Alaska News

ASD Superintendent Jim Browder prepares to make a statement at the early school board meeting Monday. Photo by Daysha Eaton, KSKA – Anchorage.

Anchorage School Superintendent Jim Browder is speaking out publicly for the first time about his decision to look for other jobs. After just 8 months with the Anchorage School District, he announced Friday that he might be moving on.

In the email addressed to staff Friday, Browder announced he was considering leaving the district because one of his daughters and young grandson are experiencing severe medical issues and that he believed it was his responsibility to be closer to them in Georgia. Browder commented for the first time on the situation at the early meeting of the Anchorage School Board Monday.

“I’m still the superintendent of schools, and I’m working everyday in the best interest of ASD students, staff and this board and community,” Browder said. “The board and my administration have a shared vision and a strong strategic plan, Destination 2020.”

“Everyone in this administration and this board and this district is committed to the initiatives and goals within Destination 2020.”

The school board learned Friday that he’s in the running for a job in Des Moines, Iowa. School Board President Jeannie Mackie says Browder had alerted the board that he may need to take time off, about a month ago, to take care of ill family members. But it was news to them that he was applying for other jobs.

“So now we’re in a situation where he is pursuing outside employment, and we will deal with that and move forward,” Mackie said.

Mackie says discussions about finding a possible successor will be addressed this week. Browder replaced longtime Superintendent Carol Comeau in July. He was hired after a more than seven-month-long search that cost the district more than $54,000. Despite the news that he may not fulfill his three-year contract, Mackie says he was the right choice.

“Quite a bit of time was spent on the search. We went over a hundred applications. The board personally read each and every application. We had a search firm that assisted us in that, but for the most part, the board really was engaged in that process and we felt that, and we still feel that Dr. Browder was the right choice. He’s been doing a great job leading our district, and we really do hate to see him have to leave early,” Mackie said.

Over the past eight months Browder has helped the district realign curriculum to the common core standards. Browder makes $180,000  a year. He has not yet submitted an official resignation.

• ASD Superintendent Search

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

Air quality in a Fairbanks neighborhood is dramatically cleaner following a court order that shutdown two wood fired boilers.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

Across-the-board federal budget cuts are coming, half from the Department of Defense budget; the other half to other federal agency budgets.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

Two speakers at an Anchorage Chamber of Commerce forum on Monday made the case for accepting federal funds to expand Medicaid in the state. They also asked chamber members to speak out on the issue.Last week, Governor Sean Parnell announced he won’t expand Medicaid in the state, at least for now. Valerie Davidson is with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. She was careful not to criticize the Governor’s decision, and was relieved he left the door open to expanding Medicaid in the future:

“Other states who have very conservative governors have made the decision to expand, because frankly it’s just too good a return on investment. Very small modest investment by the state yields pretty significant federal dollars. So I’m hopeful that as the Governor finishes his own analysis that that will point us to opportunities in our state as well,” Davidson said.

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium commissioned two independent studies on the costs and benefits of the Medicaid expansion. They show the expansion would offer health insurance to 40,000 Alaskans and pump $1 billion into the state economy over the next 10 years. The federal government will cover 100 percent of the cost of the expansion for the first three years and gradually transition to 90 percent by 2020.

Karen Perdue is President of the Alaska State Hospital and Nursing Home Association. She says the Medicaid expansion would help lower health care premiums for everyone in the state. That’s because fewer people would show up at hospitals unable to pay their bill. It’s called “uncompensated care” and Perdue says that cost is ultimately paid by people who have insurance.

“Who pays for the uncompensated care? A lot of times that cost gets shifted to private employers. So I do think we need to look at that. Not only would hospitals in the communities do better, but what would it mean for private employers,” Perdue said.

Perdue says the Governor should take as much time as he needs to understand the complex issue. The Anchorage Chamber of Commerce hasn’t taken a position yet on the Medicaid expansion, but expects to sometime this month.

