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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...
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...
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...
A final ballot count on Nov. 20 cemented the narrow lead for supporters of Alaska’s ranked-choice voting and open primary system, who defeated a ballot measure that would have done away with the state’s 4-year-old voting process. After 6,074 additional ballots were counted, bringing the total to 340,110 ballots in the decision, the repeal initiative, Ballot Measure 2, was on track to narrowly fail in a 49.9% to 50.1% split. Its losing deficit after the Nov. 20 final count was 664 votes. Supporters of the ballot measure argued that the open pri...
Republican Nick Begich has won Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat, flipping it from Democratic to Republican control. Results of the final ballot count Nov. 20 showed Begich defeating Democratic incumbent Rep. Mary Peltola, who first won the seat in a special election in 2022 after the death of Republican longtime Rep. Don Young. Peltola was the first Alaska Native woman elected to Congress, and the first Democrat to hold the seat since Begich’s grandfather, Nick Begich, won the seat in 1972. Begich captured 48.4% of first-choice votes in Ala...
Restarting Alaska state ferry service to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, is contingent on the state receiving a long-sought federal waiver for renovations to the leased terminal at Prince Rupert and waiting at least until 2026 when the Kennicott returns to service. That’s according to Alaska Marine Highway System staff presentations at the Oct. 23 Alaska Marine Transportation Operations Board meeting. Shirley Marquardt, chair of the advisory board, said there is a strong push to restore service to Rupert, just 90 miles south of Ketchikan, w...
Alaska’s most commonly reported infectious diseases, aside from respiratory illnesses such as influenza, are from sexually transmitted infections, according to the state’s most recent annual report. There were 5,118 cases of chlamydia in Alaska in 2023, the largest number among sexually transmitted diseases in the annual infectious disease report issued by the Alaska Department of Health. The infectious disease annual reports are issued each year by the epidemiology section of the department’s Division of Public Health. The secon...
The number of cruise ship passengers visiting Wrangell is expected to rise in 2026, with the borough’s draft schedule estimating it could come close to 70,000. This is an increase from the estimated 40,000 in 2025, which is already almost double the number of passengers Wrangell welcomed in 2024. Though the borough anticipated as many as 30,000 passengers this year, cancellations and cruise company bankruptcies caused that figure to fall short of expectations. The first ship of the 2026 season will arrive on May 7 when the 728-passenger S...
Kids keep asking John Schank if he's Santa. "I can't lie to them," he laughed. "But I say, 'I'm just his helper.'" John Schank is 72. He has a big white beard and has been driving for Lynden Transport for 49 years. He and Fred Austin, another longtime Lynden driver, are transporting the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree and its 82-foot sled - trailer - from Seattle to Washington, D.C. This is Schank's second time driving The People's Tree from Alaska to Washington. He was selected to drive the rig...
Police Chief Gene Meek has revamped the Wrangell Police Department. Since arriving in July, he has implemented a series of policies that emphasize transparency, prevention and community engagement. When he arrived in town, he realized something pretty quickly about the police department. "This agency was stuck in the 1990s," he said. "It was a reactive model, where you sit back, wait for calls for service, and go out and handle the calls. That's fine from a law enforcement standpoint, but...
It's been 10 years since the community saw the map of a proposed new access route to the Mount Dewey Trail and its viewing platform for a scenic look at the town and harbor below. The wait ended with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new trailhead parking lot on Thursday, Nov. 14. "It's heavily used already," Amber Al-Haddad, the borough's capital projects director, said a few hours before the official opening. The trail runs from Bennett Street, starting at the new parking area on the road to th...
GCI is pulling the plug on its cable TV and streaming services, just as its customers have been cutting the cable cord for years. The company announced Nov. 11 that it will shut down its TV services by mid-2025; it did not provide a more specific date. “Over the past few years, we have … seen our customers increasingly choose online video streaming as their preferred way to watch their favorite programming. In light of these factors, we will sunset our TV offerings by mid-2025,” the prepared statement said. GCI has been in the cable TV busi...
The ballot measure to repeal open primary elections and ranked-choice voting in general elections saw its lead narrow last week and then disappear on Monday, with a final vote count scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 20. As of Monday afternoon, the repeal effort was behind by 192 votes out of more than 332,000 ballots cast on the measure. State elections officials estimated there were about 5,000 ballots still to count this week, an assortment of early votes and mail-in absentee ballots. The repeal initiative led by more than 4,100 votes after the...