Alaska State News

Alaska News Nightly: Friday, April 26, 2024

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 01:01:39 +0000

Lawmakers vote on House Bill 254, a bill that would ban social media accounts for kids under 14 and require adult websites to verify users’ ages. (Eric Stone/Alaska Public Media)

Stories are posted on the statewide news page. Send news tips, questions, and comments to news@alaskapublic.org. Follow Alaska Public Media on Facebook and on Twitter @AKPublicNews. And subscribe to the Alaska News Nightly podcast.

Friday on Alaska News Nightly:

Lawmakers are skeptical of a social media ban for children under 14 passed by the Alaska House. Plus, Native boarding school survivors share stories of their trauma. And, students in Nikiski put on a production of the jukebox musical Mamma Mia.

Reports from:

Casey Grove, Chris Klint and Rhonda McBride in Anchorage
Tim Ellis in Delta Junction
Eric Stone in Juneau
Hunter Morrison in Nikiski

This episode of Alaska News Nightly is hosted by Casey Grove, with audio engineering from Chris Hyde and producing from Tim Rockey.

Social media ban for kids under 14 passes Alaska House

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:06:20 +0000

Lawmakers vote on House Bill 254, a bill that would ban social media accounts for kids under 14 and require adult websites to verify users’ ages. (Eric Stone/Alaska Public Media)

A ban on social media accounts for children under 14 passed the Alaska House Friday with significant bipartisan support, despite some opposition citing privacy and constitutional concerns.

If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the ban would also require 14- and 15-year-olds to get written parental consent before creating social media accounts. Rep. Andrew Gray, an Anchorage Democrat, added the social media limits to a bill requiring adult websites to verify users’ ages.

The social media proposal was added late in the process as an amendment to another bill and hasn’t been subject to public hearings or legislative scrutiny beyond a brief floor debate. Though a separate bill with different social media restrictions for kids was introduced in January, it has not faced a public hearing.

Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, sponsored the original bill, which she described as an effort to protect children from pornography. Vance was one of several members from both parties who said they expected the Senate to make changes to the social media components of the bill.

“I want to let everyone know that I’m willing to work with those in the Senate on what the full intent of that is, so that we can make this a more robust package and really help do everything that we can to protect our children,” Vance said on the House floor.

The bill passed by a 33-6 vote with support from Democrats, Republicans and independents. But some lawmakers expressed concerns.

Rep. Genevieve Mina, D-Anchorage, who spoke out in support of the social media restrictions for children, said the age verification elements of the bill gave her pause.

“Age verification technology continues to improve, and there might be a scenario in the future where it is safe enough to protect people from privacy concerns, but really, I am very concerned about privacy for all individuals who might have to comply with this type of commercial age verification technology,” Mina said.

Rep. Ashley Carrick, D-Fairbanks, was another of the six votes against the bill. She said she wasn’t sure it would stand up in court.

“Alaska has very strict rights to privacy in our Constitution,” she said. “We’re one of the states with some of the most strident and strong languages around right to privacy, and I do think that if this were to be up against a legal challenge, it could definitively, probably, be ruled as unconstitutional.”

Age verification bills aimed at adult websites have a mixed record in federal court, though some recent laws in other states have been allowed to stand. Social media restrictions for children have been blocked on First Amendment grounds by federal courts in some states.

The bill would also allow parents to be reimbursed by the state up to $100 a year to pay for parental control software. The package now heads to the Senate.

Anchorage policing of homeless encampments will hinge on U.S. Supreme Court decision

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 22:52:48 +0000

A lot of people were living in tents and under tarps in the woods at Anchorage’s Mountain View snow dump, pictured here on June 27, 2023. Anchorage city workers posted signs here and at Davis Park warning that they’d be back to clear away the encampments. (Jeremy Hsieh/Alaska Public Media)

Anchorage and many other western cities are anticipating a ruling this summer from the U.S. Supreme Court that could change how they’re allowed to police homeless camping.

The High Court heard arguments Monday in a case from Grants Pass, Oregon, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had earlier ruled that unhoused people are allowed to camp on public property if there isn’t enough indoor shelter space for them. And because Alaska is also in the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, that ruling has so far stood for Anchorage and many other cities struggling to deal with growing populations of people experiencing homelessness.

The Anchorage Daily News examined the case and its implications for Anchorage in a recent story. Reporter Michelle Theriault Boots, who wrote the story, says the city is eagerly anticipating the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Grants Pass case.

Listen:

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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Michelle Theriault Boots: So this case, it holds that it’s a basic human need to sleep and to rest and that you can’t penalize that if you, as the municipality or the local authorities, are not offering an alternative.

Casey Grove: But as it pertains to Anchorage, it’s a case that has come up in terms of how the city clears camps. And when this case was decided at the Ninth Circuit level, what position did that put Anchorage in?

MTB: Let’s say authorities in Anchorage were to, you know, penalize people from sleeping outside, clear camps, arrest people for doing that, charge them with a crime. They would be on extremely shaky legal footing. And so that, you know, definitely makes the city stop and think before they pass any ordinances or do anything to penalize that outdoor camping.

And so what that has meant in Anchorage, and many other western cities is a real proliferation of outdoor camping by unhoused people. And there’s a lot of different factors driving that, an overall huge rise in just the number of unhoused people living in a city. But what the cities have said, is this ruling, it just ties their hands, it doesn’t allow them to really regulate homeless encampments in any way. And they say that’s a problem.

CG: So this went up for oral arguments before the Supreme Court on what Monday? And in analyzing those oral arguments, what did you hear?

MTB: It seemed like the court was split on very ideological lines, which, you know, I think a lot of analysts have said they expect the court to side with the city of Grants Pass. The liberal justices seemed skeptical of giving cities more power to basically police the lives of unhoused people.

You know, in terms of the arguments on either side that the parties made in the case, I think one of the arguments made by the advocates for unhoused people is that policing homelessness doesn’t work. That the people who are fined and thrown in jail for doing basic activities of daily life, when they don’t have somewhere to live, that only serves to further entrench them in the system of homelessness and in the criminal justice system. And so they say that doesn’t work, this isn’t the solution to this.

CG: I heard a story about this on NPR, and there was some audio from Justice Elena Kagan. And I guess the example she was giving was like, you know, “What if I fall asleep on the beach, and, you know, are the police gonna come and tell me to move?” What did you hear about that?

MTB: I mean, I think that was one of one of the issues that was brought up also by, I think, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who also said, “How do you define who is homeless?” It can be such a changeable state. It’s, by its very nature, a fluid state, and I think that that is one of the one of the big questions is, would these regulations be applied evenly? Would they be applied to people who are perceived as being, you know, visibly unhoused homeless people? Or would they be applied to someone who fell asleep while waiting for their bus home at a bus stop? So that I think that that’s one of the many messy issues in this case.

But I think one thing is certain is that this is the first time in decades that the Supreme Court has heard a major case with major implications on homelessness, and whatever they decide it will set important legal precedent for years to come.

CG: And it’S like you said, I mean, it’s kind of messy, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing where they just say yes or no. Like this decision, I guess we’re expecting it maybe in June, you know, how cities deal with this issue, it’s going to come down to, kind of, the intricacies of that opinion when it’s written, right?

MTB: Yeah, I think the question is how wide or narrow the opinion might be. If it’s a very narrow opinion, it might not, you know, lead to sweeping changes. If it’s a very broad opinion, then it might completely upend the way that cities can and will regulate homelessness. So I don’t think anybody knows.

I think that this, in Anchorage, the timing will be interesting, because the city is going into, you know, June 1, all of the winter shelters, which include the hotels, as well as the (former) Solid Waste Services shelter, are set to kind of wind down, though it sounds like there’s now money for a potential summer extension of shelter for about 200 people. But no matter what, there are going to be hundreds more people living on the streets of Anchorage. And how the city will respond to that, you know, the city does not want a repeat of last summer, where there was a huge encampment at 3rd (Avenue) and Ingra (Street), there continues to be a huge encampment at Cuddy Park. The city does not want that, and they’ve made that very clear. But what tools the city will have to regulate that, I don’t think anybody knows.

