Category: Alaska News

When Anchorage officials and outdoor recreation advocates gathered Saturday to ceremoniously mark the start of construction for a 1.3-mile section of trail near the city’s industrial port, they said they were taking a small step toward a big vision.

The connector will close a gap in the city’s existing network of paved bike trails and, supporters hope, eventually be part of what they call the “Alaska Long Trail,” an interlaced network spanning 500 miles from Fairbanks to Seward.

Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance characterized the Long Trail as a “dream trail connecting Seward to Fairbanks that will most definitely, most definitely, swing through downtown Anchorage.”

“Our parks and trails are the crown jewels of our community,” she said at the ceremony.

Supporters say trail expansions and improvements offer a big payoff to residents and to the economy, helping to diversify tourism activity that is otherwise highly dependent on the cruise ship industry.

The new trail connection is to include a plaza dedicated to Dena’ina heritage tied to Ship Creek, which in that Indigenous language is called Dgheyaytnu, meaning Stickleback Creek.

Farther south along the 500-mile corridor, another incremental step toward the Alaska Long Trail goal was completed last fall.

A new trail stretch at Moose Pass, a Kenai Peninsula community of about 225, offers a potentially unbroken hiking route down to Seward, about 30 miles to the south.

The work, funded by the U.S. Forest Service, includes six miles of new trail along what is the historic Iditarod Trail route that was used in Gold Rush and territorial days for travel between Seward and Nome.

The work also includes four miles of improved trail and two new bridges, said Jane Boer, the Alaska Long Trail officer at the nonprofit organization Alaska Trails.

Boer described the work in a progress report on the Alaska Long Trail that she delivered last Friday at the annual Statewide Trails conference held in Anchorage and hosted by Alaska Trails.

“I think it’s really exciting that there’s a new trail down there, new adventures to be had,” she said.

Economic aspects of trails

To supporters, the trails that wind through Anchorage and other communities enhance quality of life and, in the longer run, the economy.

State Rep. Zach Fields, D-Anchorage, who rode to the Saturday groundbreaking ceremony with his daughter Zara on an e-bike, is among the supporters.

“Trails are Anchorage’s competitive advantage,” Fields said at the event. “I think we all appreciate that they’re amazing for our quality of life because they’re the single most important thing we can do to become more competitive in a global economy.”

Trails also support an aspect of the tourism industry that is independent of cruise ship companies.

“It’s independent travelers who spend more money and stay longer,” said Haley Johnston, executive director of Alaska Trails.

The Alaska tourism industry’s dependence on cruise ships is evident in visitor statistics from the state’s national parks.

It took until last year for visitation to Alaska’s eight national parks to recover from big losses inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which in turn depressed cruise travel, according to a new report in Alaska Economic Trends, the monthly magazine of the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic – and a year when summer cruise travel virtually stopped – visitor numbers at Alaska’s eight national parks nose-dived by 86% in 2020. That compared to a 28% average drop across the country for national park visitation, according to the analysis.

The contrast was striking, said Karinne Wiebold, the state economist who wrote the article.

In the Lower 48, where national parks are within driving distance for most visitors, those lands became something like havens for people who wanted to recreate safely.

“For people it became a really enjoyable way to travel and be outside,” Wiebold said. But that social distancing did not work for people trying to travel to Alaska. “But when you come to Alaska, you’re not in a bubble.”

Much of the statewide trend has been driven by visitation at Glacier Bay National Park, which is visited almost entirely by cruise ship, and Denali National Park, which is a major destination for cruise passengers who add train or bus trips to their itineraries.

While visitation has returned to pre-pandemic levels, National Park Service employment is now well below that, despite a rebound that started in 2021, according to the analysis.

Trump administration cuts brought National Park Service employment down to 784 in 2025 from 865 the year before. In 2019, prior to the pandemic, Alaska had 869 park service jobs. The jobs support operations in all of Alaska’s National Park Service units, which include national preserves, national monuments, historical parks and other protected areas as well as the eight national parks.

