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'Twas the weeks before Christmas and time for the annual tree lighting ceremony, set for 6 p.m. Friday, Dec. 6, next to the Elks Hall. Caroling will begin at 5:30 p.m. The annual chamber of commerce Midnight Madness sales event at downtown shops also will be held Friday evening, with hot cocoa and popcorn at the chamber’s downtown pavilion — and a chance to roast marshmallows — sponsored by the Wrangell Fire Department. The community market is scheduled to run from 4 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Nolan Center, featuring Santa Claus jolly at the r...
There’s still time for people to donate items for the American Legion Auxiliary’s Santa for Seniors program Gifts should be turned in by Dec. 16 for the annual sharing event, now in its fifth year. Auxiliary volunteers will deliver the gifts to residents at the long-term care facility at Wrangell Medical Center, most of the residents at Senior Apartments, and the town’s other older citizens who don’t have any family or are shut in at home and unable to get out, said Marilyn Mork, who helps to organize the program. “We want to help brighten...
Maybe Clark Griswold would have been able to get those lights working a little quicker if he was motivated by the Wrangell Chamber of Commerce’s hefty prize packages. The chamber’s annual Christmas home decorations contest begins soon, and if your home has the best decorations, you could win $300. Second place will win $200, and third place will win $100. There will be $50 prizes for two additional honorable mentions as well. There is a separate category for businesses. The business with the best window decorations will win the chamber’s silve...
Jeremy Bynum is transitioning from being a member of the Ketchikan Gateway Borough Assembly to his new job as state representative for Ketchikan, Metlakatla, Wrangell and Coffman Cove. He has a lot to do in the seven weeks before he is sworn in as a member of the state House when the Legislature convenes in Juneau on Jan. 21. He is looking for housing and for office staff; there will be orientation and training sessions for new lawmakers; there are legislative rules and procedures to learn; and...
The Wrangell school district will not purchase an electric school bus this year. Business Manager Kristy Andrew informed the Environmental Protection Agency that the district would return the $370,000 federal grant it received in 2023. After the school board voted down the purchase on Sept. 9, the district had until Nov. 22 to inform the EPA of its decision, which it did ahead of the extended deadline. This concludes a four-month long saga in which the school board initially expressed optimism about the bus purchase before flipping on the...
It took three rounds of bidding but the borough is on its way to installing a new, 300-foot-long float system at Meyers Chuck. The assembly last month awarded a $445,000 contract to Bellingham Marine Industries for the Washington state contractor to construct the 10-foot-wide wooden-decked floats, gangway and connection to the existing seaplane float in Meyers Chuck. The work includes building and shipping everything to Wrangell, where the 50-foot-long sections will be stored at the Marine Service Center until a separate contract is issued...
Alaska’s minimum wage workers will get a tiny bump in pay starting on Jan. 1 before a larger increase becomes effective six months later. The state’s minimum wage will increase by 18 cents to $11.91 an hour at the start of the new year, the result of a ballot measure passed 10 years ago, the Alaska Department of Labor said on Nov. 21. The bigger increase will be on July 1, when the minimum wage is set to rise to $13 an hour, the result of a ballot measure approved by voters in November. The minimum wage is set to increase again in 2026 to $14 a... Full story
Seven out of 10 Alaska adults are overweight or obese, and large percentages of adults in the state have chronic conditions like high blood pressure and high cholesterol that are linked to the leading causes of death, according to a report by the state Department of Health. The 2024 Alaska Chronic Disease Facts summary, published by the department’s Division of Public Health, also showed that 33% of high school students were overweight or obese. Large percentages of adults and teenagers are sedentary, according to the report. Among adults, 2... Full story
Gov. Mike Dunleavy said he isn’t planning to take a job with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration at the start of his second presidential term in January. Dunleavy, in the middle of his second term as governor, was mentioned by political observers and in media reports in the days after the Nov. 5 election as a candidate to lead the Department of Interior. When Trump selected North Dakota’s governor for the job, Dunleavy was listed by some as a possible Cabinet member for the departments of energy or education. But the governor, durin...
"The only thing that exists is that edge and the wood that it's moving through," Haines luthier Rob Goldberg said as he worked with a chisel, carving the braces that will hold a guitar's sound boards together. "You can't be thinking about what you're going to have for dinner or thinking about your girlfriend or thinking about anything else." He speaks from decades of experience, building world-class custom instruments at his Mud Bay workshop, several miles south of downtown Haines. That attentio...
Alaska is losing its residents to Texas, Oregon, Washington state and Florida. That’s according to 2023 American Community Survey results, an annual demographics survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. From 2022 to 2023, Alaska lost more residents than it gained, continuing a trend that has existed since 2012. Though Alaska has long led the nation in annual population turnover — typically, about 45,000 people moved both into and out of the state annually, said Alaska Department of Labor demographer Eric Sandberg — “what has changed is that...
The U.S. Coast Guard on Monday morning suspended the search for survivors from a Sitka-based commercial fishing boat that capsized early Sunday morning with five people aboard. The Coast Guard said the search for the 52-foot seiner Wind Walker continued for nearly 24 hours and covered more than 108 square nautical miles. The boat’s crew issued a mayday call at 12:07 a.m. Sunday “reporting they were overturning,” the Coast Guard said. Watchstanders in Juneau received no additional response, but the boat’s emergency beacon signal broadca...
A giant female chinook salmon flips on her side in the shallow water and wriggles wildly, using her tail to carve out a nest in the riverbed as her body glistens in the sunlight. In another late-October moment, males butt into each other as they jockey for a good position to fertilize eggs. These are scenes tribes have dreamed of seeing for decades as they fought to bring down four hydroelectric dams blocking passage for struggling salmon along more than 400 miles of the Klamath River and its tributaries along the Oregon-California border. Now,...
