Mountains are viewed across the water from Herring Pete’s Cove, now part of Kachemak Bay State Park. (Photo provided by The Conservation Fund)
A century ago, a Norwegian-born mariner nicknamed “Herring Pete” and his Austrian-born wife operated a fox farm on a scenic, remote and mountainous Kenai Peninsula island.
The Conservation Fund, a private nonprofit that protects vulnerable lands and habitat, has purchased the site on Nuka Island known as Herring Pete’s Cove and donated it to the state.
Nuka Island, which comprises about 15,300 acres, is adjacent to Nuka Passage, a well-traveled, safe and sheltered route used by boaters sailing between Seward and Homer. The region is a destination in itself for wildlife watchers. It has salmon, seabird colonies, marine mammals and land mammals.
“It is a wild and fascinating, beautiful place,” said Chris Little, Alaska field representative at The Conservation Fund. It is rich with fish and wildlife, and “the scenery is absolutely breathtaking.”
With the purchase of Herring Pete’s Cove, all of Nuka Island is now folded into Kachemak Bay State Park. The Conservation Fund’s 2023 acquisition of a site called Mike’s Bay added 22.5 acres.
“Now the entire island is public, which is really cool,” Little said.
The Conservation Fund previously added acreage elsewhere to the park to ensure public access to a site called Saddle Trail. That purchase, comprising 5 acres, was completed in 2022, and the parcel was officially added to the park in early 2023.
Aside from its natural beauty, the Nuka Island site has historic significance.
Herring Pete Sather and wife Josephine, known as “Mrs. Herring Pete,” were icons in that part of the Kenai Peninsula.
“Because the couple was involved in so many activities, many consider them the pre-eminent historical figures associated with Kenai Fjords National Park,” according to a National Park Service historical account. Pete was considered eccentric but friendly and skilled, and Josephine was considered an adventurous and capable outdoorswoman. Her son from her first marriage, Frank Angerman, served in the Alaska territorial legislature.
Herring Pete was born Peder Pederson. He became known as “Herring Pete” to distinguish him from all the other Norwegian mariners named Peterson or something similar, according to a book by author Doug Capra about the region’s history called “The Spaces Between: Stories from the Kenai Mountains to the Kenai Fjords.”
Herring Pete was not the original operator of the Nuka Island fox farm. That distinction belonged to Josephine and her second husband, Edward Tueck. After Edward died, Josephine accepted Herring Pete’s marriage proposal to ensure that she could stay on the island and keep operating the farm, according to the National Park Service.
The acceptance was despite earlier impressions Herring Pete left on Josephine, according to Capra’s book.
“Herring Pete was the dirtiest man I’d ever seen,” she is quoted as saying in the book. “His sweater was held together by wire, so he wouldn’t take it off all winter.”
Pete died in 1961, and Josephine died in 1964. After a period when other families lived there, the University of Alaska in 1988 gained title to Herring Pete’s Cove.
The university’s sale to the Conservation Fund, at an undisclosed price, and the subsequent transfer to the Alaska Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation were made final in March. The parties decided to announce the deal this month to time it with the start of the summer tourist and recreation season.
The Conservation Fund has preserved over 400,000 acres in the state since 1994, from the Utqiagvik area in the Arctic to the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska.
A section of rocky shoreline in Herring Pete’s Cove is reflected in the water. Herring Pete’s Cove is now part of Kachemak Bay State Park. (Photo provided by The Conservation Fund)
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
At the beginning of his three-year federal prison sentence for felony tax evasion, Roger Shoffstall lost his telephone privileges when a guard caught him running his small Alaska phone company from behind bars.
He’s lost a lot of privileges over the years. Shoffstall, 75, can’t serve on a federal jury. Unlike most Alaskans, he doesn’t receive an annual Permanent Fund dividend check. And he is not allowed to own a gun.
One thing never changes, however: Each year, the federal government sends his company, Summit Telephone, more than $1 million.
The money comes from a special government subsidy program that Congress created to bring fast, affordable phone and internet service to hard-to-reach places. You help pay for it.
Pull up your latest phone bill and look for a line labeled “Universal Service Fund.” Some phone companies list it as a “Universal Connectivity Charge” or fold it into a “Regulatory Programs & Telco Recovery Fee.” It’s all the same thing: a surcharge added to the monthly bill of phone customers throughout the United States.
The federal government and phone companies don’t call it a tax — but it acts like one. Carriers must currently contribute 37 cents of every dollar of their interstate and international phone revenues to the fund.
In Alaska, where many communities can only be reached by plane or boat, the Federal Communications Commission has given telecommunications companies $4.6 billion in these subsidies since 2016. That’s more than $600 per Alaskan per year. More per resident than in any other state.
Yet after all that spending, Alaska still ranks near the bottom for access to the very land-based, high-speed internet service the money was meant to deliver.
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Some communities have yet to be wired at all. In others, fiber-optic cables or microwave towers offer internet with speeds that were recently clocked, statewide, as the slowest in the country. Even with the subsidies, the service comes at a steep price to customers: often hundreds of dollars a month for internet one-tenth what the FCC considers broadband quality.
