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Three Petersburg High School students were recently selected to the All-State Music Festival Ensemble. Petersburg senior Eleanor Kandoll and juniors Canek Sosa and Heidi Brantuas were selected to represent Alaska at the Music Festival from Nov. 21-23, in Anchorage. Kandoll was selected for the Clarinet section. "Honestly, I was mostly relieved because I've been an All-State twice before, I would've been very disappointed if I hadn't been [selected]," Kandoll said. "It's a wonderful experience -...
Upgrades are in the works for a few amenities at Sandy Beach recreational area, including a year-round restroom, parking improvements, and the ongoing extension work on City Creek Trail. Sandy Beach is a place for all sorts of recreational happenings. The beachfront park and picnic area includes a few shelters, benches, firepits, barbecues, a playground, as well as a totem pole and four informational signs at the plaza installed this summer. Visitors also park at the Sandy Beach area to access...
Petersburg School District has secured a total of $973,816 in grant awards this fiscal year, so far. The special revenue includes four new grants, and more funding is "definitely" anticipated in addition to the almost million dollars already awarded to the district. The district faces ongoing challenges due to inadequate state funding, including budget cuts for this academic year. PSD has had to get creative with pursuing grants, an undertaking that requires "a lot of extra work on our staff..."...
WRANGELL – The borough wants a data center to plug into Wrangell. Better yet, it could even move into the unused formal hospital property. Data centers are large hosting sites for multiple servers that provide computing power and storage for cloud-based service providers. While at Southeast Conference, held in Ketchikan last month, borough representatives spoke with Sam Enoka, founder and CEO of Greensparc — a San Francisco-based technology company that specializes in setting up modular, small-scale data centers for cloud computing. Enoka gre...
Travis Kukull receives a lot of messages from friends, family, and randos up and down the Upper Lynn Canal every year around this time. “People text me pictures of things all the time.” They take pictures of fungi and send them to Kukull’s phone to see if they’re edible. But Kukull is the first to admit he doesn’t know everything and that he’s not a scientist. “I’m just a chef, but I am a mushroom nerd,” he said. It’s true – Kukull has been a chef for 25 years. Right now, he owns Malo Nista Catering in Haines. But his fungal fascination reigns...
Starting next month, Coby Holder, 22, will be the new Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Coordinator for the Petersburg Volunteer Fire Department, a position that has been vacant since late May when Joshua Rathmann moved away. Holder, a Petersburg resident, has volunteered at fire departments for the past three years — one in Petersburg, and the two prior in Wrangell. During his time volunteering for the department in Wrangell, Holder "fell in love" with EMS responding — even though he admittedly...
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...
Proposition 2 failed in the regular municipal election last week by an official total of five votes. The Petersburg Borough Assembly certified the election results in a special meeting Oct. 4, when outstanding ballots were counted toward the final tally. Julie Spigelmyre won the contested Library Board seat with 567 votes total; incumbent Gina Esposito had 554 votes and was not reelected. Proposition 2 failed with 516 votes in favor, and 521 votes against it. Prop 2 would have increased the...
A $900 thousand grant from the Denali Commission will help fund a borough project at Banana Point to replace the floating breakwater, reviving an undertaking years in the making. The boat launch at Banana Point is critical transportation infrastructure - but its existing breakwater system has deteriorated and no longer protects boaters as desired. There is a required 10 percent borough match tied to the grant -meaning if all the funding is spent, the borough would contribute $90 thousand....
Echoing a previous attempt that fell through last year due to cost, Skylark Park LLC recently reprised their request to purchase parcels owned by the Petersburg Borough. Skylark Park LLC filed to purchase the same parcels of borough property that they pursued last fall. The original effort to purchase these parcels did not proceed for Skylark LLC last year. At the time, Petersburg municipal code had no mechanism for the borough to sell parcels at less than assessed value for housing or large...
HAINES - A small crowd gathered Saturday night watching as a fire ate through the building that houses Haines' Quick Shop, Outfitter Liquor, Outfitter Sporting Goods, Mike's Bikes & Boards, and four apartments. No one reported any injuries and, at first, it seemed as though Haines Volunteer Firefighters were going to be able to contain flames. But as the fire got larger and more involved, the crowd swelled. Dozens sat in the small boat harbor parking lot or along Front Street, watching as the...
The preliminary results of the Petersburg 2024 Municipal Election are in. When the voting window closed Tuesday evening, 1,051 voters had cast their ballot. There are outstanding ballots that will be counted when the election results are certified this Friday. Those votes could potentially change the outcome for Proposition 2 and one contested Library Board seat. Among the five candidates who ran for the two three-year terms on the borough assembly, incumbent Bob Lynn received the most votes...