Anchorage teen’s cold-case killer sentenced to 50 years

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 22:46:00 +0000

Donald McQuade, center, poses for a photo with Public Defender Agency attorneys Benjamin Dresner, left, and Kyle Barber at the Nesbett Courthouse in Anchorage on Nov. 29, 2023. (Jeremy Hsieh/Alaska Public Media)

An Oregon man was ordered Friday to spend half a century behind bars for murdering an Anchorage teenager in a 1978 cold case.

Superior Court Judge Andrew Peterson handed down Donald McQuade’s 50-year prison term in the death of 16-year-old Shelley Connolly, according to the Alaska Department of Law.

A jury found McQuade, now 67, guilty of first-degree murder in the case in December, after genetic genealogy led to his arrest in 2019. The trial was delayed by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to a Friday statement from the Department of Law, evidence was collected from Connolly’s body in her killing and suspected rape after she was found along the Seward Highway south of Anchorage.

At trial, McQuade’s defense said that the DNA was the only evidence prosecutors had against him. But jurors rejected that argument, and on Friday the judge weighed in on McQuade’s actions.

“In his sentencing remarks Judge Peterson prioritized the seriousness and circumstances of the crime, the harm to the victim and her family, and the need to emphasize community condemnation,” prosecutors wrote. “Judge Peterson noted that Mr. McQuade had lived a full life and had watched his children grow into adulthood, a privilege that Shelley Connolly and her family were denied.”

On Friday, prosecutors thanked the Alaska State Troopers who investigated the case for 45 years, as well as the state Scientific Crime Detection Lab and the Gresham Police Department in Oregon.

Anchorage School District announces plan to close schools as part of ‘right-sizing’ effort

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 21:31:05 +0000

Dr. Jharrett Bryantt, the superintendent of Anchorage School District, listens to public testimony at the Anchorage School District Meeting on December 19, 2022. (Valerie Lake, Alaska Public Media).

The Anchorage School District announced plans to close schools over the next three years at a school board work session Tuesday. Due to steadily declining student population, decreasing birth rates in Anchorage and continued outmigration from Alaska, staff framed the potential closures as “right-sizing” the number of schools.

The district has nearly 6,000 fewer students than it did in 2010, and enrollment is projected to continue decreasing.

Toni Riley, director of diversity, equity, inclusion and community engagement, said the district plans to do a better job involving community input than they did prior to closing Abbott Loop Elementary in 2022.

“We really want to make sure that the community understands the impact of our declining enrollment, particularly on our levels of service,” Riley said.

Since 2010, the district has closed three elementary schools. In 2022, the district released a plan to close six elementary schools due to budget constraints, but only closed one after objections from families.

District staff say the closures are not due to budget constraints, but an effort to streamline services to better reflect the current number of students.

Chief Operating Officer Jim Anderson declined to predict which schools will close or how many. Anderson said the district will take six months to engage the community before making decisions.

“We really are trying to get feedback from the community to find out what’s palatable, what’s acceptable, what they’re willing to embrace,” Anderson said. “I think it’s just a little premature to pick a number.”

Anderson said that some buildings may be closed as schools, but leased and repurposed to provide childcare or other needed services. A survey will launch later this month to poll families. Anderson said the school board will begin discussions about closures and consolidations in the fall, and plan to vote on which schools to close by December.

Last year was Alaska’s deadliest on record for opioid overdoses

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 20:47:42 +0000

Crosses represent opioid overdose deaths in Alaska at a 2023 event in Anchorage organized by the David Dylan Foundation. (Rachel Cassandra/AKPM)

More Alaskans died from an opioid overdose last year than ever before, according to preliminary data, and the state reported the nation’s highest per capita increase in opioid overdose deaths.

The numbers are heartbreaking, said Lindsey Kato, the director of Alaska’s Division of Public Health. She said overdose deaths can have a ripple effect of grief, especially in smaller communities.

“I’ve lost many friends to the opioid epidemic, family members, etc.,” Kato said. “Personally these numbers are absolutely heartbreaking. Professionally, these numbers are heartbreaking. But I also know that we’re up against a lot.”

There were 342 fatal opioid overdoses reported in Alaska in 2023, according to the division. That’s about a 45% rise from the year before. The increase comes as Alaska scrambles to respond to an epidemic that continues to shift form.

The first wave of the opioid epidemic stemmed from overprescription of painkillers, and in the second wave, people already addicted shifted to heroin when prescription pill supply was reduced. This current, third wave is driven by synthetic opioids like fentanyl. It’s up to a hundred times more potent than morphine and supply is seemingly unlimited compared to drugs like heroin or cocaine which rely on crops and are limited by growing seasons. In a state without enough access to substance abuse treatment, Alaskans remain vulnerable to both addiction and overdose.

But organizations throughout Alaska are working to reduce the number of people dying from overdose, through education, connection to services and distribution of Naloxone and Kloxxado, which can reverse an overdose temporarily.

Kato said the state gave out more than 46,000 overdose reversal kits last year and without those, she said, the number of people dying would have been higher.

“I don’t want those that have been working so hard in this space to feel like they have not accomplished something,” Kato said. “I think the one thing I found out in this field is that we hardly [ever] get to know the number of lives that we save.”

Kato said opioid reversal drugs are essential for reducing deaths; most overdoses happen with someone else present.

Dr. Sarah Spencer, an addiction medicine specialist in Ninilchik, said she’s noticed most of her patients now combine methamphetamine with fentanyl, which can be more risky. She said it’s a common misconception that stimulants like methamphetamine can keep someone from overdosing on opioids.

“Fentanyl in particular is like a very incredibly potent, super fast acting respiratory depressant,” Spencer said. “A stimulant [is] not able to make a difference in that. It’s just not strong enough to actually help to keep the person awake.”

Spencer said people sometimes take fentanyl in a powder form but most often in counterfeit blue pills. Seven in 10 counterfeit pills in the country now have a potentially-lethal dose of fentanyl and she said people can overdose when smoking fentanyl too.

Spencer said many populations within Alaska don’t have enough access to addiction treatment including people who are incarcerated. She said the state doesn’t do a good job of getting medications for treating opioid addiction to them and it would be one of the biggest ways to reduce overdose rates in the state.

“They are 120 times more likely to die [in the] first two weeks that they’re released,” Spencer said. “It would reduce our state’s entire overdose rate if we had universal availability of medication for opioid use disorder throughout a person’s incarceration, and that warm handoff to treatment afterwards.”

In 2022, 11% of overdoses in the state were people recently released from incarceration and those numbers haven’t been released yet for last year.

Kato said that’s something on the Division of Public Health’s radar and they hope to strengthen relationships with the state’s Department of Corrections. She also said the state needs to think beyond just reducing deaths, and look at prevention.

“How are we focused on helping people thrive, not just keeping people alive?” Kato asked. “How do we go a little bit more upstream in our prevention, and think more about how we can keep people healthy?”

The state plans to release final data on opioid overdoses in Alaska in September, including which demographics were hit hardest. Kato said she also wants to look carefully at how youth are impacted.

Juneau seeks proposals to fill space in closing schools

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 20:26:08 +0000

Students exit the Marie Drake building, which houses the Juneau School District’s alternative high school, Yaaḵoosgé Daakahídi, and Montessori Borealis, on Wednesday, April 24, 2024. (Clarise Larson/KTOO)

The Juneau School District’s plan to close schools and consolidate grades means some buildings will sit empty after the end of the school year. But the City and Borough of Juneau is seeking proposals from community organizations to fill that space.

City Manager Katie Koester said that could mean using it for child care, housing or anything else that might benefit the community.

