Author: alaskaadmin

The Haines Borough administration took a local church to court without Assembly direction.

The Assembly met on June 9. The court appeal was filed on June 10. When asked why the matter had not come before the Assembly before filing, Borough Manager Alekka Fullerton said, “By the time it came to me, it was, we need to file tomorrow or not.” That explanation exposes a lack of transparency. 

Why was direction not sought from the Assembly during its June 9 meeting before taxpayer funds were committed to litigation?

When the issue finally came before the Assembly on July 14, the Manager defended the effort to overturn the unanimous BOE decision because the contract assessor believed the church’s property was not used regularly enough to qualify. Yet the law establishes no minimum frequency of use. It mandates an exemption for property “used exclusively” for nonprofit religious purposes.

During that same meeting, the bBorough attorney was asked whether Haines could add a minimum-use requirement to its code. He advised that it could not because bBorough code must conform to the mandatory exemption established by state law and the Alaska Constitution. That exposes the central contradiction: Why pursue through litigation a minimum-use interpretation the BBorough cannot lawfully add to its own code?

The Assembly unanimously directed that the appeal be withdrawn. That discussion should have occurred before the bBorough went to court, not afterward. Every taxpayer should be concerned when public money is committed to litigation without Assembly direction, transparency, or public discussion.

Brenda Josephson

The post The decision to spend public funds on litigation should have been more transparent appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

A Native-led voter mobilization group is working to boost Alaska Native voter education and turnout this election season. 

Get Out the Native Vote is a non-partisan effort now underway to reach voters across the state’s vast and varied geography and get them to cast ballots in the primary elections on August 18 and the midterm elections on November 3.

Alaska Native voters make up roughly one in four Alaskan voters, said Michelle Sparck, director of the initiative, who is Cup’ik from the Southwest village of Chevak. She said part of voter education is raising awareness of when Alaska Native voters came out in force and reached a peak voter turnout of 66% in 1982. Some regions had nearly 80% voter turnout, Sparck said. That’s when decisions on subsistence policy, abortion and moving the Alaska State Capitol from Juneau were on the ballot. 

“I call it the birth of the Alaska Native super voter. That generation made it a cultural value,” she said. “With that political capital that the 1980s generation built, they were able to own their sovereignty and self-determination tools.”

But voter turnout has declined significantly in the decades since. In the last election in 2024, 30% of Alaska Native voters cast their ballots. That meant Alaska Native voters made up 11% of state voters, according to data compiled by Sparck. 

The mission of the campaign is to turn that decline around and reach historic highs again. 

“This is what we’re capable of, and this is what this is our potential, and and I’m so excited to hold the mirror up to the communities because a lot of them really just had no idea what their performance is over the last, you know, 40-some years,” Sparck said.

“The challenge to the community is to say: own our power. We need to get out and vote,” she said. “Not should we go out and vote, we should make informed decisions.”

Get Out the Native Vote is supported by a partnership between the Alaska Federation of Natives, First Nations Institute and Cook Inlet Tribal Council with some funding from private foundations and the Carter Center, which was founded by former President Jimmy Carter. The campaign is collaborating with local, state and Tribal governments; regional Native corporations, organizations and service providers; schools; prisons and community groups to host voter education and outreach events around the state. Sparck spoke on a video call on Tuesday after returning from a voter outreach visit in Nome, and before heading to visit Utqiagvik, then the coastal community of Wainwright.

The August 18 primary falls within the summer subsistence fishing season, which is challenging for many people to find time to vote, Sparck said, but she’s found a helpful analogy.

“We’ve realized that if we describe primaries like basketball regionals, light bulbs go off their heads,” she said, smiling. “You have to win at regionals in order to make it to state. So a lot of people now know what primaries mean.”

Spark said 131 voting precincts in the state, more than a quarter, rely entirely on the U.S. Postal Service and air carriers to receive and mail their ballots. 

Get Out the Native Vote working to make sure post offices are staffed, and helping the Alaska Division of Elections to recruit staff and volunteers so that each precinct has elections workers, bilingual poll workers and outreach workers to help with Native language translations. Sparck is also finding youth volunteers for a  “Youth at the Booth” program, whose goal is to have two 17 and 18 year old volunteers  assist at polling places and learn about elections in the process. 