The federal program has kept money flowing to companies like Shoffstall’s whose operators have troubled pasts. It also gives money to companies like Shoffstall’s regardless of how many people use their services. And fewer and fewer Alaskans have done so since low-earth satellites from Starlink entered the market at better prices. (Satellite internet doesn’t qualify for the subsidy but costs about $90 to $130 per month for download speeds up to 280 megabits per second in the same service area as Summit Telephone. According to Summit’s website, its fastest internet plan in the same region maxes out at 25 Mbps and costs $135 a month.)
All of these excesses appear to fall within the program’s rules or the FCC’s discretion.
A telecom on the Aleutian island of Adak receives more than $350,000 a year to provide phone and low-speed internet services to 306 buildings, according to FCC records, even though the state Department of Labor says the island is home to fewer than 80 people. One business owner said everyone he knows on the island has moved on to Starlink anyway.
GCI, the state’s largest telecom and its largest subsidy recipient, got $466 million just two years after its settlement with the federal government for alleged fraud related to the same subsidy program. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.)
Shoffstall and his attorney did not respond to repeated interview requests or answer detailed questions sent by email. On Thursday, Shoffstall sent two documents to the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica asserting that he is a sovereign citizen of the United States, an ideology that the FBI has described as “those who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States.” The FBI has categorized the extremist version of this movement as “domestic terrorism.”
Larry Mayes, the owner of Adak Eagle Enterprises, the company that receives the subsidy to provide internet on Adak, declined to answer questions about the funding. “You’ll have to talk to the FCC about that,” he said, hanging up the phone.
In a written response to questions, GCI said it and other Alaska telecoms depend heavily on the subsidies to provide services across the state.
“Before and after the settlement, GCI continued to work with the FCC and customers to provide high-quality communications services in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations,” the GCI statement said. “The settlement did not change Alaskans’ growing demand for these services, GCI’s willingness to provide them, or the criticality of USF funding to the sustainability of those services.”
The FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency is weighing the future of the program and recently circulated a proposal to overhaul or potentially sunset elements of the subsidy that funds companies like Summit.
Alaska telecom lobbyists and executives said that the state provides some of the most challenging geography to serve in the United States, and that they have made great progress in bringing internet access to Alaska.
Christine O’Connor, executive director of the Alaska Telecom Association, said the subsidies have improved access and lowered costs for rural Alaskans.
“There is simply no way that rural Alaskan communities could be connected with Anchorage or with the rest of the United States and the world” if consumers living in rural Alaska communities had to pay the full cost, she wrote in a statement to the Daily News and ProPublica.
But Daniel Lyons, a former attorney whose law firm represented Verizon and AT&T and who now teaches internet law at Boston College Law School, said the subsidy program is broken. The fundamental problem: No one has ever rigorously tested whether it works.
“It’s not proven how successful it is,” said Lyons, who specializes in telecommunications and internet law, “because the FCC is not very good at auditing its program.”
In Shoffstall’s case, the FCC pays his company what works out to about $800 per month per customer. Lyons has advocated scrapping this approach and sending the subsidy directly to consumers instead, letting them choose which provider gets their money. In Alaska, that might mean Starlink, though some new users say they are being charged a “high demand” fee of $1,500 to sign up, or its future satellite competitors like Amazon Leo.
“If the goal is to make sure everybody gets online,” Lyons said, “you try to find the families that can’t afford service at market rates and you give subsidies to them directly.”
Money for Homes With No Internet
Alaska’s outsized share of the subsidy traces back to a man memorialized with a life-sized bronze statue in the Anchorage airport.
Sen. Ted Stevens — “Uncle Ted” — spent 40 years delivering federal money to Alaska and was nearing the height of his power in 1996 when Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, creating the modern Universal Service Fund.
It was before smartphones or Netflix. Most homes in America had no internet, and by the late 1990s “high-speed” service meant 200 kilobits per second — faster than dial-up modems but too slow to play high-definition video. Today, the FCC defines broadband, which is just another way of saying high-speed internet, as 100 Mbps. That’s 500 times faster than in the ’90s.
As chair of the committee that controlled the FCC’s budget, Stevens ensured Alaska telecoms received special treatment, according to Carol Mattey, a former FCC official who oversaw efforts to reform the subsidy.
“It would be suicidal to do something to make the head of the Appropriations Committee angry at you,” said Mattey, who served as deputy chief of the commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau.
Stevens lost reelection in 2008 while under a corruption indictment that was later dropped. He died two years later in a plane crash on a trip from a private lodge owned by GCI, the Alaska telecom giant. GCI’s current president and chief operating officer, Gregory Chapados, is Stevens’ former chief of staff.
A GCI spokesperson wrote that while Stevens chaired the Appropriations Committee, he did not at the time chair the Senate Commerce Committee, which drafted the Telecommunications Act and oversees the subsidy program. Chapados, who served as chief of staff for Stevens from 1986 to 1992, was not involved in developing the Telecommunications Act, the company said.
The company said it “maintains constructive working relationships with all members of our delegation to advocate on behalf of our customers and all other Alaskans.”
Nationally, the subsidy program allows payments to any company that the FCC or state regulators have designated as an “eligible telecommunications carrier.” How much they get depends on whether they want to provide internet to village schools, health care clinics or simply remote communities.
