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The next two years may be Alaska’s last chance for productive, bipartisan legislative action. The state House and Senate have both organized in bipartisan coalitions, with Democrats, Republicans and independents pledging to work together on the big issues facing Alaska. Sadly, that across-the-political-aisle cooperation could end in two years. Alaska’s switch to open primaries and ranked-choice voting for the 2022 and 2024 elections encouraged candidates, particularly Republican candidates, to appeal to moderate and nonpartisan voters ins...
Alaska has joined a growing number of states that are considering cellphone restrictions in schools. The Alaska Board of Education has directed the state’s education department to create a policy to limit the use of cellphones in schools during class hours. Currently, there is no statewide cellphone policy in Alaska, and any restrictions must be set at the district or school level. Several already do that, including Wrangell middle and high schools. “The Stikine Middle School is cellphone, earbud free,” said Greg Clark, who serves as princ...
Jeremy Bynum, Grant EchoHawk and Agnes Moran are running to fill the state House seat vacated by 10-year incumbent Dan Ortiz, who decided not to seek a sixth term. The election is Tuesday, Nov. 5. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the votes in the first count, the third-place finisher will be eliminated and voters who picked that candidate as their top choice will have their votes recounted using their second choice. Whoever has the most votes in that second count will win the seat...
Alaska legislators have voted to ban large signs in the state Capitol, a move that followed large protests over Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s decision to veto a multipart education bill earlier this year. Under a new policy, visitors to the Capitol “are permitted to hand-carry a paper-based poster board or placard type sign up to 11×17 inches in the Capitol corridors and lobby.” The policy prohibits signs on sticks and posts — all signs must be held by hand. “A sign will be confiscated if it is used to disturb, or used in a manner that will imminently...
Alaska was the second state to adopt ranked-choice voting in federal and statewide elections, but it may be the first to abandon it. A citizen’s initiative ballot measure that would repeal the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system made it to the November ballot after legal challenges. As a result, Alaskans will be asked in Ballot Measure 2 to decide if they would like to repeal or keep the state’s open primary and top-four voting system. If the repeal is successful, Alaska would revert to primaries that are controlled by the p...
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...
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...
This year’s Permanent Fund dividend, plus a one-time energy rebate bonus, will be a combined $1,702 per recipient, the Alaska Department of Revenue announced Sept. 19. The amount is slightly higher than previous estimates from the spring, in part because the number of eligible Alaskans is lower than expected. The payments will be direct-deposited into bank accounts starting Oct. 3. Paper checks, for those Alaskans who requested them, will be mailed later in October. This year’s combined dividend is about $400 more than last year’s payme...
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...
More Alaskans will be eligible for food stamps and access to health care for school-age children and young adults will increase under a new state law. Gov. Mike Dunleavy sponsored the original legislation, whose goal was to expand the services covered by Medicaid to include things like workforce development and food security. The bill takes advantage of a federal waiver that allows states to consider the underlying causes of ill health in granting benefits. The legislation was amended to include a proposal from Anchorage Rep. Genevieve Mina...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy has vetoed a bill that would have made birth control more accessible to Alaska women. House Bill 17 would have allowed women to get a year’s worth of prescription birth control at once. Currently, most insurance providers in Alaska cover only up to 90 days’ worth of birth control pills at a time. At least 24 states and Washington, D.C., have adopted laws enshrining the 12-month rule. Proponents say it is particularly important for rural women who may not be able to visit a pharmacy every 90 days, and for victims of dom...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy made the pledge and he’s stickin’ to it. Too bad he is putting national anti-tax politics above tax fairness in Alaska. Specifically, he vetoed legislation this month that would have taxed car rentals through online platforms the same as car rentals from brick-and-mortar agencies with local offices. And he vetoed legislation two years ago that would have taxed vape and e-cigarette products the same as traditional tobacco products. The car rental fairness legislation passed with 51 out of 60 state senators and rep...
A landslide tore down a slope about a mile north of downtown Ketchikan, killing one person and injuring three on Sunday. The landslide hit around 4 p.m., and a mandatory evacuation order remained in place Monday for homes on several streets in the slide area near the waterfront. A dozen people stayed at an emergency shelter established at Ketchikan High School on Sunday night, emergency officials said. Others stayed with family or friends. Schools were closed Monday, which would have been the...
