Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 217
The Alaska Marine Highway System has decided to cancel plans to replace the controllable-pitch propellers aboard the state ferry Columbia next year, opting to keep the 52-year-old ship in service until a replacement vessel is built. The propulsion system project was estimated in 2022 to cost as much as $20 million. The Columbia, the largest vessel in the fleet, serves the ferry system’s longest and most heavily traveled route between Bellingham, Washington, and Southeast Alaska. It had been scheduled to head into a shipyard for much of next y...
As if years of political interference and, for many elected officials, disinterest weren’t enough to sink the Alaska Marine Highway System, rust and age could finish the job. Maybe the answer is some duct tape to keep the ships running just a little longer until they turn 65 years old and could qualify for Medicare. But that’s too long to wait — the marine highway needs urgent care. The ships are aging, which is a polite way of saying they are long past their prime and getting older and rustier. Salt water accelerates the process. The Matan...
It’s time to expand the generating capacity at the Tyee Lake hydroelectric station to handle growing demand — particularly from heat pumps — the plant’s operator said of its plans to line up $20 million in funding and a federal permit to add a third turbine to the facility. The Tyee Lake station started supplying Wrangell and Petersburg in 1984. It was built with two turbines rated at 10 megawatts each, with an empty bay at the Bradfield Canal facility to add a third turbine when needed. That time is now, said Robert Siedman, chief executi...
The Alaska Senate is considering a bill that would allow parents who are owed child support to apply for the Permanent Fund dividend of the parent who is delinquent in their payments, providing a work-around to collect from parents who do not bother to apply for their annual PFD. “The reality is that in some cases,” said Anchorage Sen. Forrest Dunbar, the bill’s sponsor, the owing parent either forgets to apply or decides not to apply out of spite to deny the money to the other parent. Under state law, garnishment of the dividend for child...
No matter what any crowd-pleasing elected official says, Alaska cannot afford a long-deserved increase in state funding for schools and a large Permanent Fund dividend. There just isn’t enough money in the state checkbook to do both this year — not unless Alaskans want to start paying an income tax or a state sales tax, which are both even less popular than a middle seat in the last row of a six-hour flight. More than 90% of the spendable dollars in the state budget comes from two sources: An annual draw on Permanent Fund investment ear...
The Alaska Marine Highway System has added Wi-Fi service for passengers aboard the state ferry Columbia - with other ships in the fleet to follow. The service, which initially will be free on the Columbia, started last month when the ship came out of a yearlong layup to take over the weekly run between Bellingham, Washington, and Southeast Alaska when the Kennicott was pulled for its own yearlong layup for new generators. It's the first Alaska Marine Highway vessel "to provide free Wi-Fi access...
WRANGELL — The mayor convened the public workshop, inviting Washington state-based entrepreneur Dale Borgford to lay out for borough officials his plans to build biomass boilers that would burn trash from around Southeast to heat large commercial greenhouses at the site of the former 6-Mile mill. He also wants to build a plant capable of filling large plastic bottles with 40,000 gallons a day of clean water from a creek at the north end of the property, or from rainwater if the creek flow is insufficient. And his list includes a plant to turn f...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy has a choice for his final two years on the job: He can continue talking about how state law requires him to include an outrageously large Permanent Fund dividend in the budget — even though it would dig a deep budget hole which, thankfully, legislators will never approve — or he can help solve the problem. It looks like he is sticking with the irresponsible approach. He proposed a budget last week that is politically popular with his supporters but which he knows the state cannot afford without drawing down its rem...
Alaska Airlines has received a federal subsidy since 1976 to provide Wrangell and Petersburg with twice-daily jet service, and community leaders in each community are rounding up support to urge the government to issue a new contract after the current agreement expires in 2025. “I want to ensure it stays around,” Wrangell Mayor Patty Gilbert said of her petition drive to show community support for Alaska Airlines under the U.S. Department of Transportation Essential Air Service program. Sixty-five communities in Alaska —including 10 more in So...
Sometimes, the best explanations are the simplest. Especially when it comes to economics. The complicated way to describe the consequences of Alaska losing population, particularly working-age residents, is to explain that fewer people have moved north than have moved out of the state in each of the past 12 years. That net outmigration is making it hard for employers to fill jobs, which means reduced hours of operation, longer waits for services and less money in the economy. The decline in working-age residents — ages 18 to 64 — is esp...
WRANGELL — Tidal Network is operating in its test mode, with about a dozen Wrangell households trying out the new wireless internet service provided by the Central Council Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. Wrangell is the first location in Southeast to get the new service, which is funded by a federal grant for construction and later will be expanded across the region. During the testing phase, technicians will be “breaking it to fix it,” looking to maximize the signals’ range and finding the best system for managing the fiber optic a...
The next two years may be Alaska’s last chance for productive, bipartisan legislative action. The state House and Senate have both organized in bipartisan coalitions, with Democrats, Republicans and independents pledging to work together on the big issues facing Alaska. Sadly, that across-the-political-aisle cooperation could end in two years. Alaska’s switch to open primaries and ranked-choice voting for the 2022 and 2024 elections encouraged candidates, particularly Republican candidates, to appeal to moderate and nonpartisan voters ins...
The proposed summer 2025 Alaska Marine Highway System schedule shows the same level of service to Petersburg as in the past several years: one ship serving the mainline route, with one stop northbound and one southbound each week. The Columbia will stop in Petersburg northbound on Sundays, on its run from Bellingham, Washington, through Southeast, then turn around in Skagway and stop on its southbound route on Wednesdays. It’s the same schedule as the Kennicott is running this year. The state ferry system is scheduled to pull the Kennicott out...