Parnell says he plans to revisit the prospect of Medicaid expansion in December, when he rolls out his annual budget proposal.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

There are currently four women running among the top-20 in this year’s Iditarod.  This year’s race could be both extremely fast and extremely competitive.  The women in the race aren’t holding back.

After placing second last year to Dallas Seavey, Aliy Zirkle decided she was no longer just training dogs, but she’d also need to train herself to claim an Iditarod win.

“We decided our lifestyle oughta be a little more fit.  Our dogs are the most fit athletes in the world and standing on the back of the sled like a big lug seemed a little bit unfair,” Zirkle said.

This is Zirkle’s 13th Iditarod.  She has her sights set on a win, but she’s learned that anything can happen on the way to Nome.

“The first 300 miles, I run my own team, because I’ve gotta see what I’ve got,” Zirkle said.

Zirkle has a friendly rivalry with fellow musher Michele Phillips.  The two battled for first place in last month’s Yukon Quest 300, taunting and jeering each other down the trail.  Phillips, from Tagish, Yukon is running her fourth Iditarod.  Her highest place was 16th.

“I’d really like to finish top ten.  That’s my goal, so I hope we accomplish that,” Phillips said.

When asked about the competitive women’s field, Jodi Bailey, who runs dogs out of Chatanika with Dan Kaduce, was surprised to find out people consider her one of the top women.

“I think that might be a slight mistake.  People make that list based on what we have done and accomplished and that’s great, but you need to consider what our goals are for an individual race.  This year Dan and I have a young team we’ve been working on building for the future,” Bailey.

Other women rounding out the field include veteran Kelley Griffin, as well as Jesse Royer who may have lucked out when she decided to train her dogs in the warmer Montana climate.

“It’ll be good for me.  I’ve definitely been training at a lot of 40 above, so it’s not gonna hurt me any,” Royer said.

The 10-day forecast isn’t calling for terribly frigid weather along the Iditarod trail this year.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

Icicle Seafoods’ Adak plant won’t be processing fish this summer.

Icicle didn’t respond to multiple interview requests, but the company’s plant manager told the Adak city council last month that the plant wouldn’t be operating because generating power is too expensive during the slower fishing months.

That’s disappointing news for Pat Davis. He owns the 48-foot F/V Cascade, and fishes for halibut and black cod near Adak. He says being able to deliver to the Icicle plant saved him a 450-mile run each way to Unalaska.

“It’s just a beautiful thing, you’re not under the gun, you can kind of fish at your leisure. Fish as hard as you want, or take a day off.”

This summer, he’s anticipating a more rushed schedule, since the trip to Unalaska takes at least three days, and most processors want halibut and black cod delivered within seven days of being caught.

“Once you start, you’re going to have to go for it, or you’ll end up coming back to town with half a load, instead of what you should be getting.”

Less fish and more fuel means less money for fishermen. But they aren’t the only ones that will impacted by the closure. The Icicle plant is one of the few industries on the island, and the primary source of tax revenue for the city of Adak. City manager Layton Lockett says the closure could reduce tax revenues for the year by 20 to 30 percent.

“It will be painful. However, based on experiencing the complete closure of the fish processing plant — the situation wouldn’t be new.”

In 2009, the company that used to own the plant went bankrupt, and it was shuttered until Icicle bought it in the spring of 2011. Lockett  says the impact of this summer’s closure will be spread out over several years because of the way state fisheries landing taxes are distributed.

“There will be a delay. Which will help lessen the pain of a seasonal closure, which we expect only to really occur this year. We don’t expect that in the future.”

Lockett says Icicle has assured the city it’s working to reducing its energy costs so the plant can stay open year-round.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

Moving from urban anywhere to rural Alaska can be a tough transition – some newcomers don’t last long, worn down by the long winters or a feeling of isolation.  Others stay, sometimes for years.  Len Anderson talked to some Northwest Alaska residents to find out what makes the difference.

