Wooden gavel with books in background. Law and justice concept
Wooden gavel with books in background. Law and justice concept
If you’re an Alaskan and believe a government agency or public official is doing something seriously wrong, something that puts public safety or welfare at risk, you now have a clear and official way to ask for an investigation.
Alaskan residents now have a more transparent process to request an Investigative Grand Jury to probe suspected systemic wrongdoing by public figures or public entities in Alaska. This effort aims to empower the community and ensure that public trust in government is maintained.
This Department of Law initiative formalizes a process that follows rules created by the Alaska Supreme Court by dedicating a new webpage, standing up policies and procedures, and assigning attorneys to examine criteria to facilitate the convening of an Investigative Grand Jury in situations where citizens present evidence on matters that jeopardize public welfare or safety.
“The Alaska Constitution guarantees that an Investigative Grand Jury will have the authority to investigate matters of public welfare or safety, and that this right shall never be suspended,” said Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor. “This new, transparent process ensures that every Alaskan’s voice can be heard when it comes to safeguarding our community and holding our government accountable.”
An investigative grand jury is a group of citizens that are tasked with investigating potential criminal activity or issues of public welfare and safety within a specific jurisdiction. Unlike a trial jury, its role is not to determine guilt or innocence, but rather to investigate potential wrongdoing and decide whether there is sufficient evidence to issue an indictment or make recommendations for action.
Back in 2022, the Alaska Supreme Court updated the rules around Investigative Grand Juries. The Court gave the Attorney General and the Department of Law the responsibility of reviewing citizen requests and determining whether they should go forward. But until now, there wasn’t a public-facing process for how to do that.
If a citizen investigation involves actions, sections or offices within the Department of Law, a neutral prosecutor will be appointed to advise the Investigative Grand Jury.
The Department of Law says this is just phase one of a broader effort to make Alaska’s legal system more open and responsive to public concerns. More improvements and public input opportunities are expected to follow.
Elayna Cunningham, a college student interning at Koahnic Broadcast Corp., records a program on July 10, 2025, at the Anchorage, Alaska, studios of KNBA, the flagship station for National Native News. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)
Elayna Cunningham, a college student interning at Koahnic Broadcast Corp., records a program on July 10, 2025, at the Anchorage, Alaska, studios of KNBA, the flagship station for National Native News. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)
AP- Dozens of Native American radio stations across the country vital to tribal communities will be at risk of going off the air if Congress cuts more than $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to industry leaders.
The U.S. Senate is set to vote this week on whether to approve the Department of Government Efficiency’s plan to rescind previously approved public broadcasting funding for 2026 and 2027. Fear is growing that most of the 59 tribal radio stations that receive the funding will go dark, depriving isolated populations of news, local events and critical weather alerts. The House already approved the cuts last month.
“For Indian Country in general, 80% of the communities are rural, and their only access to national news, native story sharing, community news, whatever it is, is through PBS stations or public radio,” said Francene Blythe-Lewis, CEO of the Lincoln, Nebraska-based Native American video programming producer Vision Maker Media. “If the claw back happens, I would say a good 90% of those stations will cease to exist.”
Native American communities rely on local radio stations
Local radio plays an outsized role in the lives of many who live in Indigenous communities, where cable television and broadband internet access are spotty, at best, and nonexistent for many. That leaves over-the-air TV stations — usually a PBS station — and more often local radio to provide local news, community event details and music by Indigenous artists. Sometimes the news is delivered in Indigenous languages.
“It means we’re not going to hear our language on the radio,” Blythe-Lewis said.
Flagstaff, Arizona-based Native Public Media, which supports the network of 59 radio stations and three television stations serving tribal nations across the country, said about three dozen of those radio stations that rely heavily on Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding will be the first to go dark if funding is cut for the coming fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
Loris Taylor, CEO of Native Public Media, said in an op-ed that the tribal stations reach more than 1.5 million people and “may be the only source of locally relevant news, emergency alerts, public safety announcements, language preservation, health information and election coverage.”
Republicans face pressure to pass the cuts
GOP senators are under pressure from President Donald Trump, who promised last week on his Truth Social platform that any Republican who votes against the cuts “will not have my support or Endorsement.”
