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Supporters of education funding crowded a legislative committee room on Feb. 5, advocating for a permanent increase in the state funding formula for public schools. Though the advocates were unified in their message to a joint meeting of House and Senate education committees, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Education Commissioner Deena Bishop don’t support a permanent increase to the school funding formula. Instead, they have proposed targeted investments in certain areas, such as charter schools. Education administrators from across the state attempted...
Despite the rough weather, Southeast trollers recorded a record chinook salmon catch for January in the winter troll fishery, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The January catch totaled 7,200 kings, well above the previous record of 4,800 in 2016. “I knew it was good but didn’t realize we were that far above the previous high,” said Grant Hagerman, Fish and Game Southeast troll biologist in Sitka. But “it’s not all roses,” Hagerman said. The fish are smaller on average, and the prices are below the five-year average. “We’re h...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy told reporters on Feb. 7 that he’d like to answer Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s request for National Guard soldiers to support a state-run effort along the Mexico border, but he’s not sure the Alaska Legislature will approve the cost. “To send the Guard down will cost us about — according to Adjutant General Saxe — about a million dollars a month for 100 folks. We’ll test the waters with the Legislature to see if they’re willing to fund that, and I wouldn’t mind helping Texas with their issue on the border,” Dunleavy said. The...
Alaska’s courts have had a backlog of cases since courts shut down for months during the COVID-19 pandemic. The backlog has persisted, in part because of attorney shortages. The court typically carries many pending cases, but the number of pending cases is currently 27% higher for felonies and about 13% higher for misdemeanors than it was in 2019, pre-COVID. “The overall numbers are going down, which is what we want to see,” said Stacey Marz, the Alaska State Court System’s administrative director. “We want to see fewer cases that are pendi...
A new proposal from Palmer Republican Sen. Shelley Hughes would require Alaska school districts to train a volunteer able to carry a concealed handgun on school grounds. Schools would be exempted only if no one agrees to accept the duty or if no one is able to do so. Hughes’ proposal, Senate Bill 173, received its first hearing in January in the Senate Labor and Commerce Committee. The K-12 School Shooting Database includes 346 shootings and near-shootings at schools or school buses in the United States in 2023. Hughes said many of A...
To keep Alaska communities safe and workloads manageable, Department of Public Safety Commissioner Jim Cockrell said he would need 35% more state troopers than he has now. After he fills the 62 vacancies in the department, he wants to ask for about 90 more positions. But he said things used to be worse — at one point last year the department had 70 vacancies of 411 trooper positions. “The bottom line is we’re making steady progress,” he said. “We’ve made some huge steps forward between the administration and the Legislature.” The Department of...
United States ocean territory could expand by an area more than twice the size of California, with most of that in ocean areas off Alaska, under a claim being prepared by the federal government. The U.S. State Department in December announced results of a two-decade program to map the extended continental shelf areas beyond the nation’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone. Much of the focus was on the Arctic Ocean, where bathymetric and geologic surveys by federal agencies produced the first detailed maps of a complex seafloor with a series of c...
Sitka’s Mount Edgecumbe volcano is wired. On Jan. 26, the Alaska Volcano Observatory announced the completion of a new instrument network intended to measure the activity of a volcano that could be awakening after a period of dormancy. The network includes four seismic stations and four sites that measure the way the ground is deforming as magma moves deep below the volcano. Since April 2022, the movement of that liquefied rock has caused hundreds of small earthquakes and raised concerns that Sitka, 15 miles away, could soon be near an e...
A new Matanuska-Susitna Borough Assembly resolution urges residents to own weapons and ammunition to compensate for limited local law enforcement in Alaska’s fastest-growing region. The action, which doesn’t have the power of law, reflects ongoing discussion in the region about the lack of borough policing powers as the state troopers struggle with continued staffing issues that have left the local trooper detachment with roughly 20% of its positions unfilled. Unlike Anchorage, which has lost residents overall for the past nine years, Mat...
A bill before the House Resources Committee would tighten residency requirements for Alaska sportfishing, hunting and trapping licenses. Community groups have raised concerns that a gap in state law allows people who don’t live year-round in Alaska to claim residency to harvest fish and wildlife with cheaper licenses and higher catch or bag limits. The measure, introduced by Sitka Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, would align requirements to renew those licenses with requirements to get a Permanent Fund dividend. Like the dividend, applicants would n...
Alaska’s Department of Health risks losing federal funding for its food stamp program, warned a letter from the United States Department of Agriculture on Jan. 30. It said the department is out of compliance with federal standards for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) due to what the letter described as “inefficient and ineffective administration.” The Department of Health has struggled to manage a backlog of crisis proportions that began in 2022 and has left tens of thousands of Alaskans waiting months for critical food...
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has joined 24 other Republican governors in support of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to ignore a U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing federal agents to remove razor wire installed by Abbott’s administration along the U.S.-Mexico border. The statement was published hours before Dunleavy spoke to a joint meeting of the Alaska and Juneau chambers of commerce and called for more immigration to Alaska. He said the arrival of Ukrainian immigrants to Alaska has been a good thing. “I know there are some folks that belie...
Robb Arnold has withdrawn his candidacy to represent Ketchikan, Wrangell and Metlakatla in the state House. Arnold wrote in a statement to the Ketchikan Daily News on Thursday, Feb. 1, that he had ended his campaign. Under state law, Arnold could not continue in his job as a chief purser for the Alaska Marine Highway System and run for state office for the same time. It appears he was unaware of the law when he announced for the Legislature in December to challenge incumbent Rep. Dan Ortiz in District 1. Alaska statute says that, with some...
