Category: Alaska News

The UN Security Council calls the shots when it comes to appointing the body’s chief – which means 5 permanent members have an outsized say on the matter.

(The Center Square) – Alienation of affection litigation in North Carolina against a former U.S. senator from Arizona can proceed, says a federal judge.

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(The Center Square) – Aclara Resources announced it has received a letter of interest from the Export-Import Bank of the United States for up to $750 million in financing for Project Dynamo, the company’s proposed rare earths processing plant at…

It’s OK to put Treg Taylor back in the governor’s race despite a finding he violated state campaign law because the vast majority of candidates in all Alaska races this year also have questionable filings.

That response was offered by Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom during a press conference Monday focusing on her controversial decision to restore Taylor and a state legislative candidate to the ballot on Friday, reversing her disqualification of them four days earlier.

Dahlstrom and Gov. Mike Dunleavy sought to redefine the issue by declaring as suspect the information provided by 91 of 121 statewide candidates to the Alaska Public Offices Commission, citing a Department of Law review conducted during the past week. The list includes all four candidates for governor, and most of the candidates in state House and Senate races.

The review was “limited and expeditied,” and it’s not yet known if any of the questioned filings are valid or a violation of Alaska’s campaign disclosure laws, said Rachel Witty, the Department of Law’s top civil attorney, during the press conference.

“This was done over the course of a day and a half,” she said. “So I can’t emphasize enough that this is a preliminary review. We didn’t have time to contact candidates.”

The department’s investigation was characterized by the Alaska Beacon as “unusual, if not unprecedented,” since the agency “typically operates on a complaint-based system, with most actions taken when a member of the public alerts the commission to a potential problem.”

Dahlstrom said many of the challenged filings may not be deliberate acts.

“It could have been a comma left out, or a number turned around, or something more,” she said.

APOC recommended Taylor, a former state attorney general, not be certified as a candidate because he reported more than $1 million in rental income, but did not disclose the full names of his tenants as required by Alaska’s campaign laws. Dahlstrom said Aug. 31 she would follow that recommendation, then reversed herself in an annoucement late Friday night.

In that announcement she also reversed her disqualification of Jose Anthony Tagle, a Republican seeking the Anchorage state House seat held by Democratic incumbent Ted Eischeid. APOC recommended Tagle not be certified after he filed a blank Public Officer Disclosure Form.

When asked if a missing comma or clerical oversight should be given the same characterization as deliberately omitting a significant amount of required information, Dahlstrom said the comma reference “was a poor example on my part.” She said more typical examples would be “if someone forgot their address, or if somebody forgot something that they owned, or a place that they lived, or something like that.”

Dave Bronson, a Republican candidate for governor and former Anchorage mayor, questioned the nature of the Dunleavy administration’s findings in a statement Monday night.

“There is an important difference between ‘substantial non-compliance’ under AS 39.50 that was the basis for Lt. Governor Dahlstrom’s original non-certification of 2 candidates, and a technical disclosure question, accidental omission, or information put out by Department of Law that is factually incorrect,” Bronson wrote in a post on his campaign’s Facebook page.

Both candidates in Juneau’s only competitive legislative race for the House District 3 seat — incumbent Democrat Andi Story and Republican challenger Annette Kreitzer — are flagged in the Department of Law’s review. The entry for Story states “Possible business affiliation with Juneau School District,” while the one for Kreitzer states she “appears to have a current interest in a property located at Lot 2, Block 5, Young Subdivision, Plat 74-3, which is not dosclosed[sic] on her POFD.”

Kreitzer, in an interview Tuesday, said the flagged property is her primary residence, the address of which does not have to be disclosed under the state’s campaign disclosure laws. She said she did disclose she owns the property and its ZIP code to establish it’s located in her hometown of Haines.

“I felt that I had complied with what APOC required,” she said.

Story, on Tuesday, said she has no known business ties with the Juneau School District.

“To me this just seems like it’s distracting everyone from the main issue, and that’s the (election) division’s decision to not enforce what seems to be purposeful violations of campaign disclosure laws from some of the main candidates,” she said.

Unopposed House District 4 candidate Sara Hannan, D-Juneau, is not flagged in the report.

Because the administration’s press conference was held on the Labor Day holiday, APOC officials could not be reached at work for comment.

The agency has long been underfunded and short-staffed, with nine currently funded positions compared to 14 in 2014. Dunleavy said during the press conference a group of former election officials should be formed to investigate “all the laws, the regulations, the processes, the practices, the remediation, the whole list of everything involved in APOC.”