Many Republicans say the public media system is politically biased and an unnecessary expense. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, recently defended the cuts as necessary to hack away at the nearly $37 trillion national debt, adding, “It is critical in restoring trust in government.”
But some Republicans have pushed back, such as Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who questioned the proposed cuts last month during a Senate committee hearing. She said that while some of the federal money is assigned to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, most of it goes to locally owned public radio and television stations.
Tribal stations provide lifesaving alerts
Jaclyn Sallee is president and CEO of Koahnic Broadcast Corporation and KNBA, its radio station in Anchorage, Alaska. Koahnic produces National Native News, a five-minute daily newscast that features headline news from across Indian Country, and Native America Calling, a daily hourlong call-in program, for about 190 stations across the nation. It also produces Indigefi, a music program in Indigenous languages.
KNBA is on Native Public Media’s list of those stations that would be most affected by the federal funding cuts — a concern Sallee confirmed, as 40% of the station’s funding comes from CPB.
“What we’re really worried about are the rural stations in Alaska where they may be the only station in the community,” she said. “The people that live there depend on the station for vital weather alerts, emergency alerts; it’s the local hub of the community where people share information. So that is very troublesome because people’s lives are at risk without this service.”
It’s currently fishing season in Alaska, she said, “which means getting out in the ocean or in rivers and going long distances to subsist, and so they really rely on weather reports.”
Having the news reported in a tribe’s language isn’t just about preserving that language, she said. Sallee spent summers in Nome with her mother’s family. Her grandmother, she said, spoke only Inupiaq.
Loss of small stations could hurt the larger system
New Mexico PBS’s signal reaches all but one of the more than 20 tribes and pueblos in the state. It also has signed an agreement with the Navajo Nation, which has the largest reservation of any tribe in the U.S., that allows the tribe to carry the PBS signal and programming on the Navajo Nation Television network, New Mexico PBS general manger Franz Joachim said.
“It’s no question in my mind that, you know, immediately some stations will pretty much go dark,” Joachim said.
When those first stations fail, it won’t take long for others to follow, Joachim said. And as they do, it will mean fewer and fewer stations left to pay membership dues that also help fund all of the stations.
“So now the whole system starts to fracture,” he said. “So for me, the federal funding is really about the system as a whole that keeps us in place.”
That funding also helps produce national content that groups like Vision Maker Media produce. Those include Native American documentaries shown on PBS like “Mankiller,” the story of Wilma Mankiller who became the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.
Blythe-Lewis compared the potential loss of tribal stations to the country’s past attempts to erase Native American cultures, such as through federal boarding schools where Indigenous children were sent for generations to assimilate them into white society and where systemic abuse of Indigenous children was carried out.
“We’re erased from public media and therefore invisible and therefore become unknown and unheard of,” she said.
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building pictured on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
By: Corinne Smith, Alaska Beacon
Federal funds for adult education services were among those blocked by the Trump administration on July 1, causing immediate cuts to Alaska adult education and workforce development programs and staff layoffs.
The U.S. Department of Education has withheld more than $6 billion in congressionally approved grants for education, including over $629 million for adult education basic grants, and more than $85 million in adult integrated English literacy and civics education grants. The administration has said that it’s withholding the federal funding to review the grant programs to ensure they align with the Republican president’s priorities.
Adult education can range from classes that help adults learn basic literacy to programs that assist students in gaining certificates equivalent to high school diplomas, and can teach skills that are essential to performing certain jobs.
Alaska had over $1.1 million allocated as part of an adult education basic grant, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, which administers the grants. A department spokesperson said on Tuesday the grant amounts for English literacy and civics education this year were not available, but the state received more than $99,600 last year.
The withheld funds means immediate cuts to services for Alaska adult learners and staff layoffs, according to grant recipients.
“We were definitely blindsided,” said Lucie Magrath, executive director of the Literacy Council of Alaska, a Fairbanks-based nonprofit that provides adult education programs, including adult literacy, English language learning, civics and General Educational Development, or GED, preparation classes.
Magrath said an estimated $180,000 in federal funding, or over half of their budget, was impounded, causing immediate cuts to services and staff layoffs. While the organization did not identify the number of layoffs in an interview last week, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner has since reported that there were five layoffs.
