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The federal government board that manages subsistence will be expanded with three representatives of Alaska Native tribes, under a new rule the Biden administration made final on Oct. 16. The new Federal Subsistence Board members are to be nominated by federally recognized tribes. They need not be tribal members or Native themselves, but they must have “personal knowledge of and direct experience with subsistence uses in rural Alaska, including Alaska Native subsistence uses,” according to the rule. The term “subsistence” refers to harvest...
Alaska legislators have voted to ban large signs in the state Capitol, a move that followed large protests over Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s decision to veto a multipart education bill earlier this year. Under a new policy, visitors to the Capitol “are permitted to hand-carry a paper-based poster board or placard type sign up to 11×17 inches in the Capitol corridors and lobby.” The policy prohibits signs on sticks and posts — all signs must be held by hand. “A sign will be confiscated if it is used to disturb, or used in a manner that will imminently...
An airport-style security screening checkpoint could be coming to the Alaska State Capitol, ending decades of open public access. In a public notice published Oct. 2, the nonpartisan agency in charge of Capitol administration seeks a private firm to “conduct security screening of visitors and visitors’ belongings.” The firm may also be in charge of screening incoming packages. Security officers at the Alaska Capitol do not currently screen incoming visitors, and the Capitol does not use metal detectors or backscatter X-ray machines like those...
Alaska’s seafood industry has been contending with turbulent global markets for the past two years, which have been hammering harvest values and threatening fishermen’s and processing companies’ financial stability. Prices paid to salmon fishermen crashed in the summer of 2023, prompting protests and generating headlines in national news outlets. But it’s unlikely most heard anything about black cod, which is harvested in smaller volumes — though the numbers are still significant for many full-time Alaska fishermen and processing businesses, wi...
Alaska’s Department of Health is again slipping into a backlog of food stamp applications. The news comes from state data included in a filing from the Northern Justice Project in its class-action lawsuit against the state. The suit asks the court to make sure the state issues food stamp benefits on time after years of chronic delays. Attorney Nick Feronti represents the class of Alaskans affected by the backlog in the department’s Division of Public Assistance, which manages the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for the sta...
A variety of market forces combined with weak fish returns in a rapidly changing environment caused Alaska’s seafood industry revenues to drop by $1.8 billion from 2022 to 2023, a new federal report said. The array of economic and environmental challenges has devastated one of Alaska’s main industries, said the report, issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the losses extend beyond economics, casting doubt on prospects for the future, the report said. “For many Alaskans the decline of their seafood industry affec...
Alaska was the second state to adopt ranked-choice voting in federal and statewide elections, but it may be the first to abandon it. A citizen’s initiative ballot measure that would repeal the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system made it to the November ballot after legal challenges. As a result, Alaskans will be asked in Ballot Measure 2 to decide if they would like to repeal or keep the state’s open primary and top-four voting system. If the repeal is successful, Alaska would revert to primaries that are controlled by the p...
Alaska's two leading U.S. House candidates are offering significantly different views on the role of federal spending, a cornerstone of Alaska's economy. Speaking to members of the Alaska Chamber of Commerce on Oct. 10 in Fairbanks, incumbent Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola promoted her support of big federal infrastructure bills that have brought billions of dollars to Alaska. Republican challenger Nick Begich criticized that legislation and voiced concerns about the size of the federal deficit,...
A fire Saturday night destroyed a building in Haines that housed four businesses and four apartments. No one reported any injuries. Flames poured out of the second floor and above the roof as firefighters tried to control the blaze, which eventually took down the wood-frame building. The Haines’ Quick Shop, Outfitter Liquor, Outfitter Sporting Goods, Mike’s Bikes & Boards and the apartments occupied the two-story building across the street from the waterfront. The trouble started just before 9:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 5, while Dan Mahoney was...
No injuries were reported from a landslide in Ketchikan on Sunday night, Oct. 6. Officials reported the slide occurred at about 8 p.m. on a section of Revilla Road near Ward Cove, north of downtown. The landslide began hundreds of feet up the mountain north of the road and brought tons of mud and trees crashing across a stretch of the road past the Ward Lake exit, according to borough officials. Slide debris blocked all lanes of Revilla Road near the slide area, cutting off a half-dozen vehicles. There were eight people in the vehicles,...
Juneau voters have rejected the Ship-Free Saturday proposition, with 3,751 votes in favor of the initiative and 5,788 against as of Oct. 4, with several hundred more ballots still to count. The Oct. 1 ballot proposition, the first of its kind in Alaska, attracted international media coverage. It would have banned cruise ships with accommodations for 250 or more passengers on Saturdays and also banned them on the Fourth of July. Opponents of the measure, led by the cruise industry and tourism businesses, waged an expensive campaign, with...
On the morning of Aug. 9, state biologists discovered dozens of dead fish in a creek near the Kensington gold mine in northern Southeast Alaska. Scientists from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game say their observations — and the fact that the die-off occurred downstream of a wastewater treatment plant at the large mine — suggest that the event stemmed from a water quality problem. Mine workers also used an unapproved explosive at Kensington a day before the dead fish were found, according to federal officials. But nearly two months lat...