In its statement to ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News, GCI said, “There are no provisions in the Telecom Act extending special treatment for Alaska.” But the state is treated differently in practice. In 2016, the FCC created a program called the Alaska Plan specifically for carriers here, allowing them to negotiate their own performance targets rather than being subject to the same cost models applied elsewhere.
Alaska’s geography made it especially difficult for the agency to estimate the cost of serving customers in the state, Mattey said. The FCC assumed the companies would only set goals that they would be able to achieve.
They tried to adjust the national formula for distributing money to account for this factor, Mattey said, but Alaska telecoms kept pushing back and FCC officials gave up.
“We tried so hard not to treat Alaska differently because our goal was to create defined deployment obligations for all companies, and we failed,” she said of the 2016 reforms. “The political pressure was too strong.”
Summit has received $12 million over the past decade by promising to deliver internet to 337 locations across a collection of woodsy, roadside neighborhoods just north of Fairbanks. Filings by Summit report dozens of new connections in some years, a combined total of 271 as of 2025.
But according to the FCC’s interactive map of all locations U.S. telecoms report actually serving with internet, the number of customers using Shoffstall’s service is far smaller. In a phone interview, the company’s acting general manager, James Perry, said that Summit has about 120 internet customers and 160 in total.
Mattey said the rules of the program say nothing about making sure the lines that a subsidy recipient builds actually get used — only that they get built.
Companies that fall behind on building out their network can have their subsidies reduced. But they are allowed to go on collecting cash long after the technology they use has become outdated, customers have moved on to cheaper and faster alternatives or their community has become a ghost town.
“They’re playing by the rules, so to speak,” Mattey said. “It’s a flat amount of money the government has decided they are entitled to.”
Off the Grid
Shoffstall’s penchant for setting his own rules first landed him in trouble in 1996. State prosecutors charged him with a misdemeanor when he mailed documents whose tone and language mimicked court orders to an Alaska bank, demanding money.
The trial ended without a verdict when Shoffstall agreed to change his plea from not guilty to no contest. He received a suspended imposition of sentence, a judgment entering a conviction with no jail time, contingent upon completing probation. Over the decades since, he has continued to file paperwork in state court, federal court and with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources claiming to be a sovereign citizen not bound by the same court systems as other Alaskans.
An electrical technician by trade, Shoffstall bought the business for about $675,000 in 2000.
Shoffstall’s customers live mainly in the hillsides north of Fairbanks. Some right off the highway. Some at the end of snowy roads littered with warning signs like: “You are no longer a trespasser. You are a target.”
People moved here when the famously independent and rough-edged city of Fairbanks felt too urbane. They moved here to get off the grid. Not on it.
Many of Summit Telephone’s customers live in rural, remote places in Alaska, including Cleary Summit, north of Fairbanks. Kyle Hopkins/ADN
Among Shoffstall’s customers was a Sunday school teacher who’d arrived in Alaska in 1981, answering phones for a small insurance company.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, still the days of landlines and dial tones, Lois Sannes found herself frustrated with a surcharge added to calls in the Summit service area. She began complaining to the Regulatory Commission of Alaska.
She wrote so many letters to the governor that someone wrote back. Sannes met with an attorney, who she said told her the IRS had launched a criminal investigation into Shoffstall.
Separately, Shoffstall’s company was under scrutiny from the regulatory commission itself.
When Summit sought approval for the rates it charged other telecom companies to use its phone lines, the commission allowed them to look at Summit’s unredacted financial reports. A consultant hired by the rival telecom companies testified to the commission that Summit’s spending appeared unusually high, poorly documented and in some cases tied to transactions between the company and Shoffstall himself.
Roughly 95% of the company’s revenue around this period came not from phone customers but the federal subsidy program and payments redistributed through the telecom industry itself, according to audited financial statements Summit filed with state regulators.
The dispute before the regulatory commission ended when Summit and its competitors agreed to a settlement. The commission issued no findings on whether there were indeed problems with Summit’s books, as the consultant’s report had outlined.
But a new legal issue arose for Shoffstall — this time from the IRS, whose investigation Sannes had heard about. On Sept. 15, 2009, a federal grand jury indicted Shoffstall on allegations of felony tax evasion. The charges said he “willfully evaded the payment of his income taxes” for at least eight years beginning in 1996.
Shoffstall’s former accountants testified against him.
“I told him that he was going to get nailed, that’s not a question,” certified public accountant Garry Hutchison told the jury. “The only question is whether or not it would bring the company down.”
A Fairbanks jury found Shoffstall guilty on Feb. 5, 2010, after a five-day trial.
The FCC has the power to cut off subsidies to recipients convicted of fraud and other financial crimes related to the subsidy program. How closely related the crime must be to the subsidy payments is up for interpretation by the agency.
On one hand, Shoffstall’s indictment said he used his position running a federally subsidized company to obstruct the IRS investigation. On the other, the conviction was for tax evasion related to money he personally owed the IRS.
There is precedent for the FCC closely scrutinizing a subsidy recipient who’s been convicted of evading personal income taxes.
