Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 117
Four decades ago, in days before the internet and automatic voter registration, Alaska Natives turned out to vote at high levels. That participation has eroded badly, a situation that should be reversed, said Michelle Sparck, director of an Alaska nonpartisan organization called Get Out The Native Vote. Alaska Natives are not fully realizing their power if they do not vote, she said. “They say that anytime you look at a white male in this country, you know they’re a voter. We should be in that kind of category,” Sparck said in a prese...
Alaskans will vote Nov. 5 on a ballot measure that would increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2027 and require that workers get paid for up to seven sick days a year. To backers who collected signatures to put the question before voters, Ballot Measure 1 is about fairness for workers and overall state economic vitality. But opponents in business groups warn that the measure, if passed, would bring dire consequences. To Sarah Oates, CHARR’s president, the consequences of Ballot Measure 1 would be bad. “This is going to kill small...
The federal government board that manages subsistence will be expanded with three representatives of Alaska Native tribes, under a new rule the Biden administration made final on Oct. 16. The new Federal Subsistence Board members are to be nominated by federally recognized tribes. They need not be tribal members or Native themselves, but they must have “personal knowledge of and direct experience with subsistence uses in rural Alaska, including Alaska Native subsistence uses,” according to the rule. The term “subsistence” refers to harvest...
A variety of market forces combined with weak fish returns in a rapidly changing environment caused Alaska’s seafood industry revenues to drop by $1.8 billion from 2022 to 2023, a new federal report said. The array of economic and environmental challenges has devastated one of Alaska’s main industries, said the report, issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the losses extend beyond economics, casting doubt on prospects for the future, the report said. “For many Alaskans the decline of their seafood industry affec...
Alaska had a record number of drug-overdose deaths in 2023, with a total that was 44.5% higher than in 2022, the state Department of Health said in a report issued last week. The 2023 drug-overdose toll was 357, a number determined through the department’s data on deaths and diseases, the report said. The Alaska statistics buck a national trend of declining overdose deaths that was reported earlier this year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the few states with increases in overdose deaths from 2022 to 2023, Alaska h...
Alaska had the biggest decline in average life expectancy of all U.S. states in 2021, a year when health outcomes were heavily influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent national report. Alaska’s life expectancy in 2021 was 74.5 years, down from the average of 76.6 years in 2020, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, U.S. life expectancy declined by 0.6 years in that time, mostly because of the COVID-19 pandemic and increases in drug overdose deaths and other unintentional i...
Until about 20 years ago, little was known about the abundance of colorful cold-water corals that line sections of the seafloor around Alaska. Now an environmental group has gone to court to try to compel better protections for those once-secret gardens. The lawsuit, filed by Oceana in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, accused federal fishery managers of neglecting to safeguard Gulf of Alaska corals - and the sponges that are often found with them - from damages wreaked by bottom trawling. Botto...
More emergency kits to save victims of opioid overdoses are on their way to Alaska schools, in accordance with a new law. It requires schools statewide to have kits on hand, with trained people on site to administer those kits if needed. Although the new law does not go into effect until late November, the state Department of Health has already begun shipping out kits with overdose-reversal medicine and associated gear. The law is the product of House Bill 202, which Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed in late August. As of early last month, about 200 of...
Vandalism of houses of worship and other religious sites is now a felony, under a bill that was signed into law on Sept. 3 by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. The measure, House Bill 238, was signed in a ceremony at the Lubavitch Jewish Center of Alaska, a campus in Anchorage that is home to an Orthodox Jewish congregation, a preschool and a museum devoted to Alaska’s Jewish history. It was also the site of recent antisemitic vandalism, part of a national trend of increasing attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions. Anchorage Rep. Andy Josephson, the b...
An Alaska law prohibiting anyone other than a licensed physician from performing abortions violates the state constitution’s equal protection and privacy guarantees, a state Superior Court judge ruled. There is “no medical reason” why abortions cannot be provided by advanced practice clinicians, such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants, said the Sept. 4 ruling issued by Superior Court Judge Josie Garton. Limiting abortion services to state-licensed physicians violates the equal protection guarantee because other pregn...
As Alaskans from different organizations convened at the University of Alaska Anchorage to brainstorm ways to reverse the state’s continuing population outmigration, a leading state economist delivered some bad news. Dan Robinson, research chief at the Alaska Department of Labor, revealed that the latest data shows that Alaska has now had 12 consecutive years with more residents leaving than arriving. That is unprecedented, he said. “This is not normal for us. It hasn’t happened before,” Robinson said on Sept. 5 at the start of the two-day...
Alaska teens are more likely to be depressed and have suicidal thoughts than were teens a decade ago, and some mental health problems have increased notably among girls, according to results from the state’s most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Administered in 2023 to nearly 1,200 high school students around the state, the survey found numerous negative trends. Of the respondents, 19% reported attempting suicide at least once over the past year, compared to 8.7% in the 2011 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. The number who reported they had c...
Alaska’s highest-ranking Democratic officeholder said July 23 she has not decided whether to back the party’s likely candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. Rep. Mary Peltola broke with other state Democrats, who quickly gave their support and their party convention delegates’ votes to Harris just hours after President Joe Biden announced that he was ending his campaign for re-election. Peltola, in an online news conference, said she is still weighing her decision about whether to vote for Harris and is “keeping an open mind.” “We still have...
