Month: May 2026

The Alaska Legislature has approved a state driver’s license data-sharing bill that would allow some travelers to speed through security at airports in Alaska.

On Wednesday, the Alaska Senate voted unanimously to approve Senate Bill 237, from Sen. Scott Kawasaki, D-Fairbanks. Because the House voted to pass the bill 40-0 on Tuesday, the Senate’s vote sends the bill to Gov. Mike Dunleavy for final approval or veto.

As originally drafted by Kawasaki, SB 237 would have only allowed the state Division of Motor Vehicles to share driver’s license information with “a nonprofit organization, governmental, or tribal entity.”

That would allow Alaskans to apply for a replacement Social Security card over the internet. Currently, someone who needs a replacement must visit an office in Juneau, Anchorage or Fairbanks in person. 

Alaska is the only state that does not allow residents to get a replacement card online.

In the House, Rep. Steve St. Clair, R-Wasilla, proposed an amendment that would allow the state to share driver’s license data with “an entity participating in the Transportation Security Administration’s Registered Traveler Programs.”

That includes CLEAR, a for-profit company that offers fast-lane service at airport security checkpoints across the country.

“There’s actually a contract between CLEAR and the (Anchorage) airport right now, they just can’t do anything or share data until we pass legislation saying that they can,” St. Clair said. 

House lawmakers approved that amendment unanimously.

At the urging of Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, lawmakers also amended the bill with a section that will allow Alaskans to store digital copies of their driver’s licenses on their smartphones. 

If a police officer performs a traffic stop, that digital copy would be valid ID.

That amendment was originally a separate bill, House Bill 180, from the Office of the Governor. 

“For anyone who lives their life on their phone, this would be a wonderful convenience that the administration would like to offer,” Gray said.

That amendment passed the House by a 38-2 vote, and SB 237 proceeded toward a final vote in the Legislature without opposition.

Restaurants in Alaska will have to stop serving food in disposable polystyrene foam containers, under a bill passed by the Legislature and awaiting Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s signature.

The measure, House Bill 25, prohibits food establishments from using containers made of Styrofoam and similar plastic foam materials starting on Jan. 1. The bill applies to restaurants and to state agencies’ food operations, but it does not apply to containers sold in stores.

The prime sponsor, Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, said he was inspired to introduce the bill after attending meetings of the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators and learning how other states are trying to curb plastic pollution.

There are several reasons to ban containers made from Styrofoam and other polystyrene, Josephson said at a May 11 hearing of the Senate Labor and Commerce Committee. The materials are linked to cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma and other health problems, like endocrine disruption. They cannot be recycled. And they crumble into tiny pieces that spread into the environment, including Alaska’s marine environment, he said.

The bill’s ban would be “historic,” Josephson said. “It would send a strong message that Alaska, with its massive coastlines, greater than the rest of the country, intends to clean up,” he said at the hearing.

Sen. Scott Kawasaki, D-Fairbanks, summarized the environmental concerns when he spoke in favor of the bill on the Senate floor on Monday. “Styrofoam never breaks down. It always floats away. And it can float through air and water,” he said.

Some Alaska municipalities already have such bans, Josephson and Kawasaki said, naming Bethel, Cordova and Seward as examples.

The bill went through several refinements after it was first introduced before the start of the 2025 session.

Lawmakers made some changes to ease the transition to non-polystyrene materials. The final bill allows restaurants to continue using polystyrene containers that had been stockpiled prior to the effective date of Jan. 1, 2027. Another change grants municipalities the option of allowing the containers.

The local-option change was important to Sen. Rob Yundt, R-Wasilla, and helped him overcome his earlier reluctance to support the bill. He and his wife own a restaurant and the ban “very well might cost us a little bit of money,” Yundt said in floor comments on Monday, when the bill won final passage in the Senate. “But I can tell you it’s common sense. It’s long overdue.”

Environmental groups praised the bill. Among the risks of polystyrene pollution cited by those groups is the damage to fish and wildlife, which mistake tiny bits of plastic for food.

“Alaska is on the frontlines of the global plastics crisis, and lawmakers are stepping up with meaningful solutions,” Christy Leavitt, senior campaign director at Oceana, said in a statement released Wednesday. “We are grateful to Rep. Andy Josephson as the bill’s sponsor and the support from legislators across party lines. By passing HB 25, Alaska is taking an important step to reduce harmful plastic pollution, protect ocean wildlife, and safeguard the health of Alaska’s communities.”

Other organizations that were prominent supporters were Alaska Community Action on Toxics and the Alaska Environment and Research Policy Center; the latter group conducted a study that found microplastics such in all 39 Southcentral Alaska water bodies it tested.

A national trade organization representing manufacturers of polystyrene materials opposed the bill.

Lindsay Stovall, director of state and regulatory affairs for the American Chemistry Council, described her organization’s objections in written comments and in committee testimony. She said the bill would impose costs on consumers, businesses and state agencies.