The FCC Wireline Competition Bureau directed the Universal Service Fund’s administrator to look into whether Hawaii-based Sandwich Isles Communications misused its subsidy dollars. The action followed owner Albert Hee’s conviction on federal tax crimes in 2015.
The FCC fined Sandwich Isles and Hee $49.6 million and ordered the company to repay $27 million in what it described as improperly received subsidies. Hee’s attorneys contested the charges, arguing that he had concealed nothing and that the government mistook accounting errors for criminal intent. A jury disagreed.
It’s not clear whether the FCC investigated Shoffstall after his conviction; the agency did not respond to questions about the case.
But records show that Shoffstall’s company steadily continued to receive Universal Service Fund subsidies, even while Shoffstall was in prison. Two months after his release in January 2013, Summit reported collecting $1.1 million in annual subsidies.
When Shoffstall’s probation officer told a federal judge that Shoffstall was ignoring his probation requirements, he was arrested on Dec. 9, 2013, and went back to prison for several months. His company received $859,393 in Universal Service Fund subsidies during that time.
In the years that followed, the subsidies to Summit grew. FCC data shows Summit in 2016 received one of the highest levels of federal subsidies per customer in the country.
As of that year, Shoffstall’s company paid him an annual salary of up to $121,000 and paid an annual dividend of up to $155,000 to a holding company for which he was the sole shareholder. His company stopped publicly disclosing that information after 2016, as the Regulatory Commission of Alaska stopped requiring detailed annual reporting, leaving far less financial information available to the public.
Sannes, the former Summit customer who once pressured state regulators to take a closer look at the company, now lives in Wisconsin. Asked if she was surprised to learn that the company’s subsidies not only continue today, but have increased to $1.5 million a year, Sannes said she had assumed his criminal conviction alone would have been enough to cut off the money.
“I’m horrified,” she said.
Unplugged
Summit Telephone is named for a mountaintop, Cleary Summit, outside Fairbanks. Sled dogs can be heard howling from their plywood houses, and every so often a semitruck barrels down the highway, swirling snow as it hauls gold ore from open-pit mines.
In the winter, you might see a rocket launch from a valley a few miles north, from the world’s only rocket launch site operated by a university. The hills are known for world-famous aurora borealis displays, and a collection of Airbnbs and lodges line winding roads.
As the subsidies flowed to Summit, Shoffstall continued to create and distribute documents intended to look like court orders. He submitted paperwork in federal court arguing he didn’t have to pay taxes — in one 2017 filing accusing the federal government of “high crimes” against him, in another issuing what he called a “summary judgment” against President Donald Trump for “fraud, collusion and conspiracy.”
None of this stopped the state’s telecom industry from spotlighting him as a poster child. O’Connor, the executive director of the Alaska Telecom Association, cited Summit to state lawmakers in 2018 as an example of a company forced to “muddle along with the obsolete technology” rather than upgrade its network due the burden of state overregulation. Raising the rates to provide upgrades would have required Summit to make its case to regulators that the fee increases were necessary.
Asked whether it was an appropriate use of public funds for a company like Summit to receive roughly $10,000 per customer per year in federal subsidies, O’Connor did not directly answer. In a written response, the Alaska Telecom Association said the program “is specifically designed to support building and operating telecommunications networks in high-cost areas” and that participating providers “are subject to FCC program requirements, reporting obligations, and oversight.” Asked whether it stood by its 2018 characterization of Summit, O’Connor said her testimony was focused on the challenges facing smaller providers generally.
Shoffstall never upgraded to expand its service. According to the FCC broadband map, Summit’s equipment today remains incapable of delivering internet faster than 25 Mbps — one-fourth the FCC’s current definition of broadband.
Meanwhile, the internet marketplace has changed. Some Alaskans no longer need or want the slower subsidized service.
Members of the Alaska Telecom Association board, including Shoffstall, middle of bottom row. Despite his conviction for personal tax evasion, the association highlighted Shoffstall and Summit in 2018. Screenshot by ProPublica
One recent Saturday, 74-year-old Philip Marshall shoveled a waist-high tunnel through the snow to a cabin near the top of the mountain. A wood carver, he wore a red ski cap decorated with the flag of Denmark. Asked about his internet access, he invited a reporter inside and made a pot of black tea.
Marshall said his wife, Janet, moved into this cabin before he met her. The construction boom for the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline had raised rents so high within Fairbanks’ city limits during the mid-1970s that she moved here out of town. Like many cabins outside Fairbanks, the home is “dry,” meaning there’s no running water. Old-timers hauled the building itself up the side of the mountain on sleds.
In interviews, several of Marshall’s neighbors said they have no complaints about the internet speeds Summit provides. One said she pays Summit $95 a month and the internet is fine for her needs. Another, who retired after a career working on remote Alaska radar sites, said he uses the service too. But he’s recently added satellite internet.
Others who have opted for the low-orbit satellite dishes, which deliver speeds up to 10 times faster than Summit for about the same price, have dropped their Summit plans altogether. One especially clear evening recently, Marshall stood in the snow and counted 18 satellites passing overhead within nine minutes. “Starlink,” he said.