“So we are having to make some pretty drastic decisions with staffing and programming,” she said in a phone interview on Thursday. “We likely will not be able to serve nearly as many people this year, and we’re making staffing cuts right now.”
The organization provides in-person and virtual instruction and mentoring to adult learners in Fairbanks, as well as in villages in the Interior and Western Alaska, stretching from the Yukon Flats to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
They also have a workforce development program, the Pathways Program, serving youths and young adults ages 16 to 24, and run the used bookstore Forget-Me-Not Books in Fairbanks, which provides revenues for its programs, jobs training and employment.
Shelby Cooke is the assistant executive director of the Literacy Council of Alaska, and said it’s difficult to fill such a large funding gap, especially on such short notice, and Alaskans will be impacted.
“The real detriment is to our students and Alaskans who need that GED credential to go to work, or maybe they’re a super-skilled person in their native tongue, but they need enough English to be able to navigate a job interview,” she said. “Those are the folks that are suffering, and in turn, our economy suffers too.”
Magrath said some programs will be suspended immediately. It’s possible that these suspensions will be temporary, as her organization figures out its next steps. “We’re looking at restructuring some of our programs just to be able to use the resources that we have to the maximum impact for our community and our students,” she said. “So we have a lot to figure out right now.”
Southeast Regional Resource Center, a nonprofit educational services agency that provides a variety of services statewide, including adult education, English language learning and workforce development programs. In addition, SERRC provides educational and business services to school districts, including special education programs, human resources and grant administration.
“We do have some state funds, and so we’ve had to modify our budget just off what we know we have for funding — for state funds — and we are looking at having to reduce our staffing,” said Chris Reitan, its executive director, in a phone interview Thursday. He said the organization is looking at cutting at least two staff positions and a few part-time positions. “So we are concerned about the ability to have the same level of impact.”
Reitan said the federal funding freeze withheld over $86,600 for adult education programs in Southeast Alaska, and over $64,000 in the Aleutians region.
Chris Reitan, executive director, SERRC, said SERRC’s program served 112 students last year in the areas of GED support, English language learning and workforce development across the state.
“Number one, adult education provides a kind of a lifeline for Alaskans seeking to improve their lives, and it also helps strengthen our state’s workforce,” he said, and will have an immediate impact on adult learners, “which then could immediately impact their ability in regards to getting good-paying jobs, their ability to provide for their families, their ability to contribute to their local communities.”
He added: “I see this as being a significant impact across the state, in regards to our citizens being able to have the opportunity to better themselves.”
SERRC and the Literacy Council of Alaska are two of 14 adult education programs across the state with grant funding administered by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. A department spokesperson, Adam Weinert, said by email that the department has continued to award available state matching funds for the programs, totaling more than $1.9 million.
“Sub-grantees were informed that we were moving forward at this time with state funding only,” Weinert said of the programs. “Once federal funding is released, we will move forward with a budget modification to provide for the federal funding.”
The full impact of how the freeze will affect some programs in the long term remains unclear.
The University of Alaska system has several adult education programs, funded in part by federal funds, as well as state and local funding. Jonathan Taylor, the university’s director of communications, said by email Monday that “discussions are ongoing” around funding but those programs are scheduled to continue.
Taylor said at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Bristol Bay Adult Education program will start up in August with funding from Bristol Bay Economic Development Corp.
Within the University of Alaska Anchorage, there are adult education programs at Kodiak College, serving the Kodiak Island Borough; Kenai Peninsula College, serving the Soldotna, Homer and Seward regions; and Prince William Sound College, serving the Valdez, Cordova and Copper Basin regions.
“We have received assurances that all three will receive some sort of funding this year,” Taylor said. “To our knowledge, the state will initiate these awards using either state funding or federal funding it has access to. If additional Federal Funds become available, the state will amend the agreements to make up to the original intended funding amount. Currently, this is an active endeavor and ongoing discussion with the state.”
The Juneau Assembly has proposed updates to the city’s disorderly conduct laws, tightening rules around blocking sidewalks, public disturbances, and behavior in public spaces.