“These are public facilities, and it’s quite a bit of square footage that’s available. The Assembly is really curious what public benefit these facilities could bring,” she said.

The two buildings that will be open for proposals are Floyd Dryden Middle School in the Mendenhall Valley and the Marie Drake building downtown. Since voting to take over those buildings, the Juneau Assembly has openly discussed using one of them as a new home for City Hall.

Koester said that’s still an option, but the Assembly is currently leaning toward moving all City Hall employees to the building that houses the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation instead.

That plan still needs to be finalized and approved by the Assembly.

“Those negotiations will take some time. So I don’t consider that like a final decision from the Assembly,” she said. “They definitely are leaning that way. But they also want to see what the other uses could be for Marie Drake and Floyd Dryden.”

Koester said the city will consider factors like how much the proposals for those buildings would cost the city — along with space and parking needs. She says those factors could also inform the Assembly’s decision on where it might move City Hall.

Interested organizations can submit proposals using a form on the city’s website. The deadline is May 20.

The city will officially take over the buildings on July 1.

King Cove braces for salmon season with no seafood processor amid historic price slump

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 20:06:00 +0000

King Cove in August 2023. (Theo Greenly/KUCB)

The city of King Cove is worried about the future after its seafood processor announced earlier this month that it will cease operations. The plant, formerly owned by Peter Pan Seafood Company, is the economic engine of the community on the Alaska Peninsula.

A new owner will take over the processing plant, but it’s unclear when the facility will reopen. Kirsten Dobroth is the Alaska reporter for Undercurrent News, which is a commercial fishing and seafood industry trade magazine. She’s been reporting on what this means just ahead of salmon season.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ava White: Why is this plant closing- at least for now?

Kirsten Dobroth: The seafood industry has been struggling with this historic slump in wholesale and dockside prices. Back in December, Trident Seafoods announced it would sell four of its shoreside processing plants in Alaska because of this market situation. At the time that was kind of a bombshell that got a lot of attention outside the industry.

And within a few weeks of that announcement Peter Pan Seafood Company also said it would temporarily close its facility in King Cove for winter. That’s noteworthy for a number of reasons – it’s the company’s biggest plant, it processes a number of species year round. But at the time Peter Pan said it would reopen for the summer salmon season.

AW: And it sounds like now that’s not happening.

KD: Right. It was pretty widely reported as time went on that Peter Pan was in some serious financial trouble. And then fast forward to just a few weeks ago – it comes out that Silver Bay Seafoods, which is also a major processor in the state, will take over all four of Peter Pan’s plants as part of this major restructuring plan that’s still being finalized. Silver Bay says in the announcement that it will operate all the Peter Pan plants for the summer – except for King Cove.

Meanwhile, Peter Pan really wasn’t saying anything about what it planned to do with King Cove. But there were some signs that things weren’t looking good – for instance, some fishermen I spoke with were already signing on with other buyers for summer.

And then about two weeks ago the company posted on Facebook that the plant would stay closed and encouraged people to apply to Silver Bay for work. And since then Silver Bay has also confirmed that – at least for now – it doesn’t have plans to open the facility.

AW: Okay, so a lot has happened. Why is this Peter Pan news such a big deal in this whole picture?

KD: There are a few things that are notable about this announcement between Silver Bay and Peter Pan. One is that it’s a major deal between two of the state’s biggest and more recognizable shoreside processors – and one is effectively ending operations altogether less than two months before the start of salmon season, which is the peak time for most processors and fishermen.

Another noteworthy point to the Peter Pan side of this – the current owners only bought the company back in 2021. One of the financial backers of that sale was McKinley Capital Management, which was using money from the Permanent Fund Corporation’s in-state investment program at the time. I don’t know what the implications of that are. But I think when you look at how quickly this company is halting operations – it’s really indicative of how quickly things have changed for one of the state’s biggest industries.

AW: Okay, so let’s go back to King Cove, what does this mean for that community?

KD: The implications for the city of King Cove are huge. I’ve talked to city officials there pretty frequently since early this year and this is a big financial hit for them. More than half King Cove’s general fund budget comes from fishing landing taxes. And I think the ambiguous timeline for reopening has people there worried.

Some hurdles to reopening quickly, though, are deferred maintenance at the facility that need to be addressed. Silver Bay has also said it’s prioritizing absorbing as much of Peter Pan’s fleet as possible, including up in Bristol Bay, where Silver Bay will now operate two processing plants because of this Peter Pan deal. So, that will likely eat up some of the company’s more immediate expenses.

But keeping King Cove closed will have a regional impact, too. Fishermen outside of that local fleet have historically delivered to the King Cove plant depending on the species and price at any given point. So, I think there’s a lot of people that are anxiously awaiting word on when things will be back up and running.

Archaeologists try to answer new questions about first humans in Southeast Alaska

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 20:03:02 +0000

A team of scientists and Alaska Native community members use an autonomous underwater vehicle to explore the continental shelf west of Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska, seeking submerged caves and rock shelters that would have been accessible to early inhabitants of the region. (From NOAA)

A few years ago, a set of 20,000-year-old human footprints in a dry lakebed in New Mexico set scientists reeling. Those fossilized footprints, originally discovered in 2009, called into question what we thought we knew about when people first showed up in North America. Archaeologists thousands of miles away in Alaska felt the scientific impact especially strongly.

A recent paper published in the journal Nature attempts to set a new timeframe of when the first humans might have appeared along the coast of Southeast Alaska, using cave remains and animal fossils from the region.

But it’s just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.

The Nature article caught the attention of Nick Schmuck, an archaeologist with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources. He said how and when people showed up in Alaska and the Americas is a debate that may never be settled in the scientific community.

“It doesn’t take long getting into the literature on this topic to realize that this is really a heated debate,” Schmuck said. “You’ve got folks who are diehards for one idea. You can think about it as paradigms, you know, we all think about a topic in a certain way for a while.”

According to Schmuck, there are many theories in this debate but currently, the most commonly held belief is in the Coastal Migration Theory.

Remember learning about the Bering land bridge in middle school? That’s part of the Coastal Migration Theory, which suggests that after the last Ice Age, early humans migrating from Asia crossed the land bridge between Russia and Alaska in search of food. Then they traveled, either by foot or by boat, down along the coast of Alaska and into the rest of the Americas.

“These people coming into the Americas – doesn’t matter how far back we go – they’re just as capable as you and I. So, they can figure out how to use boats. They were no strangers to rivers and things like that, so, why not the coast?” Schmuck said.

For his own part, Schmuck is a bit of a pluralist. He believes this is one of many potential routes early humans took.

The recent Nature article, “New age constraints for human entry into the Americas on the north Pacific coast” by Martina Steffen, attempts to tighten the parameters of the coastal migration debate. The paper looks at gaps in dates of animal fossils and archaeological sites, including 18 caves and sites in Southeast Alaska.

During the iciest part of the last Ice Age, a massive ice sheet advanced across the western part of the continent and over Prince of Wales Island, the largest island in Southeast. All of that now dry land, buried under thousands of tons of ice. Archaeologists believe that at its peak — known as the “glacial maximum” — about 18,000 years ago, that giant wall of ice would have blocked off any land routes down the coastline. Think of it like a gate that closed for over 1,000 years.

So, the commonly held belief is that people showed up after that, as the glaciers melted from the outside in, revealing land and food to eat.

For Schmuck, it isn’t just the fossil record that supports this post-glacial theory, it’s the spoken record of the descendants of these first people.

“They sound like people coming to an early post-glacial Southeast Alaska,” Schmuck said, describing oral histories. “They talk about coming to a land that’s just a narrow strip of land between the ice and the sea. Like, holy cow! That’s what Southeast Alaska would have been before the trees came in.”

“I think the important thing to remember is that we know that we have been here for at least 12,000 years. We know that from DNA science,” said Kaaháni Rosita Worl, a Lingit anthropologist and president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute.

Worl is a descendant of those first people.

