The landlords and landladies of this town should be ashamed of themselves. Rent has skyrocketed in the last year, rising alongside the cost of groceries, utilities, and gas.
Why it has skyrocketed can only be boiled down to greed, as the two biggest landlords in town do little to nothing to actually maintain their apartments, houses, and businesses.
When I first moved to town five years ago, finding a one-bedroom apartment at between $600 and…
On behalf of The Salvation Army in Haines, I would like to express our heartfelt thanks to the Lucy Harrell Memorial Fund for its generous donation and continued support of our mission.
Because of gifts like this, we are able to continue providing emergency assistance to individuals and families not only in Haines, but throughout the entire Chilkat Valley.
These resources help us meet critical needs and ensure that help is available when our neighbors…
Dear Senator Sullivan, I recently received your letter in response to my call expressing my deep concerns about the war with Iran. The five-page single-spaced missive was dense and extremely hard to read.
While your letter provides an exhaustive description of the conflict and your role in managing its impacts on Alaskans, it says nothing about the morality of our country’s actions or about what you are doing to bring this war to a conclusion…
A Simple Meal is just that — a basic meal of homemade soup and bread. We offer two soups every Monday night, and one is always vegetarian. It is a community effort involving local churches and community members.
Our goal is simply to build community through a shared meal while hopefully helping others at the same time.
The Simple Meal team thanks everyone who has supported our meals by volunteering, donating, or simply being present…
Support our seniors and vote “No” on Tom Morphet’s Initiative 2. He is promoting new spending while also pushing to reduce the senior and disabled-veteran property tax exemption.
Newcomer Beau Bradley offers no new ideas, just the same talking points. During his CVN interview, Bradley referenced Haines’ demographics in a way that suggests he feels there are too many elders in our community.
If he had lived here long enough to know our names, perhaps…
Around Haines, people keep repeating the same talking points about childcare, but they don’t understand the issue. In the summer, when more people are working, demand increases. I currently have nine children, infant to age 3 on my waiting list. In the winter, when fewer people are working, I operate below capacity and have space available.
There is also a lot of talk about Haines receiving a $1 million childcare grant. But that grant cannot…
Erika Merklin should be judged by her actions and not her promises.
The discovery that a significant portion of Merklin’s residence encroaches onto adjoining property is a serious matter, particularly for someone seeking another term on the planning commission. Planning commissioners make decisions affecting how other property owners may use and develop their land. Proponents of an elected planning commission have argued that one of its primary benefits is that commissioners are directly accountable to…
Paul Swift settled in Haines in 1970; I arrived in 1979. We’ve voted in local elections ever since, including when our polling place was Mary Meacock’s living room.
Some years our candidates won; other years they did not. We have always accepted the results either way, but remember three divisive recall elections pushed by people unhappy with election results. We have always been offended by ad hominem attacks, both verbal and in print. Unfortunately, negative…
Mary Peltola speaks at a campaign event in Juneau on May 14, 2026. (Photo by Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon)
This commentary was originally published in the Anchorage Press. Subscribe here.
Mary Peltola’s use of hateful speech, including the R-slur and the F-slur, is more than a political matter. It cuts to the core of who we choose to be: Will we be a people that allows for words like this to be wielded without consequence? Or do we decide what is acceptable for ourselves, our candidates, our party, and our nation by demanding accountability and apology?
Had anyone else used these terms, the response from the Democratic Party would be swift and unified, so there’s no need to make the case that the hate speech of slurs is abusive. And the Peltola campaign has acknowledged the veracity of many of the worst statements, so the cries of “fake news” are foolish.
The only question that remains is, since these hateful words were used: What should happen next? The way we answer defines who we are and what we choose to allow politics to be. My answer is this: It’s not enough to win an election; we have to be people who deserve to win.
That means that we have to expect and demand compassion from our leaders. Politics is getting uglier and uglier, and the way to work against that is not by following other candidates into their ways of cruelty. It’s by leading the way to something better by acknowledging and apologizing for the times when we fall short.
Mary’s campaign referred to her very real and enormous burden of grief as a factor in her making those statements. That’s fair; grief makes us do and say things we might otherwise not. That still requires a sincere apology. That’s how we can rebuild trust in our democracy, and trust that good and ethical candidates can get elected.