The focus of the new updates- making it easier for the Juneau Police Department to arrest individuals, particularly unhoused individuals for disruptive actions in public areas.
The ordinance adds language allowing police to intervene when people stand, walk, or camp in places like sidewalks, stairwells, parking lots, and garages.
“We had a long conversation about the community impacts of public camping, and that was probably the longest agenda item that we discussed.” Said Deputy Manager Robert Barr, “it would make it a bit easier for our police department officers to do some enforcement activity that they already do.”
Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said the changes bring city code in line with state law, removing steps that currently delay enforcement, which lie within officers arresting individuals for trespassing rather than disorderly conduct.
“Our first course of action whenever we’re engaged in that sort of activity with folks who are unhoused, is to try and connect to resources and seek voluntary compliance.” Said Barr, “but sometimes it’s not possible.”
Alaska already grapples with its growing unhoused population, Juneau currently operates under a “dispersed camping” policy for its homeless population, allowing camping on unimproved public land as long as it minimizes impact and doesn’t violate specific regulations like blocking public rights-of-way.
Juneau Police cleared the unhoused encampment on Teal street back in June, Barr said the assembly asked to bring back more information at a future meeting, likely the next Committee of the Whole, on creating a shelter safety zone in the Teal Street area, “just to investigate whether other tools that we could implement would protect our social service providers out there.” said Barr.
Juneau has had the highest average sale price for a single-family home in the state for the past two years and a report from the Department of Labor and Workforce Development, shows that housing costs are nearly half of most Alaska residents’ annual income.
These proposed updates come amid nationwide trends, with the Supreme court ruling that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public places last year.
Sandbag filling and distribution, photo generously provided by CBJ
The City and Borough of Juneau and Tlingit & Haida will hold sandbag distribution events on Saturday, July 19 and Saturday, July 26, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Dimond Park Field House parking lot in preparation for another glacial outburst flood.
With the summer heat rising and water levels climbing in Suicide Basin, emergency officials, city officials and the National Weather Service are closely monitoring the threat of another glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) in the Mendenhall River Valley. This threat follows a record flood event on August 6, 2024, which swept through neighborhoods, damaged property, and reshaped how Juneau prepares for these recurring flooding events.
Suicide Basin, located above the Mendenhall Glacier, has released floodwaters nearly every year since 2011. These events occur when meltwater trapped behind the glacier breaks through ice dams, sending torrents into Mendenhall Lake and River below.
As of Saturday, July 12, water levels in the basin are around 1,263 feet, about 108 feet below the spillway level. That’s slightly lower than this time last year, due to a colder spring and early summer.
At the current rate, or around 4 feet per day, the basin could reach full capacity by August 8.
Sand, bags, and shovels will be available for residents to fill on site. Households in the 18-foot flood risk zone may collect up to 75 sandbags total, including from earlier events.
For flood prep info, visit juneauflood.com or bit.ly/JuneauFloodReady, and sign up for alerts at bit.ly/CBJAlerts.
Artist Crystal Worl has completed restoration work on her mural honoring Tlingit civil rights leader Elizabeth Peratrovich in downtown Juneau.
The project was made possible thanks to equipment donated by Tyler Rental, which provided the use of a forklift from July 6 to 12.
The lift allowed Worl to safely access and restore the 60-by-25-foot mural that spans the south-facing wall of the Juneau Public Library and Marine Parking Garage.
The mural that Worl, who is Tlingit and Athabascan, began planning in 2018 was originally installed in September 2021, and is a tribute to Elizabeth Kaax̱gal.aat Peratrovich, a member of the Lukaax̱.ádi (Sockeye Salmon) clan. She is remembered for her advocacy in the fight for equality for Alaska Natives, and for her pivotal role in the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, the first civil rights legislation of its kind in the United States.
The restoration is part of an ongoing commitment to preserving public art that celebrates Alaska Native heritage and leaders. “We appreciate this generous support in helping to maintain a public artwork that honors the legacy of a great Alaska Native leader,” Sealaska Heritage Institute said in their Facebook post.
Located on Áak’w Kwáan territory, the mural is now fully restored.
