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JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — The Alaska Supreme Court ruled Friday that a state Senate district pairing part of east Anchorage and the Eagle River area by the board tasked with rewriting Alaska’s political boundaries constituted an “unconstitutional political gerrymander.” The court said it was affirming a finding by Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews regarding Senate District K. Two House districts equal one Senate district. The Senate district at issue pairs a House district that includes part of Anchorage’s Muldoon area with an Eagle River are...
WASHINGTON - Alaska Rep. Don Young, the longest-serving Republican in U.S. House history, will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, March 29, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Monday. Young, 88, a blunt-speaking politician known for his brusque style, died last Friday. He was first elected to the U.S. House in 1973 He was reelected in 2020 to serve his 25th term and was running this year for another term. A special election will be held this summer to fill the seat. Pelosi's office...
A state Department of Transportation official told legislators that the ferry system is "burning out our crew" with lots of overtime amid staff shortages, and that the problem jeopardizes tentative plans to bring back the Columbia to service in Southeast for the first time since fall 2019. The Alaska Marine Highway System as of March 16 was down 125 employees from the minimum needed to staff its full online summer schedule plus the addition of the Columbia, according to a department...
The Alaska House of Representatives will lose a familiar face next January when Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins completes his term. Kreiss-Tomkins announced last Friday that he would not be running for reelection after serving in the House for nearly a decade. The representative of District 35, which includes Sitka and Petersburg, has decided it’s time for a change of pace as he shifts his focus to his personal life. “Having a meaningful personal life and a relationship and a family, these are all really important life priorities for me, not to...
The state has started negotiations to sell the Malaspina to a company owned by a business that operates a new multimillion-dollar cruise ship terminal at Ward Cove in Ketchikan. M/V Malaspina LLC and the Alaska Department of Transportation “have agreed to negotiate in good faith on the sale of the 59-year-old vessel,” the state announced Monday. “MVM’s letter of interest outlines a plan to use the Malaspina to showcase Alaska’s maritime history and support a Ketchikan-based tourism business,” the state said. “Among other uses, they propose...
State ferry system and Transportation Department officials plan to gather this week in Ketchikan to consider options for fulfilling the advertised summer schedule amid a continuing shortage of onboard crew. The department failed to meet its self-imposed timeline of hiring enough workers by March 1 to ensure that the Columbia on May 1 would return to service for the first time since fall 2019. The Alaska Marine Highway System had said it needed to hire at least 166 new employees to staff up its fleet — a gap of about one-quarter of its total aut...
The Forest Service is bulking up how many permits it issues to the Anan Wildlife Observatory in order to allow as many visitors to the site as people and bears can handle, while also protecting the habitat. And it has a mid-March start date for a contractor to tear down the existing observatory to put up a new one in time for the July 5 to Aug. 25 viewing season. The current limit is 60 permits a day during the season, District Recreation Staff Officer Tory Houser said Friday. That was implement...
First a trade war, then a battle against an infectious virus and now a real war are all affecting Alaska seafood exports. Shipments to China fell from as high as 30% of Alaska’s total seafood export value in the 2010s to 20% in 2020. “The U.S.-China trade war has displaced $500 million of Alaska seafood,” Jeremy Woodrow, executive director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, told legislators last week. And though people bought more seafood to prepare at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, sales to restaurants and food services fell by 70...
The Alaska Department of Transportation is asking anyone interested in taking ownership of the nearly 60-year-old Malaspina to speak up by March 7. The state has been spending about $75,000 a month to keep the unused ferry moored and insured at Ward Cove in Ketchikan for more than two years. The ship has not carried passengers or vehicles since late 2019, and requires tens of millions of dollars of repairs, steel replacement work and new engines to go back into service, according to the...
State Transportation Department officials recently told legislators the ferry system needed to quickly hire at least 166 new crew in order to meet minimum staffing levels for this summer’s schedule starting in May. “Staffing goals for the summer season will not be met at current recruitment rates,” the department reported in its presentation to the House Transportation Committee on Feb. 15. Insufficient staffing could result in scaling back ferry service plans. About 350 new hires would be even better, covering vacancies due to sick leave...
A 45-page bill to restructure the Alaska Marine Highway System as a state-owned corporation, run by an appointed board of directors, similar to the Alaska Railroad, is going to take longer than one legislative session to review, amend and adopt — if even then. “This is going to take a big lift,” said Robert Venables, executive director of the Southeast Conference, an economic and community development nonprofit for the region that supports the concept of a ferry corporation. “This is aspirational,” he said Feb. 23, a day after the Senate Tr...
Almost three years after pulling pollution monitors - called Ocean Rangers - from large cruise ships, Gov. Mike Dunleavy has proposed legislation to replace the onboard state personnel with regular inspections by shoreside staff while ships are in port and underway. The Ocean Rangers program was written into state law when voters approved a citizen's initiative in 2006 to step up oversight of the cruise ship industry. However, start-of-season and random inspections during the summer "are a more...