“To me, it affirms our oral traditions that say we’ve been here since time immemorial,” she said.

If the carbon dating was done correctly, and most archaeologists now agree it was, the New Mexico footprints are much older than the signs of human life found in Southeast Alaska. That means the footprints were from someone who was in North America before those giant ice sheets sealed the land shut, which, in turn, means that either the humans that left the New Mexico footprints didn’t cross the Bering land bridge at all or people were here much earlier than Western scientists had thought.

“There had to be another route,” said Worl. “And the coastal route – it opens up and you have resources available that people could live on.”

The footprints changed everything, according to Bryn Letham, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. And of course, he says, there were skeptics. Some made a plausible argument that the carbon-dating was wrong. But as time went on, that didn’t seem to be the case. The White Sands team kept testing the fossils and every time got the same result: that footprint was from someone 21,000-23,000 years ago.

In a 2024 article for PaleoAmerica, Letham wrote that it was breathtaking, but it also raised an existential question for him and his colleagues: “What have we been spending our careers doing?”

Had they been searching in the wrong places? The wrong times?

The footprints in New Mexico started a race among those studying the Pacific Northwest coast. Most of the geologists and archaeologists are united by a common goal — to find the oldest sites of human occupation.

Currently, the earliest signs of life in Southeast Alaska is Shuká Káa – a human skeleton and set of tools from about 10,300 years ago in a cave on Prince of Wales Island.

It’s possible archaeologists just haven’t found older evidence yet, because of the challenges of searching in the forest-covered region.

“I mean, you’ve been in the Tongass, it’s big trees. It’s hard to see very far ahead of you and it’s hard to imagine what the landscape looked like,” said Nick Schmuck, adding though that the technology is improving. Specifically, a method called LiDAR that can map the earth’s topography using pulsed lasers.

“It takes all the trees off and gives you a new map based on the surface. All of the sudden, beach terraces pop out like you wouldn’t believe. And you can just look at the image and say, ‘Oh, there’s an ancient shoreline right here.’ And you can hike right to it. And boom, there’s your 10,000 year old beach with a 10,000 year old site on it.”

Another factor in Southeast Alaska is what one scientist refers to as almost a tectonic seesaw effect. During that glacial maximum, the massive ice sheet that covered the mainland was so heavy that it literally pushed the land down. That caused the outlying islands and land masses further off the mainland to rise up above sea level, like a seesaw.

What this means for Southeast Alaska is that a lot of the oldest evidence of humans is probably either at the top of a mountain or the bottom of the ocean — which is where Kelly Monteleone, an underwater archaeologist with Sealaska Heritage Institute, comes in.

“There’s this huge, vast area that we haven’t explored yet. And so there’s so much we can find,” Monteleone said.

According to Monetleone, her profession is pretty much the same thing as a regular archaeologist. It just involves some extra work.

“Nothing changes between the terrestrial answer and the underwater answer, we just have a much more complicated step every step of the way,” she laughed.

What Monetleone and her team have found on the seafloor, including a fish weir that would have been at sea level more than 10,000 years ago, changes the “when” of coastal migration.

“I see myself as having the resources to help answer the questions of the Indigenous people of Southeast Alaska. So I have the skills as an underwater archaeologist to go out and look in areas to help them learn about their past,” she said.

As Bryn Letham put it, the current people of the coastal First Nations are the descendants of those first post-glacial humans.

Schmuck agreed, saying that in Southeast Alaska, “we’re talking about the ancestors of people who’ve been here for a really long time.”

He acknowledged that archaeology as a profession hasn’t always been a positive force in that regard.

“We don’t want to get too abstract about the people in the past,” he said. “We don’t want to get back into the old faults of archaeology, where we’re just looking at rocks and forgetting to think about people. These are people’s ancestors.”

Letham, Worl, Schmuck, and Monteleone all point out that the Indigenous peoples along the Northwest Coast are strikingly diverse. There are so many languages and cultures in such a condensed area and they are so isolatedly different from each other that it seems like people would’ve had to have been here a lot longer than other parts of the Americas. In other words, it takes a lot of long, sustained time in one place for entire languages and cultures to develop.

On the northwest Pacific coast, there are dozens in close proximity, each distinctly different from the next, which tells anthropologists that people got to Southeast Alaska after the last Ice Age and stayed, splintering off into tribes and isolate cultures over many thousands of uninterrupted years.

These origins are older than people can generally comprehend, predating known forms of agricultural civilization.

“The concept of time at 12,000 years is not a concept that humans can usually digest,” said Moneteleone. “Time immemorial, the beginning of time: 12,000 years ago, 16,000, 20,000 years ago – those are all the beginning of time.”

And while the rest of the world chases after New Mexico’s footprints, Monteleone says that understanding the history of the people of the Northwest Coast is an archaeological field of study that is still in its infancy.

Get in touch with the author at jack@krbd.org.

Net neutrality is back: U.S. promises fast, safe and reliable internet for all

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 18:47:49 +0000

The Federal Communications Commission has restored net neutrality rules that ban content providers from restricting bandwidth to customers. (Photo by Michael Bocchieri/Getty Images)

Consumers can look forward to faster, safer and more reliable internet connections under the promises of newly reinstated government regulations.

The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 on Thursday to reclassify broadband as a public utility, such as water and electricity — to regulate access to the internet. The move to expand government oversight of internet service providers comes after the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the magnitude of the digital divide, forcing consumers to rely on high-speed internet for school and work, as well as social and health support.

Because the government deems internet access an essential service, the FCC is promising oversight as if broadband were a public utility. In doing so, the government aims to make providers more accountable for outages, require more robust network security, protect fast speeds, and require greater protections for consumer data.

The decision effectively restores so-called net neutrality rules that were first introduced during the Obama administration in 2015 and repealed two years later under President Trump.

The rules are sure to invite legal challenges from the telecoms industry — not for the first time. And a future administration could always undo the rules.

Meanwhile, net neutrality regulations are set to go into effect 60 days after their publication in the Federal Register.

But much has yet to be clarified about the rules: The 400-page draft order to restore the regulations has not been publicly released.

Here’s what we do know.

What’s net neutrality?

Net neutrality is a wonky term for the idea that the flow of information on the internet should be treated equally and that internet service providers can’t interfere with what consumers do online.

Also referred to as an “open internet,” net neutrality aims to level the digital marketplace, prohibiting internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast and AT&T from running fast lanes and slow lanes — speeding up or slowing down internet speeds — for online services like Netflix and Spotify.

What’s this latest battle about?

Without the net neutrality regulations in place, phone and internet companies have the power to block or favor some content over others. The issue has pit telecom companies against Big Tech. Net neutrality advocates — tech companies, consumer watchdogs and free speech activists among them — warn that without such regulations, broadband providers are incentivized to charge customers more to use internet fast lanes or else risk being stuck with slower speeds.

In recent years, the issue has largely become a partisan one. In 2015, the President Obama-appointed FCC chair ushered in the approval of net neutrality rules. Those rules were repealed two years later under President Trump after his pick to run the FCC called them “heavy-handed” in his pledge to end them.

Now, the return of FCC regulations has reinvigorated the net neutrality debate.

“Every consumer deserves internet access that is fast, open and fair,” FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said ahead of Thursday’s vote. “This is common sense.”

As in 2015, the rules classify broadband as a utility service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.

The measure passed along party lines, with Democratic commissioners in favor of net neutrality and Republicans opposed.

What critics are saying

Opponents say the net neutrality rules are government overreach and interfere with commerce. In a letter to FCC chair Rosenworcel this week, a group of Republican lawmakers said the draft order to restore net neutrality regulations would chill innovation and investment in the broadband industry.

Dissenting FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Republican, said that fears of a sluggish or pricey internet without the rules were overblown — that consumers benefited from faster speeds and lower prices since the repeal. Net neutrality advocates dispute the argument that broadband rates dropped when net neutrality went away, saying the numbers are misleading.