Republican Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom is withdrawing from the race for the state’s lone U.S. House seat, she announced via social media on Friday, just three days after the primary election. With most of the votes counted, Dahlstrom is expected to finish third in the state’s top-four primary election, behind Democratic incumbent Mary Peltola and fellow Republican challenger Nick Begich. In a prepared statement published, Dahlstrom said she wanted to see Peltola voted out of office but “at this time, the best thing I can do to see that goal reali...
"Every room has water in it and mud," Debora Gerrish said at her home on Emily Way in Juneau's Mendenhall Valley, several hours after the Mendenhall River had receded from record flooding on Aug. 6. "Everything on the floor is destroyed. I'm trying to save my grandmother's hope chest from 1913." A similar glacial outburst flood last year only filled the ditches on her street, though it did knock down several residences along the river. But this year's flood saw the river crest more than a foot...
Technically, Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto blocked five bills from becoming law that the state House passed after the constitutional adjournment deadline. But don’t blame him for killing the new laws. The House is the guilty party. The 40-member House, managed the past two years by a splintered and often disorganized 23-member Republican-led majority, couldn’t manage to get its work done before the clock struck midnight. The governor did not hold them up; no power outage set them back; there was no IT meltdown or online hack; nothing slowed them...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy has vetoed five bills passed by the Alaska Legislature after the constitutionally mandated date to end its session. The vetoed bills include bonding authority to build a new cruise ship dock in Seward, a bill allowing licensed 18-year-olds to serve alcohol at bars, a measure that would prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage to elected officials, legislation to eliminate duplicative registration requirements for boats, and a proposal that would have allowed employers to pay workers with short-term electronic...
Financial documents published July 31 by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. show the fund lacks enough spendable money to immediately pay for items in the state’s annual budget, a sign that the state’s top source of general-purpose revenue is on course for a future crisis. This year, lawmakers and Gov. Mike Dunleavy approved a $1 billion transfer from the spendable portion of the Permanent Fund to the constitutionally protected principal, to help the principal keep pace with inflation. As of July 1, there was only $571.7 million available for tha...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy has long prided himself on being a fiscal conservative. He has consistently adhered to that mantra, with the exception of his long-standing advocacy for a state checkbook-draining supersize Permanent Fund dividend. As a fiscal conservative, the governor has always talked of keeping a short leash on spending, a tight rein on appropriations, a firm grip on the budget. Too bad that stinginess extends to explaining his budget vetoes. Critics of Dunleavy’s vetoes of legislative appropriations for the state fiscal year that s...
The top two officers of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. board of trustees were replaced at the beginning of the board’s quarterly meeting on July 24 in a contentious vote, with displaced Vice Chair Ellie Rubenstein announcing her resignation hours later. The moves came after months of controversy involving allegations of improper financial actions by Rubenstein, sparking further accusations of politically motivated behavior among some board members. Ethan Schutt was ousted as board chair and Rubenstein replaced as vice chair in a 4-2 vote at t...
Alaska firefighting departments will have to stop using fire-suppression foams containing contaminants known as “forever chemicals,” under a law that went into effect July 24. Legislators passed the new law nearly unanimously this spring. It went into effect without Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s signature, an option that governors can choose when they don’t want to veto a bill but also don’t want their name on it. The new law targets per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS. They have qualities making them resistant to fire, water and oil....
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...
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...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy on July 11 signed into law a bill originally aimed at curbing the meteoric rise in opioid overdoses in the state, but which turned into comprehensive crime legislation that Alaska lawmakers approved in the final hours of the legislative session. Lawmakers built the wide-ranging law around Dunleavy’s proposal to increase penalties for fentanyl and methamphetamine dealers. The law also directs the state to look into why minority groups are overrepresented in the prison system, creates the crime of assault in front of a child, t...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed $10 million in funding for the state agency charged with marketing Alaska seafood, with the message that he would “re-evaluate future funding needs after development of a marketing plan.” That doesn’t make sense to the state Senate president. “Waiting doesn’t help at all,” said Sen. Gary Stevens, from the commercial fishing hub of Kodiak. “It’s a very shortsighted view of the industry. Now is the time to help it out, not to just delay things,” Stevens said last week. The governor vetoed the funding on June 30 as par...
