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Environmental groups have asked a federal appeals court to overturn the Biden administration’s approval of exports from the proposed $44 billion project to sell North Slope natural gas. The Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition with the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, Aug. 11, seeking to reverse the Department of Energy approval granted in April to the state-led project that would send North Slope gas to Asian markets. The environmental groups argue that the massive project would unleash t...
Amanda Arra saw about 50 feet of her Juneau backyard consumed by the Mendenhall River in just a few hours as the waters rose to a record flood level Saturday afternoon, Aug. 5. By evening, as a nearby home fell into the river, she feared she was going to lose hers as well. Her home was still intact at midday Sunday, but about a quarter of the structure was hanging over the eroded riverbank as friends carried her belongings outside the house. Arra had abandoned the home the night before and said...
Southeast Alaska commercial seine fishermen are blazing past pink salmon catch estimates that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game predicted for the summer season. Fish and Game in May forecast that seine fishermen would harvest about 19 million pink salmon across Southeast this summer. Bo Meredith, who manages Ketchikan-area commercial fisheries for Fish and Game, said on Aug. 4 that seiners already have likely caught 19 million since the season opened in early July, with more than a month of pink season still to come. The Southeast seine...
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has announced a second opportunity for commercial trollers to catch chinook salmon in Southeast after a smaller-than-average troll fleet took about 85,000 chinook during an initial opener July 1-12. Troll fishermen can target an additional 10,000 chinook during a one-day fishery that will open from 12:01 a.m. through 11:59 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 11, the department announced on Monday, Aug. 7. The department originally had scheduled the one-day opening for Saturday, but a forecast of high winds pushed...
The Sitka city assembly has given the go-ahead to a plan for building a boat haul-out and shipyard at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park by late 2024. The option calls for a 150-ton boat lift, haul-out piers, washdown pad and an EPA-certified wastewater treatment system. The haul-out would be located next to the old Alaska Pulp Corp. utility dock, with an adjacent work yard for about 20 vessels. “I think that this will be a crucial piece of infrastructure that is worth investing in,” Assembly Member Kevin Mosher said at the July 27 meeting. “Ev...
A record number of people believed to be homeless have died on Anchorage streets in the past seven months, and the count could increase before the year is out, according to police data. The death count stood at 29 on July 28, surpassing the previous record of 24 set for all of last year, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Of this year’s count, more than half of the people died after the city closed its mass shelter at the Sullivan Arena on May 1, according to police incident reports. “That’s very unfortunate,” Alexis Johnson, the city’s...
The state has paid $350,000 to settle a four-year-old lawsuit that found Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his former chief of staff personally liable for illegally firing a state attorney. The settlement with Elizabeth Bakalar, of Juneau, ends a series of state and federal lawsuits triggered when Dunleavy and then-chief of staff Tuckerman Babcock asked state employees to submit resignation letters during the transition from the administration of Gov. Bill Walker in December 2018. In 2021, a federal judge concluded that the process was “an u...
Alaska Natives in certain rural areas of the state have the nation’s highest death rates from suicide and domestic violence and some of the highest rates of accidental deaths, while Asians and Latinos in the state have some of the nation’s lowest rates for deaths from a wide variety of conditions like heart disease and respiratory disorders, according to a new study. The study, published Thursday, Aug. 3, in The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest medical journals, is a sweeping review of health disparities across the nation, as shown in vario...
The state has formally asked a federal judge to decide whether the Bureau of Indian Affairs may create the legal equivalent of reservation land in Alaska on behalf of Native tribes. On Aug. 1, the state filed for summary judgment in its ongoing lawsuit against the federal government and the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. The lawsuit involves a small downtown lot in Juneau. So far, only two tribes in Alaska have placed land into trust with the BIA — in Craig in 2017 and in Juneau this year — after the fed...
After Donald Trump was indicted on four criminal charges, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the former president “played a key role in instigating” the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Murkowski is an outspoken Trump critic and was one of seven Republican senators who voted in 2021 to convict the impeached former president for inciting an insurrection. The senator said in an Aug. 2 statement that her 2021 vote was “based on clear evidence that he attempted to overturn the 2020 election after losing it.” ”Additional evidence presented...
The math that more people are leaving Alaska than moving to the state, along with the aging of the adult population that remains, has put Alaska’s largest city and the state at risk of squandering economic opportunities, according to a three-year outlook released Aug. 2 by the nonprofit Anchorage Economic Development Corp. “Anchorage and Alaska are witnessing a weird combination of big economic opportunities that are mostly a sure thing, combined with economic threats that could lead to decades of stagnation and decline,” Bill Popp, the organ...
A new online tool will allow survivors to check the status of their sexual assault kits, Alaska’s Department of Public Safety announced last month. The department developed a tracker so survivors can stay up to date on their case in “the least intrusive and traumatic way possible.” A sexual assault kit, known as a “rape kit,” contains materials a medical professional can use to collect DNA samples or other evidence after a crime. A rape kit can be a tool to convict perpetrators of sexual violence if survivors choose to report their assault....
