
Ranked choice changed the outcome in only three Alaska races. In two of those, the tabulations boosted Republicans. In all other races, the candidate who got the most first-choice votes kept the lead, even after the votes that went to losing candidates were redistributed according to the voter’s choices.
Mathias and other speakers at the kickoff event put the repeal campaign in culture-war terms, mocking the left for its embrace of transgender people.
“They keep preaching that a man can get pregnant until we believe it. You believe it?” Mathias asked, drawing a chorus of nos. “How absurd can this be? And we can’t let it go. We got to stay engaged. We got to get engaged, or it’s gonna get worse. How many pronouns do you call yourself?”
Other speakers included Republican fundraiser Michael Alfaro, a North Carolinian who found success raising money for Donald Trump’s presidential runs. Alfaro had said former Gov. Sarah Palin was to be the keynote speaker but she didn’t attend. Her former campaign advisor, Jerry Ward, said she was on a flight and couldn’t arrive in time.
Organizers will need 27,000 signatures to get the initiative on the 2024 ballot.
A poll by Alaska Survey Research last month found a majority of Alaska voters would repeal ranked choice if the question is put to them in a future election.
…on a future statewide ballot that proposes the repeal of Ranked Choice Voting and a return to the prior election process in Alaska, would you vote yes or no to repeal Ranked Choice Voting?
Yes 53%
No 47%2/5
— Ivan Moore (@IvanMoore1) January 26, 2023
ConocoPhillips has proposed developing the Willow oil and gas prospect in the northeastern corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.(IBureau of Land Management)Alaska’s U.S. senators warn that half measures won’t suffice as they campaign to get federal approval for ConocoPhillips’ Willow drilling project in the western Arctic.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski told reporters Tuesday that the Biden administration may try to reduce the plan to two drill sites to ensure that it won’t be economically viable.
“So in effect, (they will) be able to have it both ways: The project doesn’t proceed – satisfies the environmental community – but they can say, Well, we approved it,” she said. “That is not acceptable. That cannot happen.”
ConocoPhillips originally proposed five drill sites west of the community of Nuiqsut, in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
The Bureau of Land Management has recommended an option that includes three drilling sites, or about 219 wells. But BLM’s parent agency, the Interior Department, immediately issued a statement saying it wasn’t required to approve that preferred alternative.
Sen. Dan Sullivan interprets that as a signal that Interior wants to curtail the project.
The online press conference was arranged through a public relations firm working for Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat , a pro-development advocacy group funded by the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and the North Slope Borough. The group’s president, Nagruk Harcharek, said the 24 member organizations represent the leadership of the region.
“Our organization passed the resolution unanimously to support the Willow project, which is clear that there’s majority consensus on the North Slope,” he said.
National environmental groups oppose Willow. They say the project would threaten wildlife in the area and that the fuel produced will accelerate climate change. Other opponents include the city and tribe of Nuiqsut. They’ve written a letter opposing Willow, while Kuukpik, the village corporation of Nuiqsut, supports the drilling project that the BLM selected as its preferred alternative.
The Alaska Capitol in 2021. (Nat Herz/Alaska Public Media)Gov. Mike Dunleavy banned the use of the social media app TikTok on all state-owned devices Friday.
In a memo sent to state commissioners and executive staff, Dunleavy cited national security concerns about the app, which is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance. Last month the FBI warned Congress that the Chinese government could potentially use TikTok to collect American users’ data or control their devices.
Dunleavy spokesperson Jeff Turner wrote in an email that the state is not aware of any security breaches caused by TikTok at this time. He said the governor issued the ban as a “preemptive measure.”
According to the press release, all state entities are banned from downloading or using the TikTok app on state-owned devices or visiting the TikTok website on the state network. The governor’s announcement did not mention any specific enforcement measures for keeping TikTok off of government devices. However, Turner said the state’s information technology office regularly monitors network activity and security to enforce such policies.
Last month President Joe Biden approved a similar ban on TikTok on federal devices. Dunleavy joins more than a dozen Republican governors who have also passed TikTok bans within state governments.
President Donald Trump attempted to ban the app completely in the U.S., but was blocked in court two years ago. Republican lawmakers introduced a bill to revive the nationwide ban in November.
Larry Muehlhausen removes snow from his driveway in East Anchorage on Dec. 12, 2022. (Valerie Kern/Alaska Public Media).Last month was the wettest December on record in Anchorage.
The milestone is driven at least in part by climate change, said climatologist Rick Thoman with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy.
As the oceans warm, more moisture evaporates into the air. Then, when the atmospheric conditions are right for a storm, that increased evaporation results in “heavier and heavier precipitation,” Thoman said.
That’s in part why Anchorage saw 41.2 inches of snow last month, capping off its wettest year on record, according to the National Weather Service.
Juneau also recorded its wettest year on record in 2022. From the Interior to the Aleutians, many other towns in Alaska have broken precipitation records in recent years as well.
Thoman said, overall, total yearly snowfall levels in Alaska are remaining steady, but the season for snow is getting shorter — rain is stretching later into the fall, and breakup season is coming earlier. He said this trend of concentrated, heavy snow in the core winter months will likely continue.
“With the warming world, with warming oceans, this threat of gigantic snowstorms or repeat snowstorms as we had in Anchorage last month — the odds of that occurring go up,” Thoman said.
While December 2022 was the wettest on record for Anchorage, it was only the second snowiest. The snowfall record was set in December 1955 when the city received 41.6 inches. But Thoman said the snow that fell last month was much heavier and wetter than the snow that fell in 1955.
In a year of extremes, Anchorage also recorded some of its driest months on record in the spring and early summer.
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Rep. Mary Peltola was the only member of Congress wearing a kuspuk on the first day of the 2023 session. (Liz Ruskin/Alaska Public Media)Alaska’s lone member of the U.S. House, Rep. Mary Peltola, was to be sworn in for a full term in Congress on Tuesday, but nothing can happen in the House until the members elect a speaker.
That didn’t happen. All a majority could agree on was to adjourn and try again Wednesday.
Peltola, a Democrat, sees it as a sign of the times.
“It shows how divided, even within a party, we are as Americans,” she said just off the House floor. “And that that’s a concern.”
The ball is in the Republican court. They have a slim majority, but 20 hard-right Republicans voted for someone other than front-runner Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. That blocks him from the speaker’s chair and prevents all other members from taking their oath.
Peltola wasn’t sure at that moment — at the start of a new Congress and still unsworn — whether she was a member of Congress or not.
“That is a really good question,” she said. “I think the incumbents must be. But I don’t know. I think that is a question for a parliamentarian.”
Whatever the legal answer, she was wearing a pin signifying her membership in the 118th Congress. Peltola took a seat in the back of the House Chamber and, like all Democrats, just kept voting for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.
Jeffries didn’t have a majority either. So, after three rounds of voting the first day of the new Congress ended in a stalemate.
It’s been more than a century since a vote for speaker took more than one round.
“This is historic,” Peltola said, “because even 100 years ago, it went to two rounds, and then they adjourned. And this I believe can go as many rounds as people can take.”
She figures it’ll eventually end when Republicans iron out their differences and elect a speaker.
Peltola, in a black kuspuk and Yup’ik-style fur boots, was in demand in the Capitol hallways. A delegation of Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians stopped her to network. A national reporter admired her boots and asked whether Peltola thinks Democrats would end the stalemate by voting for a Republican speaker.
“I’m sticking with the caucus, at this point,” she said.
A pair of Hakeem Jeffries staffers were delighted to bump into her. They pumped her hand and congratulated her. Repeatedly. They invited her to a reception room near the Chamber where she could fuel up with mini quiches and other finger food. Yes, they said, by all means bring your kids.
The kids! She hadn’t seen them in hours. Five of them had come to Washington to watch their mom be sworn in. Instead, they were waiting in Peltola’s office, two of them in U.S. Coast Guard uniforms.
She needn’t have worried. At her new office, in the Cannon building across the street from the Capitol, spirits were high. The kids — who range in age from teen to adult — were yucking it up with each other, the staff and a stream of well-wishers.
Her chief of staff, Alex Ortiz, said he’s excited to have new staffers on board, including Elizabeth Othmer as the new legislative director and counsel. Othmer, from New Mexico, is among three new hires that aren’t from Alaska.
Ortiz said it’s often hard to find Alaskans, who love their state, willing to relocate to Washington, D.C. He said the new staffers have their own assets.
“The non-Alaskans we’ve hired are really, really experts on Capitol Hill and how the House works,” He said. They know “House policy and procedure and have a lot of policy expertise from their work in other congressional offices.”
And, Ortiz notes, Peltola still has staffers — including himself — who are Alaskans and worked for other members of the Alaska delegation.
On the other side of the Capitol, the first day in the Senate went entirely to plan. Sen. Lisa Murkowski took the oath of office for the fifth time. She was accompanied to the well of the Senate by her father, former Gov. and Sen. Frank Murkowski, as well as Sen. Dan Sullivan.
A 2019 photo of Rep. Don Young in his Capitol Hill office. He died in March, after 49 years in Congress. (Liz Ruskin/Alaska Public Media)Any day now, President Joe Biden is expected to sign into law a bill that renames a volcano on a small Aleutian Island after the late Congressman Don Young.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she knew Young’s softer side, as well as the reasons for his volatile reputation. She said she and U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan intentionally chose a volcano.
“As we were looking for something that might be fitting, we looked not only at mountains, but we looked at mountains that continue to blow their top to this very day,” she said.
The mountain is west of Adak, and comprises three volcanic cones. Its previous name, Mount Cerberus, was also named for a fierce creature. In Greek mythology, Cerberus was a hellhound — a three-headed dog that stood guard at the entrance to the underworld.
Besides the mountain, the bill names a federal building in Fairbanks and a job center in Palmer after Young.
Congresswoman Mary Peltola, who is finishing Young’s term in office, said Young would probably like knowing that his name is on a job center, uplifting future generations of workers.
“Don always spoke fondly of his time working construction in Alaska, driving a D8 Caterpillar bulldozer, and he always looked out for people who work with their hands,” she said on the House floor last week.
The bill passed both chambers with no opposition. Once Biden signs it, the Board on Geographic Names has 30 days to rename the mountain. Google Maps, though, isn’t waiting. It has already labeled the peak “Mt. Young.”
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Before leaving the Capitol for the year, Sen. Lisa Murkowski outlined the Alaska priorities in the spending bill the Senate passed. (Liz Ruskin/Alaska Public Media)The U.S. Senate passed a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill Thursday that had Sen. Lisa Murkowski brimming with happiness. She didn’t know where to start.
“There’s so much in this crazy omnibus,” she said shortly after the vote.
She was already wearing her coat. The spending bill is the last thing Congress passes before she and other lawmakers head for the airports to spend Christmas back home.
Her communications director was toting a thick sheaf of papers. They document Murkowski’s earmarks — or, as they’re known in Congress now, “congressionally directed spending allocations.”
“You’re going to get more text than a radio person really ever asks for,” Murkowski said, grinning broadly.
The legislation has more than 130 of her priorities, totaling nearly $500 million, all over the state. One of the smallest items: $100,000 for medical equipment in Bethel. The largest is $99 million for a fitness and training center at Fort Wainwright. Murkowski said it was the Army’s No. 1 unfunded priority. And Alaska service members are also going to have more spending money.
“The pay increase for our military, that’s going to be very appreciated. I can guarantee that,” she said. “Some of the military construction dollars are going to be significant.”
Murkowski’s earmarks were on a list she submitted months ago to the Appropriations Committee, of which she’s a senior member.
Outside of that list — but something she advocated for that’s in the bill – is $300 million to help people recover from fisheries disasters. Murkowski said it was the talk of every community she visited this year.
“Whether it’s the crash on the Yukon or the Kuskokwim, or what’s happening in the in the crab sector, just a level of desperation” has set in, she said. “And so to know that we’ve made some good headway here when it comes to to the fisheries disasters funding — I think that’s going to be important.”
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan was one of 29 Republican senators who voted no on the spending bill. He chooses not to make earmark requests, and his office did not respond to an interview request. In a statement, Sullivan said he likes much of the omnibus bill, which has several programs he worked on. But he said the process was opaque. The bill was negotiated between House and Senate leadership, and he had only 48 hours to read its 4,000 pages.
Sullivan also objects to the removal of one of his top priorities — the purchase of the Aiviq, a small icebreaker that was to be homeported in Juneau and serve until new Coast Guard icebreakers are built.
Murkowski said she, too, was disappointed that $150 million in icebreaker funding was removed at the last minute, behind closed doors. She said the money appears to have been diverted to fund security measures on the southern border.
“Because as we saw the diminishment of the funding over on the icebreaker side, we saw the plus-up on the border funding,” she said.
Since it’s the last train leaving the station, the omnibus spending bill also includes a host of other priorities beyond appropriations. Among them: a rewrite of the Electoral Count Act, to make it clear the vice president’s role in certifying the presidential election is ceremonial; the Pregnant Women’s Fairness Act; and a measure that guarantees workers the time and a clean place to express milk for their newborns.
The House is likely to pass the bill shortly, sending it to the president.
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Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers speaks during a rally outside the White House in 2017. Rhodes was convicted Nov. 29, 2022 of seditious conspiracy for a plot to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential win. (Susan Walsh/AP file photo)Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, who is awaiting sentencing for seditious conspiracy, was a witness for the defense Monday at a civil trial challenging whether Rep. David Eastman can serve in in the Alaska Legislature.
Eastman, R-Wasilla, is a member of the Oath Keepers, which experts in domestic terrorism describe as an anti-government militia that made itself appealing to white supremacists and antisemites. Rhodes, though, presented them as dedicated to peacekeeping and the U.S. Constitution.
“We had, thankfully, very few — but a few people who joined were actually racist,” Rhodes testified, “who, we found out later, discriminate along racial lines. And we kicked them out once we identified them.”
Rhodes testified by phone from a jail near Washington, D.C. He said he never ordered Oath Keepers to enter the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He said he told the members who did it was a stupid move, for two reasons.
“One, it was not our mission that day. And two, them doing that exposed us to persecution by political enemies, who have taken advantage of that to prosecute us,” Rhodes said. “And this is what’s happened to me. That’s where I’m at. That’s why I’m here in jail.”
Just then, the witness had to get off the phone.
“Hold on one second. The guard is here. Hold on …. I gotta get back to my cell,” he said.
Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy last month for his role leading up to the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. His actions, and the ideology of the Oath Keepers, are relevant to whether Eastman can hold office because of a previously untested disloyalty clause in the Alaska Constitution. It forbids anyone from holding office who belongs to a group calling for the violent overthrow of the government.
First Amendment issues abound in the case, brought by a former Eastman constituent and supporter, Randall Kowalke.
If the lawsuit is successful, the voters of Eastman’s district would not get the legislator a majority of them chose in the November election.
Eastman admits he has a lifetime membership in Oath Keepers. So the question Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna has to decide is whether the Oath Keepers advocated for concrete action intended to overthrow the government by force.
Eastman’s attorney, Joe Miller, asked Rhodes what he meant by some of his more incendiary comments.
“There’s been much ado made about some words that you’ve used in your communications, including the words ‘bloody civil war,’ and the prediction that that could come,” said Miller. “Did that have anything to do with the Insurrection Act or the invocation of the Insurrection Act?”
“Well,” Rhodes responded, “it’s my opinion that the left was engaged in open insurrection throughout 2020.”
Rhodes’ testimony from his cell was often hard to hear. He likened it to a concrete echo-chamber. His answer was that he wasn’t calling for “bloody civil war.” He said he meant that the action of leftists would require a serious government response.
Rhodes sought at every turn to portray his group as law-abiding. He said they provided security to speakers at then-President Trump’s rally on Jan. 6.
If he loses the appeal of his criminal conviction, he said he’ll have to resign from the group he founded because the bylaws say felons can’t be members.
His testimony continues on Tuesday.
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A Ridgelake Circle resident shovels his driveway on Wednesday,. (Alaska Public Media/ Matt Faubion)Anchorage is digging itself out from its third major snowstorm in less than two weeks. Residents are by no means new to snow, but the massive and historic amount of snowfall coating the city is making daily life harder, from delayed services and tricky road conditions, to navigating a massive amount of snow removal and questions like, when should you shovel your roof?
Here are answers to that question and 7 others about Anchorage’s snowpocalypse:
1. Should you shovel your roof?
If you’ve got 3 feet of snow or more, it’s probably a good idea, according to home inspector David Mortensen with Discovery Home Inspection.
Today’s building codes require roof structures to be able to withstand a weight of 40 pounds per square foot. But according to Mortensen, many older homes were built before building codes. As snow packs down or the weather fluctuates, the weight might become too much and cause a cave-in.
“So my concern would be older properties mostly,” he said. “If you have a trailer home or something built in the 1960s or 1950s then you might want to go ahead and shovel your roof.”
2. Are there other home safety concerns to be aware of?
Mortensen said it’s important to make sure any vents built into your house aren’t blocked by snow.
Plumbing vents, which allow air into a home plumbing system, can get blocked with snow and debris, and cause sinks to drain slowly. Mortensen said you might also notice a sewer gas odor, which is a good indication that your plumbing vents could be blocked.
Heating appliance vents are another type to look out for.
“A lot of times, your dryer vents are within 12 inches of the ground. So you get 3 feet of snow and now your dryer can’t vent,” Mortensen said.
With gas dryers or other heating units, Mortensen said blocked vents might cause a backdraft issue. In that case, harmful exhaust from the unit, including carbon monoxide, could flow back into the house.
Mortensaid said, at the very least, make sure there are fresh batteries in your carbon monoxide detector.
“Because that’s what’s gonna kill you in the middle of the night, is that carbon monoxide because the snow level has impacted your heating system in some way,” he said.
3. What should you do if your trash hasn’t been picked up?
Solid Waste Services said, as of Wednesday, about 20% of customers had experienced interruptions in trash and recycling service. If your trash wasn’t picked up, you can put out extra bags (three black bags or six white bags) on your next scheduled service day, at no additional charge.
“The snow hasn’t broken us, it just delayed us,” recycling coordinator Kelli Toth said in an email. “Our team is working hard to keep up, but the impact to our operations at the end of the day will not be catastrophic.”
Alaska Waste has a similar strategy for making up missed routes. An alert on the company website says they will collect trash and recycling on the next scheduled service day and that extra bags can be left next to the bins.
A van completely blanketed in snow on Monday. (Valerie Kern/Alaska Public Media)4. What’s going on with mail delivery?