The administration is proposing more cuts to both funding and employment. The budget it has proposed for the coming fiscal year would cut National Park Service employment in 2027 by more than 30% from 2025 levels.

Mixed prospects for future trail funding

The most recent trail connections and improvements have been paid for by a combination of federal, state, local and private funds.

The Moose Pass-area projects, which are in the Chugach National Forest, were the beneficiary of about $12 million in federal appropriations secured over three fiscal years by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, according to Alaska Trails.

The Ship Creek project, tentatively estimated to cost $19 million, is being paid for by a variety of sources, including federal transportation funds, state funds and local park bonds approved in recent years by Anchorage voters.

Over three budget cycles, the state has put over $6.7 million into Alaska Long Trail projects, according to Alaska Trails.

The concept of a “world-class trail” on par with the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails continues to have lawmakers’ support, said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage.

“I can’t emphasize enough how excited we are about the Long Trail,” Wielechowski said at the groundbreaking ceremony. “Every year in the legislature we’ve been trying to put a little bit more, a little bit more, towards it to build that out.”

There are no projects specific to the Alaska Long Trail in the 2027 fiscal year capital budget currently pending in the legislature, though there are several individual trail-related items.

The pending operating budget does propose an increase in funding for the state Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation, which could benefit trail users. The budget passed by the legislature last year appropriated $23.9 million; after Dunleavy’s vetoes, the amount was whittled to $21.8 million. The new operating budget that lawmakers are now crafting for the coming fiscal year puts funding for the division at $27.7 million.

Along with the Forest Service, there are numerous sources of federal funds for Alaska trail projects, such as those available from the Department of the Interior under the Great American Outdoors Act. However, budget cuts may have closed off one of those federal opportunities.

Among the Trump administration cuts to the National Park Service was the elimination of the two positions administering the service’s Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance Program in Alaska.

The program assists locally led conservation and outdoor recreation projects, including trail construction and maintenance. In the past, the program supported projects around the state, from Prince of Wales Island in the southernmost part of Southeast to Nome on the Bering Sea coast.

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SEARHC plans to build an 8,000-square-foot medical services building to consolidate dental and behavioral health services into a single campus, anchored by the hospital.

“We’re calling it the Wrangell Campus,” Ryan Matej, the Sitka-based chief administrative officer for the health care provider, said in a phone interview on Friday, May 1.

SEARHC has been looking at how to consolidate its multiple service locations in town, he said.

The dental clinic currently operates out of a SEARHC-owned building at Front and McKinnon streets, about a mile from the hospital. Behavioral health services are housed in a SEARHC-owned building at Church and St. Michaels streets.

Matej said no decision has been made on the future use of the two buildings after they are vacated.

“It’s really in the infant beginning stages,” he said of the construction project next to the hospital. “We’ve broken some ground,” with no specific timeline for construction.

Contractors will work over the next several months on site prep, preparing for a foundation and roughing in utilities, he said, but no actual construction.

At about 8,000 square feet, the medical services building will be about one-fifth the size of the Wrangell Medical Center, which SEARHC opened in 2021 with a hospital and long-term care unit.

The next phase, Matej said, will be the design work.

The health care provider has not yet applied for a building permit.

The new building also will include space for one or two optometry bays, he said, providing a dedicated area for visiting optometrists who currently work out of the hospital building.

SEARHC last month dedicated a new $300 million hospital and medical center on its Sitka campus. Charles Clement, who has served as president the past 14 years, talked about plans for Wrangell in a newspaper interview after the opening. “We have multiple facilities all over town, and we have enough land there to bring it all into a medical campus.”

SEARHC is the largest employer in Wrangell, with about 170 full-time equivalent employees and direct contractors in 2025, according to a Rain Coast Data economic report for the borough last fall.

The report said the health care payroll in Wrangell in 2024, at $15.2 million, exceeded all other industries in town.

