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A headless robot about the size of a labrador retriever will be camouflaged as a coyote or fox to ward off migratory birds and other wildlife at Alaska's second largest airport. The Alaska Department of Transportation has named the new robot Aurora and said it will be based at the Fairbanks airport to "enhance and augment safety and operations," the Anchorage Daily News reported. The department released a video in March of the robot climbing rocks, going up stairs and doing something akin to...
After 50 years, the state will no longer use wooden fish wheels to count salmon on the Chilkat River north of Haines. That leaves the Taku River, south of Juneau, as the only Southeast river where the Alaska Department of Fish and Game will operate fish wheels to scoop up salmon for research. The wheels had operated June through October in the Chilkat River about nine miles from downtown Haines since the 1970s. “It is sad — I’ve been comparing it to owning a wooden boat — it’s such a romantic wonderful thing,” said the state’s Haines fish r...
State legislators said they are unlikely to immediately act to address an Alaska Superior Court ruling that struck down key components of the state’s correspondence schools programs — and will wait for the Alaska Supreme Court to consider the issue. Speaking to reporters on April 17, Gov. Mike Dunleavy said his administration is also waiting for the high court to take up the issue. The ruling said the state’s cash payments to the parents of homeschooled students violates constitutional restrictions against spending state money on private and r...
Citing what they characterized as unacceptable risks to wildlife habitat, water quality and the Native communities that depend on natural resources, the Biden administration on April 19 rejected the state’s controversial plan to put a 211-mile industrial road through largely wild areas of the Brooks Range foothills. The decision came in a supplemental environmental impact statement released by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, a branch of the Department of the Interior. The document selected the “no action” alternative as its policy choic...
In a devastating blow to California’s fishing industry, federal fishery managers unanimously voted April 10 to cancel all commercial and recreational salmon fishing off the coast of California for the second year in a row. The decision is designed to protect California’s dwindling salmon populations after drought and water diversions left river flows too warm and sluggish for the state’s iconic chinook salmon to thrive. Salmon abundance forecasts for the year “are just too low,” Marci Yaremko, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife...
The Biden administration said April 19 it will restrict new oil and gas leasing on 13 million acres of a federal petroleum reserve on Alaska’s North Slope to help protect wildlife such as caribou and polar bears as the Arctic continues to warm. The decision — part of a yearslong fight over whether and how to develop the vast oil resources in the state — finalizes protections first proposed last year as the administration prepared to approve the contentious Willow oil project. The approval of Willow drew fury from environmentalists, who said...
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dismissed an appeal filed by the Pebble mine developer in its effort to obtain a key permit needed to build the controversial copper and gold mine upstream of Southwest Alaska’s salmon-rich Bristol Bay. The decision, released on April 15, lets stand a permit denial issued by the Army Corps in 2020. Rejection of the appeal is the latest setback for the developer. The biggest setback came in January 2023, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency invoked a rarely used provision of the Clean Water Act to p...
Federal researchers indicate the gray whale population along the West Coast is showing signs of recovery five years after hundreds washed up dead on beaches from Alaska to Mexico. The increase in population numbers comes after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association determined in November that the “unusual mortality event” that began in 2019 has ended. “It’s nice to be able to report some good news the last couple of years,” Aimee Lang, a research biologist with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, told The Seattle Times. The...
An Anchorage Superior Court judge has struck down an Alaska law that allows the state to allocate cash payments to parents of homeschooled students, ruling that it violates constitutional prohibitions against spending state money on religious or private education. “This court finds that there is no workable way to construe the statutes to allow only constitutional spending,” wrote Judge Adolf Zeman, concluding that the entire law must be struck down. The April 12 decision has major and immediate implications for the more than 22,000 students en...
The Alaska House has sent to the Senate a state operating budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1 with an almost $2,300 Permanent Fund dividend that would be the single largest expenditure in the spending plan. The budget also includes $175 million in additional one-time school funding, raising the total state contribution to school district operating expenses to just over half of what House members voted to spend on this fall’s dividend. The boost in state aid for the 2024-2025 school year, if approved by the Senate and signed into l...
The Alaska House of Representatives on April 11 rejected a constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed payment of the annual Permanent Fund dividend. The final vote was 22-18, five votes short of the two-thirds majority required to advance the amendment to the Senate for further debate. If it had won legislative approval, the amendment would have gone to the public in this fall’s general election. The amendment was part of a plan created in 2021 by a bipartisan working group after the state came within a week of a government shutdown d...
A designated wilderness area in the Tongass National Forest, the largest U.S. national forest, is now a little bit bigger, after a land purchase and transfer arranged by two conservation organizations. ‘ Five acres of land that was formerly privately owned has been added to the forest’s Kootznoowoo Wilderness area on Admiralty Island, one of the organizations, The Wilderness Land Trust, said in a news release issued on April 11. The project, a partnership with the Juneau-based Southeast Alaska Land Trust, is the latest in a series of land pur...
Lucy Pitka McCormick's relatives cooked salmon, moose, beaver and muskrat over an earthen firepit on the banks of the Chena River, just outside Fairbanks, as they honored her life. They whipped whitefish, blueberries and lard into a traditional Alaska Native dessert, and dolloped servings onto a paper plate, setting it in the flames to feed her spirit. The family prayed as McCormick's great-grandson built a small plywood coffin that was filled with gifts and necessities for the next world, such...