“There will be lots of talk about ‘net neutrality’ and virtually none about the core issue before the agency: namely, whether the FCC should claim for itself the freewheeling power to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions — from the services that consumers can access to the prices that can be charged,” Carr said in October, when the Biden administration proposed restoring net neutrality.

Some telecom companies argue that the FCC is trying to solve a nonexistent problem in its stated aim to preserve equal internet access for consumers.

“This is a nonissue for broadband consumers, who have enjoyed an open internet for decades,” said Jonathan Spalter, the CEO of USTelecom, a trade group that represents ISPs such as AT&T and Verizon, in a statement following the vote to hand regulatory authority back to the FCC.

“We plan to pursue all available options, including in the courts,” the group said.

What’s happened when net neutrality went away?

What ended up happening in the years after the rollback went into effect in 2018 was so discreet that most people unlikely noticed its effects, says Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick, who directs the school’s Center for Internet and Society and supports net neutrality.

For the past six years, she says, “a lot of public scrutiny on the ISPs and then the attempts to bring back net neutrality in Congress basically kept the ISPs on their best behavior.”

Still, there were changes. Some ISPs implemented zero-rating plans, the practice of excluding some apps from data charges, she notes, or were caught throttling — intentionally slowing down consumer internet speeds.

Absent heightened federal regulation, tough net neutrality rules that sprang up in several states, including California, Washington and Oregon, also have continued to keep internet service providers in check.

“It’s still being litigated,” van Schewick says. “And so, it is fair to say we haven’t seen a world without net neutrality.”

Watch our Anchorage Mayoral Runoff Debate 2024

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 18:11:04 +0000

Anchorage’s mayoral race is headed towards a runoff between incumbent Dave Bronson and Suzanne LaFrance. See how these candidates’ plans for Alaska’s largest city differ in a debate moderated by Alaska Public Media News Director Lori Townsend and Anchorage Daily News Opinion Editor Tom Hewitt. Watch the 2024 Anchorage Mayoral Runoff Debate live on Thursday, May 2, from 7 to 8 p.m.

Here’s how to watch and listen:
Television
Alaska Public Media TV (KAKM 7.1)
KTOO 360TV
Online Livestream
Alaska Public Media on YouTube
Alaska Public Media on Facebook
Radio
Alaska Public Media Radio (KSKA FM 91.1)

Air Force wants to build 9 Interior radar facilities for training exercises

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 18:05:28 +0000

Three of nine proposed Air Force radar sites for training pilots over the eastern Interior would be built in Army-managed areas, with a fourth on Air Force land. (From U.S. Air Force)

Eielson Air Force Base officials want to build nine radar sites around the eastern Interior for military pilots to use for training. And they’re asking for public comments on their proposal, which must be submitted by the end of next week.

Lt. Col. Jay Doerfler, the commander of Eielson’s 354th Range Squadron, said the nine radars near the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex would replace facilities that use technology developed decades ago by the Soviet Union. He said pilots flying advanced aircraft, like F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters based at Eielson, need the newer radars to train for facing possible 21st-century adversaries such as China and Russia.

“Our own capabilities, as well as our adversaries’ capabilities, are getting better every day,” Doerfler said. “And in order to train to accommodate those changes, we just need to modernize what we do here out in the JPARC and in Alaska.”

JPARC is a series of training areas mainly clustered around the eastern Interior that provide some 77,000 square miles of airspace for pilot training. The nine new radars would be located outside of JPARC, in a area bounded roughly by the Alaska and Richardson highways between the Alaska Range and the Yukon-Tanana river uplands. Doerfler said that corridor would allow for more real-world training scenarios.

“Building these new sites allow for our incorporation of the new systems,” he said, “but also spreading those out over a larger area to better represent a potential environment in which we may fight.”

Three of the radars would be built in Army-managed areas and one on Air Force land. Another would be built on Birch Hill, in the Fairbanks North Star Borough, and four on lands managed by the State of Alaska. Those include Pogo Hill, near the Pogo mine; Quartz Hill, near Quartz Lake; Dry Creek, south of the Gerstle River; and Tok Hill, just south of Tok.

According to a Draft Environmental Assessment Eielson issued last month, each 20-acre site would be cleared. Access roads would be built to them, and some would have power lines added.

“In general,” Doerfler said, “these locations could be as large as about a 500-by-500 foot area, and could be smaller, depending on what systems we end up putting where.”

But some people who live and recreate in and around those areas don’t like the prospect of them being developed and opened to entry. Like Mindy Eggleston, a Delta Junction resident who owns a 5-acre homesite next to the Macomb Plateau, where the Dry Creek radar would be built.

“This unique, pristine, non-motorized hunting area is home to the Macomb caribou herd and abundant wildlife,” she said.

Eggleston says she and husband, Gene, homesteaded the property in 1973. They’ve since moved into town, but they and many others often hunt and hike and berry-pick in the area, located about 40 miles south of Delta.

“Over the past 51 years, landowners of this rural area have been really good neighbors and stewards of this precious land,” she said.

Development of the site, she added, would permanently alter the area and bring an influx of people and off-road vehicles that would disrupt life for dozens of residents there.

“The mapping for the proposed project shows the road from the east fork of Dry Creek bordering private properties and creating access to rural cabins,” she said.

Eggleston says she’s also concerned about the impact of the radars on caribou that live around the Macomb Plateau. The herd was open to nonmotorized and subsistence hunting until recent years, when state Department of Fish and Game officials restricted the harvest due to the animals’ declining population.

She said most residents of Dry Creek and nearby communities oppose construction of the radars there. And they think the Air Force should find another site for the facility.

“I would ask them in the least moving the site to an area that won’t provide motorized access to the plateau,” she said.

Eggleston has submitted comments outlining her concerns to the Air Force, and she’s urging others to do the same. Comments may be submitted to Eielson’s 354th Fighter Wing Public Affairs office at 907-377-2110, by email at 354fw.pa.publicaffairs@us.af.mil, or through postal mail to 354 Broadway Ave, Unit 15A, Eielson AFB, AK 99702.

The deadline to submit comments is May 3.

Feds approve disaster declaration for 2022 Kuskokwim salmon fisheries

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 17:34:42 +0000

A drift net being deployed on the Kuskokwim River in August 2021. (Elyssa Loughlin/KYUK)

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has approved a federal disaster declaration for the Kuskokwim River because of the failure of multiple salmon fisheries in 2022.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy requested a disaster declaration from federal authorities for 2022 chinook, chum, and coho fisheries on the Kuskokwim after the fisheries experienced a 100 percent loss in commercial revenue and significant economic and cultural losses due to a depressed subsistence fishery.

The declaration makes the fisheries eligible for a yet-to-be-determined amount of disaster assistance. It also could allow tribal organizations and businesses to access loans or other federal funding programs to recoup losses because of the fisheries’ failures.

NOAA Fisheries announced that the 2022 Kuskokwim fisheries disaster was approved alongside two other fisheries disasters: one for chum and coho fisheries in Puget Sound in 2021, and another for Upper Cook Inlet salmon setnet fisheries in 2021 and 2022.

The declaration is one of a series of recent disaster determinations for fisheries on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The federal government has declared disasters for 2020 and 2021 fisheries on both the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers.

Haines residents could weigh in on divisive dock project

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 17:17:16 +0000

Haines’ Lutak Dock (Courtesy R&M Consultants)

Should questions about Haines’ $25 million Lutak Dock project be put to a public vote? A proposal for a special election is now officially on the table.

For years Haines Borough officials have been debating how to rebuild the aging Lutak Dock, the borough’s main cargo transit point. Soon the question could come before voters.

A split Haines Borough Assembly voted on Tuesday to move one step closer to scheduling a special election on what kind of dock the town wants. A referendum could be held as soon as July.

The vote would be advisory, meaning borough officials wouldn’t be bound by law to follow the results. Still, Mayor Tom Morphet said he wants to make sure “50 percent plus one of the community” is on board with the project before the borough moves ahead with it.

