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At 8 a.m. on July 30, Andrew Simmonds, 60, entered the chilling waters of Sandy Beach in Petersburg, setting out to prove that age has not slowed him down. His goal was to swim across Frederick Sound to the mainland, more than six miles away. His journey started months earlier. Soon after arriving in Petersburg in November, Simmonds, who is a physical therapist at Petersburg Medical Center, visited Sandy Beach to gaze out over Frederick Sound. He admired the whales leaping above the water and cr...
The borough will list Wrangell’s former hospital building on a nationwide surplus public property website, hoping for better results than efforts the past two months which resulted in not a single bid. “We’ve got to get rid of this,” Mayor Steve Prysunka said at the July 26 borough assembly meeting. The borough has been paying close to $100,000 a year to keep the building heated and insured, and protected against water damage. The borough ran an online auction in June to sell the property but received no bids. It then offered the buildin...
An additional 40 COVID-19 cases were recorded in Wrangell July 7-13, more than twice as many as in the previous three weeks, according to the Alaska Department of Health website. That’s almost as many cases as were reported in Ketchikan, 43, during the same seven-day period, though the Ketchikan borough has more than six times the population of Wrangell. Of the 713 infections in Wrangell reported to the state since the pandemic count started in March 2020, 172, almost 25%, have come in the past three months. Federal and state health o...
No one bid on the former Wrangell hospital building, which the borough had offered to sell at a minimum asking price of $830,000. The bidding period was open for a month and closed last Thursday. The property is now available for an over-the-counter sale. “It means that the first person to come in to sign an intent to purchase with a 20% down payment (payment in full within 60 days of signing) would be the buyer,” Borough Clerk Kim Lane explained last Friday. “If that happens, I would then take a resolution to the assembly to approve the sale....
No surprise, but the borough received no bids for the former hospital property. No one was willing to pay the $830,000 minimum price for the building, much of which is 55 years old. It’s not like there’s a lot of value to the building, unless a new owner wanted to run a medical center or long-term care facility, which isn’t needed in Wrangell after SEARHC spent $30 million building its new medical center just a few blocks away. Besides, the old building’s health records show a patient in ill health. “Many of the mechanical and electrica...
Two key economic indicators are falling in Wrangell—the unemployment rate, and the number of people in the labor force. Combined, the two datapoints help explain the ongoing worker shortage in the community, stressing out business owners who have to manage as best as they can with too few employees. The unemployment rate for May was 5.1%, down from 5.5% in April, down from 7.2% a year ago, and the lowest in at least the past 12 years, according to state Labor Department statistics. It’s probably the lowest rate going back 20 years or so, but...
The SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium has placed its order with the state for COVID-19 vaccination doses for children as young as 6 months old, and could start distributing them to its facilities across the region this week. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday approved the children’s doses of Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech. “At this point in time we do not have pediatric vaccine clinics scheduled, as we are waiting for approval and a definite timeframe for receiving our supply of vaccines,” Randi Yance...
The borough is making progress on its long and expensive to-do list. The decisions are not easy and several are costly. Many have been around a long time. That’s not because anyone did anything wrong. Rather, it takes time to confront hard decisions to resolve long-standing problems. And, in many cases, it takes time to find money to pay for the solutions. But the decisions are necessary and deserve the community’s support. After wrangling over multiple options, the Wrangell assembly has put up for sale the former hospital building. The borough...
Did you know that when a child goes to the emergency room at our hospital or their family suffers a house fire or a boating accident, that they can be given a beautiful, comforting teddy bear to snuggle with? These bears are provided by the Beta Sigma Phi sorority and we hope that any family who has a situation where the children could use a comforting friend, that they will ask for one of the teddy bears. The only fundraising event that Beta Sigma Phi holds to raise money for these bears is the Fourth of July pie sale. And it’s a hit every y...
One of Alaska’s largest private COVID-19 testing providers plans to close its public testing sites in the state by the end of June. The decision by the private company will not affect SEARHC’s continuation of testing services in Wrangell. The decision by Capstone Clinic is mainly driven by financial considerations, said Matt Jones, Capstone’s director of non-clinical operations. Jones said it began with an abrupt move by the federal government earlier this year to no longer cover the costs of COVID-19 tests or treatments for those without healt...
A mass casualty exercise June 7 was the first one held at the Wrangell Medical Center in its 16-month-old facility. The drill, which simulated a plane crash, was used to see where improvements could be made in the emergency operations plan. It involved about 70 staff members from the hospital, EMTs and volunteer firefighters. Eleven community volunteers of various ages were made up to resemble victims with head wounds, lacerations and other traumas requiring stabilization, medevac or blood...
The borough has listed the former Wrangell Medical Center for sale to the highest bidder until June 30, at a minimum bid of $830,000, the value assigned by an April appraisal. The hospital has been vacant since health care provider SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium moved into its new building in February 2021. The borough has been spending close to $100,000 a year to heat and insure the empty structure, and the assembly has decided to sell the surplus property. The lot is 1.95 acres, o...
At the assembly’s May 24 meeting, members unanimously approved a resolution setting the property tax levy for this year at 12.75 mills, which is $1,275 on every $100,000 in assessed value, the same rate as last year. The tax rate is 4 mills for property outside the borough’s service area, such as Thoms Place toward the southern end of Wrangell Island and Meyers Chuck. Property tax payments are due by Oct. 15. The borough estimates it will collect almost $1.8 million in property taxes in the fiscal year that starts July 1, with more than 96%...
