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The Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. intends to open an office in Anchorage by the end of the year, the chairman of the corporation’s board of trustees said Aug. 10. When the office opens in space leased by the Department of Environmental Conservation, it will be the first time since its creation in 1976 that the corporation has opened a satellite branch outside Juneau. “The principal policy driver behind this is recruitment and retention of employees,” said board chair Ethan Schutt. The corporation, which manages the $78 billion Alaska Perma...
A federal judge has upheld decisions by President Joe Biden and the Department of the Interior that temporarily suspended work needed to open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. In a 74-page order published Aug. 7, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason ruled in favor of the federal government and against the state of Alaska, its state-owned development corporation and several other plaintiffs. The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, the development bank, is the sole remaining oil...
The state has paid $350,000 to settle a four-year-old lawsuit that found Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his former chief of staff personally liable for illegally firing a state attorney. The settlement with Elizabeth Bakalar, of Juneau, ends a series of state and federal lawsuits triggered when Dunleavy and then-chief of staff Tuckerman Babcock asked state employees to submit resignation letters during the transition from the administration of Gov. Bill Walker in December 2018. In 2021, a federal judge concluded that the process was “an u...
The state has formally asked a federal judge to decide whether the Bureau of Indian Affairs may create the legal equivalent of reservation land in Alaska on behalf of Native tribes. On Aug. 1, the state filed for summary judgment in its ongoing lawsuit against the federal government and the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. The lawsuit involves a small downtown lot in Juneau. So far, only two tribes in Alaska have placed land into trust with the BIA — in Craig in 2017 and in Juneau this year — after the fed...
A state judge has ordered a tourist shop outside Denali National Park to stop selling products labeled as “Made in Alaska” after the state accused the shop of repeatedly selling fake souvenirs and art. According to a complaint filed by the Alaska Department of Law on July 20 in Fairbanks, the owners of a shop known variously as The Himalayan and Mt. McKinley Clothing Company repeatedly attempted to mislabel foreign products as Alaska-made. At one point, the owners of the store told an undercover investigator “that an alpaca poncho depic...
Alaska’s state school board has unexpectedly delayed a vote on a proposed regulation that would prohibit transgender girls from playing on girls high school sports teams. Board chairman James Fields said the delay was warranted by “hard questions” about whether the regulation could violate students’ right to privacy, among other legal issues. “I’d be in favor of a special meeting and allowing us to show the public and show our constituents that we’re not just doing this to quickly rush through it. We want to take a good long look at all of the...
Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor joined 18 other Republican attorneys general last month in a letter calling on the federal government to preserve state governments’ access to private medical records. That access could be used to restrict access to abortion and gender transition care. The attorneys general are opposing a proposed federal rule that would “prevent private medical records from being used against people for merely seeking, obtaining, providing, or facilitating lawful reproductive health care.” Idaho, which has criminalized abort...
The Alaska Marine Highway System may have to cancel some Lynn Canal sailings this week as the state ferry system’s hiring woes continue through the peak summer travel season, its top official said Friday, July 14. “We’re at risk of shutting the Hubbard down this next week because we can’t get another licensed engineer onboard,” AMHS director Craig Tornga told the ferry system’s operations board. The Hubbard was scheduled to sail between Haines, Skagway and Juneau six times in the week ending Saturday, July 22, and those sailings were in jeo...
Nick Begich III, a Republican candidate who lost to Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola in last year’s races for Alaska’s lone U.S. House seat, said Thursday, July 13, that he will run against Peltola again in 2024. Peltola hasn’t announced a re-election campaign but has been raising money and has a campaign manager. In an August special ranked-choice election to replace Young, Begich finished third out of three candidates, behind Peltola and fellow Republican Sarah Palin. Post-election analysis of all ranked-choice ballots indicated that had Begic...
The spendable portion of the Alaska Permanent Fund is dwindling and could be exhausted entirely within three years, fund leaders were told during a regular quarterly meeting on Wednesday, July 12, in Anchorage. Deven Mitchell, CEO of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp., presented the results of limited modeling that estimates the fund’s performance over the next three years. Under the “low” scenario, the fund would be unable to pay for state services or dividends by summer 2026. The “mid” scenario calls for the spendable portion of the fund to b...
A Ketchikan man agreed to plead guilty earlier this month to federal charges in conjunction with a long-running scheme to sell fake Alaska Native souvenirs manufactured in the Philippines. Travis Lee Macaset's plea deal follows several other guilty pleas this summer that stem from a scheme to sell mislabeled products out of two businesses in Ketchikan. "It occurs more often than we would like," said Jack Schmidt, the assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the cases. With tourism rebounding from...
Alaska Native leaders and the state of Alaska have hailed the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act. The ruling preserves a 35-year-old law intended to address the harm caused by the federal government’s boarding school program by prioritizing the placement of Alaska Native and American Indian children into tribal homes. “Like most Alaska Native and American Indian tribes from across the country, we have been anxiously awaiting this decision,” Julie Kitka, president of the Alaska Feder...
The group that brought ranked-choice voting to Alaska elections is now seeking to restrict big campaign donations after a federal appeals court erased the state’s prior limits. Alaskans for Better Elections submitted a proposed ballot measure to the Alaska Division of Elections in May. If approved by the division, and if the group gathers sufficient signatures, Alaskans will be asked in 2024 whether they want to limit the amount of money a donor can give to a politician running for office. The proposal, modeled after a bill from Anchorage R...