“I’m standing by the need for a vote on this thing because I’m tired of it, quite frankly,” Morphet said. “I’m tired of it consuming all the time of us. I’m tired of losing sleep over it. I’m pretty set on giving it to the voters.”

A referendum would come after years of disagreement over how to manage the $25 million project and how to spend a $20 million federal grant awarded to the borough in 2021. Last month, the Maritime Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation, called MARAD for short, extended a key deadline for the project, giving the borough an extra three years to sign a grant agreement.

The project has roiled local politics in Haines, after a contractor bought nearly $10 million of steel based on a design questioned by newly elected borough leaders. In February MARAD refused to reimburse Haines for the purchase, saying local officials could accept a grant reduced by the steel’s cost or continue with the original grant but commit to obtaining new steel.

Still, borough manager Annette Kreitzer said if the assembly wants to put the issue to a public vote, it should do so sooner than later. If voters opt for a new design, the contractor overseeing the project, Turnagain Marine Construction, would have to submit a white paper to MARAD explaining the change. According to borough officials, MARAD is open to considering an alternative, but there’s no guarantee the agency would follow the outcome of a special election.

“I just don’t want people to think that if there’s a public vote then MARAD will agree with that scope change,” Kreitzer said.

The proposed ballot measure, which the assembly forwarded to the borough’s Government Affairs and Services Committee for review, would give residents a choice between two different dock designs. One would be the borough’s current plan to encapsulate the old dock with steel and to retain its size and function. The other would be a smaller alternative that would accommodate freight and fuel barges but not larger cargo ships.

Exactly what that second option would look like isn’t clear, though the proposed ballot question describes it as “utilizing a rubble slope instead of a steel retaining wall”; Morphet said he has asked critics of the current plan, who are concerned that the dock could be used to ship ore from future mines in the Chilkat Valley or the Yukon Territory, to identify a scaled-down design to put on the ballot.

The lack of clarity about details — not just about the alternative design but also about the costs associated with both options — caused concern at last night’s meeting. Assembly members Natalie Dawson and Gabe Thomas expressed hesitation about moving ahead with a vote before questions about cost estimates and other specifics had been addressed. Both voted against advancing the proposal, as did assembly member Debra Schnabel.

“How do we bring something to the community and say ‘Hey, you’re going to vote on this or this’ without having everything drafted out?” Thomas said. “We spent years to get to where we’re at, to figure out the price right now.”

Morphet, whose vote in favor of the proposal broke a 3-3 tie, said if details couldn’t be ironed out by July, the question could be put on the general election ballot in October.

An election also could give voters a chance to weigh in on other aspects of the dock project, not just design. The assembly’s proposal includes two additional questions: whether to prohibit the shipment of ore across Lutak Dock and whether borough infrastructure projects costing over $15 million should require voter approval.

Meanwhile, a separate law that would require all ore shipped through Haines to be in sealed containers is scheduled for a final public hearing on May 14. The assembly amended that proposed ordinance Tuesday to define a sealed container as one with a hard, locked, and waterproof lid that prevents material from escaping.

The assembly also on Tuesday paused a plan to charge mining, tourism, logging, and TV companies annual fees for operating in the Historic Dalton Trail Road Maintenance Service Area, the region across the Klehini River from Haines Highway. The assembly sent a proposed commercial fee schedule to the borough’s Commerce Committee for further review. The fees would be used to pay for maintaining roads in the area, such as Porcupine Road and Chilkat Lake Road.

Finally, the borough’s chief financial officer Jila Stuart reported Tuesday that the borough collected about $4.3 million in sales tax revenue in 2023. That’s down 1 percent from 2022, but significantly up from years before that. The biggest changes were in revenue from auto and gas sales — which dropped 15 percent between 2022 and 2023 — and online sales — which went up by 17 percent.

Report portrays mixed picture of Alaska’s huge seafood industry

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 16:37:40 +0000

Low clouds hang over Kodiak’s St. Paul Harbor on Oct. 3, 2022. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)

The Alaska seafood industry remains an economic juggernaut, but it is under strain from forces outside of the state’s control, according to a new report commissioned by the state’s seafood marketing agency.

The report from the McKinley Research Group, titled The Economic Value of Alaska’s Seafood Industry, is the latest in a periodic series commissioned by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

The total economic value of the Alaska seafood industry in 2021 and 2022 was $6 billion, slightly more than the $5.6 billion tallied in 2019, the last full year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the new report and the previous version published in 2022.

Along with that good news, the McKinley Research Group’s report contains a warning about the industry’s economic future.

A price collapse in 2023 bodes ill for the industry, the report said. While the dollar and employment totals did not use 2023 data, the report included specific information about one of the main fisheries affected.

For sockeye salmon, prices paid to fishers delivering their catches were, on average, less than half of what they were paid in 2022, the report said. That price — called the ex-vessel price — averaged 65 cents last year. It was the lowest nominal price since 2004 “and among the lowest prices on record when adjusted for inflation,” the report said.

The reasons for the price collapses were multiple, the report said.

Because of inflation, consumer demand dropped, notably in the United States, where it fell below pre-pandemic levels. A strong dollar and weak yen made Alaska seafood prices less competitive in Japan, a key market, the report said. There was a large amount of 2022 harvested fish leftover as inventory, making wholesalers and retailers less inclined to buy fish in 2023, the report said. And the global supply of key species like pink salmon and pollock increased dramatically, notably from Russia but also in Alaska, the report said.

The report contains some mixed statistics on markets.

Alaska supplied 60% of U.S.-produced seafood, based on the 2021 and 2022 data, and if it were an independent nation, it would rank No. 9 as a global supplier of wild seafood, the report said. Yet Alaska provided only 1.8% of the global supply, on average, during those years.

While Alaska’s wild salmon and crab are considered premium products, fish from Alaska accounted for only 9% of the world salmon market and 9% of the world crab market, the report said. Competition from farmed salmon and wild Russian salmon dominates that market, according to the report. Much of the world market for crab is claimed by king crab from Russia – the world’s top king crab producer – and snow crab from Canada. The global crab market was affected by Alaska harvest closures, the report noted. Those closures were triggered by stock crashes in the Bering Sea.

For Alaska seafood in total, the U.S. domestic market was the top consumer destination, accounting for about $2 billion worth of product annually, the report said. The second-biggest market as of 2021 and 2022 was Japan, which took in $650 million worth of Alaska seafood annually, the report said.

Alaska halibut is advertised at Ivar’s Pier 54 Fish Bar in Seattle on Oct. 24, 2023. The U.S. domestic market is the top destination for Alaska seafood. But U.S. demand for seafood dropped in 2023. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)

Salmon accounted for 40% of the value of commercially harvested seafood, while pollock was the top-quantity fish, accounting for 59% of the harvested volume in 2021 and 2022, the report said.

The seafood industry, between harvesters, processors and managers, accounted for 48,000 jobs on average in 2021 and 2022, equivalent to 29,100 full-time positions, the report said. That is a reduction from the 62,200 total jobs in 2019, the equivalent of 37,400 full-time positions.

The industry’s economic performance varied by region.

Total employment in all regions of the state was down from 2019 levels, the new report said, but one region was particularly hard-hit: the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim region, where Western Alaska salmon runs have been faltering and some harvests have closed.

In 2021 and 2021, there were 1,100 people employed in commercial fisheries across that wide swath of Alaska, working the equivalent of 300 full-time jobs, the report said. In 2019, there were 3,100 people working in commercial fishing in that region, amounting to an equivalent of 1,300 full-time jobs, the previous report said.

Jeremy Woodrow, ASMI’s executive director, emphasized the positive signs in this year’s report.