The U.S. Postal Service canceled mail delivery on Monday, Dec. 12, due to “extraordinary circumstances,” said spokesperson James Boxrud. As a result, some customers may have seen a notification on their tracking webpage that said their mail was available to pick up at the post office. But, Boxrud said Wednesday, mail carriers are working to deliver that backlog of mail this week and are mostly caught up.
Boxrud said mail trucks are fitted with chains and plastic traction mats in case they get stuck in the snow. The postal service gives mail carriers ice cleats, hand warmers and body warmers to stay safe in snowy conditions.
Ultimately, Boxrud said, it’s up to individual carriers to decide if conditions are safe to deliver mail in an area of their route.
5. Why does the city aim for streets to be fully plowed in 84 hours? Isn’t that a long time to wait?
Right now, the city says it’s the best it can do.
“The 84-hour timeframe has been used over the last number of administrations,” said Hans Rodvik, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office. “I’m sure everyone would love for it to be much shorter, much faster. It just comes down to staffing and resources.”
Many of the fastest roads in Anchorage — like the Glen Highway, the Seward Highway and Minnesota Drive — are maintained and plowed by the state Department of Transportation. The Municipality of Anchorage takes care of smaller arteries like Lake Otis Parkway, 36th Avenue and Spenard Road.
Rodvik said the 84-hour clock only starts once those bigger city arteries and connector roads are taken care of.
“Those roads are focused on first to ensure that emergency vehicles can safely travel across town and commerce can happen … and then we move into the residential,” he said.
Rodvik said the city owns 30 graders, the big yellow construction vehicle-looking plows that are used to clear snow. Since the first snowstorm last week he said 25 to 29 of the graders have been operational at a given time. The remaining graders have been in a shop for routine maintenance.
The city has about 60 plow operators, Rodvik said, working 12 hours on, 12 hours off. He said they are still looking to hire more.
“Our crews take care of 1,500 miles of roads, 300 miles of sidewalks and 200 miles of alleyways. So, a significant amount of snow that has to be cleared and moved by roughly 60 guys,” Rodvik said.
A snowplow for the Municipality of Anchorage moves snow from a residential street in East Anchorage on Monday. (Valerie Kern/Alaska Public Media)6. How should I park?
As much as possible, try not to park on the street, to allow plows more access in neighborhoods, said Rodvik. And when shoveling or snowblowing, he reminded that it’s illegal to push snow out into the street. Any snow that falls on private property should stay there.
7. Is the city planning any snow removal for residential areas?
Yes. Rodvik said city crews, along with contractors, are planning to start hauling snow out of residential areas next week.
8. How much snow did we get?
In the last 11 days the National Weather Service recorded 41.1 inches of snow at its headquarters in West Anchorage, and even higher levels elsewhere in the city. That’s close to 30 inches more snow than Anchorage sees in an average December by this point.
Have more questions about what to do with all this snow? Email reporter Kavitha George at kgeorge@alaskapublic.org.
The Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. (Joey Mendolia/Alaska Public Media)Respiratory viruses have been threatening hospital capacity in Alaska this winter. Dr. Matt Hirschfeld, a pediatrician with Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, said flu and RSV cases started spiking early this year, in October.
“Usually, we don’t see these things start to peak until kind of December, January, February,” Hirschfeld said. “And then it’s also an extremely steep graph, meaning that a lot of people are getting infected all at once.”
At the same time, other viruses like parainfluenza, metapneumovirus and common colds are circulating too.
“It’s kind of a big soup of viruses that are happening out there,” he said.
Dr. Matt Hirschfeld poses for a photo on Oct. 7, 2021, in front of the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media)Hirschfeld said this year’s cold and flu season has been worse, in part because COVID precautions were keeping people separated and keeping viruses at bay the last few years.
Most people get RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, as children, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it again as an adult. RSV and flu both have the strongest impacts on young children and elderly people.
State epidemiologist Dr. Joe McLaughlin said RSV usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms.
“Most people recover within a week or two, but it can cause serious illness especially for infants and older adults,” he said.
Serious cases typically present with wheezing or difficulty breathing, due to inflammation of small airways in the lungs.
Late last week Hirschfeld said pediatric hospital capacity in Anchorage was close to its limits.
“ANMC had a couple of beds, Providence was totally full. And most of the other hospitals had one or two beds or they were completely full,” he said.
Hirschfeld added that the majority of his patients live in rural Alaska and were transferred into the city for more specialized care.
Meanwhile, a nationwide shortage of amoxicillin, a type of antibiotic drug, is also affecting Alaska. State pharmacist Coleman Cutchins said the shortage is being driven by increased demand for the drug, not a manufacturing issue.
Amoxicillin shouldn’t be used to treat viral illnesses, but it can be prescribed for bacterial pneumonia and some ear infections, which tend to surge around cold and flu season.
Cutchins said it’s possible the amoxicillin shortage is in part due to it being overprescribed for patients who don’t need it.
“I haven’t heard of it not being available for people that totally need it. And there are alternatives,” Cutchins said. “But as we think about things in short supply, it’d be better to prevent yourself from being sick, to prevent the burden and the need for this type of drugs.”
RSV has already peaked on the East Coast and epidemiologists are predicting Alaska is close to plateauing as well. But in the meantime health officials are urging Alaskans to get flu shots and COVID boosters, practice regular hand-washing and stay home from gatherings if any symptoms arise.
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Plaintiff Randall Kowalke is challenging Rep. David Eastman’s qualifications to serve in public office. (Still from Court System livestream)Rep. David Eastman isn’t accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol nor of attempting to overthrow the government, but if the Wasilla Republican belongs to an organization that did, his legislative career could be over.
A trial is underway in Palmer that could oust Eastman from office over his membership in the Oath Keepers, a group that rose to national prominence in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. The non-jury trial is the very first test of a 66-year-old disloyalty clause in the state Constitution, which says no one can hold office who belongs to an organization that advocates overthrowing the government by force.
The case that has implications not just for Eastman and his constituents but also the limits of the First Amendment right to associate with anti-government groups.
A Mat-Su voter, Randall Kowalke, filed the lawsuit to enforce the disloyalty provision.
“There are only two elements that we need to prove to win the case,” Kowalke’s attorney, Goriune Dudukgian, said in his opening argument Tuesday. “The first element is that Rep. Eastman aids or belongs to the Oath Keepers. And the second element is that the Oath Keepers advocates concrete action to overthrow the U.S. government or has actually engaged in such conduct.”
The first element is easy to prove: Eastman is a founding lifetime member of Oath Keepers, has contributed more than $1,000 and even after Jan. 6 took no steps to resign, Dudukgian said.
To judge by the first day of testimony, most of the case is focused on what the Oath Keepers did leading up to the Capitol assault and what exactly they advocate for. Dudukgian said they combined a dangerous mix of insurrectionist rhetoric and seditious conduct.
“On their public website, the organization advocated for a, quote, bloody revolution against the current administration,” he said. “They said that they were going to, quote, take to arms and fight … . And on January 6, they did exactly what they said they were going to do.”
Eastman’s attorney, Joe Miller, chose to delay his opening argument until after the other side presents its case. But his defense appears to turn on what the Oath Keepers organization is all about, and he maintains it’s not about overthrowing the government.
Some Oath Keepers have been charged with crimes related to Jan. 6. Leader Stewart Rhodes has been convicted of seditious conspiracy. But Miller, in pre-trial arguments and in objections, argued that the charges against individuals aren’t proof of what the Oath Keepers as an organization advocates for.
“The only thing that we know is Stewart Rhodes is the leader,” Miller said. “Otherwise, what we have are just a handful of 33 out of 38,000 Oath Keepers that have been charged with crimes.”
Miller emphasized that the plaintiffs have to prove that Oath Keepers provided “imminent incitement” to violent acts leading to the overthrow of the government. And he notes that the disloyalty disqualification can only apply to conduct that isn’t protected by the First Amendment’s right to free speech and free association.
Jon Lewis, an expert in domestic extremism at George Washington University, testified over Zoom to help make the case against Eastman. He called the Oath Keepers one of the largest anti-government militias in the United States. He said they did more than talk.
“My opinion is that both before and during Jan. 6, the Oath Keepers called for and attempted to execute a plan that would have resulted in the overthrow of the U.S. government on Jan. 6,” Lewis testified.
Eastman easily won re-election last month. Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna has put the certification of his election on hold while the case is pending. The uncertainty is one factor complicating the organization of the state House leadership.
Eastman sat beside Miller in the courtroom. Dozens of people watched the livestream of the trial.
Among the witnesses Miller said he’d like to call are Rhodes and other convicted leaders of the Oath Keepers. Miller acknowledged that their incarceration will make their participation difficult.
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Lieutenant Governor Nancy Dahlstrom on Dec. 9, 2022. (Elyssa Loughlin/Alaska Public Media)Nancy Dahlstrom’s entry into politics was an unusual one. In 2002 she challenged then-Rep. Lisa Murkowski for a state House seat encompassing part of Eagle River and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. Dahlstrom, a Republican, ran to Murkowski’s right, and lost.
A year later, Gov. Frank Murkowski appointed Lisa Murkowski, his daughter, to the U.S. Senate and asked Dahlstrom to replace her in Juneau. Since then, Dahlstrom said she’s stayed in government because she loves Alaska and wants to make it a better place.
“We can all make a difference. Everything doesn’t always go the way we want it to in politics, but we can always work together,” she said in a recent interview.
In Dahlstrom’s 20 years in politics, she’s lived mostly out of the spotlight. She shuffled through her state House seat, advisor roles and a commissioner appointment before running on Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s reelection ticket. Now, as second in command, she’ll oversee the state election system, and says she’s ready for the challenge.
Dahlstrom was born in Baltimore into a military family. She finished high school in Utah and visited Alaska for the first time with a friend after graduating from high school.
“And we both just loved it. And this has been home, I made a decision to stay,” she said.
Dahlstrom worked for multiple utility companies, including Chugach Electric, Alaskcom and GCI, and was involved in community councils before she ran for state House.
In her seven years in the legislature, she earned a reputation for being sharp, honest and willing to collaborate.
“Nancy has a deep-seated sense of public service, and she really wants to serve Alaska in a broad way,” said Beth Kerttula, a former Democratic lawmaker from Juneau who served at the same time as Dahlstrom.
Kerttula said she and Dahlstrom disagreed on social issues, but their party differences never stopped them from working together.
“Nancy and I did disagree from time to time, but you still have a working relationship and actually, you mostly have a friendship,” Kerttula said.
Over the last decade, Dahlstrom has held a number of jobs. She worked as an advisor in the Parnell administration and spent time in the private sector. In 2018 she ran for state House again and won, but never actually took the seat because Dunleavy, starting his first term as governor, asked her to head the Department of Corrections.
Four years later he reached out again, this time to ask her to run as his lieutenant governor.
“It’s not a phone call. I was expecting, you know?” Dahlstrom said.
Dunleavy’s first lieutenant governor, Kevin Meyer, announced last year he would not run for reelection, saying he didn’t want to balance campaigning and overseeing elections.
John Coghill, a former Fairbanks legislator, said he thinks Dahlstrom was a good ideological match for Dunleavy and well-versed in political issues, even though she wasn’t a name most voters recognized.
“She’s probably well known in her area,” said Coghill. “But I think here in the Interior, probably low [name recognition]. Dunleavy has a very high rating here in the Interior so I think he was the name they were looking at.”
Dunleavy won last month’s election despite his few appearances on the campaign trail — Dahlstrom made even fewer.
Lieutenant governors are often overlooked, and overshadowed by governors. But in Alaska they have a major role overseeing the state election system, an area of government that in recent years has had lots of attention as conservatives frequently question the integrity of elections. Dahlstrom said she does not have concerns about election integrity at this point.
“And if concerns do come up about the integrity, I’ll be the first one talking about it,” she added.
Elections have seen a lot of changes in the last year. The state saw its first ranked choice elections this summer and fall. And last week, longtime Division of Elections director Gail Fenumiai retired.
Dahlstrom was clear she did not ask for Fenumiai’s resignation.
“I think that she did a good job leading our first rank choice [election],” Dahlstrom said.
Dahlstrom said she’s committed to upholding the policies of the election system set in law. Even so, she expressed reservations about the ranked choice system.
“I still have people that will say to me, ‘I still don’t get it.’ And these are smart people, people running big businesses,” she said. “Maybe sometimes things are too simple and we try to make them harder.”
The state Senate has signaled it’s unlikely to pass a repeal of ranked choice voting, but it could come up as a ballot initiative instead.
The Division of Elections is currently reviewing an application for a ballot initiative to overturn ranked choice voting and the new open primary system. Dahlstrom wasn’t aware of its status a few days into the job, but it will ultimately be up to her to determine whether it passes muster and ends up on the next statewide ballot.
The view of the Chukchi Sea from the Utqiaġvik coastline in October 2018. (Ravenna Koenig/Alaska Public Media)This time of year Billy Adams would expect to see sea ice lining Utqiagvik’s Chukchi Sea shoreline. But right now, it’s all open water.
“It was raining before Thanksgiving and then it rained again and it’s December,” Adams said.
Adams lives in Utqiagvik and is an observer for the Alaska Arctic Observatory & Knowledge Hub, a coalition of northern communities that shares data about sea ice, wildlife and coastal waters.
In past winters, Adams said the weather might warm up for a week before returning to below zero temperatures. But this year is different.
“The last few months have been very unusually warm and wet, and a lot of snow,” Adams said.
Temperatures in Utqiagvik broke 40 degrees on Monday, the highest ever recorded for the North Slope community in December. The unusual warm spell was driven in part by climate change, said climatologist Rick Thoman with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy.
“The open water at this point the first week in December in the Chukchi Sea, that is a very clear climate change signal,” Thoman said.
The latest jump in temperatures stems from a combination of warm air and rain moving north from the Bering Sea, plus the lack of Arctic sea ice.
“That exposed water is basically acting as a heating pad, putting out that heat into the polar atmosphere,” he said.
Thoman said 40 degrees is the highest temperature recorded in Utqiagvik between October 30 and April 22 in more than a century of monitoring.
The North Slope has seen progressively warmer winters in recent years. As of yesterday, Thoman reported, ice coverage in the Chukchi Sea was the ninth lowest on record for the date.
Temperatures ranged in the upper 30s and low 40s across the North Slope Monday.
Adams said he’s concerned about what the spike could mean for caribou, an important subsistence animal. Warm weather tends to bring lots of snow, which he said makes it difficult for caribou to find food in the tundra.
“We have to keep an eye out in the next few weeks, next few months,” he said. “And we hope to see that animals are still around.”
A NOAA weather forecast shows temperatures in Utqiagvik are expected to drop into the teens and single digits by the end of the week.
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Both Trump-endorsed candidates are making vague accusations of malfeasance, despite no evidence of election fraud.
“The most important thing to know about Bill Sheffield is that he loved Alaska,” said friend John Pugh.
Candidates for Alaska’s lone U.S. House seat sparred over fish, energy and partisan politics at Wednesday’s Debate for the State.
On Friday, Pierce's former executive assistant filed a lawsuit against him and the Kenai Peninsula Borough alleging “constant unwanted physical touching, sexual remarks, and sexual advances."
As Alaskans prepare to vote in November on whether to hold a constitutional convention, the privacy clause is a major focus.
As Alaskans prepare to vote in November on whether to hold a constitutional convention, the privacy clause is a major focus.
In a ranked-choice election, the two progressive gubernatorial candidates are relying on each other’s second-place votes to win.
In a ranked-choice election, the two progressive gubernatorial candidates are relying on each other’s second-place votes to win.
The election of Yup'ik Mary Peltola brought unexpected tears to some Alaska Native people.
The election of Yup'ik Mary Peltola brought unexpected tears to some Alaska Native people.
When a massive, unexpected landslide blocked the only road to Lowell Point, Tom Miller knew his water taxi service was the only way to move residents, school children, and tourists back and forth to the nearby town of Seward.
Jacob Twork and Eddy Carolina Cruz both signed plea deals filed in federal court Tuesday in which they admitted to one felony count each of conspiracy to commit marriage fraud.
Windy was a gray female who came to the zoo in Anchorage in 2006, one of a half-dozen pups the Alaska Department of Fish and Game took from a predator control zone, where wolves were being hunted and trapped.
Jonathon Sawden normally works in HR, but sees an importance to tell the world that his people, the Sugpiaq (Sookh-pee-ahk) and other Native peoples are still here. Here, Jonathon and another young apprentice artist are working together with a Master Kayak builder to learn the techniques to build traditional boats and be the next generation to keep the craft and culture alive.
Billionaire hedge fund founder gave $1.5 million to Alaskans for L.I.S.A., an independent PAC.
Bri “Snap1” Pritchard is a b-girl from Anchorage who has competed and won breaking competitions across the country. She may be one of the first Olympic breakdancers.
“We absolutely do feel safer,” one plant manager said about having overdose prevention resources on hand.
The number of Alaskans with memory loss is set to nearly double by 2030. Resources to help are limited, but navigators help caregivers find them.
Wildlife officials say the animals were most likely feeding on birds that had died from the H5N1 avian influenza.
It's the step Bristol Bay fishermen and tribes have for years begged the agency to take.
For Alaskans looking to get something to eat, it’s as easy as walking up and taking it.
Twelve people from Ukraine arrived over the weekend, and hundreds more are expected in the coming weeks thanks to the local non-profit and a new federal program.
“One of the most important things is to identify an eating disorder early before you get the complications,” said Dr. Rachel Lescher.
Caring for someone with memory loss can be exhausting both physically and emotionally. The number of people with Alzheimer’s or dementia in Alaska is set to almost double by 2030. Given the growing need, reporters Anne Hillman and Jeff Chen spoke with people who are trying to support elders with memory loss.
Roughly 200 people attended the rush hour reproductive rights rally Tuesday in the wake of the release of a draft U.S. Supreme Court opinion that suggests justices are poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Talking about mental health is hard, but it’s important for anyone who is struggling to know that they’re not alone. Alaska Public Media’s Adam Nicely brings us this story of an Anchorage community project with that goal, called Mental Health Mosaics.
Karen Hobart said her main goal as a school counselor is to help kids graduate, and that means looking at a lot more than just their grades or the number of credits they’ve earned. She also connects them to resources like food, safe transportation, or different types of mental health care.
Alaska experienced a nearly 70% increase in the number of drug overdose deaths between 2020 and 2021, according to preliminary data from the state health department. That means 245 Alaskans died from an overdose in 2021, including Anchorage resident Bruce Snodgrass. Alaska Public Media’s Jeff Chen brings us a story of his mother who wants to make sure her son is more than a statistic.
Through podcasting, music and story sharing, Ralph Sara is working to make people see that recovery from addiction is possible.