SEARHC is the largest health care provider in Southeast, with facilities in 15 communities and traveling services for 13 more towns across the region.

This story was originally published by the Wrangell Sentinel.

The post SEARHC plans new medical services building in Wrangell appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

The first month of the U.S. war against Iran caused crude oil prices to skyrocket around the world, and the price of Alaska’s oil has risen particularly far.

That rise is making tens of millions of dollars, maybe a few hundred million dollars if high prices persist, available for state services and the Permanent Fund dividend, even as it squeezes the finances of individual Alaskans.

In figures newly compiled by the Alaska Department of Revenue, the average price of a barrel of Alaska North Slope (ANS) crude was $111.17 in April.

That’s $8.70 higher than the average price of a barrel of Brent crude, a benchmark price for Europe’s North Sea oil. It was also $13.11 per barrel higher than the average price of West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark for oil from America’s second-largest state.

“The differential is the largest monthly value since the year 2000 and may be the highest value in history,” said the Department of Revenue, referring to the gap between Brent and North Slope crude.

“The large premium is due to a tightness in the Pacific basin oil market, where ANS is traded,” the department said.

Alaska crude goes to refineries in Washington state and California, with a small volume delivered to a refinery in Nikiski on the Kenai Peninsula.

In addition to Alaska oil, U.S. West Coast refineries obtain their crude from Canada, North Dakota and California oil fields, and a substantial volume from overseas suppliers.

“Uncertainty about shipping and delivery is incentivizing refiners to pay a premium for available crude that does not transit areas with substantial security risks. Crude grades from the Americas are the safest option. Brent primarily trades in the Atlantic basin, where the impacts from the Iran war are not quite as pronounced on a barrel-for-barrel basis.”

The premium now being paid for Alaska crude will have a significant impact on the state treasury if it continues for months.

Each $1 increase in the average price of a barrel of ANS crude for a full year is worth roughly $30 million to $50, depending on the price.

While more than half of the state’s general-purpose revenue now comes from the Alaska Permanent Fund’s investments, oil is still the No. 2 source of flexible spending money for the state, and prices — combined with production — cause the amount of available money to flex up and down each year.

Legislative budgeters write the state spending plan with an average crude price in mind for an entire fiscal year, from July 1 through June 30 of the following year.

In the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, the Department of Revenue expects prices to average $75.26 per barrel.

Thanks in part to the Alaska premium, the average through May 5 was $75.71. Every day that prices stay above that level, the more unexpected money the state will receive.

The state Senate already has a plan for that extra money.

The first $96 million would go to an “energy relief” payment that increases the amount of the 2026 Permanent Fund dividend by $150 per Alaskan. The next $111 million would be distributed to public schools, and anything above that would go into the state’s principal savings account, the Constitutional Budget Reserve.

While Alaska’s state treasury is receiving a boon from the high prices, legislators don’t expect it to last. In the fiscal year that starts July 1, they’re anticipating significantly lower average North Slope oil prices.

“The Senate operating budget, when combined with spending agreements for the capital budget, balances the budget on $73/barrel oil, with some money left over,” said Bethel Sen. Lyman Hoffman, co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, speaking about the Senate’s budget proposal on May 6.

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Juneau Author Corinna Cook is heading to the Chilkat Valley this week for an event centered on her newest book, Permafrost Is An Archive And Other Inheritances From The Alaska-Yukon Borderlands.  Cook, whose writing blends research and personal reflection, sat down with the Chilkat Valley News’ Rashah McChesney to talk more about the collection. 

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

Rashah McChesney: Your essays move between reporting, memoir, philosophy, and literary criticism. What kind of reading experience are you trying to create for someone picking up this book for the first time?

Corrina Cook: I write in the tradition of the essay. I think that one thing that essayists are really involved in is trying to define what is an essay. We don’t agree. But what we do agree on is that an essay involves movement. The way that I teach it to my students is that an essay is always in motion between the three poles of research, lived experience and reflection. 