“Let me take you to one of my favorite places in Alaska that you’ve probably never heard of,” Danielle Marie Lister says in a recent Instagram video. Lister wears black bibs, a purple down jacket and thick white boots as she skips along the Haines Highway below a snow-covered mountain along with soft guitar music. The one-minute video includes shots of bald eagles on the Chilkat River, the slow waves of Portage Cove, and steam rising from a hot tub outside a yurt pressed against the Takshanuk Mountains. “I always love the contrast of the sma...
A group of Republican-led states, including Alaska, is suing the Biden administration to block a new student loan repayment plan that provides a faster path to cancellation and lower monthly payments for millions of borrowers. In a federal lawsuit filed March 28, 11 states led by Kansas argue that President Joe Biden overstepped his authority in creating the SAVE Plan, which was made available to borrowers last year and has already canceled loans for more than 150,000. It argues that the new plan is no different from Biden’s first attempt at s...
The fishing fleet in the Southwest Alaska town of King Cove would have been harvesting Pacific cod this winter. But they didn't: Skippers had nowhere to sell their catch. The enormous plant that usually buys and processes their fish never opened for the winter season. The company that runs the plant, Peter Pan Seafoods, is facing six-figure legal claims from fishermen who say they haven't been paid for catches they delivered months ago. King Cove's city administrator says the company is behind...
A troubled, state-backed seafood processing company, Peter Pan Seafoods, has announced that it’s pursuing a deal to sell its plants to another business. But the news still leaves a key asset, the massive plant in the Alaska Peninsula village of King Cove, in limbo for the summer salmon season. Peter Pan also announced April 4 that it would lease two of its plants, in the Bristol Bay hub town of Dillingham and the remote Alaska Peninsula outpost of Port Moller, to Silver Bay Seafoods to operate for the summer. The fate of all of Peter Pan’s pla...
The state ferry Tustumena is preparing for its 60th birthday party this summer. Over the years, the vessel has become a familiar and important part of life in communities between Homer and Dutch Harbor. But after years in rough waters, the cost of keeping the Tustumena running is ballooning. "This ship is a floating museum piece," said John Mayer, who has captained the ship for years. The Tustumena exemplifies the storms that the Alaska Marine Highway System has weathered. In March, Seward...
In the language of the Gwich’in people of northeastern Alaska, the word for month known in English as July is Łuk choo zhrii, meaning “the month of king salmon,” said Rochelle Adams, an Indigenous advocate who grew up in Beaver and Fort Yukon. With Yukon River king salmon runs diminished to the point where harvests of the species were not even allowed, that name now poses a dilemma, Adams said. “If we can’t fish in the month of king salmon, what are we living in?” Adams said at a conference in mid-March. “How we navigate the world is in ou...
Alaska Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski has made headlines again with comments on her unwillingness to vote for former president Donald Trump, which puts her in an ever-shrinking group of GOP members opposing the party’s presumptive nominee for president. “I wish that as Republicans, we had a nominee that I could get behind,” Murkowski told a CNN journalist in a brief hallway interview posted online on March 24. “I certainly can’t get behind Trump,” Murkowski added. Her comments triggered stories on a number of national news sites. On March...
Vandalism directed at a church or other property used by a religious organization would become a felony in Alaska if legislation passed by the state House of Representatives becomes law. The House voted 35-5 on March 20 to approve House Bill 238, from Anchorage Rep. Andy Josephson, sending the bill to the Senate for further debate. “I think it’s rational to say that when you commit harm to a house of worship, it should be more serious” than a misdemeanor, Josephson said. He said the defacement of a church draws “community-wide reaction and res...
Under legislation passed March 21 by the Alaska House of Representatives, police searching for a lost hiker could obtain cell phone and satellite phone location data without a warrant. The House approved House Bill 316 by a 38-1 margin after moving it forward with unusual speed. The Senate has referred the bill to committee for discussion. The Legislature faces a mid-May adjournment deadline. The measure is modeled after similar laws in other states and is known as the “Kelsey Smith Act.” Smith was an 18-year-old who was abducted and mur...
Teacher salaries in Alaska are not competitive when compared to much of the Lower 48, according to new research from the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research. Alaska teachers are paid below the national average once their salaries are adjusted for the high cost of living in Alaska, said Matthew Berman, a professor of Economics at UAA and one of two authors of the study published last month. The topic of public school funding and teacher pay has been a main focus in the Alaska Legislature this session and o...
A new legal opinion by the top attorney at the U.S. Department of the Interior has extended the land jurisdiction of Alaska tribes, upending decades of precedent and offering new opportunities for the state’s 228 federally recognized tribal governments. The opinion, issued Feb. 1 by Interior Department Solicitor Robert Anderson, says tribal authority applies on land allotments given to individual Alaska Natives, unless those parcels of land are owned by a non-tribal member or are “geographically removed from the tribal community.” “That...
Teacher salaries in Alaska are not competitive when compared to much of the Lower 48, according to new research from the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research. Alaska teachers are paid below the national average once their salaries are adjusted for the high cost of living in Alaska, said Matthew Berman, a professor of Economics at UAA and one of two authors of the study published last month. The topic of public school funding and teacher pay has been a main focus in the Alaska Legislature this session and o...