Anchorage-based avalanche expert Doug Fesler says more should be done to avoid building in avalanche paths.
Helen Lane says the space’s twin purpose fills a void in Anchorage, where many Native women don’t have access to elders’ knowledge about crafts and where many struggle with drug addiction and alcoholism.
An Anchorage teenager made major shifts in his approach to life and is about to graduate high school. He never saw a therapist, never thought about mental health. But mental health is tied to all of it.
A new project called Black in Alaska seeks to present a more complete picture of the lives and professions of Black Alaskans, with the aim of creating a more equitable future. Lori Townsend speaks with advisory committee member Bernard Gatewood and André Horton, one of the series subjects.
Veteran Iditarod musher Aaron Burmeister talked to Alaska Public Media’s Jeff Chen at the Nome radio station, KNOM, roughly a day after Burmeister finished his 21st Iditarod. Burmeister talks about stepping away from the Iditarod, about how his race went this year, and how much dog mushing has changed over the many years he’s been a competitive musher.
In this hour-long interview, we hear more from 2022 Iditarod champion Brent Sass about how he’s forged a unique bond with his dog team, how he draws inspiration from his idols like Susan Butcher, and how his life in his remote homestead has made him the musher he is. Alaska Public Media’s Lex Treinen sat down with Sass, along with a group of other reporters, and Sass’s dad Mark at the Nome Nugget newspaper in downtown Nome.
Since the Iditapod left off, after Brent Sass's epic first Iditarod victory, teams have continued to arrive in Nome, including a fun race for 3rd and 4th place, two Yukon-Kuskokwim mushers in 5th and 6th, an impressive 7th place finish for a second-year musher and a Nome local coming home to finish in 8th before stepping away. We're also going to step away, but not before we answer another listener question and bring you one last Dog of the Day.
Iditapod goes on a deep dive talking about "old school" Eureka musher Brent Sass, who won his first Iditarod championship early Tuesday in Nome. That was despite howling wind that almost caused him to stop in the final miles, with five-time champ Dallas Seavey still in pursuit, just about an hour behind. We'll take you to the finish line, plus Sass's Golden Harness dogs Slater and Morello are the subject of our listener question AND the Dog(s) of the Day.
“Nice to be in Eskimo country!” said Iñupiaq musher Ryan Redington. He said his mother was born and raised in Unalakleet, and it’s been nice to visit with the community.
Alaska Public Media's Lex Treinen caught up - just in the nick of time - with Brent Sass, who mushed into White Mountain and a mandatory eight-hour rest in the lead, in a great position to win his first Iditarod.
The Iditarod - and Iditapod - are heading into the Nome stretch, as Eureka's Brent Sass has maintained his lead, aiming for his first win, with five-time champ Dallas Seavey still on his tail. We’ll have more about the race at the front, as well as more about musher mistakes, how things are going for the top rookie - Hanna Lyrek - and the speedy team of Dan Kaduce. Plus… more pizza? Yep, and another peppy dog of the day, a listener question and an answer from the trail.
In this extended interview from before the 2022 Iditarod, 22-year-old Norwegian musher Hanna Lyrek told Alaska Public Media's Lex Treinen about competing in Norway's biggest sled dog race, the Finnmarksløpet, how she got her dog team to Alaska, her goals for the Iditarod and... about her dogs, of course!
Well, we’ve got a race, folks. Obviously, with 45 mushers out on the Iditarod Trail vying for positions, we’ve got a race. But at the very front, it’s looking like a real battle setting up between Brent Sass and Dallas Seavey for first place. As the frontrunners head for the Bering Sea coast, we’ll have a look at the teams reaching the Yukon River, we’ll talk about a pretty big scratch, women mushers, a bit about superstition, and of course we have a dog profile and a listener question.
With the northern lights dancing above, we talked to Iditarod leader Brent Sass as he danced through the Ruby checkpoint and onto the Yukon River, skipping a gourmet five-course meal in favor of more comfortable cold temperatures for his dogs. We'll also hear more from Sass and his fellow competitors on their 24-hour layover earlier, and from the back of the pack, a trio of women, who banded together in a snow storm. Plus we have a dog profile and THREE listeners asking the same question, with an answer straight from the musher in question and a separate listener... answer?
Iditarod mushers and their dog teams are now either in the middle of their mandatory 24-hour layovers or back out on the trail, if they opted to do that earlier. We've got the frontrunners at the Cripple checkpoint, as well as a chat with the folks who 24ed in McGrath, now making up the chase pack. There's also an old-timer for our Dog of the Day, a couple listener questions about how to get into dog mushing and, related, what it means to be a handler.
Kaktovik dog musher Apayauq Reitan, the first out trans woman to compete in the Iditarod, talks to Iditapod colleague and Alaska Public Media contributor Shady Grove Oliver - originally for a piece in the Guardian newspaper - about Reitan's goals for this year's race, what it's like to mush dogs, her Alaska Native culture, coming out as trans and a lot more.
One musher has regrets. Another is focused on canine appetite. And a third is relieved to have survived the "spiciest" trail.
Our Iditapod crew gets caught up - to get you caught up - as sled dog teams in the 2022 Iditarod race through the third full day of mushing the 1,000-mile trail. We'll hear about some of the most technically difficult sections and get an update on who is where... for now. We'll also hear from mushers Aaron Burmeister and Apayauq Reitan, among others, and we also have a bully of a Dog of the Day and a listener question about how to find the trail (because sometimes it's not so obvious).
Hugh Neff said his 54-year-old arms were exhausted by the constant bumping. “I’ve taken a few Tylenols, let’s say,” he said.
Editor's note: This extended interview discusses a violent encounter with a moose and might not be suitable for all listeners. Alaska Public Media's Lex Treinen gets all the details of rookie Iditarod musher Bridgett Watkins' run-in with a moose while on a training run near Salcha, in Interior Alaska, in early February.
As Alaska Public Media reporters Jeff Chen and Lex Treinen head out on the trail, Iditapod host Casey Grove updates some of the early Iditarod standings. Plus, we have a story of an ER nurse whose training for the Iditarod helped him cope with the trauma of working on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. Lex also brings us a report on the Sunday restart in Willow, as well as another dog profile, and we have a couple questions with a couple different answers (watch out: one involves some math).
The 2022 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race kicked off Saturday in Anchorage with its usual fanfare, after not holding a ceremonial start in 2021. Alaska Public Media reporters Casey Grove, Tegan Hanlon, Lex Treinen and Jeff Chen were out in the snow with the mushers, dogs and race fans, including plenty of kids and other trailgaters.
The five-decade history of the Iditarod is a story filled with adventure, skill, triumph and lots of change, and it's best told by those who have experienced it, firsthand.
Iditapod is back for the 50th running of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Host Casey Grove and fellow Alaska Public Media reporters Tegan Hanlon, Lex Treinen and Jeff Chen discuss last year's pandemic-altered Iditarod, some of the mid-distance sled dog races this season, as well as COVID-19 protocols (and already a scratch/switcheroo), scary moose encounters and the heartwarming story of an unlikely Iditarod dog.
Self-harm is a coping mechanism and a call for help. It can also be extremely hard to talk about.
On this episode of Alaska Insight, hear from your neighbors about why they chose to get vaccinated or not.
Overcrowding is a perennial problem in rural Alaska, but the Covid-19 pandemic has made living with it harder. Cramped conditions offer little space to work from home, conduct virtual schooling, or quarantine, and put many multigenerational households at increased risk of infection. Tackling the problem isn’t easy, but, as Erin McKinstry reports for Alaska Public Media, federal COVID funds are offering some relief in the Bering Straits Region.
Tribes in the pilot program would be able to try and sentence anyone who commits domestic violence, rape or related crimes in their villages, even if the offender is non-Native.
Recent attacks and vandalism targeting Jewish people have highlighted concerns over a rise in bigotry in our country. This week marks Holocaust Remembrance Day, a time to reflect on the terrible legacy of antisemitism. Lori Townsend examines that legacy with Rabbi Abram Goodstein of Congregation Beth Sholom in Anchorage and Anti-Defamation League advisory board member Robin Dern.
The Northern Hope Center is a free, member-driven drop-in center for adults with serious mental illnesses that gives people a social safety net free from judgment.
The payments to lawmakers from outside of Juneau supplement their salaries and cover their living expenses during the session. They receive $293 per day.
The post appeared to be supportive of Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany, but the former officer says it was a reference to a comedy film that was taken out of context.
As Lawmakers prepare for this year’s session, Alaska Public Media’s Adelyn Baxter looks back and reports that, despite the lengthy process, lawmakers didn’t make much progress in 2021.
Despite pressure from health experts who advocated for adding a testing requirement, the agency is standing by its original guidance that a negative test is not needed for people who are fever-free and whose symptoms have improved.
A camouflaged Santa whirled into Buckland on a funny-looking sleigh this year. As part of its annual Operation Santa Claus, the Alaska National Guard delivered 261 presents to the community in northwest Alaska on December 14. Santa says he'll drop off 360 gifts to Chevak after the holidays and once weather conditions allow.
The city’s Mobile Crisis Team started two months ago and is bringing mental health services directly to people in crisis.
ivision managers and medical officers have all left or been fired from the health department, which has largely stopped communicating with news media.
Some Assembly members said the revenue forecasts that the administration presented to a major credit rating agency before the agency downgraded Anchorage’s score intentionally downplayed the city’s forecasts to score points in an ongoing budget debate.
Alaska was one of five states picked to pass out the rapid tests based on COVID-19 rates and previous partnerships with the federal health department. The pilot program is part of a major push by the Biden administration to expand access to the over-the-counter, at-home tests as a way to curb the spread of COVID-19 this winter.
Peer mentors can now receive certification in Alaska to provide support for people in recovery from substance use and mental health issues.
About 50 speakers shared stories of losing jobs because of COVID-19 vaccine mandates or having loved ones die from COVID while being denied unproven treatments.
Next year, Alaska voters will decide whether to hold a new constitutional convention. They’ve rejected similar questions over the past 50 years. But anger over the permanent fund dividend is fueling talk of overhauling the Alaska Constitution.
A chain link fence was set up on part of the perimeter of the Sullivan Arena on Nov. 17, 2021 (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media) Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration has seen a half dozen or so resignations or firings over the past several weeks among officials working on the city’s response to homelessness.
That comes at a time when temperatures have dropped below zero degrees in some parts of town and advocates have raised concerns about overcrowding in the city’s largest shelter at the Sullivan Arena.
Alaska Public Media’s Lex Treinen has been following the city’s recent efforts on homelessness.
Listen here:
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This transcript has been edited for clarity and additional information has been added.
Casey Grove: Remind us where we’re at with the city’s response to homelessness right now?
Lex Treinen: The city has a big housing shortage right now, and during the pandemic, a lot of energy has been focused on making sure people have a roof over their heads. The Sullivan Arena, the massive emergency shelter in Midtown has been sleeping hundreds of people each night since the pandemic began. That’s still sort of the center of the city’s efforts right now, even as it works on a plan to move people out of the shelter.
CG: How have things been going at the Sullivan? Have there been any big changes under the new operator?
RELATED: Tight rental market in Alaska hampers progress on homelessness
LT: From what I can tell, none of the changes have been giant. In general people say there’s less of a militaristic feel under the new operator, that’s the private company 99 Plus 1. Staff there say they’re going for a more humane approach and treating people like adults.
Not everyone thinks that’s a good thing, I’ve heard complaints from clients who say they feel less secure because of lax rules and fewer security guards.
But it’s been really hard to get information about what is happening. Part of that is the sheer number of people working on homelessness leaving, which has disrupted the normal flow of information.
There are also policy changes that have made getting information more difficult. Reporters aren’t allowed to talk to clients inside the shelter any more. It’s been harder to arrange tours of the arena, and managers were banned from speaking to reporters without permission.
CG: Should we be concerned about the conditions in the Sullivan?
I have been able to talk to a few officials and guests of the shelter, and they say while things aren’t great, they’re adequate. Recent cold weather has pushed the shelter to over capacity, so the sheer number of people in there is a challenge. A couple days in the last week there were over 500 people sleeping there, and the shelter was set up for a maximum of 420. They’re not turning people away though, especially in this cold weather.
The operator said it’s hiring more staff, and working on tightening staff training requirements. They’re also trying to get the toilets operational again — the entire population there has been relying on portapotties for a couple of months now. Clients say it hasn’t been great, as you can imagine.
There are some things going on outside the shelter that have raised some eyebrows.
CG: Like what? What do you mean?
Just yesterday workers set up a chain link fence around part of the perimeter of the Sullivan. Shelter operators told me they weren’t told that it was going up, though a city spokesperson said the operator was told. A spokesperson wrote in an email that clients and neighbors requested the fence for security.
There was also a warming tent that finally went up earlier this week, but so far it doesn’t have a heater or a floor. An official said it should be ready to use by Friday so that people who come in after curfew or those who don’t want to be in the Sullivan have a place to go. Some sources told me the tent was supposed to go up a month ago, and it’s not clear why there was such a big delay.
The Sullivan has still been letting people inside, even though they’re already over capacity. But advocates told me they’re worried that campers might stay outside if they don’t know they’re allowed into the building after curfew. A spokesperson said that its working with providers to let homeless people know that they’re welcome in the Sullivan.
CG: Who’s supposed to be in charge of this? It seems like there’s a communication breakdown going on in the city?
I think the recent staff losses are really a big piece of this story. There’s been about a half dozen city officials involved with homelessnes who’ve been fired or stepped down recently. Several told me they left after raising concerns about what’s going on with homelessness. All the job vacancies make it really hard to know where to direct questions.
Yesterday, we learned of a new hire who’s set to take charge of the city’s response to homelessness, so hopefully that will clear up some of the communication issues.
There’s also still a working group made up of Assembly members and administration officials working out a way to move people out of the Sullivan into smaller shelters, but the recent resignations have slowed those talks down. Assembly members on the group say they’re still making progress, but they also have to rebuild trust with the new members. All that just slows down the city’s progress towards its goal of getting people out of shelters and into housing.
CG: Who’s the new hire?
LT: His name is Dave D’amato. He’s worked at a few housing nonprofits over the past decade, like United Way and the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness. Robert McNeily, a spokesperson for the health department, said D’Amato will lead a new division focused on housing and homelessness that will be created next year.
A few people in that nonprofit world said they have concerns about D’amato’s views on homelessness. D’amato and the city declined an interview request, but he testified to the Assembly last year against a plan that is really similar to one that the administration and the Assembly have tentatively agreed to. That plan is to move people out of the Sullivan Arena into smaller shelters dispersed around town. So far Assembly members working on that plan say they’re withholding judgement about D’amato, but I think it’s something to watch in the coming weeks.
Natasha Aġnaŋuluuraq Gamache. (Natasha Aġnaŋuluuraq Gamache photo) Natasha Aġnaŋuluuraq Gamache is a 40-year-old mother of four. In September, her landlord told her he was raising her rent.
“I thought, ‘Crap, I’m gonna have to move,’” she said.
It wasn’t a huge increase — a few hundred bucks, she said — but her federal housing assistance limited what she could afford. Anything over her voucher, and she’d be paying out of pocket. With a fixed income from federal disability benefits, there wasn’t much she could do. And when she tried to find a new place, she said, she realized her options were limited.
“You go on Facebook marketplace, try and find a place that meets that housing payment standard where you’re paying all your rent and your utilities at $1,850 a month for a three bedroom in Anchorage,” she said. “You can find them but you’re gonna run into some issues.”
Data suggests that Gamache’s experience is becoming more common. Vacancy rates across the state declined sharply during the pandemic, according to a state report from September.
Listen to this story:
Rob Kreiger, an economist who wrote the report, said the drop in vacancy rates could be because fewer people are moving from place to place due to an eviction moratorium that was in effect until September.
“Normally, you’d have people constantly coming and going and moving from one place to the next and you have more units becoming available than normal,” he said. “But I think in the case of the pandemic, you had a lot less people moving around.”
The Alaska Housing Finance Corporation also gave out nearly $175 million in federal rental relief since the pandemic started, though the program required that applicants show they were impacted by the pandemic. The corporation says it’s helped keep 57,000 people housed.
But for people who have lost housing, the low vacancy rate means there are few options.
“If there’s not that much available, it’s gonna be that much harder to find a place,” said Kreiger.
Gamache said she and her family bounced around AirBnBs, relying on donated money for a few weeks before settling into a shelter. This week, they finally moved into housing thanks to a tribal voucher. She said she had to give up her federal voucher to participate in the tribal program.
Before moving into housing, Gamache and her family spent weeks at Safe Harbor, a family shelter run by RuralCAP. Shelter providers say the housing market means that their efforts to move people into permanent housing are slowing down.
At a Wednesday Anchorage Assembly committee meeting, Terria Ware, an administrator at the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, testified that vacancy rates are likely to force clients to stay in shelters longer than in previous months despite a massive rehousing effort.
“If you’re someone on Social Security or disability benefits, you’re getting about $1,100 a month. If your apartment is $950, and you still have to pay electric, how can you afford that unit?,” she said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
That means the city’s shelters, which are already over capacity, could keep filling up. Ware said the only solution is the slowest and most difficult one.
“If we want to truly solve homelessness in Anchorage we need more units,” she said. “We need more affordable units.”
There is some good news, she said: During the pandemic, the state was able to keep some renters in their homes thanks to quick disbursement of federal rental relief money. But not all renters qualified. Gamache said she didn’t apply for the money because her rent increase wasn’t directly tied to the pandemic.
The federal eviction moratorium kept tenants from getting kicked out until September, when it was struck down by a federal court.
“We all expected an eviction tsunami when the moratorium ended, and it hasn’t really happened,” said Helen Renfrew, who studies evictions for the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness.
She said avoiding a surge of evictions is a good thing, but there’s a dark side to it.
“The reason that eviction filings didn’t explode is because evictions have been occurring this whole time. They never stopped,” she said. “We had eviction filings every single week, all across the state throughout the entire moratorium.”
Renfrew said there’s not good data on it, but she suspects it’s because landlords and tenants weren’t aware of the protections.
Gamache said all of the uncertainty in the rental market exhausted her family, which has had to move six times in the last five years. After researching costs of rentals and mortgages, she decided the only way she could find housing security was to buy a house.
Gamache (left) with her children and adopted Aaka (grandmother), Eva during Gamache’s daughter’s graduation in May. (Natasha Gamache photo) Her 14-year-old daughter set up a GoFundMe to raise money for a down payment on a house. So far she’s raised more than $13,000.
“It’s hard on me because I just want to be a kid,” Denali Gamache wrote on the fundraiser page. “I don’t want to feel unsafe in a shelter where people fight and get drunk and beat on doors all night.”