The research is anything we learn from outside of the body’s senses, and then personal experience is our lived life, and then reflection involves the movement of the mind. So, my interest in that form has everything to do with that sense of movement. In my perfect world, I’d like a reader to have a chance to think a thought that she hasn’t thought before…and also potentially rub up against questions that are not easy. 

One thing that I was really struck by is that a lot of nonfiction about climate change focuses on catastrophe or policy. Your work often seems more interested in memory, relationship, and meaning. I’m curious why you approach climate change in that way? 

I sometimes describe my interests as like, I’m interested in social problems with a geologic sense of time. I see a lot of exciting innovation in terms of climate grief adaptation coming out of the arts. 

I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have activists in it, I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have like policymakers in it. I want good attorneys making strong legal arguments on climate. But I also don’t think that arena is the only option, especially in this part of the north. 

Part of our colonial reality is that we’ve got these very local specific changes that our small communities and families and neighbors have to live with and have to figure out how to live with and at the same time are relying on federal powers, federal decision makers in very far away lands, on the other side of the continent. I just find that disconnect really fascinating. Someone will be making policy somewhere but, you know, in fjord country we’re seeing landslides and increased rainfall and decreased returns in salmon runs and how do we, in our small communities, find good enough ways of living with that kind of complicated loss that those changes entail? 

The title Permafrost Is an Archive treats land almost like a living record keeper. I am so curious what drew you to that metaphor?

Yeah, I was talking with a permafrost scientist, the director of Yukon University’s permafrost research lab. He made, to me, the very poetic and interesting point that ice and humans come into the land together. When you look at geologic epochs and this massive cooling event that happens on earth, it coincides with the evolution of Homo sapiens. So, this permafrost scientist told me that ice is a record of basically all of humanity so it’s very interesting that globally so much ice is melting. That’s like, our species’ most core library. So, I’m just very swept up in the kinship that implies between ice and the human animal. 

The Alaska-Yukon borderlands are central to this collection. I wonder if this region reveals anything to the north that outsiders often miss. 

I think of the drawing of borders up here as extremely strange. I think that might be a, kind of, basic answer to the question. It’s very weird that we have a line along the mountains and that on one side our neighbors have a Canadian healthcare system to contend with and on the other side of the mountains the neighbors have an American healthcare system to contend with. That’s just a surprising thing about the border. 

I think also there’s a lot of exchange and connection across these northern coast mountains. That goes very easily into geologic time, the accretionary belt of North America certainly doesn’t stop at the Alaska-Canada border. So kind of like the way that all of these jumbled bedrocks have landed in North America in the first place, that crosses the border. Then we have these generations and generations of kinship and trade ties, people walking back and forth over these mountains and sharing information, sharing material goods, trading information, trading material goods but also intermarrying, making really strategic choices about when to call a conflict a conflict and when to create alliances and avoid a conflict. That seems very integral to our inheritance here. 

Your writing often circles around the idea that the past is still present in the landscape. Do you think people in Alaska experience history differently because of the land itself and how close we are to that history? 

I think we’ve just got a hugely diverse set of people here. I think that you’re walking around with neighbors who find it very easy to truncate history at a specific moment, whether that’s contact or whether that’s pipeline. I certainly do have neighbors who help dig me out of the ditch who find it very easy to find Alaska history as starting with the pipeline. Then I have neighbors who dig me out of a ditch who don’t see it that way at all, who see a much longer extensive history and, you know, the deer’s use of the Hilda Creek estuary in early spring as this kind of standing long-term understanding of why we don’t disturb certain watersheds and shorelines. I think these time scales seem to exist side-by-side in Alaska. I think that really in the neighborly part of it is, I do not think the way that all of my neighbors think but I do rely on all of my neighbors. 

Is there one essay that feels especially important to read in Southeast Alaska? 

My larger agenda is that even though I focused on our border lands here, I think the collection is relevant to the Americas writ large and potentially globally. That aside, I think that the Kohklux Map essay is potentially the most regionally grounded in the Chilkat Valley and beyond. So that would be one that I think is really important to point at. 