Crystal Worl writes on her website about the mural, “Educating the public about the local Indigenous values, culture, and history is important for Alaskans and visitors alike. I hope that this mural will contribute to the movement to transform Juneau into the Northwest Coast arts capital of the world and will beautify and enhance the downtown Juneau area. With the world recovering from the COVID pandemic and embracing racial and social justice ideals, artists must also rise to the occasion to tell our history and our stories.”
RADM Bob Little, the new commander of the Coast Guard's Arctic sector, smiles as he shakes hands with RADM Megan Dean, the departing commanding officer, during a change of command ceremony Friday, July 11, 2025, in Juneau. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)
RADM Bob Little, the new commander of the Coast Guard’s Arctic sector, smiles as he shakes hands with RADM Megan Dean, the departing commanding officer, during a change of command ceremony Friday, July 11, 2025, in Juneau. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)
By: James Brooks, Alaska Beacon
Last week, President Donald Trump signed a budget bill with almost $25 billion for new Coast Guard construction, including almost $9 billion for new icebreakers and $300 million for new Coast Guard facilities in Juneau.
On Friday, Rear Adm. Bob Little, the new commander of the Coast Guard in Alaska, said it remains to be seen how those new ships will be used and when they will arrive in the Arctic.
“What I hope is, regardless of where in the service that capacity ends up, is that it will overall increase the capacity for the Coast Guard and that the Arctic District can certainly benefit from that increased capacity,” he said.
Until last week, the Coast Guard’s Alaska force was known as District 17. As part of a nationwide renaming project, it’s now the Coast Guard Arctic District. In a ceremony held at Juneau, Little took command of the newly renamed district from Rear Adm. Megan Dean, who has been assigned to Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“It’s a change in name, but our missions, our priorities remain the same,” Little said.
Alaska has the largest commercial fishing fleet in the United States and produces more than half of the nation’s seafood. Key maritime trade routes between Asia and California run through Alaska waters, and cruise ships carry more than 1.5 million passengers through Southeast Alaska each year.
Altogether, the Coast Guard employs almost 2,500 people, including almost 2,000 active-duty Sentinels, as active-duty members are formally known.
Vice Adm. Andrew Tiongson, commander of the Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean, speaks during a change of command ceremony Friday, July 11, 2025, in Juneau. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)
Speaking at the ceremony, the head of the Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean, Vice Adm. Andrew Tiongson, noted that it has been an extraordinarily busy year for the agency, which responded to fishing disasters, medical emergencies, foreign ships near American waters, and the recent sinking of a cargo ship carrying 3,000 cars.
Last year, the Coast Guard responded to 16 cases of foreign ships approaching the international border near Alaska, Tiongson said, calling it “the most significant foreign military presence in our waters near Alaska … in decades.”
Tiongson, who will retire later this month, said he expects the number of foreign ships near Alaska to grow.
Both China and Russia have sailed military ships through international waters near Alaska recently as part of freedom-of-navigation missions to demonstrate their right to travel through international waterways. The United States conducts similar missions near both countries.
Foreign fishing vessels frequently catch fish near the international boundary that marks the economic activity zone between Russia and the United States.
“We have an obligation to be present and to push back, to deter or deny malign activity anywhere that we have sovereign U.S. rights, and in the Arctic District, we have a lot of those and a lot of interest,” Little said.
Right now, the big budget bill isn’t expected to bring immediate help for the Coast Guard in dealing with those issues.
The Coast Guard’s Polar Security Cutter program, which received $4.3 billion under the federal budget bill, isn’t expected to deliver its first new ship until 2030 at the earliest.
When that ship, the Polar Sentinel, arrives in service, it likely will replace the Polar Star, which was commissioned in 1976 and is primarily used to keep open the sea lanes to American research stations in Antarctica.
Additional ships are expected in the following years.
The budget bill also contains $3.5 billion for a new Arctic Security Cutter program, which seeks to launch a lighter icebreaker within three years of a contract being awarded.
That ship, according to published specifications, would only be able to break ice up to 3 feet thick, less than the capability of the Coast Guard’s sole medium icebreaker, the Healy, and equivalent to a Class-5 icebreaker, second-lowest on the six-level international standards rankings.
The bill also contains $816 million to procure additional, unspecified light and medium icebreaking cutters.
That could involve buying and converting commercial ships.
