Sorted by date Results 715 - 739 of 1762
Newly appointed Alaska Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher said last Thursday that she was considering severing ties with a nonprofit that helps maintain voter rolls nationwide, after several Republican-led states announced earlier this month their intention to pull out of the effort. Beecher told state lawmakers she was evaluating Alaska’s membership in the organization during a presentation to the Senate State Affairs Committee. She cited the cost of the program as a reason for leaving despite the benefits it provides. Her c...
Crystal Kaakeeyáa Rose Demientieff Worl is a Tlingit, Athabascan and Filipino artist and co-owner of Trickster Company in Juneau. And a postage stamp designer, too. On March 24, she will attend the Art of the Skateboard U.S. Postal Service stamp release in Phoenix, at the Desert West Skatepark. Worl's stamp is featured with three other skateboard stamps selected for the honor. "It's so cool to be in this collective of artists. I didn't know about the artists before and then we've been talking to...
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) - Environmental groups and a Native American tribe have accused the operator of a Maine hydroelectric dam of not fulfilling its obligation to protect the country’s last remaining Atlantic salmon river run. The last wild Atlantic salmon live in a group of rivers in Maine and have been listed under the Endangered Species Act since 2000. The Penobscot River, a 109-mile-long river in the eastern part of the state is one of the most important habitats for the fish. The Penobscot is also the site of the Milford Dam, which is o...
Following criticism from Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor, the nationwide pharmacy chain Walgreens will not seek to sell the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone in Alaska, the company said earlier this month. Though abortion is legal in Alaska, Taylor was one of 20 Republican attorneys general who wrote the nation’s second-largest pharmacy chain and urged it to not sell mifepristone by mail. The attorneys general said they disagree with a Biden administration analysis approving the sale and distribution of the drug through the mail and by c...
Alaska's rugged and frigid Interior, where it can get as cold as minus 50 Fahrenheit, is not the place you'd expect to find an electric school bus. But here is Bus No. 50, quietly traversing about 40 miles of snowy and icy roads each day in Tok, shuttling students to school not far from the Canadian border. It works OK on the daily route. But cold temperatures rob electric vehicle batteries of traveling range, so No. 50 can't go on longer field trips, or to Anchorage or Fairbanks. It's a...
A state House committee last week held its first hearing on a bill intended to settle the Legislature’s biggest annual political battle: The amount of the Permanent Fund dividend. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Dan Ortiz, who represents Ketchikan, Wrangell and Metlakatla, would amend state law so that 75% of the annual draw on Permanent Fund earnings goes toward paying for schools and other public services, with 25% designated for the PFD. “Tonight, we’re going to open a can of worms,” Chairman Ben Carpenter, of Nikiski, said at the March 1 meeti...
A scammer stole nearly $270,000 from the Juneau School District this fall — and it’s unlikely the district will recover the money. In a memo shared with the City and Borough of Juneau Finance Committee at its March 1 meeting, Finance Director Jeff Rogers provided details of the fraud and information shared with him in early December by the school district. A person posing as a vendor for the district asked staff for a change to the company’s direct-deposit information using a spoofed email address made to look as though it belonged to the v...
Alaska Airlines will paint over "Salmon Thirty Salmon," the custom Boeing 737 that looks like a 129-foot-long Alaska king salmon, the company confirmed Feb. 27. Tim Thompson, director of public relations and community marketing for the airline, confirmed that the plane will be painted over after a final ceremonial flight on April 17 - which is scheduled to stop in Wrangell. That will be Flight 65, the daily Southeast Alaska "milk run" that travels from Seattle to Anchorage with stops in...
The Alaska Volcano Observatory is planning to install a series of seismic instruments on Mount Edgecumbe near Sitka after preliminary measurements showed magma moving deep below the Mount Fuji-shaped volcano. The movement doesn't mean an eruption will happen soon - or even at all - from Southeast Alaska's most prominent volcano, but it's significant enough that the observatory has raised the volcano's threat level. "Internally, how we think about Edgecumbe has changed. It definitely has moved...
State funding is being directed to help stock Alaska food pantries — including those serving rural communities — as part of a broader effort to address a monthslong state backlog in processing food stamp benefit applications. Major delays in processing applications for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have stressed thousands of Alaskans who depend on the monthly benefits to feed their families, and strained food bank resources across the state. State officials have attributed the processing delays to staffing sho...
Nearly six months after Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a bill aimed at reducing youth use of electronic cigarettes, its primary sponsor is trying again to pass similar legislation. Senate President Gary Stevens on March 1 introduced Senate Bill 89, which seeks to impose the first-ever statewide tax on e-cigarette products. The bill would also raise the legal age in state law for purchasing, selling or distributing the products to 21, aligning with federal law. Currently, the legal age in Alaska is 19. Stevens said the bill is needed to counter a tre...
State regulators say that taking over what are known as Clean Water Act Section 404 permits will allow more flexibility to benefit businesses and the environment in “Alaska’s unique conditions.” Most construction, resource and community development projects require such permits, and regulators hope the state could take over up to 75% of them beginning in 2024. But since almost every other state is opting against such control, the question is if Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration is pitching only the positive aspects while ignoring the drawback...