One of the gifts of living in Alaska is that we truly do know our elected officials. We see them at events and we build relationships with them. So this is the time for our candidates to lean in and build trust by acknowledging when harm has occurred, and naming what will be done to protect every constituent going forward. Expecting compassion and apologies for wrongdoing isn’t naive; it’s the foundation of every ethical system on earth. It defines who we are, it builds trust, and it differentiates the Democratic Party from the cruelty of MAGA. It’s how we demonstrate that we deserve to win.
Political machines will tell us to ignore these slurs and downplay the harm that they do to members of our community. But that cannot be who we become. It would be a betrayal of the people in our communities who are targeted by these slurs.
We should instead require basic human decency from all candidates, and apologies for when they fall short of it. If a candidate is unable to reach that very low bar, can we truly say that they deserve to win?
It’s absolutely appropriate to require an unequivocal apology from Mary herself, not a half-apology through a spokesperson. Responses from the Alaska Democratic Party and the candidates that they endorse should also be a bare minimum of thoughtfulness, because silence is also betrayal. I truly believe in grace and forgiveness, but they require an acknowledgment of the harm that has been done.
This is a teachable moment. We can show Alaska and the nation that apologies are a sign of wisdom and strength, that choosing words of compassion matters, and that people of good character can win elections. But if we follow the MAGA playbook of cruelty without apology, then we have forsaken our foundational ethical mandate to love our neighbor. And if we do that, we no longer deserve to win.
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Earlier this year, the federal government lifted restrictions that had paused the transfer of 1.4 million acres of federal land along the Dalton Highway and trans-Alaska oil pipeline, seen here in 2023. (Bureau of Land Management photo)
Alaska’s decades-long quest to obtain millions of acres of land from the federal government under the Alaska Statehood Act is getting closer to an end.
But because the state is getting closer to its goal, its requests now exceed a limit in federal law.
This week, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources announced that it is preparing to surrender the claims to as much as 5.7 million acres scattered across the state, an area collectively bigger than New Jersey.
The original 1958 Statehood Act gave Alaska permission to take over 105 million acres of federal land, but the state could — and did — target millions of acres more than that before the selection period closed in 1993.
That’s partially because some of the state’s initial selections were being used for another purpose and weren’t immediately available for transfer.
The state’s selections have paid off in a big way: The vast state-owned Prudhoe Bay oil fields were originally controlled by the federal government before being selected by the state in 1964.
Transfers move extremely slow; the land must be surveyed, marked and processed through the federal bureaucracy.
Year by year, decade by decade, the federal government has incrementally passed parcels to the state.
Earlier this year, the federal government removed restrictions that had blocked the transfer of 1.4 million acres along the Dalton Highway and trans-Alaska oil pipeline. That leaves about 3.2 million acres left to be transferred.
Under federal law, the state can select no more than 125% of the acreage left to be transferred, which means that as the balance shrinks, Alaska needs to surrender some claims.
By phone on Tuesday, DNR officials said they’re preparing to give up some low-priority selections, places that are unlikely to be transferred or are less valuable than other selections.
In this week’s public notice, DNR listed 18 targets for relinquishment — the land under Eielson Air Force Base, a bombing range near Fort Greely, land surrounded by other owners in western Alaska, land envisioned for a road near Unalakleet, and more.
Relinquishing each claim involves a separate public process, and more are likely to come. Even if all 18 claims are relinquished, the state will remain above the 125% claim limit.
Alaska also has millions of acres of “top filed” selections — claims that haven’t been formally processed because the land is being used for some other purpose, like mining.
If a federal mine claim ends, for example, the top filing means the state gets priority afterward.
Top filed selections don’t count against the 125% limit, but the state may begin eliminating some of those as well.
DNR officials said that as the state gets closer and closer to the Statehood Act’s limit, the state will become more selective about the claims it keeps, and it may keep some particularly valuable top-filed picks even if they’re not immediately available.
As it gets closer and closer to the 105 million-acre limit, Alaska could hold the last selections in reserve for those top-filed parcels, the officials said.
Any final decision would be up to future governors and future DNR commissioners.
