Day: May 28, 2026

Ten Years Ago

Borough Approves Group’s Leafletting

A new Religious sign-and-cart operation has been setting up along the Haines waterfront in recent weeks, stirring concerns for some residents. 

A group of Jehovah’s Witnesses have sporadically set up along the waterfront a portable 24-by-15 foot placard on a 37-by-16 foot cart, which they use to distribute nonprofit religious brochures.  

Jehovah’s Witnesses are a Christian denomination known for their door-to-door preaching and aggressive evangelism, a core tenet and duty of their religion. 

Tour operator Joe Ordonez said he recently saw the Jehovah’s Witnesses set up at Lookout Park. “I just really thought nothing like that was allowed. It’s proselytizing,” Ordonez said. 

In years past, Ordonez has seen children selling small trinkets or musicians seeking tips run off for soliciting on public property, so he wondered why the distribution for religious pamphlets was allowed. 

“If you think, from the visitor perspective, they don’t really want people hawking tours in any loud sort of way,” Ordonez said. “It’s not like I lost any sleep over it. I’m in the visitor industry and I think about visitor experience. I’ve seen a lot of things come and go and this was a new twist.”

Twenty Years Ago

Paintballers Compete in Local Tourney

About 60 residents and visitors turned out to watch or participate in Sunday’s Spring Paintball Tournament at Emerson Field.

Will Morrissey, Steven McLaughlin, and Fred Graham took first place among 13 teams participating in the double-elimination contest, which was held among a maze of barricades set up on the field at the junction of Mosquito Lake Road and Haines Highway.

Among those participating were paintball enthusiasts from Juneau and professional snowboarder Travis Rice. 

Dozens turned out to watch the event and enjoy a nice picnic lunch, said Nancy Morrissey. “Organizers are hoping to make this an annual event,” she said. 

Forty Years Ago

Postmasters to Gather in Haines Next Week

Usually there is only one postmaster in each community in the United States, but next week Haines will host between 25 and 30 of them. Postmasters are coming from all over Alaska to attend the 31st annual Convention of the Alaska Chapter of Postmasters of the United States. In addition to postmasters from as far away as Barrow, Eagle, Metlakatla and Gambell on St. Lawrence Island, there will be visitors from Kentucky, Alabama, Washington, D.C., California and Colorado. When given the choice of which of the 51 State conventions (Puerto Rico, too!), most of the postmasters chose Alaska as their first choice. 

“We are honored that Hugh Bates, National President of the NAPUS, elected to come to Haines with his wife, Janie, for the convention,” Postmaster Bill Hartmann said. “Our chapter president, Deane Nelson from Barrow, invited him when we were in Washington, D.C. in February.” 

Bates will be the keynote speaker at the final convention banquet Thursday at the Hotel Halsingland. Most of the meetings and training sessions will be at the Chilkat Center. 

The post This Week in History: Leafletting, paintball tournament and postmasters appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

After pulling the Chilkoot Indian Association out of debt and completing a backlog of audits, tribal administrator Harriet Brouillette was recognized as the 2025 Tribal Administrator of the year. She was presented with the award during the annual Alaska Tribal Administrators Association symposium in April.

Looking back at her time with the Chilkoot Indian Association, Brouillette said that she was the first and only employee in 1995 before she went back to school and took a different position working for the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. 

Then she got a call from an elder telling her it was “time to come home,” Brouillette said, noting that this call came at a time when the tribe was going through a rough time managing Bureau of Indian Affairs funding. Brouillette left the CIA again to work for Klukwan Inc. after a friend of hers told her she had to “jump off this sinking ship” after they had looked at the accounting system.

The struggles came after the federal government offered funding to tribes, which allows them to self-govern programs instead of relying on the Bureau of Indian Affairs to assist them.

“There was a huge learning curve,” Brouillette said. When Brouillette started in 2013, she said that the CIA was about $2.5 million dollars in the red.

“We were on the verge of losing all our federal funding and we were years behind on our audits.” The association is required to conduct federal audits each year, and had not done one in a few years, according to Brouillette. A consultant said that it was a “tangled mess” and that it would take years to get out of, time that Brouillette said they didn’t have. “We need to get out of it now.”