The company and corporate parent SpaceX did not respond to questions and do not publicly release the number of users in Alaska. But Ookla, a company that offers tools people can use to test their internet speed, offered a proxy measure: About 1 in 10 Alaskans who tested their home internet speed through Ookla connected via Starlink, compared with roughly 1 in 67 in California.
The Marshalls haven’t felt the need to pay for either service. Their cellphones give five-bar, 5G service from a nearby tower. Finishing his tea, Marshall pulled on his jacket to head back outside. Still have to shovel a path to the outhouse, he said.
In the corner of the room, a plastic box the size and color of a concrete brick sat near the floor. It was for the Summit internet line that public subsidies pay the company roughly $10,000 a year to provide. Unplugged and unused.
State prosecutors in Utqiagvik have charged a North Slope Borough employee with allegedly crashing a fuel truck while drunk.
According to court documents filed May 13 in Utqiagvik, James Brown was driving on April 9 in Point Lay, a village on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, when he ran the fuel truck off the road in front of a home.
North Slope Borough Police Department Sgt. Neil Lynch had flown into Point Lay that morning and recognized Brown — they had been on the same plane from Utqiagvik.
According to an affidavit signed by Lynch, James said “he had been binge drinking with his brother for the last five days … and had been drinking whiskey until 8 a.m. (that) morning, but had not brought any alcohol to the village.”
Lynch took James to the holding cells at the Point Lay Police Department, whereupon James fell asleep.
A subsequent breath-alcohol test measured 0.197%, more than twice the state’s legal limit of 0.08%.
James has been charged with one count of driving under the influence, a Class A Misdemeanor. No fuel spilled from the crashed truck.
The North Slope Borough did not immediately respond to emailed questions about the incident on Friday, including whether Brown remains employed by the borough.
Workers unload an early season catch of sockeye salmon at the harbor in Cordova in June 2024 (Photo by Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon)
Alaskans pride themselves on resilience. We work long hours, adapt to difficult conditions, raise families through dark winters and carry a culture that values toughness and independence.
But resilience without recovery eventually becomes exhaustion.
Across healthcare, more providers are seeing the same troubling pattern: people who are chronically fatigued, mentally overloaded, emotionally strained and physically stuck in stress physiology that never truly powers down. Patients increasingly report poor sleep, headaches, anxiety, digestive issues, chronic muscular tension, brain fog, shallow breathing and difficulty recovering physically or mentally from everyday life.
Many assume this is simply normal modern living. It should not be.
Alaska presents unique environmental and lifestyle pressures that can intensify stress on the body. Long winters, reduced daylight exposure, economic pressure, geographic isolation, demanding work schedules and increasing digital dependency all contribute to a population that is functioning under constant strain.
At the same time, many of the behaviors that help human physiology recover have steadily declined. Americans move less, sleep less, spend more time on screens, experience more chronic stimulation and often live in a near-constant state of distraction.
The human nervous system was designed to adapt to periods of stress, not remain activated indefinitely.
This conversation matters because chronic stress does not simply affect mood. It influences sleep quality, immune response, cardiovascular function, muscular tension, focus, digestion, inflammation and overall recovery capacity. Over time, those effects compound.
Unfortunately, much of modern healthcare remains largely reactive. We often wait until symptoms become severe enough to require intervention rather than placing greater emphasis on prevention, recovery, movement quality, stress regulation and lifestyle adaptation before chronic dysfunction becomes disease.
This is not an argument against medicine. Modern medicine saves lives every day and remains essential. But public health conversations should also include practical discussions about how daily behaviors influence long-term function and well-being.
Recovery is not laziness. Sleep is not a weakness. Movement is not optional. Human physiology still requires the same foundational inputs it always has.
Children need more movement and less digital overload. Adults need opportunities for physical recovery, emotional decompression, meaningful human connection and healthier stress-management habits. Communities benefit when healthcare discussions extend beyond symptom management and include proactive strategies that support long-term resilience.
Alaskans are capable of extraordinary endurance. But endurance alone is not the goal.
A population that survives while becoming progressively more exhausted, inflamed, sedentary and disconnected is not moving toward better health.
Perhaps it is time we stop glorifying burnout and begin taking recovery more seriously, not only as individuals, but as a culture.
A commercial tour boat ran aground during low tide Friday on the Chilkat River Flats near Pyramid Island. According to Haines Harbormaster Henry Pollan, no passengers were on board the Alaska Excursions vessel, just a captain and crew members. The vessel Klondike Kate set anchor and waited until the boat floated to start heading back to Skagway.
Pollan and assistant harbormaster Melina Shields communicated with the crew while they were stranded earlier in the day. She said they “seemed to have the situation under control.”
The Haines police department, fire and rescue and Wildlife Troopers were notified but were not needed.
Pollan said most nautical charts show the flats as an undesirable travel area, so boats getting stranded is an uncommon situation.
Alaska Excursions currently holds a commercial tour permit with the Haines Borough. The permit allows the company to bring tourists on a motorized watercraft to Glacier Point. Its tour route starts in Haines or Skagway, sails to view Sea Lion Rock, and then heads north to Glacier Point.
As of Friday afternoon, no one from the Alaska Excursions Skagway office was available to answer questions. A call to Murphy was not immediately returned.
