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Alaskans were among the hundreds of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees who began receiving firing notices last week, a blow to an agency that provides everything from weather forecasts to fisheries management to cutting-edge climate science in Alaska. The cuts - part of a broader effort by the administration of President Donald Trump to drastically slash the federal workforce - came after other agencies, including the National Park Service, had abruptly fired probationary...
Mass layoffs in the federal workforce ordered by President Donald Trump began to hit Alaska employees last week, with workers losing jobs at multiple agencies across the state. The scale of the Alaska layoffs wasn’t fully clear, but by Friday, Feb. 14, included around 30 Alaska employees at the U.S. Forest Service and 30 with the National Park Service, according to employees and union representatives. U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said late Friday that “dozens of Alaskans — potentially over 100 in total” had lost their jobs, criticizing what sh...
On Jan. 28, more than 2 million federal workers received an emailed offer to resign but be paid for eight months, part of an aggressive effort by the administration of President Donald Trump to drastically cut the size of the federal workforce. The move could have major consequences in Alaska, a state with 15,000 federal workers. The “deferred resignation” plan is part of a suite of changes the Trump administration is trying to make to the federal government, including slashing equity programs and ordering remote workers back to offices. Wor...
Over the past decade, landslides have cost Southeast Alaska communities in both death and destruction - 11 deaths and tens of millions of dollars in property and infrastructure damage. Now communities around Southeast are reckoning with a future in which more destructive landslides are likely, as climate change fuels the extreme rainfall events and storms that scientists say may lead to increasingly powerful events in the future. The most recent major landslide, on Nov. 20 at 11-Mile Zimovia...
From a prison cell in California, federal prosecutors allege, a 56-year-old inmate directed an Alaska drug trafficking ring that in recent years smuggled huge quantities of fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamine to some of the state’s smallest villages through a network of postal shippers and drug couriers. In Alaska, meanwhile, a woman incarcerated at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center recruited a fellow inmate on the verge of release to join the drug ring, federal prosecutors wrote in an indictment unsealed in October. That woman, the U.S. A...
More than 100 salmon trollers packed a Sitka meeting on June 7 with sharp questions about the future of their fishery, facing what could be an unprecedented full shutdown of this year’s chinook trolling season. “I’m optimistic, but I’m also scared as heck,” said Eric Jordan, a lifelong fisherman and Sitka resident at the standing room-only meeting with federal National Marine Fisheries Service officials. The closure of the king salmon fishery in Southeast would be economically devastating, according to many in the region who rely on the valua...
A major U.S. Department of Justice investigation has concluded that children in Alaska with mental health issues are “forced to endure unnecessary and unduly long” institutionalization in locked psychiatric hospitals and residential treatment facilities because no alternatives exist. The state of Alaska is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to provide services that would allow kids to stay in their homes and communities, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division found in a report released last Friday. Alask...
Longtime Anchorage civic activist and trailblazing politician Arliss Sturgulewski died last Thursday, her family said. She was 94. Raising a young son after her husband died in a plane crash, Sturgulewski became involved in Anchorage politics in the 1970s and later served as a state senator for more than a decade, shaping important institutions of modern Alaska with a collaborative, moderate approach. In 1986 she became the first Alaska woman to head the ticket for a major political party’s gubernatorial campaign. The moderate Republican’s cam...