Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 226
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...
Wrangell is not immune to the nationwide shortage of electrical transformers, and the delivery delay has pushed back the borough’s sale of 20 lots at the residential subdivision near 6-Mile Zimovia Highway until the spring. The borough wants to wait until the streets and utilities are finished at the property before opening access to the land for potential buyers to evaluate which lots they may want to buy. The transformers and buried electrical lines are part of the work. The land sale had been tentatively planned for late summer or fall, b...
Unbelievable. Elon Musk is promoting and pushing errors and false news into the heads of people around the world. All for personal profit or personal ego. Maybe just for personal fun. Whatever the reason, it’s irresponsible and dangerous. Musk, a serial entrepreneur who seems to have invented most everything but cold cereal, believes Grok, his artificial intelligence service pedaled through X, formerly known as Twitter, should be a news source. Not necessarily a trusted news source, but that’s not important in his world. “What we’re doing o...
The state of Alaska, with all the legal wisdom of a political agenda and the flowing words of a high-priced law firm, has filed a claim against the federal government. Nothing new about that — the state has filed and signed onto more lawsuits against the national government in recent years than President Joe Biden has forgotten dates or former President Donald Trump has told lies. Nothing to be proud of in any of that. The state’s latest legal endeavor came July 2 in a dubious lawsuit — with a few errors and omissions for poor measure — that as...
A long time ago, the Sentinel called out a mayor for taking an action without city council approval (this was before Wrangell became a borough). The mayor had sent a letter to a federal agency, stating the city’s official position on an issue — but it was merely his personal opinion. There was no council discussion, no public notice. It wasn’t that controversial a position, but the point was that the mayor, no matter how well meaning, should not speak for the city without first making sure the elected council is in agreement. The mayor came...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, his attorney general and others in the administration are spending a lot of time and state money defending Alaska against its perceived political enemies, fighting the U.S. government at every turn of the river, protecting Alaskans from the latest federal regulations and standing up for conservative values. The list includes picking fights with private banks that want to move away from oil and gas lending, egging on fights over library books, supporting the state of Texas in its fight to string razor wire along the border...
Consumers think of seafood as a premium purchase, which is not a good image when household budgets are tight and shoppers are worried about inflation. "The problem is not the fish," said Jeremy Woodrow, executive director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. "The challenge is in the global marketplace." Woodrow in February called the 2023 market for Alaska salmon "rock bottom" with low prices and weak demand, though maybe the industry was coming off that rocky bottom, he said then. Now,...
WRANGELL — The Wrangell Chamber of Commerce has moved the dates for this month’s salmon derby to June 15-30 to allow anglers more time to try their luck after popular areas near Wrangell open to sportfishing on June 15. The chamber had initially scheduled the derby for two weekends — June 7-9 and June 14-16 — but decided at a May 28 derby committee meeting to move the days to later in the month. State Department of Fish and Game District 6, west of Etolin and Zarembo islands, and most of District 7, east and south of Wrangell, are closed to kin...
The Alaska state ferry Columbia - which has been out of service since late November for its annual overhaul and repairs but was supposed to go back to work this summer - will be laid up until the end of the year. Extensive corrosion in the 51-year-old ship's fire suppression system is the reason for the extra time in the shipyard, Department of Transportation spokesman Sam Dapcevich said Friday, May 17. During the Columbia's extended absence, the Alaska Marine Highway System has diverted the...
The U.S. Forest Service plans to build six new cabins and a new campground in Southeast Alaska and wants to hear from the public on proposed fees for the facilities. One of the new cabins, the Woodpecker Cabin, will be on Mitkof Island, accessible by road and a 300 ft trail, about 30 miles away from downtown Petersburg. The site features a south-facing view of Sumner Strait. It has a fish-bearing stream nearby, and is in close proximity to a marine boat launch. It is likely to be used...
The state House needed an auctioneer last week. Instead, it wasted three hours in a meaningless bidding war as the Republican-led majority told Alaskans they cared far more than anyone else about supporting education and ensuring state-funded alternatives for correspondence school students and their families. That meant they didn’t want to move too quickly to fix the constitutional problem of state money going to private and religious school programs. Let the millions continue to flow and wait for the Alaska Supreme Court to hear the appeal o...
Less than two years ago, Alaskans voted overwhelmingly against convening a constitutional convention to amend the state’s founding document. More than 70% of voters said no thanks, it’s a bad idea. It was the sixth time in a row, going back to 1972, that voters by wide margins rejected the whimsy of shaking up the constitution as you would a game of Etch A Sketch and redrawing the fundamental laws of Alaska. While they oppose reopening the constitution to a potential wholesale rewrite, Alaskans have approved multiple specific amendments ove...
The Permanent Fund dividend is important to a lot of Alaska households, but so is education, public safety, ports and harbors, roads and more. The state House did the right thing last week in rejecting a proposed constitutional amendment that would have elevated the PFD to a higher status than any other need in the state. Yes, Alaskans have to find a solution to the annual divisive, debilitating, political fight over the amount of the dividend. It has become worse than a distraction; it’s become an obstruction that prevents elected officials an...
Tax credits have long been popular, growing more so every year. Supporters push them to provide government backing for new initiatives or ongoing programs, steering money to worthy causes — some unworthy ones, too — bypassing actual appropriations by federal, state or municipal lawmakers. With a tax credit, businesses or individuals can make donations to a program or invest in a project, such as housing, and reduce their taxes to the federal, state or municipal treasury. Tax credits divert private money that otherwise would become public mon...
The state ferry system carried 181,000 passengers in 2023, still short of the pre-COVID numbers in 2019 and down substantially from almost 340,000 in 2012 and more than 420,000 in 1992. Overall vehicle traffic also is down, from more than 115,000 in 2012 to 63,000 last year. Much of the decline corresponds to a reduction in the number of vessels in operation, according to statistics presented to a state Senate budget subcommittee on March 19. The fleet provided almost 400 “operating weeks” in 2012, with each week a ship is at sea counting as an...
The Alaska Marine Highway System’s ongoing crew shortage has eased up for entry-level steward positions but remains a significant problem in the wheelhouse and for engineers, likely keeping the Kennicott out of service again this summer. As of March 8, the state ferry system was short almost 50 crew of what it would need to put its full operational fleet to sea this summer, which means keeping the Kennicott tied to the dock, Craig Tornga, the system’s marine director, reported to a state Senate budget subcommittee on March 19. That is abo...
Alaska lawmakers fell one vote short Monday in an attempt to override the governor’s veto of a comprehensive school funding bill, which included a permanent increase in the state funding formula for K-12 education. The vote in a joint session of the House and Senate was 39-20. A two-thirds majority of 40 votes of the 60 legislators was required for an override. All 20 of the votes to uphold the governor’s actions came from Republicans. A dozen Republicans voted with Democrats and independents in the failed attempt. Even if lawmakers had succeed...