For 30 years Irma Mitchell has been the secretary at the Shungnak village school.  She’s seen a lot of teachers come and go. Some quit after one year, maybe two.

As for longer term principals….

“What makes a good principal is, they just do learn our culture and learn our kids, the village.  And they come back and they’re four, five years, some principals.

Last spring, Hans Boenish and his wife, Bonnie, finished a long career of bush teaching.

“It’s really, really important—I can’t emphasize this enough—that you get out and see what’s going on out in the community.  Go down and fish, take a boat ride.  Get to know people outside of the school system,” Boenish said.

They began in Noorvik in 1978, then Shungnak, taught in Grayling and moved back to Shungnak for their final three years. Hans’s advice comes from his own early years.

“We lived in village housing, in a cabin down by the river, and so much goes on down by the river and so many decisions get made down there.  Decisions get made on the riverbank.  They don’t get made necessarily in offices,” Boenish said.

Boenish adds by getting out with the people, being a decent person, the newcomer reaps an additional reward.

“Particularly in the bush, you might make mistakes, but if your intentions are good and people know you’re really giving it your all, doing your best and you really doing what’s best for kids, they’ll allow you a lot of mistake. It’s a forgiving culture,” Boenish said.

Doug Neal has lived 25 years in the Northwest Alaska hub community of Kotzebue. For 19 years he’s worked for OTZ Telephone Cooperative and is now executive director.

“I know one of the challenges that non-Natives have coming have when they come to Kotzebue is that most of them are too. It seems like too many of them are just coming up to make money and then get…leave as soon as they can.  And of course, if you live anywhere and all you’re doing is going back and forth between where you work and where you live—I don’t care if it’s Kotzebue or some urban part of the country—you’re going to get burnt out on that location pretty fast,” Nealsaid.

Neal says he’s always eager to help people break the isolation of work and home.

“I had a teacher friend bring a new teacher out to my little cabin, which is about 15 miles out of Kotzebue, and they just spent the day over there and had dinner over there.  It’s in the trees.  It’s a lovely little spot.  And the teacher who had been here for years said, ‘You know, if we could get the new teachers out here one time and see how much fun it is to be out in a place like this so close to Kotzebue, teacher retention would go way up,’” Neal said.

Neal says a recent school district survey supports that observation.

After 25 years north of the Arctic Circle in Kotzebue, Neal still likes his work.  He thoroughly enjoys the people.  But most of all, there’s the land.

“For me it’s the wild country.  And there are just not too many places you can live where you’re just surrounded by millions of acres, millions of acres of just wild country that…I mean the rivers don’t have any dams on them.  It’s roadless.   It’s just beautiful, untouched wilderness.  And you just can’t find that anyplace else.  Or it’s hard to find at anyplace else…. I mean it’s fun to live in a place where 400,000 caribou migrate within the region each year.  And where at different times of the year the fish are so plentiful and the birds so plentiful and the big game is so plentiful.  So that’s just something really, really special.   You just can’t get that anyplace else.” Neal said.

Neal gazes out his office window,  past the buildings lining the shore to the frozen sound and the low mountains beyond.  ”I love this little community,” he says.  I fell in love with it when I first came here and 25 years later, I still do.”

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

Martin Buser at the 2013 Iditarod ceremonial start in Anchorage. Photo by Patrick Yack, APRN – Anchorage.

Martin Buser and Matt Failor have both checked into Rohn, arriving at 9:53 a.m. and 2:11 p.m. respectively.

Fifteen other mushers, including Paul Gebhardt, Lance Mackey, Aliy Zirkle, Jeff King and John Baker are currently between the Rainy Pass and Rohn checkpoints.

Defending Iditarod champion Dallas Seavey and 2013 Yukon Quest champion Allen Moore have both checked into Rainy Pass.

One person is dead and two are injured after a backcountry skiing accident near Haines on Sunday.