“The brand of Alaska Seafood is cherished among consumers. The variety and superior quality of products Alaska has to offer is unmatched. Research shows that consumers strongly prefer wild seafood to farmed, they want to add more sustainable seafood to their routines, and they place a high value on the health benefits of seafood,” Woodrow said in a statement. “Alaska has the most passionate fleet behind this industry and we will weather this storm together and come out stronger on the other side.”

To address the looming problems, the Alaska Legislature is calling for a special task force to be created and, by Jan. 21, 2025, produce recommendations for action.

The task force concept is detailed in a measure, Senate Concurrent Resolution 10. It passed the Senate without opposition on April 19, and on Thursday, it cleared its first House committee, the House Special Committee on Fisheries, also without opposition.

At that committee hearing, a representative of a region of the state heavily dependent on commercial fisheries expressed strong support for the task force plan.

Ernie Weiss, natural resources director for Aleutians East Borough, testified from Anchorage about the hardships the residents there are enduring.

“Fisheries and communities in our region are in an unprecedented crisis. Fishermen are losing markets, in some cases not being paid for last year’s catch, and processing plants (are) closing or for sale,” he said.

He mentioned the closure of the seafood plant in the fishing community of King Cove.

“The current plant closing is devastating for this community, a community known for its resilience. But this is stretching the bounds of what is possible for the people of King Cove,” he said.

It is the first closure of the King Cove plant in more than a century of operation other than a closure made necessary by a 1976 fire that destroyed the facility, Weiss said. At that time, local fishers made do by for a while by delivering their fish elsewhere, and the King Cove plant was rebuilt relatively quickly, he said. This time, the outcome is uncertain.

Alaska News Nightly: Thursday, April 25, 2024

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 01:48:58 +0000

Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, sits at his desk in the Alaska House of Representatives on Jan. 16, 2024. (Eric Stone/Alaska Public Media)

Thursday on Alaska News Nightly:

The number of Alaskans dying from opioid overdose is accelerating faster than anywhere in the country. Plus, a planned graphite mine draws environmental concerns from Nome residents. And, tribes in Southeast plan to open an Indigenous language and culture immersion school.

Reports tonight from:

Rachel Cassandra, Wesley Early and Tim Rockey in Anchorage
Anna Canny, Clarise Larson and Eric Stone in Juneau
Jack Darrell in Ketchikan
Ben Townsend in Nome
Angela Denning in Petersburg

This episode of Alaska News Nightly is hosted by Casey Grove, with audio engineering from Chris Hyde and producing from Tim Rockey.

King Cove braces for salmon season with no seafood processor amid historic price slump

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 01:06:55 +0000

King Cove in August 2023. (Theo Greenly/KUCB)

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ava White: Why is this plant closing- at least for now?

AW: And it sounds like now that’s not happening.

AW: Okay, so a lot has happened. Why is this Peter Pan news such a big deal in this whole picture?

AW: Okay, so let’s go back to King Cove, what does this mean for that community?

Alaska Sports Hall of Fame | Outdoor Explorer

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 23:38:38 +0000

Eagle River’s multi-sport athlete Bobby Hill. (Image courtesy of Alaska Sports Hall of Fame)

On this Outdoor Explorer host Lisa Keller sits down with Harlow Robinson, executive director of Healthy Futures and the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame. On April 30, the Hall will induct the class of 2024. Harlow tells us about the people and the moment that comprise this year’s class, as well as the annual Director’s Awards and the popular 100 Miles in May.

HOST: Lisa Keller

GUEST: Harlow Robinson, executive director, Healthy Futures and the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame

LINKS:
Alaska Sports Hall of Fame
Healthy Futures 100 Miles in May

Supreme Court appears skeptical of blanket immunity for a former president

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 21:36:00 +0000

The Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday about whether a president enjoys broad immunity from criminal prosecution after leaving office. (Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A majority of the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of granting a president blanket immunity from prosecution for criminal acts. But it was unclear whether the court would act swiftly to resolve the case against former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

The justices pushed lawyers for Trump and the special counsel prosecuting him over the limits of presidential immunity, but much of their questioning appeared to center on broad implications for the presidency — rather than what it would mean for Trump.

“We’re writing a rule for the ages,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said.

Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, asked whether a president might curtail his own actions if he could be prosecuted for actions taken while in office.

“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” he asked.

The question of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution after leaving office has never been decided by the Supreme Court, making Thursday’s arguments at the Supreme Court genuinely historic. Specifically, Trump claims that the steps he took to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election were part of his official duties and that he thus cannot be criminally prosecuted for them.

John Sauer, Trump’s attorney, said charging a president might make that president more hesitant about making consequential decisions.

“If a president can be charged, put on trial and imprisoned for his most consequential decisions as soon as he leaves office, that looming threat will distort the president’s decision-making, precisely when bold and fearless action is most needed,” he said.

When pressed by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, Sauer acknowledged that many of the actions the former president is charged with were private in nature — not official — and hence not subject to immunity.

But several of the justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, appeared concerned that lower courts that have ruled on the matter did not distinguish between Trump’s official and private actions.

“What concerns me is, as you know, the court of appeals did not get into a focused consideration of what acts we’re talking about or what documents we’re talking about,” Roberts said.

Michael Dreeben, the lawyer for the special counsel, told the justices that blanket immunity would allow a president to commit “bribery, treason, sedition, murder.”

“The Framers knew too well the dangers of a king who could do no wrong,” he said.

But he was subject to intense questioning from the court’s conservatives.

A decision in the case is expected by the summer and could affect the timeline — and indeed the fate — of the federal prosecution against Trump. After Thursday’s argument, it appeared that any Trump trial will be held — if it is held at all — after the presidential election.

Basics and background on the case

President Richard Nixon, while in office, was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Watergate scandal, but he was not prosecuted then because the Justice Department concluded that under the Constitution, a sitting president could not be criminally prosecuted. Once Nixon resigned in 1974, however, and was no longer protected as a sitting president, he accepted a pardon from President Gerald Ford rather than face criminal charges.

Trump is making a far broader argument for immunity. He contends that he cannot be prosecuted — ever — for his “official acts” as president unless he is first impeached, convicted by the Senate and removed from office. He was impeached twice, but the Senate was not able to muster the two-thirds vote needed to convict. So, were the Supreme Court to embrace Trump’s argument, it would mean, given modern political realities, that he and future presidents would likely be immune from prosecution after leaving office.

Trump’s definition of a protected official act is a broad one, as illustrated by an exchange between Sauer, his lawyer, and Judge Florence Pan during arguments at the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.

“Could a president order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?” Pan asked, noting that an order given by the commander in chief to the military would be an official act.

Sauer replied that a former president could not be charged for giving such an order unless he had been “impeached and convicted first.”

The three-judge appeals court panel, including two Democratic and one Republican appointee, ruled unanimously against Trump on the immunity question in February. Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court, though the former president was not there Thursday because he is required to be at his New York trial on charges that allege that he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information to influence the 2016 presidential election.

A test for the high court

Although four criminal indictments are pending against Trump, only one was before the Supreme Court on Thursday: special counsel Jack Smith’s case alleging that Trump knowingly and falsely sought to prevent Biden, the duly elected president, from taking office.

The high court case is more than a test for presidential immunity. It is also something of a test for the Supreme Court itself, on both substance and timing. After all, even if the court were to rule against Trump, if the justices drag their feet or send the case back to the trial court for significant further findings, a Trump trial would be almost certainly impossible before the November election. And if he is elected for a second time, Trump could try to dismiss the case against him — or even pardon himself if he were convicted.

Trump lawyer William Scharf maintains that everything the former president is accused of doing was an official act and that after leaving office, Trump cannot be prosecuted for those acts. “What President Trump was trying to do was investigate election fraud in the aftermath of the 2020 election,” Scharf says.

Without presidential immunity, Scharf contends, “you end up in a scenario where presidents will be paralyzed by the fear of post-election criminal prosecutions, and the ability of the president to discharge his duties in a vigorous and effective way will be forever crippled.”