For Natasha Gamache, it’s a bittersweet feeling. She’s thankful for the support but also said it’s a sad statement on the state’s priorities.
“I felt I had so much shame and guilt. But at the same time, I’m so very grateful. Because, sadly, that is where we’re at,” said Gamache. “This is where we’re at.”
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Fifty years ago this December, Alaska Native leaders joined forces with national lawmakers to create legislation that ensured certain native land rights in our state. How has that legislation evolved over the decades? What does the next generation of Alaska Native leaders want to see moving forward?
Host, Lori Townsend discusses the milestone anniversary with Megan Alvanna-Stimpfle, Self-Governance Liason, Norton Sound Health Corporation; Alex Cleghorn, Senior Legal and Policy Director, Alaska Native Justice Center; Rosita Worl, president, Sealaska Heritage Institute.
RELATED: Click here for more news and coverage of the 50th Anniversary of ANCSA
To qualify as an original shareholder in an Alaska Native Corporation, you had to be born before December 18, 1971. That date — when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was signed into law — divided Alaska Native generations and even families. The corporations formed under ANCSA are slowly opening up to new generations of shareholders though, allowing younger Alaska Native people to have a voice in shaping the future.
Indian Country Today’s Meghan Sullivan has more.
This story is part of a reporting collaboration between Alaska Public Media, Indian Country Today and the Anchorage Daily News on the 50th anniversary of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Funding for the ANCSA project was provided by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism. Read more here.
Aaron Tolen has tribal and ANCSA regional corporation affiliations across the state. He aims to balance a modern education with the values and traditions of his people, so he can continue to feel grounded in his culture and also experience success in a contemporary way. Reporter James Gaddis has more.
This story is part of a reporting collaboration between Alaska Public Media, Indian Country Today and the Anchorage Daily News on the 50th anniversary of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Funding for the ANCSA project was provided by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism. Read more here.
Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson at an Assembly meeting on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2021. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson on Tuesday vetoed two ordinances that were passed by the Anchorage Assembly Wednesday. The ordinances were aimed at asserting the Assembly’s authority over the chamber and the city’s mayoral appointee confirmation process.
RELATED: After Anchorage Assembly passes rules to assert authority, Mayor Bronson accuses it of a ‘power grab’
The first ordinance gave the Assembly control over security, safety, occupancy and other aspects of the Assembly chamber. It includes allowing the body to enforce health mandates, like the masking requirements the Assembly passed last month.
In recent months, Bronson has battled with the Assembly over who ultimately has authority over the Assembly chambers.
“While the Assembly has the power to determine rules and the order of business for meetings, it cannot create for itself the ability to manage, or otherwise exercise custody of, real or personal property,” Bronson said in a statement after issuing the vetoes.
The mayor and his staff have argued that the ordinance wasn’t legal and state statute gives him the authority over all municipal buildings that don’t belong to the school district. Assembly leadership has countered by pointing to the decades of precedent where the body held authority over its chambers.
The second ordinance Bronson vetoed changed how mayoral appointees can be confirmed by the Assembly. It would have required the mayor to request a confirmation hearing within 60 days of appointing someone to a position that requires Assembly approval. If the request was not submitted within 60 days, the Assembly chair could schedule a confirmation hearing.
“By placing limitations on the administration’s right to delegate for longer than 60 days the responsibilities of a position subject to confirmation, the Assembly is making its own determination of when a mayor intends to appoint someone to a position subject to confirmation,” Bronson said in a statement.
To override the mayor’s vetoes, the Assembly would need a supermajority of eight members. Both ordinances had passed with at least eight votes. The Assembly has scheduled a meeting on Friday at 3:30 p.m. to vote to override the vetoes.
The Alaska Supreme Court hears arguments in 2019. (Elizabeth Harball/Alaska’s Energy Desk) If the Alaska Legislature wants to reject a governor’s appointees, it will have to take a vote on them, the state Supreme Court said in an opinion issued on Friday.
The court had ruled in April that Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s appointees had remained in office despite the Legislature’s failure to meet to confirm them last year during the pandemic. It reversed a Superior Court judge’s ruling against the governor.
But the court hadn’t released its full reasoning until Friday.
Justice Peter Maassen wrote that the record from Alaska’s constitutional convention in 1955 showed the importance the delegates placed on holding a joint session for votes on the governor’s appointments.
The Legislative Council had maintained that the positions had been vacated. It pointed to a 1964 state law that said that failure to hold a vote is tantamount to declining an appointment.
But the Supreme Court found that the language of that law was contrary to the plain language of the state constitution that the governor’s appointments are “subject to confirmation by a majority of the members of the legislature in joint session.”
The Legislative Council argued that the constitution only required joint sessions for the Legislature to confirm appointments, not for rejecting them. But the Supreme Court said that the word “confirmation” referred to the entire process of voting on appointments.
Normally, the Legislature holds a joint session once each year to vote on all of the appointments over the previous year. In May, the Legislature confirmed 174 appointments and rejected three. The Legislature has confirmed all of the governor’s cabinet appointments since he took office. The joint session is usually held toward the end of the regular session.
Alaska’s Arctic region is opening to increased vessel traffic and global interest. What are the American military’s plans to ensure security?
Lori Townsend speaks to Troy Bouffard, director of the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Michael Sfraga, chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission.
Sophie Griffith, 5, gets a kiss from her dad, Scott Griffith, after getting her COVID-19 vaccine during a pediatric clinic on Thursday, at Riverbend Elementary School in Juneau. (Photo by Rashah McChesney/KTOO)
Hundreds of young kids in Juneau are getting vaccinated for COVID-19 this week at clinics put on by local health officials.
A lot of kids barely notice the jab. For others, it’s really scary, but they have advice for anyone else who’s nervous about getting a shot.
At Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School, nurse Aisha Hill tells third grader Nehir Caf to take a big, deep breath. She gives her a quick poke with a needle to give her the vaccine.
“And let it out. All done,” Hill said.
It hardly registers on Nehir’s face. Mom and dad tell her good job.
Erin Felke-Caf comforts her daughter, Nehir Caf, as nurse Aisha Hill gives her a COVID-19 vaccine shot at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School on Nov. 9, 2021 in Juneau. Nehir said it felt like her little sister pinching her. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) “That hurted like my sister pinching me, a little,” Nehir said. “I could get thousands of those in one day!”
She said she’s happy she got it.
“Because if everybody gets it, and then we might not have to wear masks in school,” she said.
She said COVID is like the villain from Harry Potter.
“I don’t know why, but COVID reminds me of Voldemort,” Nehir said.
Her little sister Feray goes next. No problem.
Giuli Russell had a tougher appointment. She was really quiet, right up until the needle was ready. Then she started whimpering.
“I don’t wanna get it!” she said between alarmed breaths.
Giuli holds onto her mom’s hand, who’s pouring praise on her. A volunteer nurse keeps Giuli’s exposed arm still. Giuli bawls through the shot.
“You did amazing!” her mom said. “Come here, monkey butt. Oh, you did awesome.”
Carolina Russell takes a selfie with her daughter, Giuli Russell, as volunteer nurse Sue Webb looks on during a youth COVID-19 vaccine clinic at Mendenhall River Community School on Nov. 9, 2021, in Juneau. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) Mom gives her a big hug. Her next shot for the flu goes about the same.
A few minutes later, Giuli’s eyes are dry, and she said she feels good.
She and her mom hang out in the gym of Mendenhall River Community School, just in case there’s a bad reaction. For the other kids that need to get shots, Giuli said, “Be brave.”
Giuli’s mom, Carolina Russell, promises her some treats, too.
“Uh, I did say McDonald’s and froyo after,” she said. “And then we found out she gets to go to Coppa this weekend, so she’s got a pretty good deal out of this one. But I said, ‘If you’re gonna do that, you’ve got to get a flu shot, too.’ So pretty good negotiation, right?”
Giuil’s not so sure.
Coppa is offering a free scoop of ice cream to young kids with their vaccine cards.
Icee Delgado, 9, gets a flu shot after getting her COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday, at Riverbend Elementary School in Juneau. (Photo by Rashah McChesney/KTOO) Carolina is eager to get her daughter vaccinated. Her parents live in Sweden, and she said the family had to cancel two trips to see them because of the pandemic.
“I’m trying to get to some sort of normalcy, as much as possible,” Carolina said. “So, I mean, that is one of many things, of course, but I feel like it’s important to be part of the solution in whatever way we can.”
Trey Powers is in sixth grade. He’s a few minutes away from getting his shot, and he’s nervous and upset.
“I didn’t have a choice! They forced me to get a shot,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me not get it.”
His parents walk him through some downsides of not getting the shot.
“What reasons do you not want to get a shot?” his dad asks.
He’s oozing with petulance. “Uh, I’ve done well without getting COVID for two years!”
Then mom: “And why is that?”
“Because I’ve been wearing a mask,” Trey said.
“And, staying at home all the time,” dad adds.
“That and –”
“– Not doing a lot of stuff because you’re not vaccinated?” dad continues.
Trey’s a little deflated. “Technically it’s only been a year,” he grumbles.
Once he’s in the hot seat, he asks to see the needle.
Geo Abad, 10 and his sister Bea Abad, 9, wait around in the gym at Riverbend Elementary School after getting their COVID-19 vaccines on Thursday, in Juneau. (Photo by Rashah McChesney/KTOO) Nurse Aisha Hill shows him. “See how small that is? … So that’s what we’re going to put in, it’s .2 milliliters, so it’s that much fluid in there. OK?”
“OK. I’m like, gonna get a spot ready to pinch, so I can not deal with that,” he said, eyeing the needle.
And that’s his suggestion for other kids: Distract yourself with a pinch somewhere else.
A moment later, it’s over. Trey’s protests shift to how soon he can get free ice cream.
Nurse Aisha Hill answers questions for Trey Powers about the COVID-19 vaccine he’s about to get at a clinic at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School in Juneau on Nov. 9, 2021. Powers said he pinched himself as he got the shot to distract himself from the sting. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) Through Tuesday’s clinics, about 450 young children in Juneau got their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. So far, none have had a bad reaction. At least, not in the medical sense.
These clinics are a big step for the school system.
“We have seen the highest percentage of our cases in schools being our elementary, unvaccinated population,” Superintendent Bridget Weiss told the Juneau Board of Education on Tuesday.
Among all school system employees, Weiss said at least 93% are vaccinated.
Appointments are still available for upcoming free, youth vaccine clinics in Juneau. You can sign up at Juneau.org/vaccine or by calling 907-586-6000.
A jar of marijuana buds is seen at the Stoney Moose in Ketchikan. (KRBD photo by Leila Kheiry) Alaska’s cannabis industry generates tens of millions of dollars in sales each year. After all, the state has the most retail cannabis shops per capita in the country.
So it might seem like there’s plenty of cannabis consumers’ cash to go around. But insiders say the industry is very competitive and cannabis entrepreneurs have to be shrewd to keep their businesses alive.
A recent story in the Anchorage Daily News looked into that competitiveness.
And ADN reporter Zachariah Hughes says some factors impacting Alaska’s cannabis industry are unique to the state.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Zachariah Hughes: One of them is just purely historical. And that’s that Alaska didn’t have a medical cannabis industry prior to legalization and the recreational industry standing up in 2016. So some other states, you know, notably California and some other West Coast states, did have a medical apparatus. And when legalization happened, decriminalization happened, the medical cannabis businesses sort of transitioned or there was at least some infrastructure in place. We didn’t have that in Alaska. So the industry here was built from the ground up. But some of the other nuances that we have, there’s no cap on licenses in Alaska. In other states, there are caps, and that makes the price of a permit a lot more valuable, since there’s a ceiling on how many people can get involved. I talked to one attorney who handles a number of cannabis clients who mentioned Arizona, where there’s a really firm cap in place and permits to cultivate and sell cannabis can go into the eight digit figures, which I was blown away by but is true. The other thing that we have that not a lot of other states have is a very firm residency requirement in the form of you have to be a PFD recipient in order to be out of business license and be part of the cannabis business. And so there’s not a lot of out-of-state money that can come in legally and prop up businesses. In other states, there’s a couple of very large multi-state business entities that have gotten involved in the cannabis sector and growing and selling. And we don’t have that.
Casey Grove: How are some of those things that are unique about Alaska affecting the industry now?
ZH: Well, according to a report in Politico, we have the highest number of cannabis retail shops per capita of any state that they looked at. They were looking mostly at Western states where the market really is kind of the biggest, but we have a, you know, we have more pot shops per resident than anywhere else. There’s a number of cultivators, there’s a number of manufacturers, but we have you know, upwards of, it’s in the neighborhood of 140 or 150 retail shops. I would almost call it like a Wildcat type industry patchwork here, you know, there’s a lot of independent small operators, and they’re working together, and they’re competing for market share. But there’s just a lot of small companies, very small companies, some of them are literally mom and pop or a family run businesses, and not too many of them are that big, there’s only a couple of businesses that have, you know, multiple sites for retail.
CG: And I guess there’s some thinking that to stay profitable in the future that some of those businesses need to get bigger, right? And to vertically integrate, I think is what you said in your story, huh?
ZH: Yeah. And that was a trend that I’d heard about from the beginning that, you know, there is this kind of race, when businesses started opening, to vertically integrate. That basically means you’re controlling all of the different steps involved from seed to sale. So you have a business that might have started out, you know, growing cannabis products, and then it gets into manufacturing, and then it gets into retailing, and plenty of them did this in different orders. But you’d basically be able to grow your product, refine it, manufacture it, and things like edibles or concentrates or flower products that you’d then sell at your retail location. And that was always seen as a way of giving businesses more flexibility. The thing is, it’s quite expensive to vertically integrate. Cannabis businesses are pricey to operate anywhere in the country, and that’s certainly true in Alaska. And one of the byproducts of the costliness is that you need a lot of cash to open new businesses, because cannabis is still federally illicit or illegal or kind of this shady gray zone. Banks won’t lend to these people. So to start new businesses, you need to have your own cash. It’s a very cash-intensive business, particularly because there are so few financing options for people like you would get, you know, in other sectors. The other thing is, it’s a very regulated business. And what I have heard from a lot of people is that a lot of businesses are not making it. They are operating on razor-thin margins, there’s intense competition among growers and retailers over price points. And I think we’re probably going to see more businesses go under, and that’s a long process. That’s a, you know, a year minimum to get a license to cultivate, manufacture or sell cannabis. It’s very costly. And we’ve seen dozens of businesses that in the five years since the industry got off the ground have already folded because it’s just not a very profitable business at this point, given how open the market is.
Snow piled high on top of a bird feeder after a storm in Anchorage dropped over a foot of snow in some areas on November 11, 2021. (Julia O’Malley/Alaska Public Media) Anchorage residents went to bed Wednesday night expecting some snow in the morning. When they woke up, though, it was more than double what had been forecast.
National Weather Service climate researcher Brian Brettschneider — back for our Ask a Climatologist segment — says there are a couple reasons for that.
The snow was very fluffy, due to some very specific atmospheric conditions, Brettschneider says, so being less dense, it made a thicker carpeting on the ground, and everything else.
And, he says, forecasters suspected there’d be a narrow band of heavy snow, but predicting where it would end up is extra tricky.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Brian Brettschneider: So the heavy snow was always on the table, although I think the maximum amounts have surprised pretty much everyone. But the the potential for heavy snow had actually been there for a while, it was a low-probability event at any given location.
Casey Grove: We went to bed last night, where my house is it was pretty bare on the ground, and woke up with almost a foot of snow. What were the totals around town?
BB: Well, as we’re talking, most places in town east of, say Minnesota drive have had 10 or more inches, and almost every place east of Seward Highway has had over 12 inches. And a handful of places have had 16, 17 inches. So it’s really been a big snow bonanza. As of about 1 o’clock, the official measurement was 5.6 inches. So the spot that has the lowest of any place in town, is our official total. So that’s kind of unfortunate.
CG: Yeah, not a bonanza for them. So something my editor asked me as I was coming in here, she said, “I’m very interested in the fluffiness factor.” And I wondered if there was a way of getting at that. Is it champagne powder? I described it as flufftastic. But I don’t know if that’s a technical term.
BB: Well, we, in the science community, we absolutely use the term “fluffy.” We’ll talk about how fluffy the snow is. Now, there are ways to quantify that. And really, what we talk about is what’s called the “snow-to-liquid ratio.” And so if you take the snow, and you melt it, and you end up with liquid, if you divide the snow divided by the liquid, you get your snow-to-liquid ratio. So for example, if you have 12 inches of snow that falls, and you melt it, and you end up with 1 inch of water, you take 12 divided by one and you get 12. So 12-to-1 is your snow ratio. If you have 24 inches of snow, and you melt it, and you end up also with 1 inch of water, we would call that 24-to-1 ratio snow. And in this case, this is a very low density snow. I’m estimating, you know, probably in the 20-, 25-, even in some cases 30-to-1 ratio in general. Here in Anchorage, we average about 15-to-1. So we’re kind of close to doubling that. So this is kind of double the fluffiness.
As the Arctic warms, it increasingly has the potential to become an arena where world powers compete for dominance. While Russia and China are beefing up their Arctic presence, the Pentagon has been slow to make the Arctic a priority. Alaska Public Media’s Liz Ruskin reports that may be changing.
Supporters of the Alaskans Choose Respect campaign listen to speakers during a 2014 rally at the state Capitol. (Skip Gray/Gavel Alaska) Last week a woman in Anchorage went public on social media with an allegation of sexual assault, prompting other people to share their stories.
By the end of the week, a group of Twitter accounts published a spreadsheet of names accused of being abusers. It grew fast — from a few hundred to more than 500 people before the list came down three days later.
The list — first called The Alaska Abuser List and later changed to Questionable People of Alaska — is anonymous and crowdsourced.
Listen to the story here: In most cases, there are no specific allegations backing up the claim that a person is an abuser. In rare cases, organizers linked to a person’s name in the sex offender registry or noted court case numbers. But the vast majority are just listed by name.
The list’s organizers did not want to be interviewed, but they said in social media posts that by publishing the list, they’re trying to bring some accountability to abusers in Alaska.
Advocates and law enforcement say this type of vigilante justice may not be the best way to do that. There’s the risk of being sued for defamation, among other considerations.
A similar national spreadsheet, called the Sh**ty Media Men list, gained attention when it was published during the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017. At least one person named on it filed a $1.5 million defamation lawsuit after the list’s creator revealed her identity.
In Alaska, more than half of women will experience intimate partner violence, sexual violence or both in their lifetimes, but most perpetrators will not get prosecuted.