The borough assembly and SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium have come to an agreement of voluntary payments by SEARHC of $45,000 per year for 10 years on property owned by the nonprofit health care provider in town. In negotiations that began in November, the borough had been asking for $225,000 a year, and SEARHC had asked for a refund on a $331,287 property tax bill it paid in full on the new Wrangell Medical Center in 2021. As a nonprofit, SEARHC is exempt under state law from property taxes. In the agreement approved by the...
The SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium plans to break ground in June on a four-room expansion to the 14-bed long-term care facility at Wrangell Medical Center. The 1,800-square-foot expansion was prompted by the community’s need for long-term care rooms “that are typically hard to come by,” SEARHC spokesperson Lyndsey Y. Schaefer said via email on Friday. SEARHC is adding to the building for the extension, she said Monday, but declined to provide a cost of the construction. “As it’s a pure estimate at this point, I’d rather not...
On June 7, Wrangell Medical Center will hold its annual mass casualty exercise to prepare staff for real emergencies. But they need bodies. “We’re looking for up to 10 volunteers that would be a part of the patient base,” said hospital administrator Carly Allen. “They would play a specific role that would be assigned to them. They would go through a makeup moulage tent, (making ‘wounds’) visually apparent.” A few volunteers have already signed up to participate in the drill, which takes place from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., but depending on the roles...
The borough assembly was scheduled to hold a special meeting Tuesday evening to consider an agreement for the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium to make voluntary payments on tax-exempt property it owns in town. A draft agreement had been on the agenda at the assembly’s May 10 meeting but discussion was postponed. Mayor Steve Prysunka is leading the negotiations on the borough’s side, Borough Manager Jeff Good said last Thursday. The borough had started negotiations by asking for $225,000 a year, and SEARHC offered $45,000 per year for...
The borough assembly on Tuesday was to consider a draft agreement for the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium to make voluntary payments of $45,000 per year for 10 years on property owned by the nonprofit health care provider in town. The borough had initially asked for $225,000 a year. SEARHC is not legally required to pay taxes — state law exempts nonprofit religious, charitable, hospital or educational organizations from municipal property taxes — and it has been in negotiations with the borough for several months for a vol...
The borough assembly on April 26 postponed a vote to put the old hospital building up for online auction after assembly members raised the question if the $830,000 starting bid went up to or beyond the $1 million limit in the law for selling municipal property without a vote of the people. If that were to happen, the sale would have to be approved by voters at an election — either the regular one in October, or the borough would have to hold a special election. The assembly will consider the issue again at its May 10 meeting. “If it (bi...
Just as other communities, Wrangell is enduring a springtime bloom of COVID-19 cases. As of April 20, the state health department reported 79 new cases in the community in the past 30 days. Most of those were reported to the state in late March and early April, with new infections declining in the past week. The spread of the highly infectious disease is of particular concern at the schools. “We have had an increase in COVID and other illnesses during the past month and the schools have been struggling to find ways to stay open,” Sup...
The borough assembly may put the old hospital building up for online auction next month, at a starting bid of $830,000, the value deemed by a recent commercial appraisal. A Florida-based substance abuse treatment center that had expressed interest last year in taking over the property had told borough staff it was waiting on an appraisal but hasn’t been back in touch. The borough assembly on Tuesday considered a resolution to put the 30,596-square-foot former Wrangell Medical Center on nearly two acres along Bennett Street up for auction on p...
Bodies were strewn throughout the rocks north of the Wrangell Airport, the site of a grisly airplane wreck. Cries for help could be heard here and there. Bloodied victims wandered aimlessly. Every three years, the state Department of Transportation requires a drill to prepare emergency responders in the case of a real disaster. Last Wednesday, approximately 25 firefighters and EMTs treated volunteer victims during a mock plane crash, complete with fiery wreckage and triage stations. Before the...
Juneau-based Alaska Seaplanes will add Wrangell to its route map starting May 26. The company, which operates a fleet of 14 single-engine aircraft, mostly nine-passenger planes, will run a daily flight from Sitka to Petersburg to Wrangell and back to Sitka. Encouragement from SEARHC “was instrumental” in starting the Sitka-Wrangell service, Andy Kline, Alaska Seaplanes marketing manager, said last Wednesday. SEARHC is based in Sitka where it operates the Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center, providing acute, specialty and behavioral health care ser...
It’s been more than two years since “coronavirus” became a household word, and though case numbers have subsided from last summer’s surge and record highs this past winter, the disease is still in town. Wrangell recorded about 10% of its total pandemic infections in the last two weeks of March, the state reported last Friday. Of the 517 Wrangell cases recorded by the state in the past two years, 54 came in the last two weeks of the month. “It’s still here and it’s still making people sick,” Dr. Anne Zink, the state’s chief medical officer,...
The family of David and Sue Jack would like to thank the staff at Wrangell Medical Center, especially the nursing staff, who attended to the needs of our parents while they were in the hospital. They were professional in every way, and made the best of a very difficult time for both mom, dad and us. At this time, we would also like to give a very special thank you to the members of the local American Legion Post and the veterans who assisted the Army color guard with the funeral services for dad. The send-off they gave dad was poignant, with a...