Cook is scheduled to be at The Bookstore at 4 p.m. on Friday, May 15 for a meet and greet, followed by a 5:30 p.m. reading and discussion. 

The post Q&A: Corinna Cook on Ice, Memory and the Alaska-Yukon border appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

Alaska will recognize Hispanic Heritage Month under a new law signed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

The month recognizing Hispanic heritage will be September 15 to October 15 each year. The legislation encourages schools, community groups and other public and private organizations to honor the history and culture of Hispanic Americans.

Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, D-Anchorage, is the bill’s sponsor, and said in a statement that the month is a time to honor and celebrate “the rich cultural tapestry that Hispanic and Latino Americans have woven into the fabric of our nation.”

There was no bill signing ceremony. A spokesperson for Dunleavy’s office said the governor signed the bill to acknowledge those contributions. “He believes it is important to recognize the rich traditions, history, and achievements of Hispanic Americans,” said Jeff Turner, Dunleavy’s communications director, by email Tuesday. 

The period also marks the anniversary of the independence of several Central American countries from Spain, including Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Mexico. 

“While Alaska may seem distant from the heart of Latin America, the contributions of Hispanic and Latino Alaskans to our state’s history, culture, and economy are undeniable. From pioneers and settlers to artists, educators, and business leaders, Hispanic and Latino individuals have made significant impacts in every corner of our state,” Gray-Jackson wrote. 

Gray-Jackson said in an interview Tuesday her goal since being elected to the Alaska Senate was to spearhead recognition of diverse cultures in Alaska by enshrining them in law. Since 2019, she’s sponsored legislation to recognize Black History Month, Alaska Native Heritage Month, Filipino American History Month, Juneteenth and Women’s History Month, which passed last year. She said next she’d like to see June recognized as LGBTQ Pride month.

“All it takes is one person to begin the effort, and that one person happens to be me,” Gray-Jackson said. “And I’m grateful for all the support that I’ve gotten since 2019 and, No. 1 when it comes to our very diverse communities, I’m just really proud to welcome our neighbors to Alaska who enrich our communities.”

“I see them; I value them,” she added. “I appreciate their contributions to not only our community, but to the world.”

The law will take effect on August 6. 

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Last week, a state court approved the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s plan to resume killing scores of brown bears, including newborn cubs, across a 40,000 square mile area in southwest Alaska. The goal of the extensive bear kill effort, according to ADFG, is to reduce the number of predators in order to increase the size of the Mulchatna caribou herd. 

The court stated:

“The Court is in no position to second guess the Department’s biologists in their technical conclusions. The Court must give deference to the Department on these technical game management decisions… The information considered by the Board (of Game) at the July 2025 meeting could be problematic or incorrect. However, the Court is not in the position, nor does it have the authority, to make that determination at this point in the proceedings. The Court simply does not possess the technical and specialized skills to do so.”

Indeed, this is a perpetual problem, and one that Rep. Andy Josephson’s bill, HB364 — “An Act relating to intensive management of big game prey populations” — seeks to resolve by requiring independent scientific peer review of all predator control proposals from the state. Science requires independent peer review.  

Regarding the ruling, the ADFG commissioner stated: “We are happy that science prevails.” They may be happy, but science clearly did not prevail.  

What did prevail is the state’s continued reliance on inadequate, anecdotal information to advance its objective of killing predators as political spectacle to mask its mismanagement, including its wildly unrealistic population goal of 30,000 – 80,000 for the Mulchatna caribou herd. Science points to lack of adequate nutrition, rather than predation, as the main driver of Mulchatna caribou numbers — a fact the state conveniently ignores.

Regarding HB364, the administration did not endorse the bill and the Legislature has ignored it entirely.  Obviously, predator control advocates do not want independent scientific review of their proposals, as they know such proposals would not survive independent scientific scrutiny.  