Alaska had a record number of drug-overdose deaths in 2023, with a total that was 44.5% higher than in 2022, the state Department of Health said in a report issued last week. The 2023 drug-overdose toll was 357, a number determined through the department’s data on deaths and diseases, the report said. The Alaska statistics buck a national trend of declining overdose deaths that was reported earlier this year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the few states with increases in overdose deaths from 2022 to 2023, Alaska h...
The Ten Commandments and six other historical documents will be placed on permanent display in a lobby outside the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Assembly chambers in Palmer, according to a resolution unanimously approved by the assembly on Oct. 1. The display will “honor historical documents” that have influenced U.S. and state law, the resolution states. It will include the Ten Commandments, a summary of the Code of Hammurabi (a Babylonian legal text composed during 1755–1750 B.C.), the Magna Carta (written in 1215 to establish the princ...
Alaska had the biggest decline in average life expectancy of all U.S. states in 2021, a year when health outcomes were heavily influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent national report. Alaska’s life expectancy in 2021 was 74.5 years, down from the average of 76.6 years in 2020, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, U.S. life expectancy declined by 0.6 years in that time, mostly because of the COVID-19 pandemic and increases in drug overdose deaths and other unintentional i...
Until about 20 years ago, little was known about the abundance of colorful cold-water corals that line sections of the seafloor around Alaska. Now an environmental group has gone to court to try to compel better protections for those once-secret gardens. The lawsuit, filed by Oceana in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, accused federal fishery managers of neglecting to safeguard Gulf of Alaska corals - and the sponges that are often found with them - from damages wreaked by bottom trawling. Botto...
A new documentary, "Sugarcane," recounts the searing, traumatic history of colonization and forced assimilation of British Columbia's Indigenous people through a network of what are known as Indian residential schools. The film features former students and their descendants seeking truth, reconciliation and healing from the nation's legacy of those schools - institutions that the Canadian federal government now says carried out a "cultural genocide" through physical and sexual abuse. After...
The U.S. Justice Department has announced more than $86 million in grants for American Indian and Alaska Native communities to support survivors of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, stalking and sex trafficking. Nearly $14 million of those dollars were awarded to Alaska tribes and tribal organizations, including the village of Kake. The news comes after Alaska lawmakers increased state funding to the state’s Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault to make up for a decrease in one if its federal funding sources and a...
Federal managers shut down a major Alaska fishery Sept. 25 after two Kodiak-based boats targeting whitefish caught some 2,000 king salmon — an unintentional harvest that drew near-instant condemnation from advocates who want better protections for the struggling species. The Kodiak-based trawl fleet has caught just over one-fourth of its seasonal quota of pollock — a whitefish that’s typically processed into items like fish sticks, fish pies and surimi, the paste used to make fake crab. But about 20 boats will now be forced to end their pollo...
More emergency kits to save victims of opioid overdoses are on their way to Alaska schools, in accordance with a new law. It requires schools statewide to have kits on hand, with trained people on site to administer those kits if needed. Although the new law does not go into effect until late November, the state Department of Health has already begun shipping out kits with overdose-reversal medicine and associated gear. The law is the product of House Bill 202, which Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed in late August. As of early last month, about 200 of...
A pair of Tlingít villages in Southeast Alaska will receive apologies for past wrongful military action from the U.S. Navy this fall. The first of those apologies took place in Kake on Sept. 21, where U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mark B. Sucato acknowledged the harms of a bombardment in 1869. An apology in Angoon is scheduled for Oct. 26, the 142nd anniversary of the 1882 bombardment of that village. Navy Environmental Public Affairs Specialist Julianne Leinenveber said it was determined that the...
Alaska seaweed farmers and oyster growers mingled with professors, tech industry representatives, state and federal government staff, bankers and consultants who converged at Ketchikan’s Ted Ferry Civic Center for the third-ever international Seagriculture USA conference, the first such conference in Alaska. All eyes of the 190-some conference participants earlier this month were on the promise of developing a profitable seaweed industry in Southeast Alaska, with people traveling to Ketchikan from California, Maine, Canada, The Netherlands, N...
This year’s Permanent Fund dividend, plus a one-time energy rebate bonus, will be a combined $1,702 per recipient, the Alaska Department of Revenue announced Sept. 19. The amount is slightly higher than previous estimates from the spring, in part because the number of eligible Alaskans is lower than expected. The payments will be direct-deposited into bank accounts starting Oct. 3. Paper checks, for those Alaskans who requested them, will be mailed later in October. This year’s combined dividend is about $400 more than last year’s payme...
An Alaska man accused of sending graphic threats to injure and kill six Supreme Court justices and some of their family members has been indicted on federal charges, authorities said Sept. 19. Panos Anastasiou, 76, is accused of sending more than 465 messages through a public court website, including graphic threats of assassination and torture coupled with racist and homophobic rhetoric. Anastasiou appeared in federal court in Anchorage on Sept. 18 and pleaded not guilty. He was assigned a federal public defender. A federal magistrate judge...
Alaska’s first ranked-choice presidential election ballot will list eight candidates, according to the final roster approved by the Alaska Division of Elections — and voters will be able to rank all eight people if they choose to do so. Alaska’s ranked-choice primary system to narrow down the candidates to the top four vote-getters for general elections does not apply to presidential races. The first ballots for the Nov. 5 general election are scheduled for mailing to international voters starting Sept. 20. On the front of the ballot are eight...