WASHINGTON - Tlingit leaders dedicated a storied totem pole in Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's office on Feb. 28. The 10-foot tall, 900-pound totem pole, which is on loan from the Sealaska Heritage Institute, has a long history on Capitol Hill. The totem pole once stood in the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens' office. When Stevens left Congress, the totem pole journeyed to Alaska Rep. Don Young's office. When Young died last year, the totem pole traversed Capitol grounds back to Stevens' old office, no...
The Sitka-based Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association board voted March 1 to provide up to $75,000 toward legal expenses to help fight a lawsuit that threatens to shut down the Southeast commercial troll fisheries. The 22 members at the board meeting gave unanimous approval to the contribution to the Alaska Trollers Association, said association general manager Scott Wagner. The aquaculture association manages hatcheries and salmon run enhancement projects as far north in Southeast as Haines. The Wild Fish Conservancy, a...
WASHINGTON — Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski testified in support of the Equal Rights Amendment at a Senate hearing this week, opposite a fellow Republican senator who opposes it. The Equal Rights Amendment, which was proposed in Congress in 1972, would codify equal rights for women in the U.S. Constitution and ban discrimination based on sex. Along with Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, Murkowski sponsored legislation in the Senate in January that would remove the deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and recognizes that t...
At its two meetings last month, members of the Alaska Marine Highway Operations Board expressed frustration over the state Department of Transportation’s communication with the board on significant decisions, including the state ferry system’s summer schedule, job vacancies, and short- and long-term planning. In phone interviews last week with the Ketchikan Daily News, several board members elaborated on those concerns, saying the department occasionally struggles to meet one of its only obligations to the board listed in state statute: “Th...
A proposed overhaul of Alaska’s public employees retirement system would provide a new pension plan for state and municipal workers, intended by supporters to address the ongoing inability to recruit and retain enough employees. Half of the 20-member state Senate have signed onto the bill, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, an Anchorage Republican. The measure was outlined in a news conference March 1 by members of the bipartisan coalition that controls the Senate. Coalition members said the 2006 legislation that moved Alaska f...
Alaska’s 401(k)-style retirement system for new employees is providing significantly smaller benefits than the pension-style retirement system discontinued for new hires in 2006, according to an analysis from the state Division of Retirement and Benefits. The analysis, presented Feb. 23 to the Senate Finance Committee, comes as legislators are considering whether to revive a pension system for new employees as a way to encourage hiring. Almost one in six state government jobs were vacant in December, according to the governor’s Office of Man...
Bills under consideration in the Legislature to cap state spending are not addressing the main challenges Alaska is facing, said Sitka Sen. Bert Stedman, co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee. “We don’t have a spending-side problem; we have a revenue-side problem,” said Stedman, who also represents Wrangell and the rest of Southeast except for Juneau, Haines, Skagway and Gustavus. He is in his 20th year in the Legislature. The senator pointed out that the latest spending-cap proposal advanced by an Anchorage Republican would exclude the P...
The state is shutting down most summer king salmon sportfishing around Cook Inlet amid continued declines in the strong, hard-running fish that not that long ago filled freezers and fueled tourism in the state’s most populated region. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game last Thursday announced an unprecedented array of restrictions and closures on sport and personal-use fishing from the Kenai Peninsula to the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, a sweeping series of emergency regulations that illustrates the severity of king salmon population c...
In her annual address to the Alaska Legislature, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski urged state lawmakers to avoid spending too much time on the amount of this year’s Permanent Fund dividend and to focus on problems causing people to move out of the state. For a decade, the number of people moving out of the state has exceeded the number of people moving into Alaska. Only the addition of new births has caused the state’s population to plateau, rather than continue to fall. “They’re counting on us to have a vision and to push that vision, whether for res...
No invasive green crabs have been found outside the area on Annette Island where they were discovered last summer, though experts are working against a potential population explosion in Southeast Alaska. Barb Lake, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Juneau, gave a presentation in Ketchikan last Friday about the invasive crab species that a team of scientists with the Metlakatla Indian Community first identified on Annette Island in July. It’s the only place that the crab has been captured in Alaska waters. Lake said t...
JUNEAU (AP) - An Alaska lawmaker with a history of incendiary remarks was censured by the state House on Feb. 22 after he said it has been argued that cases of fatal child abuse can be a "cost savings" because the child would not need related government services. The House voted 35-1 to censure Republican Rep. David Eastman of Wasilla, with only Eastman voting against the censure. The House action has no formal consequences other than putting a statement on the record. Eastman was censured in...
On May 1, the Alaska Court System will remove the marijuana possession convictions of about 750 Alaskans from Courtview, the state’s online database of court cases. The Alaska Supreme Court announced the move in an order signed Jan. 31 by the court’s five justices. The action, first reported Feb. 19 by the Alaska Landmine website, follows years of similar, unsuccessful, legislative efforts to join a nationwide trend. “I’m glad that the Supreme Court has ordered this,” said Fairbanks Sen. Scott Kawasaki. The records will still be available for i...
A multimillion-dollar share of the Alaska grocery store chain Three Bears is one of the latest additions to the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp.’s $200 million in-state investment program — a small slice of the $76 billion state savings account. The program, ordered by the board in 2018, has almost finished making its investments. The corporation’s board of trustees received an update on the program at a quarterly meeting this month. In addition to Three Bears, the new in-state investments include millions spent on a company that operates aviat...