Mandy Cole, the executive director of Juneau’s domestic and sexual violence shelter, AWARE, said a list like this can be a way for victims to take back control.
“I think it goes back to that feeling of just, like, powerlessness and hopelessness that you get when someone takes advantage of your body in that way and, for many of us, it doesn’t feel like there’s recourse,” Cole said.
She said going through the legal channels of filing a report and getting a medical examination is an emotionally costly prospect.
“The idea of then subjecting yourself to more trauma in order to get a result of just being believed and heard is hard,” she said.
Cole said she understands the motivation behind wanting to say “this happened to me” without having to do all of the things that go along with making an official report to law enforcement.
She said she doesn’t know who made Alaska’s list, but thinks it’s more about catharsis for survivors of abuse than it is about punishment for people named on it.
People sometimes rely on a whisper network in situations where they can’t get justice — sharing information between friends and colleagues, warning people away from abusers.
Cole said the power of a whisper network lies in the trust people have in the people they’re sharing with and getting information from. The people in a whisper network know each other, and they know the people they’re whispering about.
“And so, that is the information that I need — not necessarily like, you know, forensic evidence,” she said.
But Cole said these networks also lose some of the power of trusted secrets shared among friends when they go public. The bar gets higher, and people want proof and evidence.
“I mean, I think that’s how our culture decided to solve this issue. Once it’s in the public sphere, it has to be about things that you can prove,” she said.
Cole and others said this spreadsheet is a symptom of a much larger problem in Alaska.
The majority of sexual assaults are never reported to the police, and every year hundreds of thousands of instances of domestic violence nationwide go unreported.
And, Juneau Police Department Lt. Krag Campbell said, just a fraction of what is reported will be prosecuted successfully. Still, he said, he probably would have encouraged the list’s organizers to find another way to tackle the problem.
“I would say they just have to use a lot of caution. Because, they’re throwing out a lot of information that could be damaging to people — it might not be justifiable, because they’re not vetting the source of information,” he said.
He looked at the list when it was published and said it was difficult to figure out who was being accused of what. The list had just two categories, sexual assault and domestic violence, but many of the names were not categorized in either.
Campbell is looking for more specificity, in part because the list names a Juneau police officer. Like so many of the names on the list, the claims are unsubstantiated. But Campbell said he takes the allegations seriously.
He said the officer went through a background check to get a job on the force, and Campbell didn’t hear of any allegations or even rumors that came up in that investigation.
“Could it still be [that] things are out there? You know, there’s always the chance,” he said. “But we just don’t have any information to go off of, and our plan is to at least look into it.”
Campbell wouldn’t say if he talked directly to the officer about the list; he called it a personnel matter.
“It would be good, if somebody does have an allegation that they believe is true and accurate, to make a report,” Campbell said.
And if that person doesn’t want to go to Juneau police with an accusation, he suggests making it to another agency like the Alaska State Troopers or a sexual assault and domestic violence advocate.
Campbell said he’s cautious about an unsubstantiated list of allegations because he’s dealt with instances of false reporting throughout his career — not just confined to rape and sexual assault.
Data show that it’s unusual for people to falsely report rape or sexual violence. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center estimates the rate of false reporting at somewhere between 2% and 10% of cases.
Isaac Weber says he’s one of those rare cases. He found out his name was on the list from an ex-girlfriend.
“It was just really a stomach-dropping moment. I couldn’t believe it. I went through the list and saw that it was, in fact, there — my name along with a bunch of other people that I knew all in a row,” he said. “I couldn’t think of what I could have possibly done to deserve a place on this list next to all of these disgusting people. Just being roped in with that made me feel very small in the moment.”
His mom, Sarah Weber, works in addiction and mental health services. She describes her professional and personal lives as trauma-informed. She said it was surreal and difficult to talk to her son about what may have led up to someone putting his name on the list.
“I absolutely grilled him,” she said.
Isaac had similar conversations with his current girlfriend and older sister, and he said he felt hopeless.
“Every part of me tells me that they trust me completely and that they know that I would never do this. But that irrational anxiety that just keeps nipping away at my head tells me that everybody kind of believes it, and that’s really scary,” he said.
Setting that fear aside, Isaac and his mother say their family is intimately familiar with sexual violence and the toll it takes on people. He said that being falsely accused of something is hard, but it doesn’t compare to the experience victims of violence and sexual assault go through every day.
They believe they know who put his name on the list. They shared a screenshot of a text-thread appearing to corroborate their account that his name was included as a cruel joke. But they know that’s probably not enough to prove Isaac’s innocence to people who have never met him.
Sarah Webber fears the allegation will follow her son throughout his life. But there’s also the problem of pushing back against an effort they both believe is valid. She said the unfortunate thing about the list is that there’s a need for it.
“It feels like for some of the women that were posting names on there, it’s like their only way to get any sort of justice. And for lack of better words, that sucks,” she said. “That sucks to know that … an anonymous Twitter feed is the best that some of these women can get. It is really disheartening.”
Both said if they had seen the list and Isaac’s name hadn’t been on it, they’d assume everyone on it had committed a crime.
This is the tough spot the family is in. They say they’re concerned that the inclusion of names of people who don’t belong on the list lessens its impact.
Sarah Webber feels her own discomfort and sees her son’s discomfort, but she thinks there are probably people on that list who deserve to be there.
“Having the discomfort of their names put on the list versus the discomfort and pain they’ve caused real victims is like small potatoes. It’s nothing,” she said.
“Drops in a pond,” Isaac added.
If you’re a survivor of sexual assault, ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News compiled this Alaska Sexual Assault Survivor Guide.
Denali Pass is the V-shaped notch in the upper left quadrant, at18,200 feet. The flat plateau below it to the right is where the high camp sits. Adam Rawski was traversing from the notch to that flat section when he fell, according to park officials. (NPS Photo/Jeff Pflueger) A man climbing Denali in May made a false report of hypothermia in an attempt to get a helicopter rescue after his failed summit attempt on North America’s highest peak, according to federal charges.
Dr. Jason Lance is an Ogden, Utah-based radiologist who now faces charges of interfering with a government employee, violating a lawful order and making a false report.
According to the charges filed Tuesday, here’s what happened:
Lance was climbing with another man, named only as “A.R.” in the charges but identified as Adam Rawski by the National Park Service in a May news release, because of what happened next.
Lance and Rawski were ascending Denali’s popular West Buttress route. They weren’t registered as climbing partners, and the charges say they had just teamed up that day at a camp at 14,200 feet.
Higher up, somewhere between 18,600 and 19,200 feet, Rawski started to show signs of altitude sickness. At some point, Lance took Rawski’s Garmin InReach satellite communication device.
Lance left Rawski with another two-person team of climbers and continued up the mountain. The other team decided to abandon their own summit attempt to help Rawski back down.
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Later, Lance also turned around and met up with Rawski and the other two climbers. As the four were descending together, with Lance and Rawski unroped, Rawski fell about 1,000 feet down a slope called the Autobahn and lay motionless at the bottom.
Lance hit the S.O.S. button on Rawski’s device. A Park Service helicopter picked up a mountaineering ranger already on the mountain, and they rescued Rawski, who was unresponsive and later listed in critical condition.
Lance still had Rawski’s device, and in subsequent messages with Park Service personnel, he said he didn’t have the right gear to descend on his own. The Park Service continued to tell Lance he needed to get down the mountain and refused to send a helicopter.
The other two-person team, apparently in the same location as Lance, sent a message saying there had been an accident but that they were OK.
According to the charges, Lance sent another message requesting a helicopter evacuation, apparently for the other climbers: “Cant decend safely. Patients in shock. Early hypothermia..”
Later, the other two climbers said they were never hypothermic or in any form of medical shock and that they had tried for hours to convince Lance to descend.
Lance insisted they stay put and said the Park Service was obligated to rescue them because, “We’ve paid our fee,” according to the charges.
Because of his message about hypothermia, the Park Service did launch a helicopter. But before the helicopter reached them, Lance and the other two climbers had finally started to head down.
Once they were all safe farther down the mountain, a mountaineering ranger with law enforcement credentials tried to talk to Lance about what had happened. Lance said he was a medical professional and could recognize hypothermia, even if the climbers he said were suffering from it disagreed.
Then, in what sounded like a tense exchange, the ranger stood outside Lance’s tent, asking for the Garmin InReach while Lance appeared to be deleting messages from the device. He eventually handed it over, the charges say.
Lance did not immediately respond to a message left at his Ogden, Utah radiology practice. It remains unclear what happened to Rawski.
The incident at the heart of the charges appears to be just one that irked Denali mountaineering rangers during the 2021 climbing season, enough so that they wrote a terse statement about inexperienced, over-eager climbers without the proper gear and the dangers of climbing with unfamiliar, last-minute partners.
A man ice fishes in northwest Alaska. (Kristen Green) It’s no secret that climate change has affected how — and when — Alaskans harvest subsistence foods.
But what are the biggest impacts? How much has the warming climate changed things? And how are subsistence harvesters dealing with that change?
Well, a new study in the journal Ecology and Society aims to answer those questions, specifically as they pertain to the Northwest Alaska communities of Kotzebue and Kivalina.
Kristen Green is a co-author on the study and an Alaska-based Ph.D. student in environment and resources at Stanford University. She says a lot of research on subsistence adaptations due to climate change has been theoretical, so she and her fellow researchers went to interview the harvesters themselves.
Listen here:
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The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Kristen Green: Well, since we were working with Alaska Native communities, it was really important to us to partner with them through every step of the research project. So, as we were first coming up with the idea, we started conversations with the Native Village of Kotzebue first and then later Kivalina, and trying to understand what questions might be meaningful to the community. From there, we started to focus on this idea of access and harvest, and developed a research protocol where we decided that we would interview expert harvesters throughout the region and ask them about what was most impacting the ways that they got to where they hunted and harvested. We asked them what changes they were seeing with respect to animal availability. And we also asked them how they’re responding to those changes and what their ideas were going forward.
Casey Grove: Just to be clear, what animals are we talking about?
KG: We asked people what was most important to them with respect to harvesting and caribou. The people there often refer to themselves as caribou people. It’s a symbolic animal for cultural and nutritional sustenance. So that was a of course a very important species. Ice seals, especially bearded seal, beluga whale are also really important. And as you get out to Kivalina, marine species become even more important based on their location. So marine mammals and fishes as well, particularly things like chum salmon and sheefish.
CG: So a pretty big range of things it sounds like.
KG: That’s right. Harvesters in the region definitely have a range of food sources that they rely on because they do harvest seasonally throughout the year. And when you look at the seasonal harvest, you do see in every month of the year, people are harvesting things. And that’s actually one thing that we found: some of those harvesting seasons are shifting a little bit relative to the past. And we believe that’s correlated with sea ice retreats.
CG: The season is changing and how much?
KG: We saw changes in three key species. For bearded seal, harvest is now beginning in early May instead of late May. For chum salmon, harvest is now starting sometime in June, mid-June, when it used to start in early July. And for beluga whale, it’s now beginning in mid- to late May. Anywhere from two to three weeks earlier for all those species. And the total window of harvest is also often more narrow and more unpredictable with some of the changes in the weather.
CG: Is the quantity of pounds of food is changing too?
KG: We didn’t specifically ask about pounds of food harvested in our study, it was outside the scope of our work. But we did hear from the two years that we asked people questions about this, that there were some years where it was much harder for them to get bearded seal. And we suspect that people are relying on other things to fill in for food that they’re not able to get — sometimes relying more on fish in a year where they can’t get seals or they’re trading more with other communities or other families.
CG: And it kind of stands to reason if you have to spend more energy, more time, more money trying to harvest the same amount of food that that’s just an overall greater difficulty than in the past.
KG: Absolutely. And that’s one of the things that we found is the amount of time you have to harvest, the amount of financial resources you have — whether it’s gasoline to be able to travel farther to find animals, or whether it’s access to multiple types of transportation. So having a snowmachine and boat and a four-wheeler, if you have access to all those, you may be able to harvest more than someone who can’t.
CG: This study, it strikes me as very intensive on the talking, almost in a journalistic sort of way, that you’re getting a lot of information by talking to people. And I wonder, what was that like? I mean, it sounds like a lot of interviews and a lot of direct communication with folks?
KG: It was a really meaningful aspect of this study that people in Kivalina and in Kotzebue were so willing to share their stories with us and we spent time at people’s houses and in fish camps, having coffee with folks and really hearing the stories of change that they’d experienced and also some of their optimism for the future. We also did look at some of the quantitative environmental trends to see how they compare to what the harvesters’ stories were and they both had similar stories about climate change. But I think the nuances, that when you’re talking to people, you’re able to gather a much broader context for climate change and potential ways to adapt than when you just are looking at the numbers.
Better internet access is coming to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, but other regions of the state are still waiting to bridge the digital divide. How will new technology and funding resources help?
Lori Townsend speaks with Hallie Bissett, Chair of the Governor’s Task Force on Broadband, and Akiak Technology CEO & President Kevin Hamer.
Rural Alaska communities have largely been left behind in the digital revolution — until now. Akiak will be the first community in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta to bring high-speed broadband internet to all its residents later this month on November 15. New satellite technology and huge federal investments are making that possible. KYUK’s Greg Kim has the story.
Cars line up for drive-through Covid-19 testing on the Alaska Native Medical Campus on Aug. 24, 2021. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) State health officials are hopeful that the worst of Alaska’s fall COVID-19 surge has passed.
Daily cases, hospitalizations and the percent of positive tests have all been declining for the last several weeks, according to data from the state’s COVID-19 dashboard. Weekly case totals have also gone down in each of the last four weeks.
The declines follow a stubborn plateau of high numbers that lasted from the end of September through mid-October, which strained hospitals and medical workers.
While Alaska’s case rate remains the highest in the country at about four times the national average, according to data compiled by The New York Times, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink said the new downward trend is “relieving.”
“We still have a lot of cases, we’re still in that high zone, there’s a lot of chances people can still get infected, but it’s a much better trend,” she said.
State data shows hospitalizations are down about 30% from their highs last month. As of Thursday afternoon, 157 people in Alaska were in the hospital with COVID-19, according to Jared Kosin, president and CEO of the Alaska Hospital and Nursing Home Association.
“We definitely are feeling consistent softening volumes,” said Kosin.
RELATED: Anchorage kids ages 5-11 get first shots of COVID vaccine at school district clinic
Kosin said the statewide declines in COVID-19 patients are driven by steep drops of people with the virus in Anchorage’s three main hospitals. Hospitals on the Kenai Peninsula and Mat-Su Borough have also started to see some declines, Kosin said. But he pointed out that levels are still above the highs set during last winter’s surge.
“We’ve been operating at such an extreme level that now that we’re close to our prior peak we’re able to kind of let out a sigh of relief for the moment,” he said.
Weekly cases have dropped by about a third over the last month, though hundreds of positive cases are still being reported each day.
COVID-19 continues to infect unvaccinated Alaskans at a much higher rate than vaccinated Alaskans. A report from the Department of Health and Social Services shows that unvaccinated residents are 11 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID than those who’ve gotten a vaccine.
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University of Alaska Anchorage Bachelor of Social Work student Amber Shields (right) takes notes as Cook Inlet Tribal Council’s suicide intervention coordinator Kris Green (left) and youth prevention coordinator Colleen Newcity (center) teach a 16-hour suicide intervention training course in Anchorage on Monday. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) The statistics around suicide in Alaska are staggering. It’s not just that it’s the sixth leading cause of death in the state or that 184 people died by suicide in 2020. It’s also that so many people seriously consider killing themselves every year.
In 2018, before the pandemic, researchers estimated around 32,000 Alaskans age 18 and older, or 5.85% of the population, seriously considered suicide. For high schoolers, it was closer to 25% in 2019, according to the Alaska Youth Behavior Risk Survey. That’s about 9,600 students.
“People are so desperate, they are so profoundly overwhelmed, that they cannot live life and that they want the pain to go away,” said Kris Green, who teaches suicide intervention courses with Cook Inlet Tribal Council. “They want relief from the pain. They don’t necessarily want to die. They just don’t want to keep feeling this bad.”
Most people in the United States want to be able to support loved ones who are dealing with thoughts of suicide, but many feel like they lack the right words or the right knowledge to talk about the topic, according to a national poll conducted in 2020. That’s where free programs, including Cook Inlet’s, are stepping in. They’re trying to teach people how to safely and confidently talk about suicide.
“People need to be heard,” said Green. “They need their stories to be heard. They need the pain to be elevated. They need to know they are not alone.”
Listen to this story:
Cook Inlet Tribal Council’s suicide intervention coordinator Kris Green (left) and youth prevention coordinator Colleen Newcity. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) Green teaches a class called Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training, or ASIST, in Anchorage. The training gives people steps to use when having conversations about suicide and developing a safety plan with a person. The idea is to keep the person safe for now. You can’t solve all their problems, said Green, but you can help them realize that resources and options exist.
The two-day-long, in-person training combines conversations, videos, powerpoints and roleplaying to teach the stages of the model. It’s a global model developed by LivingWorks 35 years ago in Canada.
As part of reporting this story and because I wanted to develop the skills myself, I attended the training in late summer along with about eight other people, including Michelle Martin. She’s a community member who took the class because she was concerned about a friend.
She said the program’s acknowledgement that suicide is a choice resonated with her and with the training she received as a victim advocate and support line volunteer.
“When a person feels disempowered, it’s really, really critical for them to know that they actually do have power over their own life,” she said.
During the training we did a role-playing exercise together to simulate what it’s like to talk directly about suicide. In the exercise, Martin played a teacher who was concerned about her student, and I played a person about to graduate from high school. We chatted a bit, I said some concerning things about life being pointless, then she asked directly: “So you sometimes think about suicide? About ending your life?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I answered.
“That’s heavy stuff. I’m here with you. Can we talk more about that?” she asked, gently but directly.
In the scenario, Martin listened to what I was saying and highlighted the small things that gave my character hope. She didn’t try to fix my problems, but we talked about easy things to do right now to stay safe, like calling a relative and avoiding alcohol.
That’s the training’s model. Martin walked through it step by step, even pulling out a pocket guide to help her remember.
“It felt good to have a model to follow,” she said.
ASIST is just one of many suicide intervention training options, but most research shows it is effective. One of the largest studies, with about 1,400 participants, showed that suicide prevention lifeline counselors who received the training helped callers feel less depressed, less suicidal and more hopeful. A significantly smaller study with about 60 people from Indigenous groups in Manitoba, Canada, showed that people who participated in ASIST did not develop better suicide intervention skills than a control group who attended a two-day culture-based resilience retreat.
