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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...
The borough assembly has taken the first step in allowing American flags on veterans’ gravestones to remain up for the month-long stretch between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. After approving the change in first reading at the July 23 assembly meeting, there will be a second reading of the ordinance at the Aug. 27 meeting, with a public hearing before assembly members vote whether to adopt the change. The current version of the law states: “No temporary decoration, marker, or monument, may be placed upon or near the grave … except on th...
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...
The National Indian Gaming Commission has approved plans for a casino-style tribal gaming hall proposed by the Native Village of Eklutna for a site near Anchorage. The decision, published this month by the commission, follows an Interior Department decision in February that reinterpreted the legal status of Alaska Native trust land, reversing decades of precedent. The gaming hall, which is expected to hold rows of electronic gambling machines, is similar to the Southeast Winds Casino in Metlakatla but would be a first in the state’s p...
All of the seven attorneys who have applied for appointment to fill the latest vacancy on Alaska’s Supreme Court are women. After the governor selects the next justice, the court will be majority-women for the first time in state history. After one of the seven is seated on the court, three of the five members will be women. The seven applicants were announced last month by the Alaska Judicial Council, which screens and nominates applicants for judicial positions. The governor then fills a judicial vacancy from the nominees provided by the coun...
The Alaska Legislature recently increased state funding for domestic violence and sexual assault efforts, but a leading advocate says the effort doesn’t go far enough to meet the need. One of the main federal funding sources for Alaska’ domestic violence and sexual assault prevention efforts and programs has dropped over the years, creating a hole in service providers’ budgets as state funding has remained the same for seven years. Lawmakers plugged part of the that hole with a $3.7 million budget boost this year for the Alaska Council on Domes...
The Biden administration has rejected a nominee for a key Alaska fisheries management post who could have tipped decisions toward the interests of tribes and conservation groups and away from the priorities of the large-boat, Seattle-based trawl industry. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo skipped over the top choice of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, conservation advocate Becca Robbins Gisclair, and instead reappointed the last-ranked nominee on a slate of four candidates that Inslee offered: Anne Vanderhoeven, a trawl industry employee who...
NEW YORK — Tucked within the expansive Native American halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City is a diminutive wooden doll that holds a sacred place among the tribes whose territories once included Manhattan. For more than six months now, the ceremonial Ohtas, or Doll Being, has been hidden from view after the museum and others nationally took dramatic steps to board up or paper over exhibits in response to new federal rules requiring institutions to return sacred or culturally significant items to tribes — or at lea...
Wrangell is not immune to the nationwide shortage of electrical transformers, and the delivery delay has pushed back the borough’s sale of 20 lots at the residential subdivision near 6-Mile Zimovia Highway until the spring. The borough wants to wait until the streets and utilities are finished at the property before opening access to the land for potential buyers to evaluate which lots they may want to buy. The transformers and buried electrical lines are part of the work. The land sale had been tentatively planned for late summer or fall, b...
So, you want to see bears at the Anan Wildlife Observatory. But maybe you couldn't get one of the limited number of permits, or you live out of town and can't make the trip, or maybe you are a little more afraid of them than you care to admit. But now, thanks to the U.S. Forest Service, explore.org and 14 Wrangell high school students in the T3 Program, anyone worldwide can view Anan's fish-crazed black and brown bears. Last week, after months of preparation, planning and prototyping, the two...
T.J. Sgwaayaans Young, a Haida master carver from Hydaburg, arrived in Wrangell earlier this month to lead a team of Wrangell-based apprentices to carve a new Kadashan totem pole. When the work is finished, the Wrangell Cooperative Association plans to hold a pole raising ceremony on Shakes Island sometime next year, Wrangell's first totem raising in 38 years. The Kadashan pole - referring to the Tlingit chief of the same name - is the first of two the WCA team will carve this year. Next month,...
Annual moorage rates will not increase this year, after the assembly on July 23 passed a resolution reversing a 3% fee increase it approved in April. The higher rates had been scheduled to take effect this month. The vote to roll back the rate increase was unanimous. “Realizing that it’s such a poor commercial fishing season, realizing that the tourism industry has struggled a bit this year, we felt we could drop the rate increase this year and come back to it next year,” Borough Manager Mason Villarma said in an interview last week. The assem...
They may be out of sight to the general public but they are never out of mind for the U.S. Forest Service. The agency maintains 35 mountaintop repeater towers within the Tongass National Forest to provide radio coverage for their field crews and first responders. A contractor is installing new repeater stations at five sites this summer in the Wrangell and Petersburg ranger districts, part of an ongoing effort to switch out older units with newer models. Of particular importance to Wrangell, a...