Next month, the Coast Guard is expected to commission the icebreaker Storis in Juneau. That ship was formerly the Arctic oil drilling support ship Aiviq but was purchased by the Coast Guard as an interim icebreaking solution.
Speaking Friday, Little confirmed that the Storis will be operating on a more limited basis until it undergoes a comprehensive refit.
“She’ll be transitioning from kind of an initial operating capability into what we’ll eventually consider full operational capability,” he said. “But that doesn’t diminish the fact that we’ll have a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, painted red with a Coast Guard stripe, operating in the region this summer.”
The budget bill includes $300 million to construct a new port and support facilities in Juneau to support the Storis, but Little said he didn’t have any information Friday on the timeline for construction and development.
For this summer, he said, the plan is to “limit the mission space” for the Storis until its crew and the Coast Guard are familiar with the ship.
“We’ll step into that very thoughtfully,” he said.
Friday’s ceremony didn’t include as much discussion of aviation. The budget bill includes $2.3 billion for up to 40 new MH-60 helicopters, the long-distance workhorses of Coast Guard heliborne aviation.
It also allocates $1.1 billion for six new HC-130J fixed-wing aircraft. In Alaska, five of those aircraft are based at Kodiak and used for extremely long-range search-and-rescue missions, as well as “Arctic domain” flights that can involve flights along the American border in the Arctic Ocean.
The budget bill also contains $2.2 billion for new maintenance facilities nationally, $4.4 billion for shoreside facilities — including the $300 million for Juneau — and $266 million for long-range drone aircraft, an under-developed area for the Coast Guard.
Little said that kind of spending is a “fundamental change” for the Coast Guard, whose annual budget is only about $14 billion.
Coming into his new job, he said he’s aware that as ship traffic increases in the Arctic Ocean and surrounding waters, there are “increased risks, increased commercial traffic, increased tourist traffic, cruise ships, and increased access to what were otherwise hard-to-access waters.”
The risk of a “no-notice incident that we might have to respond to — and it might be a large incident in a more remote area than we’re accustomed to operating, that would be the thing that would maybe keep you up at night.”
A school bus drives in front of the Alaska State Capitol on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)
A school bus drives in front of the Alaska State Capitol on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)
Governor Mike Dunleavy has called a special legislative session beginning Saturday, August 2, in Juneau.
The session will focus on two issues, education reform and the creation of a new Alaska Department of Agriculture.
The Governor’s recent budget vetoes have been raising concerns, the Governor cut over $122 million from the state budget, including $50 million from per student funding and major school maintenance projects. Juneau Senator Jesse Kiehl spoke with News of the North about the Base Student Allocation and had this to say, “when we look at the budget issues and the Governor’s special session coming up, what that really has to do with is, are we going to fund the BSA that we passed? it took an override to get that $700 per kid increase, and of course, the Governor vetoed that down, actually below a level that he proposed at one point during the session.”
Senator Kiehl is also a part of an education task force created by House Bill 57 which will look at a wide range of financial challenges and school policies, It’s charged with making recommendations before the 35th Alaska State Legislature convenes in January 2027.
When asked if the governor’s vetoes would affect the Education Task Force, Senator Kiehl said “I think those are going to be pretty separate issues. The task force has a lot of work ahead of us, to look both at the adequacy of how much we’re putting into schools and whether we’re doing it as well as we can be- Are there better ways to fund? are there more fair ways to fund? And then some other education policy issues.”
The group will dig into rising costs in transportation, energy, insurance, and school maintenance, along with accountability and student outcomes. The task force will present recommendations in a report on the first day of the January 2027 session.
Alaska’s three biggest cities have the highest health care costs among the nation’s urban areas, with costs that are about 50% higher than the U.S. urban average, a state analysis shows.
The findings, part of a broader analysis of Alaska’s cost of living that was released by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, are the latest in a series of reports detailing Alaska’s extraordinarily high medical costs.
“It was not surprising at all,” said Sam Tappen, the state economist who did the analysis. His findings are in an article in the current issue of Alaska Economic Trends, the monthly magazine of the department’s research section.
Similar analysis has shown that Anchorage, Juneau and Fairbanks have held the top three spots for urban health costs in each of the past 15 years, he said.