An Alaska Railroad train is in motion through the Chugach National Forest near Portage. (Photo by A&J Fotos/Getty Images)
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has vetoed a bill from Rep. Genevive Mina, D-Anchorage, that sought to raise the priority of public transit programs like buses in state transportation planning.
Senators passed House Bill 26 by a 16-4 vote on April 29, and the House approved it on a 22-14 vote May 1.
If the bill had been enacted, it would have mandated that the state include rural transit programs, like those in Nome and Tok, when drafting a statewide transit plan.
It also would have mandated coordination with the Alaska Railroad, state ferry system, tribes and local planning groups when drafting a statewide transit plan.
In his veto message, the governor said the bill was “unnecessary” and “redundant” because the state is already doing what the bill mandates.
In addition, the message said, adding transit explicitly in the core planning priorities of the Alaska Department of Transportation “inappropriately seeks to elevate a single mode of transportation above others.”That could affect the way the state applies for and receives federal grants, the message said.
Rep. Genevieve Mina, D-Anchorage, said that while the “state is doing planning related to public transit, part of the issue that the advocates that we have been working with have been facing is that they’re not always consistent about how they do those activities.”
In the past, she explained, rural transit groups have missed out on federal grants that have gone to urban ones in Alaska.
In addition, she feels the state hasn’t properly planned for ways to incorporate commuter rail programs on the Alaska Railroad or the Alaska Marine Highway into a statewide network.
“We’re not doing our best efforts as a state to really coordinate all these efforts together, so (the bill) would be the vision of incorporating that in the department’s responsibilities, even though they are doing some of this work already,” Mina said.
She said she does not expect legislators to override Dunleavy’s veto, which is his 12th during the 34th Alaska State Legislature.
Legislators passed 111 bills during the two-year legislative cycle, and more vetoes are possible as lawmakers gradually transmit their work to the governor for consideration.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed Senate Bill 192, the evacuation system bill, on Wednesday, and he allowed House Bill 48, the civil legal services fund bill, to become law without his signature on Thursday.
SB 192, from Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Nikiski, mandates that officials use a standardized three-level designation when communicating when Alaskans should leave the area of a disaster. Previously, that system was only optional, and the lack of a standard has occasionally caused miscommunications around wildfires.
“I am thankful that Alaskans will get clear and easy to understand instructions about when to prepare to leave and then when to evacuate in an emergency,” Bjorkman said.
HB 48 affects the organization that provides free legal help to Alaskans in civil cases. The Alaska Constitution mandates that the state provide free legal defenses in criminal cases, but Alaskans in civil lawsuits are not mandated to receive help.
In Alaska, domestic violence victims are frequently involved in civil lawsuits as they seek to separate from abusive partners and establish new lives.
HB 48 requires that 25% of all state court filing fees go to ALSC, up from 10% in current law. That higher percentage is worth an extra $400,000 to the corporation and is expected to help an additional 800-850 people annually.
Rep. Sara Hannan, D-Juneau, sponsored HB 48 and said on Friday that she appreciates the administration allowing it to become law.
“More Alaskans may be able to access civil justice,” she said by text message.
Lawmakers have proposed the 25% figure since 2011.
Sen. Forrest Dunbar, D-Anchorage, has been seeking it for the past four years. A prior bill fell just short of passage in 2024 after then-House Rules Chair Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage, blocked it from coming to a final vote in the House, Dunbar said.
Dunbar said he was “very glad to see” the bill become law.
“ALSC provides critical services to some of Alaska’s most vulnerable populations,” he said, crediting ALSC’s current director and her predecessor for their work on the bill.
“Maggie Humm and Nikole Nelson deserve a ton of credit for educating legislators on both sides of the aisle and turning support for Civil Legal Services into a bipartisan goal,” he said.
Glenfarne CEO Brendan Duval speaks on May 21, 2026, at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference in Anchorage, while Gov. Mike Dunleavy listens. Duval and the governor argue that a near-total elimination of property taxes on gasline-related infrastructre is one of the last steps needed to make Glenfarne’s massive liquefied natural gas project a reality. Dunleavy has called a special session in the hopes of getting lawmakers to approve that tax change. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
On the day a special legislative session began to consider tax incentives for a long-desired pipeline to carry natural gas from the North Slope to markets, Gov. Mike Dunleavy insisted that the massive project is about to become reality.
“It’s gone from concept to discussion to, now, execution,” Dunleavy told the audience Thursday at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference in Anchorage.
All that it will take to start “the most transformational, generational project this part of the world has ever seen” is a shift away from the state’s petroleum property tax system, Dunleavy said.
The governor has called lawmakers into a special session to pass a bill imposing sweeping changes in the property tax system that has been the main source of revenue for several Alaska local governments. Under his proposal — which lawmakers failed to approve before the end of the just-concluded regular session — the state and local governments would eliminate 90% of the property tax that would be levied on gasline-related infrastructure in exchange for future opportunities to tax natural gas as it moves through the yet-to-be-built system.
The founder and chief executive officer of the company proposing to build the gas pipeline system urged conference attendees to lobby for the governor’s bill.
“Please talk to your mayors, your elected officials, your legislators, your community leaders, your union leaders and get them behind any rally here to call to arms. Let’s get this thing over the line,” said Brendan Duval, the CEO of the Glenfarne Group.