One aspect of ASIST that makes it unique is its focus on attitudes around suicide. It teaches that if you come into a conversation about suicide projecting that it’s a shameful thing to consider, it will shut the conversation down and isolate the person further. If you approach the conversation with the idea that it’s a choice among many choices, people feel heard. They know you are listening to them.
A poster outlining a process called Pathway for Assisting Life is taped to the wall during the training course. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) Instructor Green said seeing suicide as a personal choice is also a way to keep yourself safe when entering these conversations.
“Everybody needs to understand that concept,” she said. “That suicide is a choice by an individual, not one we ever want them to make and never encourage somebody to make, but it also relieves us of the guilt and the burden of the what ifs. I should’ve, I could’ve, what did I do wrong?”
Green said we just need to be willing to sit with someone and listen.
If you or someone you know needs help, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK. CITC is offering ASIST training and half-day SafeTalk classes for free for anyone through May. You can email Kris Green at kkgreen@citci.org to find out dates and sign up. If you want tips on how to start the conversation, you can find tips from the Indian Health Service and NAMI. The Suicide Prevention Resource Center can help you find other programs to attend or teach as well.
This story is part of an ongoing solutions journalism project at Alaska Public Media about destigmatizing mental health. The project is funded by the Alaska Mental Health Trust.
The Anchorage Assembly chambers at the Z. J. Loussac Public Library in Anchorage. (Staff photo) Monday night’s Anchorage Assembly meeting managed to be what months’ worth of meetings weren’t: pretty much business as usual.
After weeks of combative meetings marked by bitter conflicts, raucous behavior and even a few arrests, discussion returned to more mundane topics like liquor licenses, utility rate increases and whether to charge for single-use plastic bags.
The Assembly ultimately voted 7-3 to not have businesses charge for the bags — at least for now. It’s temporarily suspending its plastic bag ban until Jan. 1. The bag ban originally took effect in September 2019, but then was suspended for about a year and a half due to concerns about reusable bags and the spread of COVID-19.
RELATED: Former Anchorage chief equity officer is suing the Bronson administration for wrongful termination
Also among the topics that generated the most discussion Monday night: changing the land use designation for a section of West Anchorage so a snow dumping facility can be built. The Assembly approved the new designation.
The Assembly was also unanimous in its support of a resolution to work with the Bronson administration to close the mass shelter at the Sullivan Arena and move toward a more community-oriented approach to homelessness. The resolution doesn’t specify any final choices for new, smaller shelters.
And on Monday, the Assembly voted to increase rates for trash collection and disposal as well as water treatment.
The Assembly did not get to everything on its agenda. An ordinance that would change how the mayor appoints department heads and how long a person may serve as a “acting” department head, was bumped to the next Assembly meeting on Nov. 9.
While the Assembly was mostly back to its usual routine this week, the meeting was not totally without disruption. Two men — who have a history of getting escorted out of public meetings — were removed by security after yelling and being repeatedly asked by Assembly leadership to stay on topic.
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Redistricting is a lengthy process that takes place every ten years. Various draft proposals have already come under fire. Will the redistricting board be able to avoid litigation this time around?
Lori Townsend speaks with Sen. Tom Begich (D-Anchorage) and Randy Ruedrich from Alaskans for Fair and Equitable Redistricting to learn more about the process.
Every ten years, a state board redraws the boundaries of Alaska’s legislative districts. The process is long and technical, but there’s a lot at stake. It can determine which party controls the state Legislature. Alaska Public Media’s Annie Feidt explains.
Dr. John Morris, who leads mayor-elect Dave Bronson administration’s homelessness response, speaks with the media after an Anchorage Assembly’s Committee on Housing and Homelessness meeting in June 2021. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) A routine Anchorage Assembly work session on the city’s shelter operations was thrown into disarray on Thursday when news surfaced that a key player in Mayor Dave Bronson’s response to homelessness had resigned.
John Morris, an anesthesiologist who has served as the city’s homeless coordinator since July, confirmed in a text message to Alaska Public Media Thursday afternoon that he had resigned on Monday. He declined to comment any further and would not say why he quit.
Morris was scheduled to give an update at Thursday’s work session on the Sullivan Arena, the city’s main homeless shelter. The meeting was held by videoconference. About 15 minutes in, Assembly Chair Suzanne LaFrance directed a question to Morris. He did not answer.
Eagle River/Chugiak Assembly member Jamie Allard interjected to say that Morris had resigned.
The news seemed to take administration officials by surprise, including Bronson’s chief of staff Sami Graham and the city’s acting health director Joe Gerace.
“I emailed Dr. Morris this morning,” said Gerace at the meeting. “I was not aware that that had occurred. So I’m shocked to hear that.”
Morris is the latest member of Bronson’s administration involved with homelessness to leave, less than four months into Bronson’s tenure as mayor.
Bronson’s office announced in a statement later Thursday afternoon that it had accepted Morris’s resignation. Bronson thanked him for his work and said his administration will work with the Assembly on homelessness issues.
“The focus and mission remains the same in helping our city’s most vulnerable get the compassionate care and resources they need,” said the statement from Bronson.
Morris’s departure comes amid concern and questions from Assembly members and homelessness experts about conditions at the Sullivan shelter, which recently underwent a management change.
Jasmine Boyle, director of the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, told Assembly members during Thursday’s work session that she’s heard an increasing number of complaints about conditions at the Sullivan, including issues with rule changes, violence and cleanliness.
Gerace acknowledged that there had been recent problems at the Sullivan because of lax behavioral policies. He said security guards had been assaulted with a knife last week.
“Bean’s had a very strong behavioral policy. I will admit that the current vendor hasn’t,” he said. “We can only ask very strongly through a contract compliance tool that they use the same rules that Bean’s did, because that was what the people were used to.”
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Gerace said the administration is working to ensure that 99 Plus 1 is complying with its contract. 99 Plus 1 is the private company that took over operations of the Sullivan shelter from Bean’s Cafe in September. Its contract ends on Sunday, but it can be extended for up to six months.
Assembly members on Thursday also had questions about the status of the city moving out of the Sullivan Arena with Morris and others leaving their jobs.
Morris was part of a six-member group of administration representatives and Assembly members working on a plan to transition out of the Sullivan. Larry Baker is the only remaining member of the group representing Bronson’s administration. Craig Campbell, a senior advisor, announced he was leaving last week.
“With two-thirds of that team gone, who is spearheading implementation of the facilitated process so that we can move out of the Sullivan as soon as possible?” Assembly member Forrest Dunbar asked Gerace during the meeting.
“I don’t know who’s going to sit in the chair,” said Gerace. “But it’s definitely something we need to look at.”
Morris was a proponent of building a large temporary shelter in East Anchorage that couldn’t win Assembly approval in part because of unclear costs and concerns about earthquakes and snow load. A smaller version of that shelter is in the most recent proposal by the city’s working group, along with several other smaller shelter sites.
RELATED: Anchorage working group proposes building large Midtown shelter and buying 3 smaller sites
Other city staff that have recently left their jobs include Bob Doehl, director of development services who was integral in setting up the Sullivan shelter last March. He announced he will resign in November.
Shawn Hays, the mass care lead who oversaw operations at the Sullivan and other non-congregate shelters, was fired last week. Hays said she is “considering options” related to her dismissal. She previously told Alaska Public Media that she had not been told of any performance issues before she was fired.
Correction: This story previously misspelled the name of Assembly Chair Suzanne LaFrance.
Mourners including Dustin Darden and Michael Chambers gather around William Topel’s coffin on Monday, Oct. 25, 2021. (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media) About a dozen friends gathered around a wooden casket on a cold Monday in October for conservative activist William Topel’s burial at the Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery.
In attendance were friends, state Sen. Roger Holland, R-Anchorage, and the city’s chief medical officer, Michael Savitt. Mourners placed their hands on Topel’s casket and wiped tears as his body was lowered into the earth. Topel died on Oct. 13 at age 68.
Friends remembered Topel for his kindness, generosity and love of chocolate cake from Leroy’s Family Restaurant.
William Topel (Michael Chambers photo) They also said they saw Topel’s death as a call to action to oppose mask mandates and COVID-19 vaccines, and to promote the use of ivermectin to treat the virus, even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warns against it. Topel was a longtime attendee and testifier at Anchorage Assembly meetings and was deeply involved in a recent string of contentious meetings on a proposed mask mandate. He attended the meetings unmasked until he was hospitalized with COVID-19.
“God’s going to use this as a fulcrum to propel us into victory,” friend and fellow activist Dustin Darden told the crowd after Topel’s burial. “We’re going to take every square inch of Anchorage, everything that Bill stood for every time he was out there, it’s just been amplified 1,000 times.”
RELATED: Fight over required health precautions in Anchorage Assembly chamber ends meeting early
For other people who observed Topel in public life, there’s a different lesson to take from his death.
“It’s just heartbreaking,” said Downtown Assembly member Chris Constant, who supported the mask mandate and knew Topel through his frequent and lengthy public testimony. “It just punches you straight to the heart of your core mission.”
Listen to this story:
For supporters of health measures like COVID-19 vaccines and mask mandates, Topel’s story is one of a man who was misled by misinformation. Constant said he voted for the mandate in order to save lives, but he also predicted that it could cost some people their lives after seeing the packed Assembly meeting room during the weeks-long public testimony.
“I looked to the chair [Suzanne LeFrance] and I said to her, and this is a grim thing, but you know, ‘When we see this crowd here, it’s very likely some of these people aren’t going to make it,’” he said. “Why? Because it’s predictable, simply science, virology.”
Last week, Suzanne Straub, an Eagle River nurse practitioner, also warned about the potential spread of COVID-19 at the meetings. In a letter to the Assembly, she said she had a patient who attended the meetings without a mask, had been infected with COVID and was gravely ill. The patient, according to the email, refused to wear a mask in the medical clinic.
“That’s the sickness we have going on right now where someone who believes it’s their right and freedom not to take a vaccine or not to put a mask on believes they have the right to spread disease,” Constant said.
It’s unclear how Topel contracted COVID-19, but many suspect it may have been at those crowded Assembly hearings. Several people, including members of Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration, were recently infected.
Michael Chambers, a friend of Topel’s for the last 15 years, said after Topel was hospitalized, he demanded ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug not approved for COVID treatment. Doctors denied his requests, he said, which some friends blame for his death. They see the problem as the medical establishment’s refusal to treat COVID patients with drugs like ivermectin, a drug used mostly to treat conditions caused by parasitic worms. The drug generally has few side effects, but the FDA has warned of illness caused by taking high doses usually from the drug in its form designed for animals.
“We’re not talking about drinking battery acid, we’re talking about benign medical things that he wanted, that he requested,” said Chambers. “And they denied him that … And I think it’s just disgusting.”
The FDA has not approved ivermectin for treating COVID, though larger studies are ongoing to see if it could be effective. The National Institutes of Health says that there are indications it may be helpful in treating the virus based on in-vitro lab studies, but says there isn’t enough evidence to recommend for or against using it. Physicians could be liable for adverse effects from prescribing drugs that are not approved for treating a certain condition or disease, according to the NIH.
Health officials say they worry that interest in ivermectin could distract people from the most effective way to avoid serious effects of COVID: getting vaccinated.
Chambers said Topel was adamantly opposed to the vaccine, but said he didn’t deny that the virus was dangerous. Chambers said Topel had several underlying conditions and knew the risk he was getting into going to the Assembly meetings.
“He didn’t want to be a martyr, he wanted to live,” said Chambers, “But he knew that he stood by his convictions, he stood by his principles so he went to the public [hearing].”
Now, his group of friends are hoping to spread his message at an upcoming medical summit. The conference features nationally renowned vaccine skeptics, promoters of unproven cures for COVID and local doctors who disagree with the medical consensus on the use of drugs like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and Z-Pak, an antibiotic, as COVID treatment.
RELATED: Prominent COVID vaccine critics scheduled to gather in Anchorage
Meanwhile, a mask mandate is in effect throughout Anchorage, though compliance has been spotty and it’s unclear whether Bronson’s administration is enforcing it.
To supporters of public health measures, the response from opponents feels like a collective fever dream that has pitted parts of the community against each other, when the clear enemy is the virus.
“People don’t really wake up until it happens to them or someone they love,” said Constant. “And even now, you have evidence that that isn’t even enough to wake people up.”
Correction: This story previously described ivermectin as an antiviral drug. It is more accurately described as an antiparasitic drug with some antiviral properties.
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Ian Fox, a canvasser supporting Meg Zaletel, scrolls through an iPad that will show him likely voters in the Midtown special election. Fox is one of 12 door knockers working for the campaign to retain Zaletel, Oct. 22, 2021 (Lex Treinen/Alaska Public Media) In the final days of the campaign to recall Anchorage Assembly member Meg Zaletel, tens of thousands of dollars are pouring in to fund a sprint of door knocking, mailers and a barrage of online ads before voting closes on Tuesday.
Recall supporters say the race represents a rejection of what they see as wasteful spending of federal COVID-19 relief money that flaunted normal public process. Those who oppose recalling Zaletel say she’s unfairly bearing the brunt of tough decisions to support COVID-19 mitigation measures like mask mandates, and that the health of Anchorage residents is at stake.
Regardless of which way the election goes, it’s unlikely to change the balance of the Assembly. That’s because even if the recall succeeds, the progressive Assembly will select a replacement until the regular election in April.
Still, to some observers, the cash going toward the recall — which is more than the campaign that got Zaletel elected in the first place — signifies something bigger: a deeply partisan political climate where people have starkly different views on the pandemic.
“I think there are more people on both sides of the political spectrum who are looking at recalls as just a way of irritating, annoying and distracting people in office that they disagree with,” said Jim Lottsfeldt, a political consultant who has worked in Alaska politics for decades, mostly for progressive candidates.
A campaign to recall Midtown Assembly member Felix Rivera, who is also progressive, failed in the April election. Another campaign is underway to try to unseat Jamie Allard, an outspoken conservative
It’s unclear what has caused the recent uptick in Assembly recall petitions. Ballotpedia, a crowdsourced website that tracks local elections, shows the recent recall attempts are the first for Assembly members in at least a decade.
Recall supporters say the campaign to unseat Zaletel, which is based on a minor rules violation at a meeting last fall, represents more than just unseating her.
Russell Biggs, who organized the recall, argues that Zaletel has ignored public process rules by pushing through the controversial purchase of a former hotel to use as a substance abuse treatment center. Last year, the Assembly purchased the building, near Biggs’ property in Geneva Woods, but Mayor Dave Bronson recently repurposed the building as a COVID-19 treatment center.
Biggs is also unhappy with how the Assembly has awarded federal COVID-19 relief and stimulus money.
“It’s a very unique time in Anchorage history because [the Assembly members] are being gifted millions of dollars of money,” he said. “And the people that should be in charge of that money should be using that in an ethical and responsible manner.”
Biggs pointed to funding given to groups like the Alaska Black Caucus, a civil rights group that Biggs sees as political. He described that funding — which the group said it would use for COVID-19 vaccination and testing to create the first report on the health of Black Alaskans — as irresponsible. The $1.15 million grant for the group was approved at the request of then-Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson and passed as part of a consent agenda, so it didn’t require a separate vote.
Biggs also criticized a $70,000 donation from the Unite Here union based in New York, which he sees as outsiders trying to influence the election.
Joelle Hall, president of the AFL-CIO, a labor organization, who’s leading the anti-recall campaign, said the donation was from the national umbrella union that has a local branch that’s actively opposing the recall. She’s not a fan of all the money funneling into the election, but said it’s a result of looser campaign finance laws over the last decade.
“People might lament that they wish this was like the olden days and maybe in the old days this didn’t happen,” she said. “But it’s not the old days.”
Pro-recall groups have had their share of large donations from local companies. Recall supporters got a $75,000 boost from a local paving company, a $15,000 from a property company, plus a handful of $5,000 donations from local contractors.
Those costs don’t take into account $98,000 of taxpayer money the Assembly approved to mail out and count up to 40,000 ballots.
There are also thousands of dollars the city spent after the clerk denied the recall petition, claiming that the stated reasons weren’t factually sufficient. The recall campaign appealed and the judge agreed, saying it wasn’t the court’s job to determine whether the grounds were factual. The ruling was based on a recent decision about the recall of Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
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Biggs said the influx of Outside money makes him worried about whether his campaign will succeed. His campaign to unseat Felix Rivera lost substantially in April. But he said some benefits have come out of it, like more people, including himself, engaged more heavily in local politics.
“This kind of stuff makes me want to be an activist — I don’t really I don’t like using that word,” he said, “But, you know, I have zero political aspirations except to see people get a fair shake.”
Others, like political consultant Lottsfeldt, aren’t so optimistic.
“I’m not sure I view this as increase interest in local politics as much as I view this as just another proxy for this larger cultural war,” he said.
That won’t change, he said, until national leaders turn down the temperature in political debates.
Correction: This story previously misidentified what type of group the AFL-CIO is. It is a labor organization, not a union.
Alaska offers an abundance of wild foods, but when it comes to locally grown crops, we’re often at a disadvantage. What programs and efforts are underway to help lower our dependence on outside shipments?
Lori Townsend discusses food security with UAF Cooperative Extension Program’s Casey Matney and the Intertribal Agriculture Council’s Tikaan Galbreath.
RELATED:
Agriculture projects in Alaska have yielded mixed results. Sometimes it works; sometimes it takes decades to bear fruit. Now, Alaska is working on its next big effort to promote agriculture — a large-scale land auction in the Interior. As Alaska Public Media’s Jeff Chen reports, the Alaska Division of Agriculture hopes the land will be used for ranching, wild harvests, grains, and more.
Samantha Barr, owner of Granny’s Guns in Anchorage, talks with first-time customer Ronald Nardi on Friday, a day after the city’s mask ordinance went into effect. Nardi, an advanced practice nurse, says he thinks wearing quality masks is important to slow the spread of COVID-19. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) Samantha Barr, a co-owner of Granny’s Guns in Anchorage, is no fan of face masks.
“This is a gun store, so we never liked them,” she said.
She said she has asthma, wearing a face-covering makes it hard for her to breathe, and she doubts masks actually slow the spread of COVID-19. Plus, she said, gun stores are frequent targets of theft, and having customers come in with face coverings makes her nervous.
Despite her opposition to the new mask mandate, which went into effect Thursday evening, Barr said that little will change in her store. She plans to tape up a sign in her window.
“Just ‘Per the new emergency order, whatever, the Municipality of Anchorage now requires masks in all public places,’” she said. “I won’t put that we require it.”
Samantha Barr, owner of Granny’s Guns. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) After days of dire warnings from people at recent Assembly meetings about mask mandates’ impact on personal liberty and their threat to small businesses, the mask mandate that went into effect Thursday has little impact on businesses like Granny’s.