The Haines Police Department received an ambulance call Sunday afternoon to the Haines Airport where a helicopter brought an injured skier. The skier was transported to the Haines clinic where he was pronounced dead. Two injured skiers were also brought to the clinic. Haines police notified Alaska State Troopers, who is the lead investigating agency on the incident. A trooper arrived in Haines from Juneau on Monday, according to trooper spokesperson Megan Peters.

“He’s been trying to do interviews; he was able to fly over the area to see it. He has a couple more interviews lined up before he leaves town and has to get back to Juneau,” Peters said.

Troopers identified the deceased as 34-year-old Christian Cabanilla of Haines.

Cabanilla is a guide with Haines heliski company Southeast Alaska Backcountry Adventures. But company owner, Scott Sundberg, said Monday Cabanilla was skiing recreationally with a group of skiers, and he was not the official guide of the group.

Sundberg said the two injured skiers were in stable condition on Monday. Both were medevaced to Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau and one of the skiers was later sent to the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

The group of five was skiing as part of a commercial tour with the company just west of Haines when the incident occurred, according to Sundberg. He said reports indicate the incident might have been caused by a massive cornice failure, but not an avalanche. Troopers’ preliminary findings are similar, Peters said.

“And from what it sounds like, they were traversing an area and snow collapsed from under them, but I don’t know how far the fall was,” Peters said.

Cabanilla’s biography on the company’s website says he is an international backcountry snowboard guide working in Alaska, Chilean Patagonia and Antarctica with more than a decade of experience in the Alaska heli-ski industry. It says he is also a commercial helicopter pilot in Alaska. He is originally from Vasalia, Calif.

This is Haines third heliskiing fatality in two years. Last year a guide and skier were killed in a March avalanche while skiing with a different company.

Martin Buser is maintaining his lead, checking into Rohn at 9:53 a.m. Monday. Matt Failor, who is also running a team of Buser’s dogs, is in second place, approaching the halfway point between Rainy Pass and Rohn.

Aliy Zirkle, Justin Savidis, DeeDee Jonrowe and Michelle Phillips remain in Rainy Pass.

Former Iditarod champ Martin Buser took an early lead in this year’s big race, according to official race standings. He was in and out of Rainy Pass about 5:40 Monday morning.

Racing behind Buser were the two Mackeys, Lance and his brother, Jason. They were in and out of Finger Lake early Monday. Lance, about 4:21; Jason about 4:41.  Prior to the beginning of the race on Sunday, Jason said his previous Iditarod starts had been “camping trips,” but this year he was out to win.

Aliy Zirkle led the field of women mushers. She was running in sixth place overall and was out of Finger Lake about 5:50 Monday morning.

Defending champion Dallas Seavey was in 17th place in and out of Skwentna.

A subcommittee in the legislature is looking to shave money from early education programs.

The group tasked with looking at the Department of Education and Early Development in the House rolled out their recommendations on Thursday, and their cuts to pre-school programs amount to $1 million. The reductions make up almost a fifth of the early education funding included in the governor’s budget.

The pre-kindergarten program saw the biggest cut, with its funding reduced by $480,000. The education subcommittee also made the program’s $2 million allocation a one-time amount, with the intention to reconsider program funding next year.

“That’s a pretty significant hit to pre-K programs,” says Michael Hanley, commissioner of Education and Early Development.

The program was created in 2009 as a pilot, and it serves 13 schools across the state. Most of those schools are in rural Alaska. Hanley says that the cut could shrink the program by 135 children and that at least one district’s pre-school program could close as a result.

Funding for Best Beginnings — a childhood literacy program — was brought down by $137,500. The Parents as Teachers program, which trains families to do pre-school activities at home, was reduced by $242,500. The subcommittee recommends both be funded at $800,000.

Rep. Tammie Wilson, a North Pole Republican, chairs the subcommittee. She says she supports early education, but doesn’t want the state to commit to paying for new programs with the state’s revenue projected to decline.