Alaska’s legislative session ended last month, and Gov. Mike Dunleavy has yet to consider most of the 31 bills passed by both House and Senate this spring. The Legislature’s 31 bills are the third fewest of any first-year session since statehood. The biggest bills of the year are the budget bill and the annual mental health budget. Dunleavy could veto or reduce line items within the budget before the start of the state’s fiscal year on July 1, but with a couple weeks to go, he hasn’t given any clues about his thinking. Other bills waiting...
Alaska’s state school board has voted almost unanimously to advance a proposed regulation that would bar transgender girls from playing on girls’ high school sports teams in the state. The vote opens a 30-day public comment period. After that period, the board will consider amending, rejecting or adopting the proposal. The decision comes amid a nationwide, Republican-led movement to restrict transgender rights. Felix Myers, a non-voting student member of the school board, suggested that the board’s action was part of that movement. Other membe...
The state of Alaska will keep its membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit network that helps states keep track of registered voters and reduce fraud, an official at the Alaska Division of Elections confirmed June 7. Eight Republican-led states have withdrawn from the multistate partnership, known as ERIC, since far-right groups and former President Donald Trump began attempting to discredit the group in 2022. Earlier this year, Carol Beecher, the new director of the Alaska Division of Elections, said during a...
A new ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court likely exempts large areas of wetlands in Alaska from federal regulation under the Clean Water Act, a decision that has alarmed environmentalists and could speed road construction, mining and other development projects here. The decision, in a case known as Sackett v. EPA, means that the Environmental Protection Agency can only regulate navigable bodies of water and only those wetlands that have a “continuous surface connection” to navigable lakes, rivers, streams and ponds. Before the ruling, the EPA int...
The Alaska Supreme Court has affirmed that the state will not be allowed to go ahead with a plan intended to make it more difficult for state employees to participate in a union. In a ruling released Friday, the court upheld and confirmed a lower-court decision that found the state acted illegally when it unilaterally attempted in 2019 to change the rules pertaining to employees’ dues deductions. The five justices, ruling unanimously, said the state violated the Alaska Public Employment Relations Act and the Administrative Procedures Act, as w...
Alaskans would be able to more easily get subscription-style health care from their doctor or dentist if a bill passed by the Alaska Senate last week moves through the House next year and becomes law. Under a “direct health care agreement,” also called “concierge care,” a customer agrees to buy a subscription to a doctor’s office. The doctor charges a monthly fee and in exchange the customer gets access to regular checkups or other services. The Senate voted 18-2 to approve Senate Bill 45 from Wasilla Sen. David Wilson, sending the measure t...
Senior citizens and people with disabilities who need extra care would be able to get help at home under a bill passed by the Alaska Legislature and on its way to the governor for signature into law. The state House voted 39-1 to approve Senate Bill 57 on May 8, followed by unanimous Senate concurrence on May 10 with the House changes. The legislation would allow the state to license individual homes as the equivalent of assisted-living centers. A home would be permitted for up to two residents under normal circumstances, three with special...
With a week remaining in Alaska’s regular legislative session, leading lawmakers say they still haven’t reached agreement on a deal to finish the state budget and end the session on time. “We are meeting daily with the Senate … just working on finding some way to come together to put this kind of ‘endgame’ package together, which I can tell you right now, we don’t have the details as of yet,” House Speaker Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla, said last Friday. Since 2015, odd-numbered years have brought tortuously long arguments over the budget as lawma...
The Alaska Legislature is changing some procedures after Capitol phone lines became overloaded by public testimony for a record fifth time this year. The Capitol’s phones reached capacity on May 2, during a hearing about a bill that intends to repeal the state’s new ranked-choice voting law. The phone lines have filled more times this year than in the past six years combined, legislative statistics indicate. Overall call volume hasn’t changed significantly from past years, but Alaskans’ habits have: Members of the public are now much more li...
A bill advancing in the Alaska Legislature would dramatically shorten the time needed to authorize logging of some state-owned lands, shrinking approval time from years to days in the most extreme cases. Proponents say the bill will alleviate fire danger and revitalize the state’s dwindling logging industry by expanding the amount of timber that can be sold from public land, but legislative and public critics contend that the bill’s lack of specificity gives the commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources almost unlimited discretion to...
As public employees rallied in front of the Alaska Capitol last week, demanding reinstatement of a pension system the Legislature abolished 18 years ago, leading members of the state Senate said their request was unlikely to be fulfilled this year. Members of the 17-member bipartisan Senate majority said at the start of this year’s legislative session that a bill intended to improve recruitment and retention of state employees was a priority. But with only a week left in the regular legislative session, Senate President Gary Stevens said a p...
Parents of Alaska public school students would be required to OK every lesson taught by their child’s teacher under newly revised legislation approved by the House Education Committee, but which is not expected to pass the Legislature this year. Without permission, the student would be held out of field trips, extracurricular activities, and even basic lessons on algebra, biology and history. The revised bill also requires school districts to make single-person restrooms available to students. An earlier version of the bill, proposed by Gov. M...