The EMS branch of Petersburg Volunteer Fire Department is trying out a new response system that no longer holds EMS responders to a fixed schedule. Emergency Services Director Aaron Hankins told the Pilot that it was difficult to get volunteers to commit and sign up for consistent 12-hour shifts; he said there was conversation about changing the shift schedule to more than two shifts in a day, but there was not a consensus among the group to agree on a change. Ultimately, Hankins said EMS...
Voters in Alaska's capital city have rejected a resident-written ballot proposition that would have banned large cruise ships on Saturdays and the Fourth of July.Tuesday was municipal election day for most of Alaska's cities and boroughs, and in preliminary results in Juneau, about 60% of participating voters sided against the "ship-free Saturdays" initiative. Some ballots have yet to be counted but are not expected to change the result. Elsewhere across the state, municipal elections saw... Full story
Wikan Enterprises, Inc. is still on the market. Owners John and Sheri Wikan plan to retire on Oct. 18, John's 75th birthday. The Wikans are looking for a successor to continue their diesel marine engine parts and repair shop that has operated out of Petersburg for over three decades. "Our intention and goal with the sale is to find somebody that can continue the business so that our fishermen have service. That's what we want," Sheri told the Pilot. "But with that being said, if we can't find so... Full story
Petersburg's public safety advisory board wants the state of Alaska to initiate a safety standard for motorized rental boats. At a meeting in mid September, board members said lodges near town let tourists use skiffs without making sure they know what they're doing. Vice Chair Mark Tucillo said he doesn't want people to die because they don't know how to operate a boat. "I think it's the right thing to do," he said. "To say 'You should have training before you get in a watercraft and go off on...
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...
Opponents of the planned Donlin Gold mine in Western Alaska won a key victory on Monday when a federal judge ruled that regulators who granted a permit needed to build the project failed to properly consider the risks of a catastrophic release of mine waste. U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason agreed with tribal government plaintiffs that argued the environmental study that led to federal permitting for the Donlin mine illegally omitted analysis of the impacts of a major tailings dam failure. “I think it’s a major victory for the tri...
An array of businesses, fishing companies and investors are objecting to a pending proposal to sell the assets of a struggling Alaska seafood company to Rodger May — one of the original investors in the company before it entered a bankruptcy-like process called receivership. The financial firm that’s overseeing Peter Pan Seafood’s receivership proposed last week to sell the company’s three processing plants and an array of other assets to May, an entrepreneur and fish trader who narrowly outbid another processing company, Silver Bay Seafood...
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 Thursday. The amount is slightly higher than previous estimates from the spring, in part because the number of recipients is lower than expected. The payments will be direct-deposited into Alaskans' bank accounts starting Oct. 3. Paper checks, for those Alaskans who requested them, will be mailed later in October. This year's combined... Full story
Cedar Social Club, the adult day service program at PMC, soft-launched nearly a year ago. And thanks to new funding avenues from the state, the program continues to grow. The State Health Department has awarded PMC's Home Health Department an Adult Day Services grant to support staffing and participant scholarships for Cedar Social Club. Home Health is also newly state certified to provide support for participants who are under a Medicaid waiver. "It's exciting, because I feel like we're...
Facing unavoidable costs for water and wastewater upgrades, borough authorities stress the need for voters to pass Proposition 4 in the municipal election next week. Passing Prop 4 will authorize the borough to borrow up to $19.3 million from the state to fund 12 water and wastewater projects slated for the next six years in Petersburg. The loans would not be borrowed all at once. On a project-by-project basis, each would need to be approved by the assembly before the borough could pursue the... Full story
Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, a blue heron got too close to a power source near South Harbor last Friday morning - causing a power outage in the darkest hours of the night. The encounter with the power lines around 1:20 a.m. cost the waterfowl its life and part of Petersburg its power until PMPL crew brought the lights back on by 3:00 a.m. "Unfortunately, in the middle of the night ... a large blue heron made contact with our primary power in the area of South Harbor and ... put the...
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...
Wrangell is trading in the stormy skies of Seattle and heading east, hoping for favorable tourism trade winds in Chicago. For the first time in two decades the borough will not send any representatives to the Seattle Boat Show. Instead, the Economic Development Department has elected to attend the Travel and Adventure Show in Chicago. The two-day event kicks off on Feb. 1 of next year. Economic Development Director Kate Thomas said she expects an audience as large as 19,000 travel enthusiasts and an additional 2,000 to 3,000 attendees who work...