“As our oil keeps reducing, we’re getting to a point that we need to make some serious looks at everything in the budget. So, we took a close look at teaching and learning, which is the biggest portion of education, which has anything to do with pre-kindergarten programs,” says Wilson. “We didn’t go across the board for them, but there was quite a bit of new programs that the department asked for.”

Wilson has targeted the early education programs for cuts in past years, and attempted to cut the pre-K pilot program’s $2 million budget entirely in 2011. She has previously expressed concern that some of the state’s early education programs could be duplicative — especially with the federal Head Start program — and she cited redundancy as a reason for shrinking the pre-school budget.

But those programs have different objectives, says Education Commissioner Michael Hanley.

“That would sure be erroneous on our part if we actually were providing two services to one child, but I don’t know how you enroll a child in two pre-school programs at the same time,” says Hanley.

Another one of Wilson’s issues with the governor’s departmental budget was that the expansion of public pre-school could hurt private sector daycare programs.

“Should we also be competing with the ones that are completely private by starting new daycares and new pre-schools using state funding while other parents are having to pay for it,” says Wilson. “That’s where the discussion needs to be.”

Rep. Harriet Drummond, an Anchorage Democrat, opposes the cuts, and she introduced multiple amendments to keep the funding during the subcommittee’s closeout. She questions the idea that these early education programs are competing with the private sector.

“How’s that going to happen? You’re talking about some pretty remote places here, that don’t have cash economies, don’t have a tax base to ask their taxpayers for more money to fund these programs” says Drummond. “I don’t know where this funding is supposed to come from.”

Drummond also argues that the funding early education programs saves the state money in the long run in remedial education and public safety costs.

Hanley says that Alaska’s pre-school program has performed particularly well. Of the students who were enrolled in the program in 2011 and 2012, 80 percent of them exceeded expectations for vocabulary development and showed anywhere from one month to two year’s extra growth from the time they were first assessed. The department’s three-year report on the program also showed substantial improvement in motor skills and concept development.

“Our pre-K programs have some of the highest results in the country,” says Hanley. “But when it comes to access, we have some of the lowest access rates in the country. Fewer kids have access to pre-K than almost every other state. So, that’s a challenge we have, and we exacerbate that especially when we see cuts.”

The subcommittee recommendations will now be reviewed by House finance. Hanley says that the Department of Education and Early Development will push for the funding to be restored.

In total, the House education and early development trimmed the governor’s departmental budget by 1.6 percent, or $5.7 million.

The polar bear was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2008. Because the Appeals Court upheld that ruling, no laws change. Companies looking to operate in sensitive habitats will still need to undergo the existing review processes.

Mike Geraghty, Alaska’s Attorney General, said it’s too early for the state to decide what options it has.

He said the polar bear population is healthy, and this ruling sets a precedent that it’s legal to preemptively list a species as threatened.

“The polar bear is based on a 45 year projection. Nobody doubts that the current species has a healthy population,” he said in a phone interview Friday morning. “It takes a certain amount of speculation to figure out what’s going to happen 45 years from now with climate change. And also, what about the adaptability of species to loss of habitat.”

Kassie Siegel, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, welcomed the ruling. Her group was one of the appellees in the suit.

“The polar bear’s plight is so clear and so dire there was really no question they deserved protection under the Endangered Species Act,” she said.

Siegel said the polar bear is the first species to be placed on the endangered list solely because of climate change.

And now that the court has ruled, she said climate policy needs to follow.

“The science on climate change the very real threats on the polar bear have long been indisputable. They are now also legally indisputable as well. But what we really need to do now is to get serious about swift greenhouse pollution cuts. Because that’s what we need to do to save polar bears,” she said.

Siegel argued it’s only a matter of time for Fish and Wildlife to upgrade the polar bear’s status from threatened to endangered.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

Colonel Brian Duffy

The sequester cuts take effect at midnight, but what it may ultimately mean is still a moving target. The Commander at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, Colonel Brian Duffy says he would like to be hopeful that Congress will still find a resolution before the late night deadline.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

Photo from People Mover Facebook.