The assembly last week took the first step toward seeking voter approval to someday pay members for their work. The assembly on July 23 approved in first reading an ordinance that would put the question to voters on the Oct. 1 municipal election ballot; they set a public hearing on the ordinance for Aug. 27. If approved by voters, the ballot measure would not result in immediate compensation for assembly members and the mayor. Instead, it would only remove a provision from the borough charter prohibiting such payments. The assembly would need...
A $38.6 million federal grant will help lower the cost of energy-saving heat pumps for an estimated 6,100 Alaska households stretching from Ketchikan to Kodiak, including Wrangell. The money will provide rebates of between $4,000 and $8,500 per household for the purchase and installation of a heat pump. The funding is in addition to federal tax credits of up to $2,000 per household. The federal grant for coastal Alaska, announced July 22, will go the Southeast Conference, a community and economic development nonprofit for the region, and...
First it was radio, then television. Then it was video games and TikTok. Many book lovers, bookstores and parents of reading-age children feared the demise of the printed story. Yet, with just a few days to go before the end of the Irene Ingle Public Library annual summer reading program for kids, the youngsters are far ahead of last year’s pace. The program ends Saturday, Aug. 3, with prizes for readers and a party on Aug. 10. Wrangell’s young readers entering kindergarten through ninth grade in August had gone through 2,603 books as of Jul...
The WMC Foundation and SEARHC are inviting women to enjoy some "fun and frolic" golf for a good cause. The annual Rally for Cancer Care will be held Saturday, Aug. 10, at the Muskeg Meadows. Registration starts at 9 a.m.; the event begins at 10 a.m. The day will feature a luncheon, beverages, prizes, a silent auction and a golf tournament with no scoring and no skills required. "It's not even golf," organizer Patty Gilbert, board member of the WMC Foundation said. "It's 'fun and frolic' on the...
More than $600,000 was returned to the Ketchikan Gateway Borough on July 25 after the borough’s bank, Wells Fargo, successfully retrieved an electronic fund transfer that the borough made to a fraudulent account a couple of months ago. Charlanne Thomas, the borough’s finance director said the borough was notified by Wells Fargo in May that it unknowingly sent money to a fraudulent checking account at Citibank after attempting to pay for the Dudley Field turf project. The contractor’s email account had been hacked by scammers who reque...
Alaska’s highest-ranking Democratic officeholder said July 23 she has not decided whether to back the party’s likely candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. Rep. Mary Peltola broke with other state Democrats, who quickly gave their support and their party convention delegates’ votes to Harris just hours after President Joe Biden announced that he was ending his campaign for re-election. Peltola, in an online news conference, said she is still weighing her decision about whether to vote for Harris and is “keeping an open mind.” “We still have...
Alaska’s U.S. House race will be one of the hardest-fought campaigns in the country, according to a national group dedicated to getting Republicans elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s for that reason the National Republican Congressional Committee launched its first television ads in the general election cycle in Alaska before any other state, according to a news release. The television ad labels incumbent Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola a “devout Biden enabler” who would “betray Alaskans to back Biden.” It includes Peltola say...
Alaska voters are set to have an opportunity in the November election to affirm or repeal the state’s use of ranked-choice voting, Division of Elections officials confirmed on July 24. The news comes after Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin on July 19 disqualified some of the petition signatures collected by the repeal effort because the gathering process was not carried out in accordance with state law. The judge found instances in which the signature-gathering process was improper and disqualified those petition booklets. She ordered s...
A cyanide spill at a major gold mine in the Yukon Territory — high in the Yukon River watershed — has sparked widespread concern in Canada. But Alaska salmon advocates say the mishap isn’t just a problem for Yukoners: The spill happened upstream of a tributary of the Yukon River. The Yukon is Alaska’s biggest transboundary waterway, and residents along its shores who have depended on salmon for generations are already suffering amid crashes of fish runs. Officials on both sides of the border say it’s too early to know the full impact of the sp...
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 the only preschool teacher left Harold Kaveolook School in Kaktovik, a village of around 250 people on the northern coast of Alaska, Chelsea Brower was in charge. It was January and she had been the preschool aide for about a year and a half. “Being with the kids and trying to be their teacher is what really made me realize I want to be their teacher — and it also made me realize I need to become certified to be their teacher,” she said. The only problem was that universities that offered the requisite courses were hundreds of miles away,...