So “we the people” are left not to trust the state administration, the legislature or the courts on such matters of natural resource policy. And scores of brown bears will be killed in the next few weeks, without solid scientific justification, ostensibly on behalf of all Alaskans.

Hopefully, our next governor will better appreciate science and the need to apply it effectively in resource policy.

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A late amendment to a bill nearing final passage in the Alaska Capitol would exempt some Alaska Native village corporations from public financial disclosures required by state law.

On Monday afternoon, the Alaska Senate’s labor and commerce committee voted to amend House Bill 126 with a new section that reduces and caps the number of Native corporations required to share information annually with the Alaska Division of Banking and Securities. 

Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Nikiski and chair of the labor and commerce committee, declined to answer questions when asked Tuesday about the change. 

In Monday’s committee hearing, Bjorkman said, “I think members of the media might be interested in information therein, but at the end of the day, I don’t know that information is their business because it happens within the confines of a Native corporation.”

State law currently requires corporations with at least 500 shareholders and $1 million in assets to provide financial documents to the state, which treats them as public records. 

Because Native corporations are exempted from federal disclosure requirements, existing state law provides the only free public avenue for non-shareholders to inspect their work. 

Of the state’s 200-plus Native corporations, 59 are currently required to file reports with the division, and the number is growing over time because shareholders are splitting their shares and passing them to their descendants, pushing more corporations over the 500-shareholder limit.

The new definition would limit disclosures to corporations with 500 shareholders when they were created, regardless of how many they currently have. 

That change would exempt at least seven village corporations — the division isn’t sure of the exact number and is reviewing another 30. None of the 12 regional corporations would be affected by the change because each had more than 500 shareholders when they were created. 

Shareholders of each exempted corporation would still have access to financial information, but members of the public would not.

Curtis McQueen, executive director of the Alaska Native Village Corporation Association, is supporting the change and wrote to the committee, saying that the modification brings state law back to its original intent.

“The amendment will exempt, as was originally intended, smaller village corporations from the filing requirements. This amendment will allow their staff and leadership to focus their time and energy on improving the health of their communities and providing benefits to their shareholders, not filling out forms and complying with the complex requirements of the division of banking and securities,” he said.

Attorney Christopher Slottee, representing the Village Corporation Association, testified separately, writing that no other private corporation in the state is subject to the same reporting requirements as Alaska Native corporations.

“It means that an ANC’s non-Native competitor in the same federal contracting market … faces no public disclosure obligation, while the ANC must publicly expose the financial details that inform its pricing, overhead structure, profit margins, and executive compensation to the exact same competitors,” he wrote. 

The original bill was from Rep. Neal Foster, D-Nome. On Monday, members of the labor and commerce committee asked a Foster aide if he was open to the change.

“It’s not core to what the bill itself does, but we are not opposed to it,” the aide said. 

Alaska has more than 200 village corporations and 12 regional corporations, which were created as part of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.

Since that act, many of these corporations — legally distinct from tribes, which are sovereign governments — have become a powerful force in Alaska, holding vast swaths of land and employing tens of thousands of Alaskans.

Many corporations have also become important nationally because they receive preferential treatment under federal contracting rules. Under the 8(a) program — named for the relevant section of federal law — some Native corporations have become successful behemoths with more than a billion dollars in annual revenue. 

Most had humble beginnings, with just a few hundred initial shareholders. Federal law prohibits those shares from being publicly traded or sold, so Native corporations are not required to file documents with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, as publicly traded corporations are.

On Monday, Sen. Forrest Dunbar, D-Anchorage, proposed an amendment with a different exemption criteria, but members of the committee rejected that proposal. 

After Monday’s action, members of the committee voted to advance the bill to the Senate Rules Committee, the last stop before a vote of the full Senate. 

Because the bill has already passed the House, Senate approval would trigger a single up-or-down vote in the House, which would be asked to agree or disagree with the change.