President Obama announced Friday morning that Congressional leaders had failed to reach a agreement to avoid sequestration. This triggers automatic spending cuts to balance the budget. Communities around the country are bracing for the cuts, including Anchorage.

Officials with the Municipality expect sequestration to impact the People Mover bus system. Lance Wilber, the Director of Public Transportation for the Municipality of Anchorage, says that’s because his department’s budget is heavily supported by federal grants.

“Roughly 20 percent of our operating budget is supported by operating dollars from the federal government. And we use those funds to really keep our system on route. On the capital side, it’s more significant — roughly 70 to 80 percent of our capital improvements are supported by the federal transit administration.”

Wilber says sequestration could slow down bus and bus stop improvements as well customer service upgrades. According to officials at the Anchorage Police Department, grants that support DWI and Seatbelt patrols could be reduced, as well as those that provide funding to fight Internet Crimes against children and support task forces on human trafficking and illegal drugs.

Anticipated sequestration reductions for the 2013-2014 Anchorage school District budget equal about 6-million dollars, and were included in recent budget cuts. Chad Stitler, ASD budget director says the district is watching department of defense reductions at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson closely because they could impact the district down the road.

“As the federal footprint in Alaska is reduced, we expect that will also reduce the population and the enrollment inside of the district and so we’ve considered that along with the actual immediate impacts of the sequestration.”

The district gets a little less than 10 percent of their funding from federal monies. Most sequestration cuts would probably take time to trickle down the local level — until the end of 2013 or the beginning of 2014.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

A group of North Slope villagers filed suit Thursday in federal court against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. According to Brian Litmans, with the environmental law firm, Trustees for Alaska, seven residents of Nuiqsut claim that the Corps violated the Clean Water Act in issuing a permit to Conoco Phillips to fill almost 60 acres of wetlands for the oil company’s Colville Delta 5 project.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

The Alaska Federation of Natives has changed its bylaws to give tribes more votes during conventions. The move separates tribal votes from tribal corporation votes.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

A state Superior Court decision could sidetrack state administration plans to change water protection statutes.  Earlier this week, the court decided in favor of the Chuitna Citizens Coalition in a case involving what is termed “instream flow” rights to Middle Creek,  on the West side of Cook Inlet.  The Coalition filed for instream flow rights in 2009, saying that wild salmon populations in the creek need to be protected.  But the state Department of Natural Resources failed to process the application.  Later, DNR approved a temporary water use permit for PacRim Coal to remove water from the same creek, with the Coalition application pending, so the Coaltion appealed to the courts. The court has decided that DNR failed to follow its own rules.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

This week we’re heading to a northern part of Alaska’s Pandhandle, Haines. The community of over 1800 people is a gateway between the U.S. and Canada. Daniel Lee Henry is a long time community member in Haines.

Listen to the full story

Download Audio

Last year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded eleven billion-dollar weather events.  That brought the total for the last two years to 25.  The average up until then had been less than four.  Climate change is already here and it’s not changing back any time soon.  Communities are going to have to become more resilient, and for some
that means a closer look at local food.  One of the top experts on sustainable and climate-resilient “food-sheds” will be the guest on the next Talk of Alaska.

HOSTS:

• Steve Heimel

GUESTS: 

• Gary Paul Nabhan, Chair, Sustainable Food Systems Program in Southwest Borderlands Food and Water Security, University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioural Science, Tucson
• Callers Statewide

PARTICIPATE:

• Post your comment before, during or after the live broadcast (comments may be read on air).
• Send e-mail to talk [at] alaskapublic [dot] org (comments may be read on air)
• Call 550-8422 in Anchorage or 1-800-478-8255 if you’re outside Anchorage during the live broadcast

LIVE Broadcast: Tuesday, March 5, 2013 at 10:00 a.m. on APRN stations statewide.

SUBSCRIBE: Get Talk of Alaska updates automatically by e-mail, RSS or podcast.

TALK OF ALASKA ARCHIVE