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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...
The state of Alaska, with all the legal wisdom of a political agenda and the flowing words of a high-priced law firm, has filed a claim against the federal government. Nothing new about that — the state has filed and signed onto more lawsuits against the national government in recent years than President Joe Biden has forgotten dates or former President Donald Trump has told lies. Nothing to be proud of in any of that. The state’s latest legal endeavor came July 2 in a dubious lawsuit — with a few errors and omissions for poor measure — that as...
The borough has been awarded a $25 million Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity grant to rebuild most of the downtown harbor floats, install new pilings and improve parking. The federal money, which requires no match from the borough, will fund most of the estimated $28 million project that will include an overhaul of the Inner Harbor, Reliance and Standard Oil floats, new fire suppression systems, pilings and relocated parking. The borough will likely get the remaining $3 million for the project through the...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed more than $230 million in spending from the state budget but left intact $6.5 million for repairs to Wrangell school buildings, along with $5 million for stabilization work at the community’s water reservoir earthen dams and $200,000 for the borough to start planning an emergency access route from the southern end of Zimovia Highway. In addition to covering state-provided public services, construction projects and community grants, the budget bills signed by Dunleavy on June 27 also will provide an estimated $1,650 t...
The Alaska Supreme Court on June 28 overturned a lower court decision that found two statutes governing Alaska’s publicly funded homeschooling programs violated the state constitution by sending public funds to private and religious schools. The ruling is a victory for Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who has sought to defend the statutes and keep them on the books. But it is largely procedural, and the attorney who originally challenged the constitutionality of the statutes vowed to continue fighting the practice of spending correspondence school a...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, his attorney general and others in the administration are spending a lot of time and state money defending Alaska against its perceived political enemies, fighting the U.S. government at every turn of the river, protecting Alaskans from the latest federal regulations and standing up for conservative values. The list includes picking fights with private banks that want to move away from oil and gas lending, egging on fights over library books, supporting the state of Texas in its fight to string razor wire along the border...
In May, the Alaska Legislature narrowly rejected a conservative talk radio host’s appointment to a highly paid position regulating the state’s commercial fisheries. Now, after the failure of that pick, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy has chosen a new appointee with a similar — though not identical — background for the six-figure job at the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission, or CFEC. In an unannounced decision, Dunleavy selected Rick Green last month, according to a letter to Green that the governor’s office released June 12 as part of a resp...
The state last month sued the owners of three Ketchikan jewelry stores, alleging a broad scheme to defraud Alaskans and tourists by selling fake made-in-Alaska jewelry. The stores, which include Soni Inc. and Colors Fine Jewelers, initially continued operations despite the state’s request for a court order closing them, reported radio station KRBD in Ketchikan. As of Thursday, June 6, Soni was still open; no one answered the phone at Colors Fine Jewelers. The case is one of several consumer-protection lawsuits filed by the Alaska Department of...
Though legislators passed dozens of bills during the two-year legislative session that ended May 15, they left behind multiple big issues for future consideration. Lawmakers were not able to finalize any part of a plan intended to bring the state’s revenue in line with expenses over the long term. In 2022, a bicameral, bipartisan working group recommended changes to the Permanent Fund dividend formula, an effective state spending cap, new taxes and constitutional changes to guarantee the dividend and limit spending from the Permanent Fund. W...