While planning and hoping for as much as $2 billion to replace its shrinking fleet of older ships over the next 20 years, the Alaska Marine Highway System also is looking at smaller things it can do to improve service in the near term. That will include Wi-Fi service on the ships; possibly more offerings or expanded bars; maybe even putting gift shops on the vessels. Federal money will pay for installing Wi-Fi. Increased bar service and possible gift shops will depend on whether the state ferry system can cover the costs, said Sam Dapcevich,...
It’s not only the fault of the people who post insults on social media, who embrace the politically inspired lies and accept the politically driven threats of violence as a necessary means to the end they favor. Nor is it only the fault of people on the other side of the political world who lecture but don’t listen, who can’t understand why so many Americans are drawn to the ever-expanding lies and ever-cruder insults yet sit by all too quietly, waiting for the turmoil to pass. It’s like the entire nation is living through a Florida hurricane,...
The number of jobs in Southeast Alaska continued its post-pandemic recovery last year. Yet, employers remain worried about filling job vacancies amid declining — and aging — population numbers. “While jobs continue to grow in 2024, so do concerns about the lack of a sufficient workforce in the region,” according to the annual Southeast Alaska by the Numbers report. “Compared to 2010, when the population was nearly identically sized, the region now has 1,700 more jobs and 5,600 fewer workforce-aged residents,” said the report, prepared by...
Whichever side wins the national election Nov. 5 needs to think about why they did not get a larger share of the vote. Not that they ever really expected to win over the hearts, minds and ballots of 60% of voters. The honest reality is that most candidates would accept 51% as a clear victory in this divisive world. OK, maybe they’re prefer 52%. But they’ll happily declare a mandate on the thinnest of margins. Gloating is ugly. It makes sore losers out of disappointed losers. Even worse, many of those sore losers are increasingly embracing anger...
WRANGELL — Though it was important to pinpoint the exact location and extent of damage to the community’s wastewater outfall pipeline into Zimovia Strait, officials also discovered that the 12-inch plastic pipe and the seabed around it have become home to hundreds of sea cucumbers. “Over the years and years, wildlife has figured it out,” Tom Wetor, the borough’s Public Works director, said Sept. 26. Sea cucumbers, a bottom-dwelling invertebrate, proliferate around the nutrient-rich waters near the diffuser end of the outfall line, he said. “I...
State health officials have recorded 234 cases this year of whooping cough — also known as pertussis — through Sept. 9, more than were reported over the past seven years combined. About three-quarters of this year’s cases came in the past three months. Of the statewide total, SEARHC reports 11 in Southeast from June through early September, Lyndsey Y. Schaefer, communications director for the health care provider, said in an emailed statement Sept. 12. Privacy rules prevent SEARHC from disclosing the communities with whooping cough cases...
WRANGELL — The borough hopes to learn this week the exact location and condition of the kinked blockage in the treatment plant outfall pipeline that has forced a temporary solution — discharging the wastewater on the beach near City Park. “It’s essentially been bent in half,” Public Works Director Tom Wetor said of the 12-inch-diameter plastic pipe, which was hooked Aug. 30 by a boat anchor and damaged as the anchor line was being pulled up. Repairs could take a couple of months, he said Sept. 6. It just depends on how much work is needed. T...
To modernize an old expression, Alaskans are fiddling while the Permanent Fund burns. Not literally, of course. The Permanent Fund’s stocks and bonds, real estate deeds, lease agreements and investment contracts are all safely stored. But the fiddling part, that’s true. And because it’s a state election year, we can expect a lot of candidates to turn up the volume on their fiddles. No matter how off-key the music, no one ever loses an election by playing happy tunes about big Permanent Fund dividends. No one wins an election talking about...
Technically, Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto blocked five bills from becoming law that the state House passed after the constitutional adjournment deadline. But don’t blame him for killing the new laws. The House is the guilty party. The 40-member House, managed the past two years by a splintered and often disorganized 23-member Republican-led majority, couldn’t manage to get its work done before the clock struck midnight. The governor did not hold them up; no power outage set them back; there was no IT meltdown or online hack; nothing slowed them...
Petersburg this year will go without state ferry service for almost three weeks in late November and early December under the fall and winter schedule released Aug. 2. The service gap will occur between the time the Alaska Marine Highway System pulls the Kennicott out of service for major work and until it can transfer crew from the Kennicott to the Columbia, and outfit the Columbia, said Sam Dapcevich, Alaska Department of Transportation spokesman. The Columbia has been out service for repairs since last November. Other than the three-week...
A $38.6 million federal grant will help lower the cost of energy-saving heat pumps for an estimated 6,100 Alaska households stretching from Ketchikan to Kodiak. The money will provide rebates of between $4,000 and $8,500 per household for the purchase and installation of a heat pump. The funding is in addition to federal tax credits of up to $2,000 per household. The federal grant for coastal Alaska, announced July 22, will go to the Southeast Conference, a community and economic development...
They may be out of sight to the general public but they are never out of mind for the U.S. Forest Service. The agency maintains 35 mountaintop repeater towers within the Tongass National Forest to provide radio coverage for their field crews and first responders. A contractor is installing new repeater stations at five sites this summer in the Wrangell and Petersburg ranger districts, part of an ongoing effort to switch out older units with newer models. Of particular importance to Wrangell, a...