Using available data, Tappen found that Fairbanks had health costs that were 51.5% higher in 2024 than the average among 254 U.S. cities and metro areas. Juneau was in second at 50.9% and Anchorage third at 47.5% above the urban average.
Medical costs in urban Alaska also rose more than the costs in almost all other sectors, Tappen’s analysis found. Medical costs increased by 7.8% in 2023, compared with an overall inflation rate in Alaska that was under 2% that year and just slightly above 2% in 2024, the analysis found.
Compared to the U.S. average, urban Alaskans also devote a higher percentage of their annual household spending to medical care – 12% in 2023, compared to a national average of 8%, the report said.
The findings, which did not extend to health costs in rural areas of the state, are consistent with past reports on medical costs in Alaska.
In 2016, for example, a consultant’s report prepared for insurer Premera Blue Cross found that payments to Alaska providers were 76% higher than the national average and that operating costs for hospitals outside of Anchorage were more than twice the national average.
Reports by the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage have also documented steep increases in Alaska health care costs. One ISER report, issued in 2018, found that annual health care spending in Alaska increased from $1.5 billion in 1991 to $8.2 billion in 2014. A 2023 report by ISER, ranked Alaska second in per-capita health care spending, behind the District of Columbia, and said Alaska’s total health care spending had risen to $9.7 billion by 2019.
Beyond medical costs, Tappen’s analysis showed that Fairbanks had the highest utility costs among the 254 cities and urban areas in the analysis. Utility costs in Fairbanks in 2024 were more than twice the U.S. urban average, the analysis said.
The three Alaska cities also had among the highest U.S. urban grocery costs, with Juneau ranking second, Fairbanks third and Anchorage fourth. Honolulu had the highest average grocery costs of the 254 cities in the analysis.
Overall, the Alaska cities’ cost of living, though 21.5% to 27.2% higher than the national urban average, was not extraordinary in 2024, Tappen’s analysis found.
That is because housing costs in Alaska that once were among the nation’s highest have now been far surpassed by those in several cities elsewhere. “The U.S. housing market has just been a lot hotter than Alaska’s, and so they’re getting more expensive faster than us,” Tappen said.
Photo provided by CBJ following the installation of the HESCO barrier project
Photo provided by CBJ following the installation of the HESCO barrier project
With the summer heat rising and water levels climbing in Suicide Basin, emergency officials, city officials and the National Weather Service are closely monitoring the threat of another glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) in the Mendenhall River Valley. This threat follows a record flood event on August 6, 2024, which swept through neighborhoods, damaged property, and reshaped how Juneau prepares for these recurring flooding events.
Suicide Basin, located above the Mendenhall Glacier, has released floodwaters nearly every year since 2011. These events occur when meltwater trapped behind the glacier breaks through ice dams, sending torrents into Mendenhall Lake and River below.
As of Monday, July 7, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reports that the basin’s laser-monitored water elevation is approximately 1,224 feet, well below the 1,247 feet recorded on the same date last year, and more than 100 feet below 2023 levels. The current elevation is about 147 feet below the overflow channel, which begins spilling at 1,371 feet.
If the rate of rise in the basin remains around 4 feet per/day, this would result in a full basin in 37 days, though the rate of the rise could change.
These differences in water levels from 2024 and 2023 to current levels are due to the cold spring/early summer time temperatures. Freezing levels remained 3000 to 4000 feet through the spring and early summer time but are now around 7000 feet, meaning rapid melt could accelerate water accumulation.
Monitoring equipment, including two daily cameras and a USGS laser sensor, remains active. Officials caution that water level data may show occasional jumps or drops due to icebergs disrupting sensor readings.
City and Borough of Juneau (CBJ) officials, in partnership with state, federal, and tribal agencies, have implemented Phase 1 and Phase 1A of a near-term flood mitigation strategy. With guidance from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, CBJ has installed HESCO barriers along vulnerable stretches of the Mendenhall River. These modular barriers are designed to protect against floodwaters as high as 18 feet.
Given the growing threat and lack of a permanent solution, officials urge Juneau residents, especially those in the Mendenhall Valley, to take stay informed and prepared.