Not so, counters Peter Keisler, who served as a top Justice Department official in President George W. Bush’s administration: “You don’t protect the presidency by immunizing somebody who tries to steal it.”

Keisler has joined with several dozen high-ranking former Republican officeholders in filing a Supreme Court brief opposed to Trump’s position.

“The text of the Constitution has no provision granting this immunity. No court decision has ever recognized this immunity. The historical understanding in our country has always been exactly the opposite,” Keisler says. “Fundamentally, Trump’s argument’s just at war with the basic precept of our system that says that no one’s above the law.”

New York University law professor Trevor Morrison also pushes back at Trump’s claim that his actions surrounding the 2020 election were part of a president’s official duties. “The Constitution gives the president no role whatsoever in the administration of federal elections,” says Morrison, adding that the states, Congress and even the vice president play a role. But there is no mention in the Constitution of the president playing a role.

As for Trump’s claim that no president can be prosecuted unless he has first been impeached, convicted and removed from office, Morrison calls that argument “preposterous.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell clearly rejected that idea when he voted against conviction in the second Trump impeachment. “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office,” McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. “We have a criminal justice system in this country … and former presidents are not immune.”

But Trump lawyer Scharf contends that if the Supreme Court doesn’t put a stop to presidential liability now, “you’ll have an endless cycle of recriminations and prosecutions at the end of every presidency.” If Trump can be prosecuted after leaving office for what he did in seeking to void the election results, he says, then why not Biden for his handling of the border, Barack Obama for ordering drone strikes that resulted in American casualties and George W. Bush for starting the Iraq War?

Trump rests much of his argument on a 1982 Supreme Court decision holding that presidents have absolute immunity from civil lawsuits for their official acts. But the court majority in that case emphasized that it was not deciding whether a similar immunity exists when it comes to criminal prosecutions.

The Trump briefs don’t include any significant discussion of the Nixon tapes case

In that landmark decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over to prosecutors specific White House tape recordings in which Nixon, then still president, plotted to cover up various campaign crimes, including the attempted bugging of the Democratic National Committee offices. When the White House tapes eventually became public, they led inexorably to a House committee vote to approve articles of impeachment and then Nixon’s ultimate resignation.

Still, Thursday’s case is not a slam dunk for the prosecutors. NYU’s Morrison says it’s “significant” that three members of the court — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh — previously served in the White House and were “responsible for attending to questions of presidential prerogatives and presidential power.”

Kavanaugh has been on both sides of these issues. He played an important role in the special counsel’s investigation of the sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton, but more importantly, he served first as associate counsel and then, for three years, as staff secretary for President George W. Bush.

With that in mind, the brief filed by the group of former Republican officeholders has advanced something of a middle ground. It rejects presidential immunity for federal crimes undertaken by a president on or after Election Day in order to usurp the legitimate results of a democratic election.

On “the particular facts of the case, where the charge is that he unlawfully tried to seize the presidency after losing the election, it’s sufficient to say there’s certainly no presidential immunity … for crimes like that,” says Keisler.

That would leave undecided tricky immunity questions involving presidential decisions centered on foreign relations or use of the military abroad.

Amendment banning kids under 14 from social media passes Alaska House with bipartisan support

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 21:06:43 +0000

Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, center, sits at his desk in the Alaska House of Representatives on Jan. 16, 2024. (Eric Stone/Alaska Public Media)

The Alaska House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a proposal that would bar children under 14 from creating social media accounts. The measure came as an amendment to an otherwise unrelated bill that would require adult websites to verify users are 18 or older.

Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, said he drew inspiration for the social media measure from an unlikely source — a conservative Republican governor thousands of miles away.

“This amendment is based almost verbatim on a bill signed into law last month in Florida drafted by Gov. Ron DeSantis,” Gray told colleagues during the late-night session. “Verbatim” might be a stretch — the 20-page Florida bill came to the Alaska House as a three-page amendment.

But the concept is the same. The amendment would ban kids under 14 from creating accounts on social media platforms. If the amendment survives the remainder of the legislative process in the House and Senate and is signed into law, 14- and 15-year-olds would need written parental consent to create an account. People under 14 would have their existing accounts deleted.

“According to the US Surgeon General, nearly 40% of children eight to 12 years old, and 95% of children 13 to 17 years old, use social media apps,” Gray said, referencing a 2023 report from the nation’s top doctor. “Teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media double their risk of depression and anxiety.”

And his colleagues agreed. The Alaska House of Representatives approved the amendment in a 27-11 bipartisan vote Wednesday night.

The amendment is attached to a bill that the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, listed as a priority for the last few weeks of the legislative session — a measure that would require adult websites to use a “commercially reasonable age verification method” to ensure users are 18 or older. Similar age verification bills have passed in more than a dozen other states.

Gray is a member of the mostly Democratic and independent House minority caucus, making the sequence of events fairly unusual — typically, when a bill comes to the floor, members of the 23-person Republican-led House majority caucus line up to defend the bill as written.

But every so often, an issue emerges that exposes cracks in the facade. And the social media ban for kids quickly picked up steam.

Soon after Gray introduced the amendment, Rep. Jesse Sumner, R-Wasilla, stood up to support it — it’s similar to a bill sponsored by the House Labor and Commerce Committee, which Sumner leads.

And then, one after another, Democrats and independents came out in favor of the social media limits.

“I think that kids need to be given their lives back and to get to know one another in their own neighborhoods, and to have their innocence restored,” said Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage.

“As a mom, I am horrified thinking about my kids being on social media or the internet one day. I think looking out for our kids is not a partisan issue,” said Rep. Jennie Armstrong, D-Anchorage, who also praised DeSantis for “taking the lead on this” issue.

Some of the youngest House lawmakers, though, were split. Rep. Geneveive Mina, D-Anchorage, age 28, recalled encountering troubling content on the bizarro imageboard 4chan as young as 10 years old. She spoke in support of limiting kids’ social media use.

“I don’t usually say that I’m an expert on anything, but I feel like I’m an expert on being a girl on the internet,” Mina told her House colleagues. “I’ve lived this, right? And I think there’s a really important nuance in this conversation when we’re talking about social media and the role that it plays in young women and young girls and the impacts on mental health.”

But Alaska’s youngest sitting lawmaker spoke out against the ban. Twenty-six-year-old Rep. CJ McCormick, D-Bethel, recalled how social media helped him keep in touch with family — and played a key role in pressuring rap star Kendrick Lamar into following through on a promise to visit Bethel after students won a college-prep contest.

“Unfortunately, Kendrick Lamar didn’t want to come out to Alaska, so all we got was a Skype call. But thanks to some rambunctious student council members, we decided to make quite a media storm on Twitter,” McCormick said.

The social media campaign “caught the attention of Taco Bell, who then brought us [NBA star] James Harden, [MTV personality] Sway Calloway, and then it just turned out that Kendrick Lamar was performing at the State Fair, and he actually surprised us and showed up,” he continued.

Rep. David Eastman, R-Wasilla, raised free speech concerns, saying he was concerned the limits on social media were written so broadly that they would keep kids off broad swaths of the internet that allow user-generated content, from Amazon reviews to Google Docs to comments on news websites. Eastman also said age verification requirements could lead websites that don’t want to comply to exclude Alaskans of any age.

Federal judges have blocked similar laws targeting children’s use of social media in Arkansas and Ohio.

Others speaking against the bill, including Vance, the sponsor of the underlying age verification bill, said they were concerned the social media limits hadn’t been studied closely enough by lawmakers.

“The idea may be merited, but the details of the bill have great importance,” Vance said. “We’re not here to pass ideas. We’re here to pass good laws.”

But many of her colleagues rebuffed Vance’s request for more time and the amendment passed with significant bipartisan support. The House is, for now, scheduled to take a final vote on the combined age verification/social media measure on Friday.

Archaeologists try to answer new questions about first humans in Southeast Alaska

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 20:03:02 +0000