Action by the legislature is one of the last pieces needed to proceed to a final investment decision, Duval said.
A few blocks from the Deni’ina Civic and Convention Center, where the conference was held, energy and environmental experts detailed reasons to be wary about Glenfarne’s plan.
Protestors hold a sign at a May 20, 2026, rally in Anchorage. Rally participants criticized the fossil fuel emphasis at the Alaska Sustaintable Energy Conference, as well as Glenfarne’s push for state assistance for a massive natural gas pipeline project.(Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
The insistence on a near-elimination of property taxes is a sign of the plan’s weakness, they said.
“I have less faith in anything regarding the pipeline than I did three days ago,” said Dan Rodgers, a board member at the Anchorage-based Chugach Electric Association, at a panel discussion organized as an alternative to the conference.
Erin McKittrick, a Homer Electric Association board member, said Glenfarne’s promises seem hollow, with important information lacking.
“We had Glenfarne here last year saying that they were going to get their (final investment decision) by the end of 2025 before the legislative session. And then now we have Glenfarne saying they are completely dependent on a tax break that the legislature passes for them,” she said.
The call for a groundswell of support for the governor’s bill is suspicious in itself, McKittrick said. “If you actually have a project, you don’t need a bunch of individual citizens to rally for your project which already has its permits. You need to go do the actual pieces of it,” she said.
Krystal Lapp of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center said she hopes lawmakers meeting in the special session will reject the governor’s plan.
“It would be crazy if I went to the legislature and said, ‘Hey, I don’t want to pay 90% of my taxes in the Fairbanks North Star Borough. Would you please have Dunleavy go over there and bully them into a special session?’” she said.
Instead of pinning hopes on a giant project that developers insist requires near-elimination of state and local property taxes, Alaska policy should focus on diversifying energy sources through more use of renewables, the panelists said.
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum speaks on May 19. 2026, at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference in Anchorage. Burgum encouraged state lawmakers to pass Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s gas pipeline tax-break bill. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
Hydropower is already a significant contributor to the Southcentral Alaska energy mix, and four more hydro projects are being considered to boost that contribution, Rodgers said.
Conference criticized
A day earlier, a group of activists had harsher criticism of Dunleavy and Glenfarne, which was a prominent sponsor of the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference.
The use of the word “sustainable” for the conference was a sham, said the activists, who staged a protest rally Wednesday on the sidewalk across the street from the convention center. They blasted Dunleavy, featured speaker U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — who encouraged lawmakers to approve the governor’s tax bill — conference sponsor Glenfarne and others for emphasizing fossil fuel development over renewables.
Sara Siqiñiq Thomas of Alaska Community Action on Toxics said she attended last year but was too disappointed at the content to attend this year. “We know that what’s going on in there is a lot of false solutions,” she said at the rally on the sidewalk across from the convention center.
Chris Kasanke of the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition targeted the Glenfarne project specifically. It is no more economically viable than all the other gas pipeline plans that were proposed but failed over the past half century, he said.
“This is an extremely bad project for Alaska, and right now they are debating giving corporate subsidies to this AK LNG project,” he said. “Why do we continually subsidize dirty energy for oil executives that don’t live here, right? We don’t need that. What we need to do is start working on renewable energy, real renewable, sustainable energy.”
The conference did have some sessions on renewable energy, including one in which Dunleavy defended his record of promoting renewable energy in Alaska.
Glenfarne’s name is displayed on May. 19, 2026, on the stairs at the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center, the venue for the three-day Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference. Glenfarne is a major sponsor of the conference. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
His own family benefits, he said on Wednesday.
“I may be the only governor in the country that has a 50-panel array, solar array, at my residence, and I can tell you from my own experience, even in the shortest day of the year, Dec. 21, especially up here in Alaska, we generate electricity,” he said.
Long history of gas pipeline plans
The energy industry, including major international companies, has floated various North Slope gas pipeline plans over several decades. All were abandoned, despite support and authorizations for gas pipeline development from presidential administrations dating back to the 1970s, as well as enabling legislation from Congress dating back decades. Those past plans include a “bullet line” concept promoted in the early 2000s that would deliver North Slope gas to the Cook Inlet region, just as Glenfarne is planning to do with its first phase.
But Dunleavy said the Glenfarne plan, with an estimated cost ranging from $44 billion to over $65 billion, “is very different” from those past failed plans.
He listed reasons why he believes that: permits that have been granted, a war in the Middle East that has disrupted world energy markets, the emergence of artificial intelligence and need for data farms that is driving up the demand for energy, the looming scarcity of natural gas from Cook Inlet — long the source of supply for Alaska’s most populated region — and the enthusiastic support of President Donald Trump.
Throughout the conference, Dunleavy, Duval and others praised the president, citing Trump’s policies to promote fossil fuel development.
“I really do see this as the beginning of a golden age for Alaska,” Dunleavy said on Tuesday at the start of the event, echoing a phrase that Trump is fond of using. “I’ve never seen more opportunity come out of an administration that has come out of this administration, and a better partnership than what we have with the federal government.”
Goldbelt Tram overlooking Juneau, courtesy of Goldbelt.