“While we support efforts to reduce plastic waste, we believe the legislation would increase costs, create implementation challenges, and fail to achieve its intended environmental objectives,” she said in testimony to the Senate Labor and Commerce Committee on May 15.

An analysis commissioned by her organization found that the Alaska Department of Corrections, for example, would have to spend an extra $1.8 million to switch to paper alternatives or $2.6 million to switch to degradable options, Stovall said.

However, the analysis of the bill conducted by the state Department of Revenue found that it would impose no additional costs on any state agency.

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, which would oversee the ban, “can integrate compliance into existing processes without the need for regulatory development or significant additional staff workload,” and would be able to use previously allocated resources, according to the Department of Revenue’s fiscal analysis.

The bill does not apply to food-service items purchased in stores for home use or to storage containers such as those used to ship fish. The bill also contains an exemption for disaster emergencies.

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Maybe it’s because of the winter we had, with its lingering cold and back-to-back storms, but I’ve been deep in spring cleaning this season. I’ve always hoarded papers — old handouts, notes and fliers — but I’m not organized enough to know what’s where, so it’s always a bit of a surprise where information shows up, and this year, I want to change that.

In March, around the time Gov. Mike Dunleavy introduced his bill asking the legislature to approve tax breaks for the proposed Alaska LNG pipeline, I uncovered a forgotten notebook from 2018. One page contains a statement from an Alaska Gas Development Corporation public meeting assuring attendees that long-term contracts with international buyers would be finalized by 2025. Another page, from another meeting later that year, outlines a timeline promising “first cargo” in late 2024. 

These contradictory notes motivated me to dig through my personal archives, the unlabeled folders in beer boxes and stacks of undated notebooks, for more records of public meetings about this speculative pipeline. Concerned about the impacts the project would have on my neighborhood, Alaska more generally, and the planet, I attended Federal Energy Regulatory Commission meetings and AGDC public relations presentations in the Denali Borough throughout the regulatory process, and I was curious about what I wrote down.

What I found is often frustrating. 

“That’s a good question, next time we’ll bring a geologist,” a FERC official said, in response to concerns about building a pipeline across the Denali Fault. 

“That’s a good point, we should start thinking about Western Alaska energy costs,” AGDC said to people who had been thinking about it for decades. 

Once, someone suggested a bike path could be built on top of the pipeline if its route paralleled the Parks Highway through the Denali Borough. But the bike path or the woman who proposed it were never mentioned again. 

At another meeting, someone who had just arrived in Alaska from a pipeline project in Papua New Guinea told us, in response to questions about safety, that “you can pour [LNG] in a glass, boil it, and drink the water,” as if the question was about drinkability of gas that no one was able to ascertain we’d have access to for utilities, let alone consumption. He said we could learn more on YouTube, which is how I learned about local conflicts and displacements surrounding the Papua New Guinea gasline. In the margins, I wrote a note: “YouTube. No wonder he needed a new job.” They tossed around dates and dollar amounts like confetti. I wrote them down, often accompanied by question marks. 

If this sounds disjointed, it’s because it has been.

Sometimes, presentations would focus on air quality in Asia, and frame Alaska gas, transported hundreds of miles before being shipped across the ocean, as the only viable solution to improving it. The next year, the emphasis would be on endangered polar bears, floating helplessly on diminishing sea ice, whose only hope was that Alaska could contribute methane rather than CO2 to the rapidly warming climate. But by 2022, all pretense of environmental concern had been abandoned, and the AGDC representative who visited Healy told us that investments in sustainability, or the Environmental, Social and Government framework “is killing everybody.” (“Where’s the bears lol” I wrote in my notes. But I think we all know it was never about the bears.)

But the image that has remained most consistent over the decade plus that I’ve been following this process is one I found on a printout of AK LNG-branded slides from 2015. It’s a 3×4 grid, each gray rectangle containing a dollar sign, and a yellow diagonal line representing a general upward trend. It’s accompanied by a second graph, again without numbers, whose bars get taller across an unmarked axis — showing supposed investment in local economies, though that investment was not promised, just vibes, and when asked for specifics, AK LNG representatives answered with vague statements about boroughs or regional corporations maybe stepping in.

According to this decade-old slide, the estimated cost of the project was $45-65 billion, which is quite a range, and interesting given that the number $44 billion keeps getting tossed around now, as if pipeline construction is the one thing that has miraculously gotten cheaper since 2015. 

Following recent legislative hearings, and watching Glenfarne executives attempt to justify their asks for free gravel and tax-exempt passage across state, borough and private lands, it seems that the laughably vague dollar sign graphs are still the best available data. Glenfarne is simply the latest character in a saga that has outlived its welcome.

They haven’t sent out any brochures or hosted any meetings, but I’m trying to write down what they say anyway, so that a few years from now, I can flip though my now organized and labeled folders and highlight the dates that came and went, the promises made and abandoned, just the latest in an archive of corporate lies.

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