Haines-Lynn Canal fishermen might have an opportunity to diversify if a Juneau-based fishing charter and lodge owner is right about his hunch that a viable commercial squid fishery could exist in Southeast. Richard Yamada, who's been operating fishing charters for 40 years, has been looking for ways to reduce the impacts on his business from king salmon declines. He speculates that an observed influx of magister squid in the northern inside passage might be one factor in salmon survival. About 1...
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Petersburg's Representative in the State House has broken his leg after crashing a paraglider in Anchorage last weekend. Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins told the Anchorage Daily News he intends to return to Juneau late Wednesday. Kreiss-Tomkins has been recuperating in Anchorage following surgery and attending committee meetings remotely. He broke two bones in his right leg in the Saturday crash. Anchorage Republican Rep. Laddie Shaw was out flying with Kreiss-Tomkins when the crash happened. Kreiss-Tomkins was taking his f...
Alaska's state housing agency has distributed more than $243 million in financial aid the past year to help renters hurt economically by the pandemic and will soon embark on a $50 million federally funded program to help homeowners, too. The aid can go toward eligible homeowners' monthly mortgage payments, and may also be applied to current and past-due property taxes, insurance premiums and utility bills, the Alaska Housing Finance Corp. announced Friday. Preregistration for Alaska Housing...
A state and federally designated economic development organization for Southeast Alaska has received $1 million in two grants to build up mariculture in the region, with half the money to go toward applying for an even larger grant and the other half going to design a processing facility on Prince of Wales Island. A $500,000 grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration will be used "to build an application to allow us to compete for $50 million," Robert Venables, executive director...
State ferry management said they are working to be more responsive to community and passenger concerns, including reconsidering the use of "dynamic pricing," where fares increase as ships fill up on popular sailings. No one likes dynamic pricing, Katherine Keith, the Transportation Department's change management director, told legislators last week. The pricing structure is similar to airlines, hotels and rental cars, where bookings on popular routes and travel days can cost significantly more,...
Unless the Alaska Marine Highway System can recruit enough workers by March 1 to restaff the unused Columbia, officials said the largest vessel in the fleet would remain tied to the dock for a third summer in a row. "Management is doing everything we can" to recruit and staff up, Katherine Keith, the ferry system's newly hired change management director, told legislators last week. As of the first week of January, the state ferry system was short more than 350 workers - about half of the...
The state is working through a couple of challenges in its plan to distribute tens of millions of dollars of federal relief funds to municipalities and businesses. Applications for grants to local governments far exceeded the available funds, while grant applications from eligible tourism-related businesses and others fell far short. The Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development is looking for answers to both questions: How to decide which cities and boroughs will receive how much of the limited money to replace their lost tax...
Though they say the level of funding for the state ferry system in Gov. Mike Dunleavy's budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1 is adequate, coastal legislators don't like that the governor wants to use one-time federal money to pay the bills, eliminating almost 95% of state funding. Their fear is that when the federal dollars from last year's $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending plan run out, so too will adequate ferry service. "Those federal dollars were meant to augment state money, no...
WRANGELL– In a break from past practice, the Alaska Department of Revenue this year will provide monthly updates to legislators whenever projected oil prices — and state revenues — move up or down more than 10%. Several legislators worry that could confuse budget deliberations this session. Revenue staff has updated the state’s twice-yearly oil-price forecasts internally but not released the numbers to the public, the department’s chief economist Dan Stickel told the Senate Finance Committee on Jan. 20. “We’ve decided to go ahead and star...
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Political parties “have no right to be gatekeepers to the ballot,’’ an attorney argued Tuesday in urging the Alaska Supreme Court to uphold a voter-approved electoral system that would end party primaries in the state and institute ranked-choice voting in general elections. Scott Kendall, who helped write the ballot measure, argued on behalf of the group behind the initiative, which narrowly passed in 2020. Laura Fox, an attorney for the state, joined Kendall in asking that the court uphold a lower court ruling in favor of...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – The former head of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. claims her firing was “political retribution” by board members appointed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Dunleavy, a Republican seeking reelection, denied any involvement in Angela Rodell’s removal last month, the Anchorage Daily News reported. The corporation’s board has provided no explanation for Rodell’s Dec. 9 dismissal. The vote was 5-1, with the lone dissenting vote cast by the only board member not appointed or reappointed by Dunleavy. Rodell was a commissione...
WRANGELL – The Alaska Department of Transportation is contracting with Allen Marine to run one of its vessels “as needed” between Ketchikan, Wrangell and Petersburg this winter, though no runs are scheduled and any operations likely would depend on whether the state ferry Matanuska finally comes out of winter overhaul as now expected on Jan. 31. Delays caused by extensive repair work to the 58-year-old ferry forced the Alaska Marine Highway System to cancel several sailings between the three communities in December and January. The Matanu...
With the Matanuska out of service longer than expected for more repair work, and the state uncertain whether it can bring an idled ferry out of a cost-saving lay-up, the Alaska Marine Highway System is seeking bids from private vessel operators to possibly provide additional winter runs to several Southeast communities, including Wrangell. The state issued the hurried bid notice on Dec. 31, with proposals due by 2 p.m. Friday. The state also is advertising for a contractor to help it recruit and hire for the ferry system, which is short on...