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Alaska’s industrial development agency this week is set to vote on spending $190 million on controversial plans for oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The budget, drafted by staff and still pending approval by the agency’s governor-appointed board, includes up to $175 million for advanced geologic testing, plus as much as $15 million to bid on new areas of the refuge in an upcoming federal lease sale.

If approved, the plans from the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA, could represent a major step toward development in the refuge. They could also represent a massive expenditure, as $190 million exceeds the yearly general fund budgets of more than half of Alaska’s executive branch agencies.

The refuge occupies the state’s northeast corner, east of existing oil infrastructure, and its future has been the subject of a fierce, decades-long national debate. No oil is produced there now, and just one community sits within it, the Iñupiaq village of Kaktovik.

AIDEA’s proposed spending is outlined in a resolution that the authority’s board is set to discuss at a meeting Wednesday. The state published a notice about the meeting on Sunday.

The geologic work, known as seismic testing, involves searching for oil deep underground by using sound waves — a technique that geologists liken to an ultrasound of the earth.

The program would allow the agency to move to “the next level” of exploration and development in the Arctic refuge, according to Randy Ruaro, AIDEA’s executive director and a former chief of staff to Gov. Mike Dunleavy. But it would also come with risk, as there is no guarantee that exploration would lead to the discovery of profitable deposits; the authority’s critics say its money would be better invested in Alaska’s permanent fund.

AIDEA bought seven leases in the refuge, totaling about 365,000 acres, at a sale held during the first Trump administration five years ago. But it has yet to do any exploratory work.

“It’s time to move forward and get the oil and gas on the coastal plain, on our leases, producing for the nation,” Ruaro said in a brief phone interview Sunday.

There could be “billions and billions of barrels of oil” beneath the refuge’s 1.5-million-acre coastal plain, Ruaro added. He cited an October report commissioned by AIDEA that describes the refuge’s coastal plain as the “most prospective unexplored onshore area in North America,” citing new discoveries just to the west.

The area’s true oil and gas potential has long been a mystery, though; much of the geologic data that’s been collected there is decades old, and preliminary. Reporting by the New York Times before the 2021 lease sale indicated that confidential results from the sole test well drilled inside the refuge were not encouraging.

The Trump administration is currently taking sealed bids in another lease sale in the refuge, with 700,000 acres available and results to be announced June 5.

AIDEA intends to submit bids, according to Ruaro. “We’re absolutely interested,” he said.

AIDEA’s board chair, Bill Kendig, declined to answer questions Sunday about the proposed spending.

The proposal on Wednesday’s agenda explicitly exempts authorization for “drilling or well execution,” but Ruaro said the board could change that at the meeting.

The prospect of oil development in the refuge — the nation’s largest federal wildlife reserve — has been hotly debated for 50 years.

Leaders from Kaktovik and other North Slope communities largely support opening the coastal plain to oil companies.

But the area includes the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd — a cultural touchstone and important traditional food source for the Gwich’in people, who live over the Brooks Range to the south but still within the herd’s migration route, and who are stridently opposed to oil development.

The refuge also provides habitat for migratory birds, polar bears and musk oxen.

Until 2021, the area was never formally opened for oil development, in spite of intense lobbying efforts by Alaska’s congressional delegation.

And it remains far from existing oil infrastructure, which is concentrated near the massive Prudhoe Bay field some 60 miles to the west.

The oil industry itself showed little interest in the first-ever lease sale in the refuge, in 2021. AIDEA was the top bidder, and no major companies participated.

The Biden administration canceled AIDEA’s leases in 2023. But a federal judge later restored them, and the industry’s outlook in the Arctic has shifted since then, with huge demand at a recent lease sale in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

Nonetheless, opponents of drilling in the Arctic Refuge say they’ll be fighting AIDEA’s move toward development.

Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, called it a “deeply unpopular project” that lacks a “meaningful public engagement process.”

“They know that they don’t have the support of the majority of Alaskans, and most certainly don’t want to face the voices of Gwich’in,” Moreland said in a text message Sunday. “We will continue to fight any entity that bids on leases on the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge under the legally questionable grounds that this administration is holding a lease sale on. This is way too important to the survival of the Gwich’in and their communities.”