A large contingent from Wrangell will be in the crowd as the switch is flipped to light up The Capitol Christmas Tree on Tuesday, Dec. 3, including tribal members of the Wrangell Cooperative Association who will bless the 80-foot-tall spruce. The lighting ceremony is scheduled for 1 p.m. Alaska time and will be available for online viewing, including on the YouTube channel of the Speaker of the U.S. House at https://bit.ly/3V5EDQg. The tree, with a trunk almost 22 inches wide, arrived in the nation’s capital on Friday, Nov. 22, after a long j... Full story
Virgina Oliver set the reflective tone for the community’s landslide remembrance by singing the first verse of “Silent Night” in Tlingit, and then inviting people to sing it together in English. The town gathered on Wednesday, Nov. 20, at the Nolan Center to remember their six friends and neighbors who died in a destructive landslide a year ago that evening. With the words “sleep in heavenly peace” resonating in the hall, Esther Aaltséen Reese, WCA tribal administrator, explained the vision for the evening: coming together to remember,...
For about half the average price of a home in Seattle, you could buy Wrangell’s former hospital property. The borough assembly passed a resolution on Nov. 18, dropping the price of the property from its appraised value of $830,000 to a new asking price of $498,000, pretty close to the reduced price of $470,000 the borough advertised in 2022. The property, which has been vacant since SEARHC moved out in 2021, currently sits empty. It costs the borough several tens of thousands of dollars a year to insure and maintain the building against d...
The Wrangell school district is running out of money — literally. If state and borough funding continue at the current levels, the schools will empty their reserves within two years. To help counteract the funding woes, the school board and superintendent met with the borough manager, mayor and borough assembly to workshop potential solutions on Nov. 19. The conversation lasted nearly two hours and began with slide deck presentations from Borough Manager Mason Villarma and school district Business Manager Kristy Andrew. Villarma was blunt. “We...
In a unanimous decision, the borough assembly took the first step toward increasing flexibility for the number of annual tax-free days, allowing for anywhere between zero and two days in a year. Currently, there are two sales tax-free days per year, often bookending the summer season so that full-time residents (rather than tourists) can enjoy the town-wide discounts in the spring and fall. On tax-free days, Wrangell’s 7% sales tax is removed for 24 hours. Local businesses tend to run additional sales on these days, with the hope of increasing...
The sale of 20 borough-owned residential lots at the Alder Top Village (Keishangita.’aan) subdivision near Shoemaker Harbor is on track for summer 2025. The sale — half of the lots by auction and half by lottery — had been planned for this past summer, but site work pushed that back to the fall and then a nationwide shortage of electrical transformers delayed it even further. However, the borough assembly at its Nov. 18 meeting approved a contract with a South Dakota-based company for a dozen electrical transformers for the subdivision. The b...
Participants in the nationwide Elks Hoop Shoot have to be a lot younger than the event itself. The free-throw contest is more than 50 years old, but it’s open only to kids 8 through 13 years old. The annual Hoop Shoot will be held Saturday, Nov. 30, at the Wrangell community center gym. The times are 10 a.m. for ages 8 to 9; 11 a.m. for ages 10 to 11; and noon for ages 12 to 13. Kids’ age as of April 1, 2025, will determine which group they will shoot in. They will each get five warm-up shots at the hoop, followed by a round of 10 throws and a...
Commercial salmon harvesters have had a tough year in Alaska, with preliminary state estimates showing that the 2024 season had the third-lowest catch since 1985 and the third-lowest inflation-adjusted ex-vessel value to fishermen since 1975, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The department released its annual salmon harvest summary on Nov. 18. Statewide, commercial fishermen landed 101.2 million salmon of all species during the 2024 season, according to the summary. That’s down 56% from the total harvest of 232.2 million i...
State and federal fisheries managers predict that Southeast Alaska fishermen will harvest about 29 million pink salmon in 2025, an “average” harvest based on catch data going back to 1960 but a 45% boost over this year’s catch. The prediction comes from a joint National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries and Alaska Department of Fish and Game 2025 Southeast Alaska Pink Salmon Harvest Forecast that the state released Nov. 19. The 2025 forecast for 29 million pinks is “approximately 60% of the parent-year (2023) harvest of 48 mill...
The music is almost 300 years old, and it’s been at least 20 years since it’s been performed at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Wrangell, but George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah” is timeless and the community is invited to a sing-along Sunday, Dec. 1. “We decided to try to revive it,” Bonnie Demerjian said of the community sing-along event. “We’re just going to sing along with the recording” of “Messiah” by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, she explained. “They’re our backup.” It’s “classical (music) karaoke.” It will be a much shorter version tha...
State officials and industry leaders trying to rescue the ailing Alaska seafood industry are facing daunting challenges, recently released numbers show. The industry lost $1.8 billion last year, the result of low prices, closed harvests and other problems, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Direct employment of harvesters last year fell by 8% to the lowest level since 2001, when counts of harvesting jobs began, the Alaska Department of Labor said. The monthly... Full story
Alaska seafood processors hired fewer people in 2023 but paid them more and relied more on nonresidents to fill the jobs, a state analysis shows. The employment trends are what would be expected in an industry struggling to find workers, said Dan Robinson, the state economist who wrote the analysis for the Alaska Department of Labor’s monthly magazine. “I do think the reason for that is just they’ve had to work harder to get workers and to pay workers more to come there,” said Robinson, the department’s research chief and author of the artic... Full story