Brouillette said she and staff figured out how to operate federal grants and got audits completed with the goal of getting out of debt. They filed three audits in one year and then the following year filed two audits and “got them all out of the way.” 

With the audit and debt worries resolved and core funding back in place, Brouillette said that CIA started developing new projects including the environmental science, transportation and housing programs. Brouillette estimated that the current budget for the environmental department is in the millions while the transportation department’s budget is “more along the lines of about $3 million.” 

In recent years, Brouillette said the association leveraged funds to purchase the CIA dock as well as open the Taste of Deishu restaurant. Brouillette said the businesses will bring in unencumbered funding that won’t be restricted by the federal government.

“The idea now is for the tribe to become more self-sustaining, instead of relying on grants,” Brouillette said.

Brouillette said it was nice to be recognized for something because Haines is predominantly non-native and not a lot of people “think of this as a native community.” She said CIA has offered language classes and currently teaches subsistence hunting and gathering, and regalia-making. She referred to these activities as “luxuries” because the tribe is at a point where it is stable enough to host these cultural programs.

“They’re like a treat,” she said. 

Brouillette said she mainly looks at big-picture projects and issues, one of those being the ongoing push to include Haines, Tenakee, Petersburg, Wrangell and Ketchikan into the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. A federal amendment to the 1971 Act would include the five communities. By joining ANCSA, these communities would receive recognition from the federal government “so that we could have our own village corporation.”

Brouillette said she hopes the effort to get the five landless tribes added to the ANCSA settlement would help CIA get a “very small portion of our lands” returned. “The Tongass forest is over 17 million acres and we’re just asking for a very tiny portion of that to be returned to us,” she said. 

With this land, “we can subsist and hunt and gather, and maybe find an old growth tree to cut, so that we can build a canoe or carve a totem,”she said. 

Looking towards the future, Brouillett said there are ideas to turn a building on Main Street into a cultural and language center that provides a daycare and childcare setting in addition to after school programming. Additionally, CIA is currently developing a new nonprofit arm to bring in more unencumbered funding to fund cultural education classes. Brouillette said CIA is close to launching the nonprofit.  

“I think that we’ve come a long way,” Brouillette said. “They [ancestors] are holding me up, and I’m holding up my kids and my grandkids. With each generation we become stronger.”

The post Chilkoot Indian Association’s Brouillette named tribal administrator of the year appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

This article was first published by Post Alley.

Early this month, a mobile floating gas station of sorts pulled up alongside the towering cruise ship Star Princess at Seattle’s Pier 91 terminal. For the next eight hours, the refueling crew made news by pumping a large volume of super-cooled natural gas into the bowels of the cruise liner.

The newest cruise ship operated by Princess Cruises is the first oceangoing vessel to be refueled in Seattle with liquefied natural gas (LNG). It could be the start of a new way of fueling the Alaska cruise ships that operate out of Seattle and Vancouver all summer.

“I’m just delighted to see there’s no smoke coming out of the cruise ship. We’re plugged in. We’re burning the cleanest gas you can right now,” Port of Seattle Commissioner Fred Felleman said while observing from an adjacent pier. “Right now, this is about as good as it gets in the industry.”

The steadily-growing fleet of mammoth cruise ships that ply the Inside Passage has a sizable carbon footprint – ship fuel being the biggest single component. Cruise line executives acknowledge that they need to do their part to soften the environmental impact. The major cruise lines in the Alaska market, through their trade association, have committed to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from ship operations by 2050. The challenge until now has been finding an alternative fuel that is cost-competitive and available at scale locally.

Felleman said the Port of Seattle is striving to be the “greenest” cruise homeport. The gleaming floating palace over his shoulder demonstrated a fuel technology that the maritime industry appears to be coalescing around to improve air quality in port communities such as Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver. But the lengthy transition is accompanied by some sniping and griping.

The super-chilled natural gas arrives on a specialized small-scale tanker ship from British Columbia in a multiday journey that underscores the novelty of the alternative marine fuel. Vancouver-based Seaspan Energy acquired three refueling tankers (commonly called bunkering vessels) from a Chinese shipyard to offer ship-to-ship LNG refueling along the West Coast.