An unused U.S. Forest Service building in Kake may soon be a healing center for the community to move forward from generations of trauma after a boarding school harmed members of the Alaska Native population. When Joel Jackson, president of the Organized Village of Kake, saw the building on an access road outside of Kake, he said he was surprised. "A cultural healing center has been on my mind for decades," he said. "I said to myself, 'Hey, there's our cultural healing center.'" Now, with...
Alaska Airlines has begun flying Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners for the first time since the aircraft were grounded after a panel blew out of the side of one of the airline’s planes. The airline said it resumed flying the Max 9 with a flight from Seattle to San Diego on Friday afternoon, Jan. 26. The Federal Aviation Administration on Jan. 24 approved the inspection and maintenance process to return the planes to service. Technicians at Alaska began inspections that night, the airline said. The airline said they expect to complete inspections by t...
Southeast salmon fishermen say they weren’t surprised by the news that the nonprofit Wild Fish Conservancy has launched a fresh effort that could shut down Alaska’s king salmon fisheries. Last year, Southeast Alaska king salmon troll fisheries were threatened by a lawsuit from the Washington state-based organization in the name of protecting an important food source for Puget Sound killer whales. The latest threat comes from the conservancy’s announcement that it will seek listing of Alaska king salmon under the protection of the federal Endang...
Unless the Legislature decides otherwise by mid-March, Gov. Mike Dunleavy will take over appointment of the entire nine-member Alaska Marine Highway Operations Board. State law reserves four of the seats for appointment by legislative leaders, but Dunleavy on the first day of the legislative session Jan. 16 introduced an executive order that changes the law so that the governor would control all of the appointments. The change will take effect 60 days after the order was issued — unless a majority of the 60 legislators vote in a joint s...
The Alaska Legislature failed on Jan. 18 to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of $87 million in one-time additional state funding for the 2024-2025 school year. The vote was 33-26 and did not fall along party or political caucus lines. Forty-five votes were needed to override. The failed override capped days of legislative maneuvering and months of unsuccessful lobbying by public-education advocates. Attention now switches to a bill that would permanently increase the state’s funding formula for public schools. Unable to agree last year on...
As the Alaska Legislature gets back to work in Juneau, the state population is on the minds of lawmakers. For the 11th consecutive year, more people moved out of Alaska than moved into it, according to new estimates published last week by the Alaska Department of Labor. Though new births over the past year counterbalanced the losses, the state’s population growth was a meager 0.04%, demographers estimate. The state’s new estimated population, 736,812, is below what it was in 2012. While the trend has been building for more than a decade, the...
Hoonah has submitted a petition to the Alaska Local Boundary Commission to create the state’s 20th organized borough, which would include the city and some lightly populated outlying communities. The Xunaa Borough would include Hoonah, as well as Game Creek, Elfin Cove and Funter Bay — and most of Glacier Bay. The potential borough’s name is a closer match to the Tlingit language word for the community. “Voluntary incorporation is preferable to the potential alternative of either having a different borough government imposed upon residen...
The Juneau school board has approved a series of immediate cost-cutting measures including a hiring freeze, plus exploring the longer-term option of a loan to help deal with an unexpected $9.5 million budget deficit. Members at the Jan. 16 meeting were also presented with large-scale future cuts to consider, including school consolidations, closing the district during the summer and going to a four-day school week. Board members, after learning earlier this month about the substantial deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30, asked Schools...
The Biden administration has taken action to conserve groves of old-growth trees on national forests across the U.S. and limit logging as climate change amplifies the threats they face from wildfires, insects and disease. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the agency was adopting an “ecologically driven” approach to older forests — an arena where timber industry interests have historically predominated. That will include the first nationwide amendment to U.S. Forest Service management plans in the agency’s 118-year history, he said in a De...
Alaskans trying to quit their tobacco habits made some significant progress over the past year, according to the annual report released last week by the state’s Tobacco Prevention and Control Program. The program, which includes the Tobacco Quit Line, helped 1,753 Alaskans stop smoking or using smokeless tobacco or electronic cigarettes in the 12 months ending June 30, the report said. The program gave support to 21 community organizations around the state. The program also produced and distributed an anti-vaping toolkit to the state’s school d...
Supporters of a ballot initiative that would increase Alaska’s minimum wage, mandate paid sick leave and provide other worker protections submitted more than 40,000 petition signatures to the Alaska Division of Elections on Jan. 9, bringing their cause one step closer to a decision by voters. The group, called Better Jobs for Alaska, brought boxes of signed petitions to a Division of Elections office in Anchorage. The initiative proposes to hike the state’s minimum wage, currently at $11.73 an hour, to $13 an hour next year, $14 an hour in 202...
Juneau school administrators are facing a severe budget shortfall partly related to flat state funding and declining enrollment. But much of the crisis comes from accounting errors that “drastically” undercounted staffing costs. The city’s school board learned Jan. 9 that the district is projected to be $7.6 million in deficit for the current fiscal year and carrying over a $1.9 million shortfall from the prior fiscal year. The combined $9.5 million deficit equates to roughly 10% of the district’s total budget, and it’s expected to keep ball...