When Kay Brown was director of the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas in the 1980s, her job was to make sure the state got the maximum benefit from its abundant fossil fuel. At the time, North Slope activity was on the rise and Alaska was on its way to supplying 25% of the nation’s domestically produced oil. Now the producing oil fields are mature, Alaska production is down to less than a quarter of its late-1980s peak and climate change impacts have become dramatic in the state and elsewhere in the far north. And Brown, who went on to become a s...
Fishery managers overseeing Alaska’s faltering salmon runs should be able to rely on a more comprehensive and holistic approach to science that considers all habitat, from the middle of the ocean to freshwater spawning streams far inland, according to a task force report on salmon research needs. The report was issued this month by the Alaska Salmon Research Task Force, a group established through a 2022 act of Congress to identify knowledge gaps and research needs. The task force comprises close to 20 members and includes scientists, f...
Two environmental groups have filed a new legal challenge to the Biden administration’s approval of a proposed multibillion-dollar project that would send Alaska North Slope natural gas to overseas markets. In a petition filed with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club argued that federal agencies failed to properly consider harms that the massive gas project would cause to Endangered Species Act-listed animals living in the affected marine areas: polar bears, Cook Inlet beluga whales and...
The Alaska Division of Public Health is hoping to expand wastewater-monitoring programs that have proved useful in detecting outbreaks of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases, a recent report said. Testing at Anchorage’s John M. Asplund Wastewater Treatment Facility, the municipality’s main wastewater plant, was able to provide notice of a spike in COVID-19 cases in January 2023, several days ahead of patients’ cases that were confirmed by health laboratories, said a bulletin recently issued by the division’s epidemiology section. The inf...
The federal government has awarded more than $5 million in grants to the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute to help the state agency find new ways and new places to sell fish. Of the federal money, over $4 million is from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Regional Agriculture Promotion Program, known as RAPP. That money will be used in specific areas of the state to help improve international markets, said Greg Smith, an ASMI spokesperson. “The timing of the RAPP funds is well-aligned with the Alaska seafood industry’s needs to combat numer...
As the climate warms, more Pacific salmon from Alaska are showing up in the Western Arctic waters of Canada. But residents in those Arctic Canadian communities are not catching salmon every year, which led them to ask why. Now a study by scientists from Canada and Alaska has described the ocean gateway that must open to bring salmon from the Bering Sea to those far-north sites. Conditions must line up over vast stretches of ocean for salmon to make the journey through the Bering Strait, across the Chukchi Sea and into the Canadian Beaufort Sea...
For the second time in two years, the Alaska Legislature has passed a bill requiring a phase-out of firefighting foams with contaminants called “forever chemicals.” The chemicals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances that are commonly known as PFAS, have become notorious for their persistence and widespread presence in the environment. Known for their resistance to flames and degradation, PFAS chemicals — which number in the thousands — have been used since the 1950s in a wide variety of products, from consumer goods like clothing and cookware t...
Alaska bar patrons will see new signs warning about the link between alcohol and cancer, and women at elevated risk for breast cancer will no longer have to pay extra money for more detailed examinations that go beyond routine mammograms, if bills passed by the Legislature are signed by the governor. Both measures were proposed initially in stand-alone legislation but wound up combined with related bills that passed late in the session and now await the governor’s decision. The proposal for signs warning about the alcohol-cancer link was o...
The Alaska Legislature passed a couple of bills aimed at improving health care services. The measures are now headed to Gov. Mike Dunleavy for his consideration. House Bill 228 would set up a state task force to recommend regulations for use of psychedelic medicines that the federal government is expected to approve soon. The first of those medicines expected to be approved, called MDMA, is considered useful for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. Approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is anticipated within months. Anchorage Sen...
The Alaska Legislature has passed a bill that combines underground storage of carbon dioxide, new regulation of underground storage of natural gas, state financing for new Cook Inlet natural gas development and an expansion of the state’s geothermal energy program. The measure, House Bill 50, sets up a regulatory and commercial framework for Alaska to stash carbon gases that would otherwise stream into the atmosphere, where they reinforce the greenhouse layer that is heating the planet. The bill started as one in a pair introduced last year b...
With Alaska’s drug overdose deaths surging, state leaders on May 6 kicked off a new campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of the drug that caused most of them: fentanyl. The new campaign, called “One Pill Can Kill,” is national and spearheaded by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies. But it has special meaning in Alaska, which last year had a record-high total of overdose deaths. Preliminary numbers show that 342 Alaskans died from overdoses in 2023, a 40% increase over 2022 totals, according to the state...
The Alaska seafood industry remains an economic juggernaut, but it is under strain from forces outside of the state’s control, according to a report commissioned by the state’s seafood marketing agency. The report from the McKinley Research Group, titled The Economic Value of Alaska’s Seafood Industry, is the latest in a periodic series commissioned by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. The total economic value of the Alaska seafood industry in 2021 and 2022 was $6 billion, slightly more than the $5.6 billion tallied in 2019, the last...