“We’ve been held to a very high standard, not only in the construction of these vessels, not only in the crewing and the credentials of the people operating on these vessels, but in the actual play-by-play operations,” said Seaspan Energy President Harly Penner during an online roundtable hosted by the Port of Seattle. “We’re going to make sure it’s done safely.”

Penner appeared to anticipate LNG’s detractors who portray the fuel as acutely risky if spilled, due to its very low temperature. Critics also worry about the wide, devastating impact if an LNG cargo ignited, which Penner said has never happened during ship-to-ship refueling elsewhere in the world.

The U.S. Coast Guard and Seattle Fire Department reviewed and were satisfied with Seaspan’s LNG bunkering plans. A Star Princess passenger posted the safety instructions applicable to passengers on board. The cruise line handout told people assigned to staterooms overlooking the Seaspan tanker to stay off their balconies during the refueling operation and that smoking in the Star Bar would be forbidden while fueling was underway. A Port of Seattle police boat also kept watch a couple hundred yards off the stern of the cruise ship, which has a 4,300-passenger capacity.

Overall, Port of Seattle officials appear to be giving a tempered welcome to LNG as they celebrate what is anticipated to be the busiest Alaska cruise season in port history. Maritime Division Managing Director Stephanie Jones Stebbins said the port is interested because of the “tremendous” reduction in air pollutants, such as diesel particulates and harmful sulfur and nitrogen oxides. But port staff pointedly avoided claiming a global warming mitigation benefit and also told elected commissioners that there are no plans to invest in local infrastructure to supply LNG from shore.

“We know LNG is ultimately a fossil fuel. We view it as a transition fuel,” Jones Stebbins said. “We are looking beyond that to renewable fuels – options like green methanol, renewable natural gas, ammonia, drop-in synthetic fuels, electrification.”

Shipping line TOTE Maritime converted two large cargo ships on the Tacoma-Anchorage circuit to LNG propulsion in 2022. The ships refuel from an adjacent Puget Sound Energy liquefaction and LNG storage facility that remains controversial in Tacoma and has so far failed to attract other marine users.

On the wrong course?

Climate protection campaigners and some political conservatives take issue with the maritime industry’s fuel transition, but for very different reasons.

The environmental group Seattle Cruise Control urged the Port of Seattle to reject LNG-powered ships. The group labels LNG as a “false promise” because activists calculate the carbon footprint of natural gas from “well to wake” to be as bad or worse for the climate than traditional marine fuels. (The math varies in the industry, and some like Penner claim a positive greenhouse gas benefit.)

“The use of LNG will continue harming the climate, lock in obsolete technology, and delay the necessary transition to zero-emissions fuels,” Seattle Cruise Control co-founder Elizabeth Burton said in an email.

Conservative voices, meanwhile, including at the highest levels of the Trump administration, are pushing back on maritime decarbonization because of the potential pass-through costs to consumers.

“Popular fuel alternatives, such as liquefied natural gas and hydrogen, require double to more than triple the tank size of oil. In an industry that monetizes every square foot of space, it’s a costly gamble for regulation that may not come to pass,” wrote opinion columnist Kate Farmer in the Wall Street Journal last month.

Princess Cruises spokesperson Negin Kamali described LNG as “the best readily available fuel that significantly reduces direct greenhouse gas and other emissions and particulate matter now.” Notably, the cruise line barely mentions the dual-fuel capability of its newest vessel in marketing and advertising. The Love Boat’s other amenities get all the love – such as the restaurants, stage shows and luxury staterooms.

This summer, Star Princess is scheduled to refuel with LNG in Seattle every other weekend. Kamali said that should be sufficient to operate the big ship on LNG throughout the season. When LNG is unavailable, Star Princess’ engines burn traditional marine gas oil.

Star Princess was mistakenly credited by a port and a chamber of commerce in southeast Alaska as the first LNG-powered cruise ship to visit the Last Frontier. That title actually belongs to Silver Nova, which was refueled by Seaspan with LNG in Vancouver before an Alaska sailing last year in May. The dual-fuel luxury liner is being relocated to the Mediterranean for this summer by its operator, Silversea Cruises.

The challenge of decarbonizing

A demonstration last summer in Seattle involving another cruise line, Holland America, showed the multiple challenges and cost barriers involved with decarbonizing large ship operations. For this project, Holland America and the port teamed up to refuel the cruise liner Eurodam with renewable diesel made from vegetable oil.

