News

If you’ve been unable to pay your rent or mortgage due to being out of work for the last few months, the State of Alaska may have some relief for you.

To receive a payment, you’ll have to be able to demonstrate that you lost wages due to COVID-19.
 
The State allocated ten million dollars in federal CARES Act funding for rental assistance and mortgage relief.

The Alaska Housing Finance Corporation is managing that program and the deadline to apply is Friday evening  - one minute before midnight at 11:59 p.m.

The Homer City Council received its quarterly update from the Southern Kenai Peninsula Opioid Task Force during its meeting on Monday. Stephanie Stillwell said the organization has been forced to make changes in outreach because of COVID-19.
    “We've kind of had to switch gears on some of our initiatives and prioritize things a bit differently,” Stillwell said. “So we wanted to really focus on how we can still remain visible and stay connected in our community through this social distancing experiment we're all in.

In the months following the disappearance of a 38-year-old Homer woman from the streets of downtown last October, a series of community conversations have been held to help the public deal with the shock and aftermath. Friends of Anesha “Duffy” Murnane have scheduled another conversation for Thursday, this one focused on safety and self-defense.
    Christina Whiting is one of the organizers of the conversation.

Alaska Chief Medical Officer Anne Zink was the special guest of the Homer City Council at Monday night’s regular meeting, with Mayor Ken Castner moving a question and answer session with her to the top of the agenda.
    Frustration was clear in Castner and council member’s questions as they pointed out how Homer and the South Peninsula have become the hottest Covid-19 spot in the state, second only to Anchorage.

    After one crewmember tested positive for COVID-19 on the state ferry Tustumena’s second voyage of the year, the ship was returned to Homer and has been tied up ever since.

    As soon as the Tusty returned, six more crewmembers were tested positive for the highly-contagious infection. When asked what further steps the Alaska Marine Highway System was going to take, Capt. John Falvey said they were going to continue to rely on their pre-sailing contingency plan.

The tourism season for summer 2020 was, as we keep hearing, supposed to have been a record breaking one for Alaska’s visitor industry, with untold numbers of Outsiders arriving by RV, plane and cruise ship. And in preparation, were hundreds of businesses ready to show them a little piece of Alaska.
    Of course most of those Outside visitors will not show up this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the local tourism industry is scrambling to shift gears to attract other Alaskans to the Kenai Peninsula in order to help save the season.

After failing to block an ordinance in the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly that would provide for an expanded number of options for residents to casts votes, foes of voting-by-mail, led by Assemblymembers Norm Blakley of Sterling and Jesse Bjorkman of Nikiski, have filed a referendum petition application to have the measure repealed by voters in October.
    The Borough Mayor's Office and assembly members were notified by the clerk of the filing on Thursday.

The first year of Homer’s two-day halibut tournament has been cancelled.
    That word from Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Brad Anderson.

The first Juneteenth celebration to be held in Homer will take place at WKFL Park today.
Juneteenth honors the day news reached Texas that the Civil War was officially over and that those enslaved in America were free by law. That was 155 years ago and more than two year after the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Kenai Peninsula Borough Schools Superintendent John O’Brien announced the district’s planning for opening up school again in the fall.
    In an announcement posted to the district web site Thursday, O’Brien said a 20-person team has been designing a safe start-up plan, with the planning goal of opening all 42 schools in the borough for on-site and in-person teaching and learning.

The KBBI Board of Directors is proud to announce the dedication and renaming of the principal on-air studio as the 'Gary Thomas Studio'. Gary served this community at Kachemak Emergency Services, as a member of the Homer Volunteer Fire Department, as editor and publisher of the Homer News and as volunteer host and auctioneer for decades worth of fundraising and advocacy events across the peninsula.

Six employees of South Peninsula Hospital have been diagnosed positive with COVID-19 over the past three weeks. That information came from SPH spokeswoman Derotha Ferraro Thursday morning on KBBI’s COVID Brief.
     “So we have six employees, since late May, it's actually three weeks today. And of those six, that represents one percent, just over one percent of our 480 employees,” Ferraro said. “And these six employees work in five different departments. And none of these employees reported close contact with patients or residents.”