Particularly in the Arctic, the initiative is partnering with the North Slope Borough and local community leaders to make sure all precincts are staffed and open, in hopes of avoiding repeats of past election years where rural residents could not vote due to issues with staffing poll workers. In 2024, polling stations in rural villages of Wales and Kaktovik never opened. In Northwest and Western Alaska, voting hours were reduced in Marshall, Shaktoolik,Diomede and Kobuk. Primary ballots arrived late in at least 14 other Native villages. 

“I get a lot of (precinct) chairs calling me before an election saying, ‘I don’t think I can do this.’ And we’re like, ‘You can do this. Your community can’t vote without you,’” she said. The organization’s goal is to have a well-staffed polling station in each village. 

Alaska Native communities have also had the highest rates of rejected ballots, according to the Alaska Federation of Natives. One of the main  issues is an incomplete witness signature on the ballot. In 2022, one in eight rural mail-in ballots were rejected, totalling more than 7,500 ballots rejected from rural Alaska. 

A bipartisan elections bill that would have removed the witness signature requirement, among many other measures aimed at improving voting access, passed the Alaska State Legislature this year, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it. 

Between now and November, the campaign is working to distribute voter information, with guides on how to register, cast a ballot and find more information on state and federal candidates. 

“So we’re trying to make things easier, but we’re building the plane as we’re flying it,” Sparck said. “You know, it’s still a work in progress, and we’re glad to have the alliances we have.”

This year, the annual Alaska Federation of Natives convention, where thousands of people from across the state convene in Anchorage, will be held one week later than usual to accommodate early voting at City Hall across the street. “So we’re excited that we’re going to have an ability to send people across the street to go vote or drop off their absentee ballots,” Sparck said.

The campaign is planning to hold voter outreach events in Alaska Department of Corrections facilities where roughly 40% of incarcerated people awaiting trial and sentencing are eligible to vote. Organizers are also working with service provider organizations to reach people who are unhoused or housing insecure, as well as foster youth who are turning 18, and inform them about their voting rights. 

“We try to recognize every avenue to access voters, and especially those that are low propensity or disenfranchised. We try to meet their needs in every way, so it doesn’t mean we’re doing it 24/7, but it means we are trying to dedicate time and create the allyship and coordination with organizations that are more intimate with those groups to to best deliver that,” she said.

Get Out The Native Vote shares outreach events and regional voting updates on their Facebook page, and website at aknativevote.com.

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The Mat-Su school board recently passed a policy to arm classroom teachers. I’ve been struggling to find the right word to describe it.

The district claims the policy is about “maintaining a safe and secure learning environment.” In a profession obsessed with research-based decision making, nothing supports the claim that armed teachers make schools safer, especially when there hasn’t been a gun-related death in an Alaskan school in over twenty-five years. The board claims the policy will not “change the educational environment.” When you hide guns in classrooms, the environment changes immediately. 

The board’s concealed carry program will cost an estimated four hundred and fifty thousand dollars — roughly forty-five thousand dollars per gun. With forty-nine schools and over one thousand teachers, guns will be in a fraction of schools. The chance a gun related incident will happen near an armed teacher is miniscule. The cost of “protecting” such a tiny number of classrooms is fiscally irresponsible. 

This isn’t even the worst part of the policy. The school board is arming themselves. According to the policy, the superintendent can approve to arm board members. If the superintendent denies a board member’s request, they can appeal the decision… to the board!

I don’t support arming teachers, but arming board members is absurd. First, board members are rarely in school buildings. Their usefulness as security is next to nothing. Second, most board members have no training in classroom management, school procedures or deescalation. Third, because board members are not regular participants in classrooms they have no understanding of individual students, classroom dynamics or school culture necessary to understand volatile situations.

Finally, and I can’t stress this enough, board members are not school employees. In fact, they are barred from being employees by Alaska Statute AS14.14.140. It begs the question, why do board members need guns at all? To threaten people in board meetings? Outside a board meeting, individual board members have no authority.

There is simply no logic that justifies arming board members. Then again, logic is hardly a motivating factor these days. Guns don’t belong in classrooms, books do. An expensive lesson the Mat-Su board had to learn from a federal judge. And while they claim this policy will “maintain a safe” environment, they literally struck the phrase “safe spaces” from their library policy and have actively made their schools less safe for LGBTQ students.

All of this brings us to the real problem: school boards. Nothing prevents school boards from enacting irrational policies like this. Many board members have no experience in education. No training is required of board members. Every year we put the fate of our schools into the hands of people whose only requirement for eligibility is a pulse and valid voting registration. 

It was a struggle, but I finally found a word to describe this situation: asinine. 

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