A port memo described the three refuelings as a bit cumbersome, but ultimately successful from an operational point of view. However, the biofuel netted out to triple the cost of conventional low-sulfur marine fuel. So, the bottom line was that the experiment would not be repeated until biofuel costs come down and availability improves.

Bud Darr, CEO of the trade group Cruise Lines International Association, said it takes “an awful lot of courage” for ship owners to spend as much as $2 billion on new dual-fuel cruise ships designed to burn various kinds of climate-friendly fuel that cannot be procured today.

Darr said there is not much uptake on methanol because the industry is still waiting for bio- or synthetic forms of the fuel to become available at scale. Darr said “the safety case” for carbon-free ammonia is not strong enough to work as cruise ship fuel because of the high toxicity of the gas were it to leak.

That basically leaves LNG as the preferred alternative marine fuel, Darr said during the Port of Seattle’s industry roundtable in April. He said no ship owners had told him that the fossil fuel LNG was their final answer.

“Really, we’re looking to progress from the fossil form of LNG,” Darr said, “on to a renewable version of that.”

Commissioner Felleman is also zeroing in on renewable natural gas as the way to have a thriving cruise industry and protect the climate. Renewable natural gas – aka RNG or bio-LNG – is most commonly derived around here from the breakdown of landfill waste, municipal sewage or feedlot cow manure. Felleman said he is encouraged that the steep price premium for RNG is slowly coming down. Other branches of government are trying to spur greater supply with carbon credits.

“The fastest way to make progress with the existing and growing fleet of vessels is to incentivize the use of alternative fuels,” Fellman said.

Post Alley launched in June 2019 as part of a new, Seattle-based writers’ collective aimed at helping fill gaps in local journalism and exploring new ways of delivering quality reporting and commentary. Learn more about the publication here.

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The Alaska Legislature approved legislation to add a superior court judge to the state’s third judicial district. The new judge is to be based at the Palmer courthouse where the new position is intended to alleviate rising civil and criminal case workloads.

The Alaska Court System requested the legislation, House Bill 262, which would bring the total number of superior court judges from 45 to 46. Lawmakers approved the change by a combined vote of 57 to 0, with three House members absent. The bill now heads to Gov. Mike Dunleavy for consideration.  

Officials with the court system said the state needs to add a judge because the four current superior court judges in Palmer are grappling with unsustainable workloads. That judicial district has the highest numbers of civil and criminal caseloads in the state – nearly 50% higher than the statewide average, with an average of 683 cases per year. That’s an average of 13 cases per week per judge. 

Officials noted that adding a fifth judge to the Palmer courthouse would only bring average caseloads down to an estimated 546 cases per judge annually. “This would still exceed the statewide average number of cases per judge, and Palmer judges would still have the highest caseload per judge of any court in the state, but it would be a welcome and needed improvement,” said Nancy Meade, General Counsel to the Alaska Court System, in a statement requesting the bill.

The population of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough has grown 40% over the past twenty years, a major contributing factor to the rising need in legal services and case numbers at the Palmer courthouse, Meade said. In the same time period, the number of cases filed has risen by 55%.

Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, carried the bill in the House, saying the high number of cases at the Palmer courthouse has spillover effects in Anchorage. 

“Cases in Palmer take too long to be heard. In fact, some Mat-Su residents choose to file their cases in Anchorage so that they have a chance of being heard sooner. This means that Anchorage has more cases than they would otherwise have,” he said, speaking on the House floor ahead of the vote on April 22. “We need to fix this problem, so that we can better provide basic justice to all Alaskans,” he said. 

The new judge position is estimated to cost $268,000 annually, according to a state fiscal note. 

If the bill is signed by the governor, the new judge would be selected by a nomination process, including interviews and vetting by the Alaska Judicial Council. The council puts forth two nominees and the governor has 45 days to make a selection for superior court judge. New judges serve for an initial term of three years, after which they appear before voters in a retention election where voters can weigh in on whether the judge should remain on the bench by a yes-no vote. If approved by voters, judges’ subsequent terms are six years until mandatory retirement at age 70.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the vote count. The bill passed 57 to 0, with three House members absent.

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