A new $120,000 program that puts retired state troopers in uniform on Alaska ferries is seeing results: no incidents and an appreciative crew, which has long been tasked with overseeing the occasional unruly passenger. “We’re here to make sure that people enjoy their trips, but don’t interfere with other people enjoying their trips,” said retired trooper Chad Goeden, who was in uniform and stood out among passengers in casual clothes on the Columbia during the ferry’s three-day passage from Bellingham, Washington, to Ketchikan on July 14-1...
Elders and adults with disabilities will have more opportunities to get care at home or in a home-like setting under a bill that became state law when Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed it on July 29. The measure, Senate Bill 57, serves two broad categories of Alaskans who might otherwise have to move into assisted-care facilities: disabled adults, including youth who have aged out of the foster system, and elders. For disabled adults, the bill authorizes a system of adult host homes serving one or two people, a category into which foster parents’ h...
Actress Jennifer Aniston knows something about Haines that even some longtime residents don't: The town is home to some of the finest wooden bathtubs that money can buy. Aniston is one of the celebrity customers of the small operation that's been slowly growing and carving a name for itself in the luxury wood bathtub world for the past two decades. Buyers include Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of the software giant Oracle, as well as hundreds of less affluent customers enticed by the...
Telecommunications company GCI will end its longtime email service next year, a move that will force customers to transition to new email providers. Spokespeople with GCI, Alaska’s largest telecommunications company, said the service will end sometime in mid-2024. At that point, customers will no longer be able to access or use their gci.net account, according to a draft fact page posted online. “We will provide our customers formal notice at least six months in advance of email deactivation deadline,” GCI spokeswoman Heather Handyside said...
A state judge has ordered a tourist shop outside Denali National Park to stop selling products labeled as “Made in Alaska” after the state accused the shop of repeatedly selling fake souvenirs and art. According to a complaint filed by the Alaska Department of Law on July 20 in Fairbanks, the owners of a shop known variously as The Himalayan and Mt. McKinley Clothing Company repeatedly attempted to mislabel foreign products as Alaska-made. At one point, the owners of the store told an undercover investigator “that an alpaca poncho depic...
A major highway project improving the connection between Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula has more than doubled in cost over the past five years — from $350 million in 2018 to the latest estimate of $840 million — and the new pavement is still four years away from opening to the public. The bypass — officially the Sterling Highway Milepost 45-60 Project — is a decades-old plan to divert traffic around the small Kenai River community of Cooper Landing by creating a 10-mile bypass cut through the forested and sloped terrain north of the town. C...
While Alaska’s state government has made progress in getting more people the food stamps they are entitled to receive, advocates say the process to appeal denials or delays is breaking down. Food stamps are a federal benefit managed by the states, and there are rules for how quickly a state has to get the benefit to qualified applicants. Alaska has been taking an unlawfully long time to process most applications since last fall. Citizens have a right to a legal hearing when the state takes too long to get them food stamps or denies their a...
Tracking changes in permafrost can take years and sometimes decades, lags that cannot keep up with the transformations in the rapidly warming Arctic. Now scientists will be developing new technology to track those changes in real time, thanks to a project funded by Google. The company has awarded a $5 million grant to the Massachusetts-based Woodwell Climate Research Center to create a system combining satellite data with artificial intelligence to spot the changes as they occur. The project is led by Anna Liljedahl, an Alaska-based Woodwell...
Tracking changes in permafrost can take years and sometimes decades, lags that cannot keep up with the transformations in the rapidly warming Arctic. Now scientists will be developing new technology to track those changes in real time, thanks to a project funded by Google. The company has awarded a $5 million grant to the Massachusetts-based Woodwell Climate Research Center to create a system combining satellite data with artificial intelligence to spot the changes as they occur. The project is led by Anna Liljedahl, an Alaska-based Woodwell...
Alaska’s state school board has unexpectedly delayed a vote on a proposed regulation that would prohibit transgender girls from playing on girls high school sports teams. Board chairman James Fields said the delay was warranted by “hard questions” about whether the regulation could violate students’ right to privacy, among other legal issues. “I’d be in favor of a special meeting and allowing us to show the public and show our constituents that we’re not just doing this to quickly rush through it. We want to take a good long look at all of the...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy has vetoed a bill defining electric-assisted bicycles the same as regular bicycles — which passed the Legislature by a combined vote of 57-2 — because “it creates unnecessary bureaucracy by regulating recreational activity,” according to a spokesperson. House Bill 8, sponsored by Rep. Ashley Carrick, a first-term Fairbanks Democrat, sought to revise state code to allow most e-bikes to ride anywhere a regular bike is allowed such as roads, bike lanes and multi-use trails. The bill also said owners of e-bikes generat...
With colder months approaching, Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson said July 24 that the city likely will not use a municipally owned sports arena as a large-scale homeless shelter again this winter, and to prevent people from freezing to death on the street, his administration wants to purchase plane tickets for people who want to travel to communities within Alaska or warmer climates out of state. “I am not going to be responsible for people freezing to death on the street. … I’m doing everything I can to keep that from happening,” Bronson said du...
Which came first, the magister squid fishery or the magister squid market? A Juneau charter fishing operator was recently awarded a $230,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to find out, and fishermen might soon have a chance to diversify in the face of declining fish stocks and high barriers to entry in other markets. "It's the chicken and the egg. Do you start researching how to catch them or if there's a market?" said Richard Yamada, who has dedicated the past...