NOTN- Goldbelt Inc. will not reopen the Goldbelt Tram until a full round of safety testing and recertification is complete following an April 30 mechanical incident that injured several employees, the company’s president and CEO said.
McHugh Pierre said an internal investigation found “an operational event” triggered the tram’s emergency stop system, causing both cars to contact infrastructure near the lower terminal and skybridge.
“I want to make sure that everybody knows that safety is the core component at the Goldbelt Tram, and at all Goldbelt operations.” Said Pierre, “We take events like what happened April 30th at the tram very seriously, and so we’ve completed a rigorous investigation. We’ve identified an operational event that occurred that triggered the emergency stop system at the tram, and because of the proximity of where the cars were to the lower terminal in the sky bridge, each one of those cars made contact with that infrastructure. We are going through very serious testing and evaluation of all of our equipment before we reopen to make sure that we continue to stay focused, and have a very clear mandate on safety across all of our systems.”
Pierre said the tram, which is marking its 30th year of operation, undergoes rigorous annual inspections before each season, including non-destructive testing of welds on aluminum and steel for stress fractures, and evaluation of the haul and tow cables. The manufacturer also participates in reviewing the electric and diesel motor systems.
Because of the April incident, the full inspection is being repeated.
“We will go through it before we reopen this summer, and there’s been some confusion, and I understand, you know, people are looking for some answers. We will reopen when we are safe and certified to reopen.” Pierre said.
All season pass holders have been refunded but will still receive their usual benefits once the tram resumes service.
“I’m committed to being the first person to ride a tram car up the mountain,” he said, adding he wants to personally demonstrate the system’s safety and reliability, “I want to make sure that I can personally demonstrate the certainty that our loyal local customers have, and our visiting customers have as well.”
Mt Edgecumbe High School student dormitories are seen on Oct. 6, 2025 (Photo by Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon)
The Alaska Legislature approved millions for immediate upgrades to the facilities at the state-run boarding school, Mt. Edgecumbe High School.
Mt. Edgecumbe has been the focus of public concern and legislative hearings this year, after more than 100 students disenrolled during the school year. Lawmakers called the state’s management of the school into question after witnessing deteriorating facilities, particularly dorms and student living areas.
In response, legislators designated funding in next year’s budget for improvements at the boarding school: $10 million to renovate the dining hall and kitchen, $3 million to replace dorm windows, and thousands to replace mattresses, dorm furniture and decades-old laundry machines. They also approved a new maintenance manager position at the school and earmarked $450,000 for student travel, utilities costs, student activities, and mental health services.
Lawmakers also approved a bill to include Mt. Edgecumbe in a state grant program for funding major maintenance and construction projects in rural school districts. Lawmakers say the change will help streamline funding and prioritize improvement projects at the state-run boarding school moving forward.
Senate Bill 146 passed the Legislature and now goes to Gov. Mike Dunleavy for consideration. If approved, the bill would add Mt. Edgecumbe construction and maintenance projects to be included among those eligible for the state’s Regional Education Attendance Area and Small Municipal School District fund. The grant program is run by the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development for rural school districts’ major maintenance and construction in areas without local municipal governments contributing funds.
Rep. Robyn Frier, D-Utgiavik, the bill’s sponsor, is a third generation alumna of the school, and her son graduated from Mt. Edgecumbe this year. “So this school is deeply meaningful to me and to many rural Alaskans across our state,” she said on the House floor Tuesday.
Rep. Robyn Niayuq Frier is seen on the last day of the 34th regular legislative session on May 20, 2026. (Photo by Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon)
Frier noted that students from over 100 rural, mostly Alaska Native communities attend Mt. Edgecumbe every year.
“Unlike other schools in the state, Mt. Edgecumbe is not included on the school construction and major maintenance grant list. Instead, the school falls under statewide departmental maintenance list and must rely on the department to prioritize and advance maintenance requests. This differs greatly from other districts around the state, which are able to advocate directly for their own projects and apply for major maintenance funding,” she said.
If approved, the bill would also lift the $70 million cap on the REAA fund, allowing the Legislature to put more state dollars into the fund.
Maintenance at Mt. Edgecumbe was managed by the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities up until 2022, and then transferred to DEED.
Officials with DEED did not provide details about how Mt. Edgecumbe maintenance is managed or how projects are prioritized within the department on Thursday.
A similar proposal that would have changed the funding source for Mt. Edgecumbe as well as allow that money to go to maintain rural teacher housing was passed by the Legislature last year with bipartisan support, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it. In a veto message, the governor wrote that expanding the fund for teacher housing would “diminish equity across school districts” by “diverting already scarce dollars away from critical classroom repairs and complicating grant rankings.”
The governor also opposed repealing the cap on the REAA fund. He objected to the additional state money going into the fund “without project deadlines and adding ongoing operating costs to the state.”
In the current bill, a provision to include funding for teacher housing maintenance projects was removed. Frier noted that any funding above $70 million that goes unused will be lapsed back into the state’s general fund at the end of the fiscal year.
Mt. Edgecumbe High School, the state’s sole public boarding school, is seen in Sitka on Oct. 6, 2025 (Photo by Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon)