The United States Bureau of Land Management on Monday formally cancelled the so-called “Public Land Rule,” which required the agency to consider conservation and development equally in land-use decisions for millions of acres across the West.

The BLM published a notice Monday in the Federal Register finalizing its elimination of the 2024 rule, officially known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule. The agency first announced it was considering eliminating the rule in September.

The Biden-era rule provided guidance for ensuring conservation received due consideration along with mining, timber, grazing, recreation or other uses on public lands. It also allowed the BLM to issue leases specifically for conservation, though the agency never issued any.

The BLM’s notice Monday said officials had received and responded to nearly 140,000 public comments in response to the proposal. Ultimately, officials said eliminating the 2024 rule was necessary because it “threatened to restrict productive use of the public lands and introduced uncertainty and unnecessary burdens in planning and permitting.” The rule’s elimination comes alongside executive orders and other actions by the Trump administration to expand drilling, mineral production and other commercial uses of public lands.

Michael Carroll, a campaign director for environmentalist group The Wilderness Society, said Monday that the rule’s rescission, which officially goes into effect in 30 days, will leave millions of acres across the West newly vulnerable to oil and gas extraction and mining.

“They’re effectively saying, ‘We’re just going to prioritize extraction across BLM lands,’ Carroll said. “They’re going to be prioritizing industrial-scale development on those public lands. I think we’ll see that right away.”

He also noted that the BLM determined it did not need to consult with Indigenous tribes in its decision to rescind the rule, which he called “shocking in terms of its disrespect to tribal nations,” many of which sit adjacent to federal lands.

The Wilderness Society was among many environmental groups that denounced the end of the “Public Lands Rule” on Wednesday. Several public statements from the groups mentioned the pending U.S. Senate confirmation of Steve Pearce, a former New Mexico Republican congressman, as BLM director.

If the Senate confirms him, Pearce, who has deep ties to the oil and gas industry, will oversee an agency that is no longer required to consider conservation as an acceptable use of public land, Carroll said.

“Today is a bad day for those people who care about public lands and care about the Bureau of Land Management,” he said. “But we’ll keep fighting and keep pushing back.”

This article was first published by Source New Mexico, part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.

A Kenai man is facing five felonies after being accused of letting a brush fire escape containment and start a wildfire near the Sterling Highway on the Kenai Peninsula last year.

The Alaska Department of Law’s Office of Special Prosecutions and Appeals filed those felonies and five misdemeanors against Keith Richard Crowder, 48, on May 4. 

According to a probable cause statement attached to the charging document, Crowder was burning two debris piles, also known as slash piles, on June 11, when a Forest Service officer responded to a call reporting smoke in the area.

The officer told Crowder to put out the fires, and the next day, a state fire prevention officer talked with Crowder and issued him a large-scale burn permit, which Crowder signed.

Under the permit, he could burn only one pile at a time, and “he could not cap the piles with dirt because it would hold the heat in and continue to burn into the ground and when weather conditions got right, it could reignite and escape,” according to the probable cause statement.

On July 4, a medevac helicopter reported a wildfire burning near the TJ Seggy’s gas station on the Sterling Highway. Firefighters, aircraft and helicopters responded to the fire, extinguishing it by July 6, after it had burned 8-10 acres.

A state fire officer traced the fire’s origin to one of the slash piles on Crowder’s property.

“One of those slash piles showed clear signs that the fire had escaped the pile into the edge of the forest and appeared to be the specific origin point of the main fire perimeter,” according to the probable cause statement.

Another slash pile “was actively smoldering, and it appeared the remaining seven slash piles had extensive heat deep inside of them. It appeared that the piles had been capped with dirt rather than fully extinguished at the time burning was complete,” the statement reads.

Online court records list no attorney for Crowder, who faces arraignment at the Kenai courthouse on May 21.

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