There are large exceptions carved out for everyone from children to members of Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration, as well as for church gatherings and fitness centers. Bronson’s administration has emphasized in public statements that there is no enforcement built into the measure.
RELATED: Who needs to wear a mask in Anchorage and where? Here’s a breakdown of the new ordinance.
That’s led many businesses around the city — Granny’s Guns included — to implement laissez-faire policies on verifying masks. Matanuska Brewing, for example, wrote on its Facebook page that it would assume customers entering their stores without masks qualified for exemptions.
“Our young hosts and hostesses will not police this matter,” they wrote.
But some businesses are making changes to comply with the law.
Fatboy Vapors owner Matt Wagonner said masks were optional for employees before the mandate. Now, employees are required to wear them and customers won’t be allowed inside without masks.
“If they don’t, we’ll ask them to step outside so that we can go ahead and take their order and bring it directly outside to them,” he said.
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Wagonner said he isn’t thrilled about the new mandate, but he’s happy to comply with the law. For other business owners, the new mandate has made operating easier. Store owners that previously had the responsibility of asking customers to wear a mask, now have the power of city law to back them up.
“People know going out, ‘Oh, if I’m going into a store, I have to have a mask’ and they bring a mask with them,” said Laurette Rose, owner of Tiny Gallery, an art shop in downtown Anchorage.
A sign outside of REI in Anchorage on Friday alerts customers that local regulations now require that everyone wear a face mask. (Tegan Hanlon/Alaska Public Media) For people like Rose, the mandate brings some hope that things can return to normal and help her business.
“If you look around downtown, there’s not a lot of foot traffic. There’s not people walking around and that’s not because of the mask mandate. That’s because of case counts being high,” she said. “That’s worse for downtown businesses than any mask mandate could possibly be.”
That idea that mask mandates can help boost the economy is born out by academic research, said Nolan Klouda, director of the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development.
“Wearing a mask, by providing some level of protection … tends to make people feel safer to go outside of their homes, and perhaps spend money with local businesses,” he said.
Klouda points out that there is little cost to a mask mandate, other than the price of masks for residents.
Even for opponents of the mandate like Barr of Granny’s Guns, mask mandates haven’t affected business. Barr said that over the last year, she’s had record sales, part of a nationwide trend of new gun buyers.
“We were super busy during the last mask mandate,” she said.
The question of whether more people will wear masks due to the mandates and encourage spending is still open. On Friday, businesses said it was too early to tell.
Research shows masks are imperfect at stopping COVID-19 spread, but they do work. A recent large-scale study found that properly-worn surgical masks can prevent 11% of COVID spread in a population. Cloth masks only prevent 5% of spread, according to the same study.
That might not sound like a lot, but it means a small change in behavior could be enough to reverse trends of growing case numbers.
“We just have to kind of get the edge off of these peaks,” said South Anchorage Assembly member John Weddleton at the meeting last week where the masking rules were passed. “That 10% can do it if people rally together and just for a little while.”
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy speaks at a news conference in downtown Anchorage last month. (Nat Herz/Alaska Public Media) It’s a little more than a year from Alaska’s next gubernatorial election, and Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy would love to talk about some of the issues he ran on: crime rates (they’re down), jobs, his plans to boost the state’s energy industry.
But for now, the state remains in the grips of an intense, delta-driven surge of the coronavirus that’s stressed its hospitals and fueled a caustic public debate over a mask mandate in the state’s largest city. And a special session the governor called to address the Permanent Fund dividend and Alaska’s budget deficit is languishing.
Dunleavy spoke with Alaska Public Media’s Nat Herz this week about the state of the pandemic, his relationship with lawmakers and the outlook for next year.
Listen to the interview (the voice that breaks in partway through is Jeff Turner, Dunleavy’s deputy communications director):
This transcript was edited for clarity and condensed.
Alaska Public Media: On the pandemic: We’ve got those hundreds of contracted workers who showed up to work at hospitals. Cases seem like they are at least plateauing, if not going down. Hospitals are still in crisis standards of care, and if you look at the numbers, we still have lots of cases compared to most other places in the country. How do you think we’re doing?
Mike Dunleavy: We’d love to see the cases come down, and the cases will come down. Back in early August, the most vaccinated state in the country, Vermont, experienced a 245% increase in cases, because the delta variant’s just much more infectious. So, we’re seeing a surge that other states have seen. We want the cases to come down; we believe the cases will come down here, sooner than later.
APM: Are we doing okay?
MD: We still have the fourth-lowest death rate per capita. We did have the third. Forty-six other states have done worse.
It’s a tough one, to say that when somebody dies, ‘Are we doing good?’ Our hospitals are holding, they have assistance. None of what we’re seeing is unnecessarily unanticipated. And I would say that we’re hanging in there, and we’ll get through this.
APM: You’ve been consistent in saying that mask mandates are a choice for local governments. But what would you say to people who see that their local governments, except for in Anchorage, are not doing that, it’s costing lives, and that a mandate is something the governor has the power to put into place — so why not do it?
MD: Government has a lot of power to do a lot of things in people’s lives, which I don’t necessarily believe is good. There are some people that believe that you need government to do the right thing. I have been in government for several years — government is not perfect. Government makes mistakes, as well. I actually thought we did really well with the pandemic, when it first started, because people did what they needed to do to take care of themselves. I don’t believe in mandates, especially putting something into someone’s arms. I know other people do. I don’t.
Dunleavy sits with his chief medical officer, Dr. Anne Zink, at a news conference last month. (Nat Herz/Alaska Public Media) APM: On the mask mandate, though: Is it not worth the potential reduction in spread that we would see to violate that principle?
MD: What would that reduction be? How much?
APM: I think the state and the municipality have said it’s significant, right?
MD: If everyone wore an N-95 (mask), and wore it properly in the right settings, I think you would see a significant reduction.
Related: Alaska doctors say masks work and some are better than others
APM: You’re not convinced that a mandate would be very effective?
MD: I don’t think so. And can you describe the mandate that Anchorage just passed? People are exempt? I don’t know — is there going to be enforcement?
APM: But wouldn’t you at least accept that probably it will result in more people wearing masks, even if it’s not a lot or everyone.
MD: Probably, but I don’t know. Probably.
APM: In Anchorage, it’s been a pretty difficult couple of weeks, I think, for the local government. Do you have a sense of what is driving the kind of toxic debate and discourse that’s gone on there?
Related: Incivility in Anchorage: Ex-Assembly members do not approve
MD: I think the media is part of it. I think social media is part of it. I think there are a number of things being discussed nationally that are polarizing people. I think there are good people that absolutely believe that their rights are in jeopardy. And I believe that there are good people that believe that certain mitigation efforts such as mask wearing will have some impact
APM: But you don’t really believe that at this point, that mask-wearing will have much of an impact?
MD: It depends on what kind of mask, in what setting, for how long and how well is it fitted. We did a mask 101, many months ago, with mask experts at one of our press conferences. You start with a parent teaching a kid to cover their face when they sneeze, right? That’s a mitigating attempt. Most of us would agree that that probably won’t stop a virus. But it helps deflect, and then you work your way up to a loose fitting cloth mask, all the way up. So, it depends on what you’re wearing.
APM: But generally speaking, the average mask that someone’s going to wear — there’s an idea that either that’s going to help or it’s not going to help. And it seems like you’re kind of backing away from the idea that generally speaking, more people in masks —
MD: Help do what though, is the question? Everyone says help. Help do what? Stop the virus? It won’t stop the virus. It will not stop the virus. Does it help if the guy wearing the mask is a truck driver that goes up and down the North Slope and nobody else is around him? I don’t see how that helps. You’re talking about everyone getting into a crowded room — you’re better off wearing an N-95 if you get into a crowded room. So, it’s a matter of degree.
APM: Okay. To go back to the previous question —
MD: Can I ask you a question? When I answer your question, sometimes you don’t like the answer. I mean, I’m just being polite. But if you have a better answer, you should substitute and say, ‘This was Dunleavy’s answer.’ Or, ‘This is the answer I think he should say.’
APM: I just think that, you know, the public health folks would say —
MD: The public health folks, their job is to look at every mitigating approach you could possibly do. And ideally, you would be wearing an N-95 and be 8 feet away from people. That would be ideal.
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APM: But I think that evidence also says that if you wear a cloth mask or a surgical mask, that’s still a lot better than not wearing a mask at all.
MD: It depends on your setting.
APM: If there’s a city requirement to wear a mask in a public space — that will reduce transmission?
MD: It may.
APM: It may?
MD: You’re absolutely right — it will reduce it by 67.5%. I’m sorry, 80%. How much would Dr. Zink tell you it will reduce it by? How much will it reduce it by?
APM: I don’t know.
MD: Right? Okay.
APM: But I think the point is, we don’t know, but presumably it’s a meaningful amount somewhere between zero and not 100, because we know they’re not 100%.
MD: I think whenever you have a barrier on your face when there’s a virus around, it could have an impact on reducing spread.
APM: Going back to the Anchorage discourse question, around what’s fueling the toxic discourse there. Is it all media? Is it specific media? Is it just social media, or is it media like me, or media like The Watchman and Must Read Alaska and The Blue Alaskan?
MD: I think all of it contributes. Prior to the internet and social media, you had printed media that was pretty static. Usually, the news was dated, because you had to deliver it. But now, it’s instant, all across the world. And there are numerous, too many to even name, how many different sites there are and groups and so forth. So, I think you have a plethora of opinions, interspersed with facts. I just think the whole thing has contributed to a huge questioning situation.
APM: Is there anything government can do to fix that situation?
MD: Government can’t fix everything. I don’t believe so.
APM: What kind of consideration are you giving, if any, to any kind executive action or legislative proposals to ban mask or vaccine mandates?
MD: None, at this time.
APM: Last COVID question: What are you hearing about ivermectin right now, and would you say that people should not be using that for COVID?
MD: I’ll never pose as a doctor and tell you what you should use or shouldn’t use. That should be between your doctor and the patient. There’s ivermectin for livestock. There’s ivermectin that is actually for human beings as well. That’s a decision between the doctor and the pharmacist and the patient.
Related: Alaska GOP politicians are lobbying the governor and pharmacy board for easier access to ivermectin
APM: Would you agree that the focus on ivermectin distracts from the usefulness of vaccines?
MD: No, I don’t think it does. All of these discussions, you can have. We’ve been through this before: I was infected. I got the vaccine.That’s one discussion. There’s other potential therapies. There’s monoclonals. So, no, I don’t think it distracts.
Dunleavy speaks to reporters at a political fundraiser last year. (Nat Herz/Alaska Public Media) APM: If you got COVID, would you want ivermectin?
MD: Would I want it? I’d have to have a discussion with my doctor to see what was best. (You’re suggesting) it’s almost, like, I have this craving for ivermectin or something. I would just like to be able to know that I could get better if I got infected. That’s all.
Dunleavy’s communications aide, Jeff Turner, breaks in: It’s important to remember what the administration’s done on COVID. We now have 250 health care people coming up that were just licensed under the program that we announced a few weeks ago. So there’s that and other measures going on to address COVID. Those might be good things to bring up as well. It’s more than just face masks.
APM: The special session on the Permanent Fund seems to kind of be stalling out. There was an opinion piece the other day that basically said the governor has it backward with his fiscal plan: Locking in the Permanent Fund dividend and the Permanent Fund in the Constitution is the easy part. And the hard part is filling whatever the budget deficit is that we’re left with, if we go with your plan to divide Permanent Fund revenues 50-50 between government services and dividends. So: Where are the proposals that would give legislators confidence that you’re serious about filling that budget hole?
MD: You’re kidding me. You’re kidding me. You really don’t know where the proposals are? You haven’t seen the proposals, since we started introducing proposals in January of last year, and in subsequent special sessions, you’ve haven’t seen those proposals? We can get you — there’s probably a book that thick of proposals.
Related: Alaska lawmakers say they want compromise on PFD, but it’s unclear how they’ll get there
APM: So, basically, at this point, you feel like the Legislature has the tools in front of them?
MD: Yes, they do. They have the tools in front of them. They know the numbers. They just have to choose, as a Legislature, if they want to solve the issue with the tools that they have.
APM: Do you have the ability to knock heads together and bring everyone into a room and kind of push things forward yourself? Or is that not your job at this point?
MD: They’re having a very difficult time getting into a room with themselves right now. Our job is to lay out a budget and lay out a sustainable fiscal plan. We’ve done that. Our job is to do the research, when they ask for it. We’ve done that. Our job is to come up with as many ideas as possible, to put together a sustainable fiscal plan with all the components. We’ve done that. Our job is to provide them the environment for a special session. We’ve done that.
APM: So if Alaskans are frustrated that they haven’t seen more progress, is it your feeling that there’s really not that much more you could do, and the leadership at this point needs to come and is not coming from the Legislature?
MD: Yes. Yes. And if they don’t come up with a decision, that non-decision is a decision. That they prefer to have the situation that we have now.
APM: Do you see that changing over the next regular legislative session?
MD: I wish it changed in January. I wish it changed this summer. Alaska needs a sustainable fiscal plan. There’s nobody that argues that. What this really comes down to is whether the Permanent Fund and the Permanent Fund dividend are going to be permanent, or whether they’re subject to being spent on government programs. That’s what this comes down to.
APM: What do you feel like the chances are that we do get this resolved before the election this coming year?
MD: I have to remain optimistic. But there’s always the chance that they won’t want to resolve it. And then, the people of Alaska will have to decide if that’s the type of government that they want.
APM: There was that ruling from the federal judge last week, where he said those two psychiatrists had been unconstitutionally asked to resign. And he made a reference that you could be held personally liable. In retrospect, the fact that the request for resignations, at the start of your term, went out to a larger-than-usual group of employees after you were elected — was that a mistake?
MD: I don’t think so. No.
Related: Ex-Alaska Psychiatric Institute docs win federal court victory in challenge to Dunleavy ‘loyalty pledge’
APM: So, you feel like you guys will continue to fight that lawsuit?
MD: We’re having that discussion.
APM: What else do you want people to know?
MD: 500 health care workers are here. Our fiscals are actually looking very good for the state of Alaska. Our crime rates have plummeted over the last three years. I don’t know if I saw anything on that.
APM: Are you frustrated by the fact that people don’t seem to be acknowledging that stuff?
MD: No. I think there’s a lot of good things going on in Alaska. It’s all overshadowed by this virus, nationwide, and the politics nationwide. But there’s plenty of jobs if people want them.
APM: Do you have a sense of when the pandemic will —
MD: (joking) December 1, it will end. No, but you raise a very good question. Let me answer it. This pandemic is not going to ‘end.’ Okay? This pandemic is in many mammal species now. Denmark had to destroy millions of mink because there was a spread going back and forth, transmission. So, people need to realize that we’re going to have to live with this pandemic, this virus. We have the mitigating approaches that I think give us the upper hand. But it’s going to be with us. And, as I mentioned, it’s just a matter of time before everyone has the antibodies, either through infection or vaccination.
Vehicles line-up on Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021, afternoon at the Loussac Library, one of Anchorage’s free COVID-19 testing sites. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) An apparent decrease in COVID-19 cases in Alaska in recent weeks appears to have stalled.
“Basically, Alaska has plateaued,” State Epidemiologist Dr. Joe McLaughlin said during a call Thursday with reporters.
Alaska reported 964 new resident COVID cases on Thursday and another 22 among nonresidents who tested positive in the state. The number of cases over the past week has increased by an average of 8% over the previous week, though it’s still about a third lower than the record high levels set at the end of September.
COVID hospitalizations also ticked up on Thursday, to 209 patients. The number of patients with coronavirus in Alaska’s hospitals reached a record high in September, at 230.
McLaughlin said hospitalizations will likely stay high as long as case counts are high. Alaska continues to lead the country in its COVID-19 rate, according to data from the New York Times.
“What we can expect with respect to hospitalizations is probably something similar to what we’ve seen in the recent days and weeks,” he said. “As soon as we do start to see a notable decline in cases, then we expect that we will see a concomitant decrease in hospitalizations.”
December 2020 was the deadliest month of the pandemic in Alaska so far with 100 deaths recorded, but hospitalization trends suggest September could surpass it once officials finish reviewing death certificates.
RELATED: Anchorage Assembly will decide tonight whether to override Bronson’s veto of masking measure
Health officials say that before the delta variant, there was usually a delay between a rise in cases and a rise in hospitalizations. The trends are different with the delta surge, which experts say could be caused by the faster transmission of the highly-contagious delta variant, as well as patients behaving differently.
“We continually see people in the emergency department who are unvaccinated who show up who never got tested. And so their first presentation is when they become hospitalized,” Alaska Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink said on Thursday.
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The state has enacted crisis standards of care for 20 hospitals, which protect them from liability when they’re forced to ration care, and Zink said another hospital had requested coverage under those standards. She didn’t name the hospital.
But Zink said a recent influx of hundreds of out-of-state health workers has helped hospitals restore some care that was being rationed, like dialysis.
“I get texts every day from happy health care workers explaining what a difference this is making on the frontline, which is fantastic,” she said.
Hispanics make up a growing share of the population in Alaska, and their stories are intertwined with the state’s culture. How has life changed for the Hispanic and Latino community through the decades?
Lori Townsend discusses Hispanic Heritage Month and a new documentary showcasing Latinos in Alaska with artist and filmmaker Indra Arriaga Delgado and University of Alaska professor Mariano Gonzales.
Clem Tillion in Halibut Cove in 2018. (Jason Sear) Clem Tillion had a story for everyone, it seemed, and now everyone is telling Clem Tillion stories.
A towering figure in the worlds of Alaska fisheries and politics — and in the intersection between the two — Tillion, 96, died Wednesday morning at his home in Halibut Cove.
“Clem Tillion belongs to history now,” said Rick Halford, who served with Tillion in the state Legislature. “Almost 100 years of his own history and a lot of great contributions to the state of Alaska. He was an outstanding person and a great teacher.”
Tillion, in the words of one close friend, was Alaska’s original “fish czar.” He helped resettle Halibut Cove, played a role in the creation of the Permanent Fund and, into his 90s, remained active as a fisheries lobbyist and an uncompromising advocate for the Permanent Fund dividend.
And he was the only Alaska lawmaker to vote against repealing the state’s income tax in 1980 — a decision he defended for the rest of his life.
“He was a long-term thinker,” said Vince Tillion, one of Tillion’s two sons. “His fish politics were for the fish. His state politics were the long-term interest of the state.”
The only thing that slowed Clem Tillion down was a long ago back injury that interfered with the sensation and circulation in his feet.
His last foot injury, which led to complications that ultimately caused his death, came as he was using heavy equipment to work on a neighbor’s foundation over the summer, said Martha Cotten, one of Tillion’s two daughters.
Tillion, left, and former state Sen. Mike Szymanski carry Tillion’s casket at Tillion’s “Dead or Alive” party in 2012. (Courtesy Mike Szymanski) “But he was going to be doing those sorts of things ’til he died anyway,” she said.
Tillion’s casket had been waiting for him for a decade: He bought one after having a premonition that he would die in October of 2012. One of his friends, tired of hearing about Tillion’s impending demise, challenged him to a bet that would come due when Tillion expected to die.
“If you’re in that casket, I will pay for all the booze that people can drink at your going-away,” the friend, former state senator and fisheries lobbyist Mike Szymanski, said he told Tillion. “If you’re not in that goddamn casket, you’re paying for all the booze, but we’re still having a party.”
Tillion lost. The “Dead or Alive Party” was an alive party.
“I had just come back from fishing, got to go over, and here’s Clem, sitting on the dock with his casket full of beer,” said another longtime friend and Homer fisherman, Buck Laukitis. “He said, ‘Buck, better have a beer — I can’t get in there ’til it’s all gone.’”
Tillion was born in 1925 in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was an architect. He served in the South Pacific during World War II — a searing experience that he would breezily recount, in gruesome detail, into his old age.
He arrived in Alaska on a steamship and traveled to the shore of Kachemak Bay by train, raft and on foot before working his way around to Halibut Cove. The community was once home to thousands of people who worked in a herring fishery, but it was largely abandoned after fish stocks died off.
Tillion could still fish for halibut and cod, and he bought most of an island in the cove for $1,400. The money was secured from an Anchorage bank with a letter of recommendation from a seafood processor named Squeaky Anderson: “He’s a crazy kid but catches fish.”
Tillion married Diana, an artist who became known for painting with octopus ink, and the couple raised four children.
He entered the state House in 1963, just a few years after statehood, when a retiring lawmaker signed Tillion up to run without consulting with him.
Tillion served in the House and Senate for nearly 20 years. While there, he helped develop the state’s system to limit the number of permitted commercial salmon fishermen, in an effort to conserve declining stocks and keep fishing rights in Alaskans’ possession.
Clem Tillion as a state senator. (Alaska State Library) Much later, as “fish czar” for Gov. Wally Hickel, he got behind a system that divided up harvests of halibut and black cod into individual catch shares for fisherman — a move aimed at eliminating frenzied, derby-style fisheries where boats faced pressure to operate in dangerous weather.
Even into his 90s, Tillion continued working on fisheries issues as a paid lobbyist for the regional Alaska Native corporation for the Aleutian Islands.
Tillion was also close with Jay Hammond, a bush pilot and fisherman who served with Tillion in the Legislature, then was elected governor.
The two worked together on the establishment of the Alaska Permanent Fund in the 1970s, which Tillion later described as the “probably the single best accomplishment completed by our state government since statehood.”
His advocacy around the fund and the dividend never stopped.
Tillion signed onto a 2016 lawsuit that unsuccessfully challenged a partial dividend veto by then-Gov. Bill Walker. And he continued writing opinion pieces and letters pushing Alaska leaders to put larger dividend payments and lower overall spending by the fund in the state Constitution. (Any resulting budget holes, he has said, could be filled by a reinstated income tax.)
A May 3 letter to the Legislature apologized for “nattering on,” cited a 1970 Harper’s Magazine story and told lawmakers that their political problems would “disappear like a plate of king crab legs at a legislative reception” if only they could agree to enshrine a “sensible” dividend payment in the Alaska Constitution.
Those positions, like many others Tillion took in his career, were geared toward preserving resources for future generations of Alaskans.
“I never thought of myself as anything but a temporary organism that was going to be here for a few years and pass on,” Tillion once told journalist Charles Wohlforth. “And the only thing that counted were my children, my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren.”
The policies Tillion fought for have not been universally embraced. One recent report published by the Nature Conservancy found that the limited entry permit program disadvantages Alaska Native and rural communities.
Tillion also could be pushy, and a crafty and confounding opponent if you found yourself on the opposite side of an issue. A 1992 Anchorage Daily News profile referenced a bumper sticker that referred to Tillion as the “prince of darkness,” and featured a photo of him sitting on a bulldozer under the headline: “Get out of the way — be it for fisheries or for family, Clem Tillion does what he thinks is best.”
But Tillion was also effective, and beloved by generations of fishermen, policymakers and family members who spent time with him.
Tillion’s casket was filled with beer for his 2012 party. Now, it rests in a crypt on a hilltop above his home in Halibut Cove, where he lies beside his late wife, accompanied by pickled herring, cookies and a martini. (Courtesy Mike Szymanski) “He could command the room, and everybody listened,” said Laukitis, who, like Tillion, served on a key fisheries policy making board called the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. “I’ve had dinner with him in restaurants, and he’s so loud that you get stares from all the way on the other side of the room. And some of his stories were not very politically correct, and some of them kind of made you cringe at times. But we’ve all heard them, and they make me smile now.”
Laukitis was one of Tillion’s close friends who got to see him in his final days.
Tillion had spent four days in the hospital for treatment of an infection in his foot. But visitors couldn’t see him there because of COVID-19 restrictions, so two of his children rolled him out of the hospital for a little party with friends, then rolled him back in for his next dose of antibiotics.
Ultimately, with his health failing, his family brought him back across Kachemak Bay to his expansive home in Halibut Cove. That’s where he died, said Martha Cotten, his daughter.
“In his room, with a picture of my mom, comfortably,” she said.
Cotten, her husband and her brother Vince spoke with a reporter late Wednesday from Tillion’s home, just before his casket was sealed in a hilltop crypt that also holds his late wife’s Diana’s coffin.
“It was a great loss,” Cotten said. “But not unexpected. We definitely all were crying for a couple of hours. But we’re bucking up.”
Inside the casket with Tillion: pickled herring, cookies, photos of his family and notes from Diana. And a martini.
Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson during public testimony at the Anchorage Assembly on Sept. 29, 2021. (Wesley Early/AKPM) As expected, Mayor Dave Bronson on Wednesday vetoed a mask requirement for most indoor public spaces that the Anchorage Assembly passed late Tuesday night.
Bronson’s veto comes after days of chaotic and combative public testimony about a proposed mask ordinance that was similar to the emergency measure approved Tuesday.
In the veto letter, Bronson blasted the Assembly for using an emergency ordinance that didn’t require public testimony, claimed the ordinance violated the Alaska constitution’s guarantee of privacy and said the city’s declining case numbers show the mandate is unnecessary.
Anchorage’s case counts have declined slightly for the past two weeks but remain high. Alaska still has the highest COVID rate of any state in the country.
Read the veto letter here.
Bronson, a conservative, and the largely progressive Assembly have sparred over numerous issues since he took office this summer, including masks. The Assembly will weigh Thursday whether to overturn Bronson’s veto and is expected to do so.
RELATED: Anchorage Assembly approves emergency mask mandate
Bronson wrote in his veto letter that the masking measure was “stoking widespread fear in an attempt to scare the public into submission.” He said the Assembly had “openly displayed their scorn for the public process” by passing the ordinance around 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday in a mostly empty Assembly chamber.
In a separate lengthy emailed statement, Bronson said that the Assembly had violated the public trust in passing the masking rules.
“They have made their agenda clear: shut down the people, shut down the public process, and shove the heavy hand of government mandates into your personal health decisions. Make no mistake, the Anchorage Assembly is not done with such intrusions,” he said.
Downtown Assembly member Chris Constant fired back in a phone interview, pointing to record COVID-19 hospitalizations and some of the deadliest months of the pandemic since Bronson took office in July.
“The mayor continues to harp on this idea that we have broken the public process. Well, I would rebut that and say that clearly, he has, as people die,” Constant said.
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In his statement, Bronson underscored that there are no penalties for not complying with the mask measure.
“I am against forcing individuals to make medical health decisions, based on the personal desires or views of nine elected representatives, especially when the public’s participation in the process has been prematurely and deliberately curtailed. Please know, there are no fines, no fees and no punishments for violating this ordinance,” he said.
The Assembly can override Bronson’s veto with eight votes. The emergency ordinance passed with nine votes on Tuesday.
Before Tuesday’s vote, the Assembly held six public meetings on a similar masking ordinance and took public comment. The Assembly heard from 276 people in person and got written comments from more than 4,000 people. The Assembly has said while most of the people commenting in person opposed a mask mandate, a majority of the written comments supported one.
Cars line up for drive-through Covid-19 testing on the Alaska Native Medical Campus on Aug. 24, 2021. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) Alaska on Wednesday recorded a jump in COVID-19 hospitalizations and 1,239 new infections.
The state Department of Health and Social Services said 204 people are now hospitalized with COVID-19, an increase of 18 patients from a day ago. That’s still below Alaska’s COVID hospitalizations record set in September, with 223 COVID patients hospitalized.
The state on Wednesday reported no new deaths linked to the virus.
RELATED: Bronson vetoes Anchorage mask mandate
Wednesday’s case numbers were more than twice as high as Tuesday’s, but Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink said the rise is a result of how tests are recorded. Speaking at an online public forum on Wednesday afternoon, Zink said that the jump happened because a new batch of tests was included in Wednesday’s numbers.
“Overall, we’ve been kind of plateauing with a slight decrease,” said Zink.
The 1,239 new cases include 1,220 Alaskans and the rest nonresidents who tested positive in the state.
Daily case counts reached above 1,700 at the end of September. Alaska still leads the country in its seven-day case rate, according to data compiled by the New York Times.
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Jose Urrutia gets a COVID-19 test at an Anchorage municipal site in August. (Jeff Chen/Alaska Public Media) After a funding crunch forced Anchorage’s city government to cut back COVID-19 testing last week amid an intense surge in cases, Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration said it plans to present the Assembly on Tuesday with a $2.65 million request that would restore testing to its previous level through the end of November.
“The Assembly is aware and is in support,” Corey Allen Young, Bronson’s spokesman, said in an email Monday.
Bronson’s administration directed Anchorage’s contracted testing company, Visit Healthcare, to cut hours last week. The company then scaled back its opening hours at several sites around the city, including at the Loussac Library and Changepoint church.
Related: Amid one of the nation’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks, Anchorage officials say they’re rationing testing
Anchorage health officials said that move was necessary because the city pays $98 per test, and a spike in testing demand amid the current surge in the virus had depleted the testing budget previously approved by the Assembly.
A number of Assembly members questioned the decision, saying they would be willing to approve additional spending to sustain testing.
The new Bronson administration proposal hasn’t been formally released yet. Young said it would be unveiled at Tuesday’s Assembly meeting, which is set to start at 5 p.m.
Ivermectin is a drug approved for use in humans to fight parasites. Federal agencies caution against using it to treat COVID-19, as studies have been inconclusive. But conservative elected officials and activists in Alaska have been lobbying for easier access to the drug. (TajPharmalImages under Creative Commons license BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) An array of Republican state lawmakers and activists are pressing Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration and the state pharmacy board to make it easier for Alaskans to get access to ivermectin, the unproven COVID-19 treatment that state and federal agencies caution against using.
In recent weeks, Palmer GOP Sen. Shelley Hughes has spoken with Dunleavy and his health commissioner to encourage them to consider supplying Alaskans with vitamins and drugs, including ivermectin, “that some Alaskan physicians are prescribing but pharmacies aren’t filling,” she said.
Three Republican representatives and a pair of Dunleavy’s appointees to the Alaska Commission on Aging, meanwhile, also testified about ivermectin at a recent pharmacy board meeting — where some asked board members to lean on pharmacists who are denying prescriptions for the drug.
Big Lake GOP Rep. Kevin McCabe, right, leaves the House floor at the Alaska Capitol in June, 2021. (Nat Herz/Alaska Public Media) “Maybe the pharmacists could be directed — or, directed’s the wrong word — suggested that they allow the doctors to actually be doctors and do their jobs,” said Big Lake GOP Rep. Kevin McCabe. “The patient and the doctor should be the ones to decide.”
Pharmacy board members did not endorse McCabe’s suggestion. And less than a week later, the board’s chair drafted a letter to the three representatives that laid out that pharmacists have the authority to refuse prescriptions.
But the legislators’ lobbying efforts highlight how some Alaskans’ insistence about ivermectin has persisted. That’s even with limited scientific evidence the drug is effective, and as federal regulators and an array of provider groups warn that it should not be used to treat or prevent COVID-19.
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The drug, which is approved to treat parasites in humans but not the coronavirus, has been linked to multiple cases of hospitalizations and even deaths stemming from misuse. Many vaccine skeptics, meanwhile, have championed it as a cure.
“Anyone who claims to be creating medical guidance and they don’t have vaccine as their No. 1 recommended tool are pushing misinformation,” said Coleman Cutchins, a state pharmacist. “Vaccine is our No. 1 drug for the prevention of severe disease from this virus.”
Related: Amid one of the nation’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks, Anchorage officials say they’re rationing testing
Very early in the pandemic, ivermectin showed some potential to be effective against the coronavirus in a lab setting.
But further research suggested that huge doses would be necessary to work in the human body. And while dozens of trials are still underway, the ones conducted so far have produced mixed results. One study from Egypt that linked ivermectin to a huge reduction in deaths was withdrawn, amid allegations of plagiarism and data manipulation.
“There is insufficient evidence for the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19,” the National Institutes of Health’s informational page says about the drug. “Results from adequately powered, well-designed and well-conducted clinical trials are needed to provide more specific, evidence-based guidance on the role of ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19.”
Still, people have been clamoring for access to the drug around the world, including across the United States and Alaska. In August, Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce backed ivermectin and suggested that his area could become a testing ground for COVID-19 treatment research.
Related: Kenai Peninsula Borough mayor promotes debunked treatment for COVID-19
Buoyed by endorsements from lawmakers and television and radio hosts, ivermectin has been particularly popular among political conservatives, who view federal medical authorities like Dr. Anthony Fauci with increasing skepticism.
“My trust in Dr. Fauci is zero point zero zero, negative 50,” said Mike Coons, a 69-year-old conservative activist from the Mat-Su.
Coons was one of the two Dunleavy aging commission appointees who testified at the pharmacy board last month.
In a phone interview, Coons said he’s more familiar with and enthusiastic about hydroxychloroquine, another unproven drug once used to treat former President Donald Trump.
But Coons said he’s also encouraged by what he’s read about ivermectin. And when he was exposed to a neighbor who had the coronavirus, his doctor said he’d be willing to prescribe both drugs if Coons needed them.
Coons then called a local Fred Meyer pharmacy to ask if they’d fill the prescriptions. The response, he said: “Oh no, we can’t do that. Because we’re worried about liability.” Coons said he was also told that filling an ivermectin prescription written to treat COVID-19 could jeopardize a doctor’s license.
In an email, a Fred Meyer spokesperson cited warnings against the use of ivermectin by both the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Fred Meyer supports our pharmacists’ exercise of professional judgment, including consideration of information published by the FDA and CDC, in deciding whether to fill or refill prescriptions,” the spokesperson said.
After the phone call, Coons then joined the pharmacy board’s meeting to express his frustration and issue a request.
“What we need this board to do is to tell Kroger and Fred Meyer’s and Safeway and Carr’s and Walgreens that if you’re going to operate in the state of Alaska, under state of Alaska licensure, when a doctor gives a prescription, they get that prescription out to that patient — no questions asked, other than what they’re normally supposed to be asking,” Coons testified.
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While it’s rare for even one lawmaker to call into a pharmacy board meeting, each of the three Republican state lawmakers also referenced ivermectin in their testimony.
Rep. Ken McCarty of Chugiak expressed his concern about “making sure that our state has all the medications necessary.” Rep. Chris Kurka of Wasilla told board members that “we should allow doctors the freedom, if they’re using good clinical judgment, to treat their patients.”
And McCabe, the Big Lake representative, said he’s heard from doctors, physician assistants and nurses in his district who are frustrated “when they issue a prescription and the pharmacy will not fill it because it’s ivermectin.”
“Several pharmacists claim that they are being threatened, or their licenses are being threatened by this board,” McCabe said. “In times like this, where no one seems to have a cogent solution, the Alaska pharmacy board could provide leadership and guidance by at least getting out of the doctor’s way.”
Board members, however, were largely unmoved.
Chair Justin Ruffridge, a Kenai Peninsula pharmacist, pointed testifiers toward a draft ivermectin Q&A document under consideration by the board that highlights a joint position statement from three national doctors and pharmacists groups: They “strongly oppose” dispensing the drug outside of a clinical trial.
Pharmacist Justin Ruffridge pre-loads COVID-19 vaccine into a syringe at a clinic at a Soldotna school. (Nat Herz/Alaska Public Media) Less than a week after the meeting, Ruffridge drafted the letter to the three lawmakers emphasizing pharmacists’ potential legal liability for drugs they dispense, and said pharmacists were free to use their “professional judgment” when deciding whether to fill prescriptions. (The letter was dated Sept. 29, though after this story was published, the lawmakers said they never received it, and pharmacy board officials acknowledged that, in an error, it may not have been sent.)
The board has made no threats against pharmacists’ licenses related to ivermectin, Ruffridge said in the letter. But he noted that the reports of misuse of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 “should give most prescribers and pharmacists reason to pause.”
Hughes, the Palmer GOP state senator, bypassed the pharmacy board and took her ivermectin case directly to Dunleavy and Adam Crum, the state health commissioner.
Hughes, who responded to an interview request with a prepared statement, said she encouraged both Dunleavy and Crum to consider providing Alaskans with “therapeutic kits” for people who test positive for COVID-19, and their family members.
“I challenged Gov. Dunleavy and Commissioner Crum to make Alaska be the first state in the US to take this proactive step,” she said. “They said FDA doesn’t allow off-label use. I said, ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way, when it comes to saving lives.’”
Crum and a health department spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Dunleavy, Jeff Turner, said the governor “maintains that decisions regarding COVID should be left between individuals and their doctor.” Turner also referred to Dunleavy’s comments from a news conference where he was asked about ivermectin nearly two months ago.
“I know what ivermectin is — I’ve had horses and mules, and you use it for worming and other issues that horses and mules have,” Dunleavy said. “But as far as prescribing it as a therapy for humans, I haven’t heard about that.”
This story has been updated to correct a reference to Ruffridge’s letter, which pharmacy board officials originally said had been sent to the three Republican lawmakers. The legislators said they never received it, and pharmacy board officials now say that in a possible error, it may not have been sent.