“There’s, I think, a strong overdue review of not just APOC — I don’t want to leave people with the impression that APOC is ‘the problem,’” he said. “It’s just updating everything from resources to laws to regulations to practices and so forth, so that going forward we make things better.”

The Dunleavy administration has taken a number of controversial election-related actions over the past several months, including providing confidential voter data to the Trump administration, removing more than 3,000 people from voter rolls and asking them to verify their citizenship, and using unprecedented ballot tactics to distinguish U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan from Petersburg challenger Dan J. Sullivan after an attempt to disqualify the latter was rejected by the Alaska Supreme Court.

President Donald Trump, in the meantime, is seeking to restrict mail-in voting and other election-related measures to counter his frequent and unsubstantiated accusations of widespread fraud.

Dunleavy on Monday said he wants to shift the current focus to the upcoming election that will choose his replacement since he cannot run this year after serving two consecutive terms.

“We think people need to get on with campaigning,” he said. “The people of Alaska need to get on with understanding what the candidates want, what they intend to do while they’re office so they can vote for them, and we just have to be able to navigate through our election system here in November.”

Kreitzer, when asked about the decision to put Taylor back on the ballot, said the situation exists because of the state’s open primary that puts up to four candidates in each race to compete in a ranked choice general election.

“I think that ranked choice voting has encouraged all of this,” she said.

The Anchorage Daily News, in an editorial published Saturday, criticized a candidate certification process that “can be reopened and settled behind closed doors on a Friday night, on the say-so of (Dahlstrom) alone.”

“Three wrongs don’t make a right. Treg Taylor should follow the law. Dahlstrom should release the Department of Law’s review in full,” notes the editorial, which was published before the review was released Monday. “APOC — not a lieutenant governor acting alone — should immediately notify the public that it is conducting an emergency review of all candidates’ filings, and that it will give each candidate five days to correct any deficiencies. After that it will recommend removal of any candidate that doesn’t follow the law. Only then can the public trust that the game is being played fairly.”

This story was originally published by the Juneau Independent.

The post Story and Kreitzer flagged in Department of Law’s review of campaign filings appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory on Tuesday lowered the alert level for Kupreanof Volcano on the Alaska Peninsula after weeks of declining activity at the remote peak.

Kupreanof hasn’t erupted in about 570,000 years, but in May, the observatory raised its alert level after detecting a growing number of nearby earthquakes and detecting significant amounts of sulfur dioxide, a chemical associated with magma moving beneath volcanoes.

Unusual activity at Alaska volcano prompts extra look at remote peak

Since May, the number of earthquakes has declined and the amount of sulfur dioxide has declined to normal background levels, the observatory said in a statement. 

Volcanoes without active unrest are typically designated “green” on the observatory’s color-coded alert spectrum, but Kupreanof isn’t normally monitored by the observatory, and Tuesday’s downgrade now labels it “unassigned.”

The observatory lacks the funding and resources to continuously monitor all of Alaska’s active volcanoes.

Alaska is the most seismically active state in the nation, with more volcanoes than every other state combined. Great Sitkin, a volcano in the Aleutian Islands, has been erupting since 2021. Shishaldin, on the Alaska Peninsula, last erupted in 2023 and has been experiencing signs of unrest since last year. 

The observatory, a collaboration between state and federal officials, monitors the state’s volcanoes for activity that could affect residents, travelers and aircraft.

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The nation’s biggest tribal health organization now owns the Anchorage hospital it has long operated.

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium gained title to the Alaska Native Medical Center, the hospital at the center of the organization’s 140-acre campus in Midtown Anchorage. Ownership was officially transferred from the Indian Health Service last month.

The long-sought acquisition was an important milestone, said ANTHC President Natasha Singh.

“Alaska Native people have done a great job operating the Alaska Native Medical Center. The hospital is truly the heart of our system and now we officially own it. This gives us more control over our own future,” she said in an interview.

The hospital, the second largest in Alaska after Providence Alaska Medical Center, opened in 1997, the same year that ANTHC was founded. Until now, the Indian Health Service was the facility owner. Through a compact with the Indian Health Service, ANTHC operated most of the services at the hospital, while Southcentral Foundation, the Tribal health provider for the local region, operated some of the primary care services.

Federal ownership had some downsides, Singh said. Because of it, the consortium did not qualify for certain federal funds that it would have otherwise been able to use, she said. And investment in the facilities was too slow to meet patient needs, she said.

The hospital acquisition was preceded by several preliminary steps over the past several years.

There were some Congressional acts transferring federal land to ANTHC, including a bill sponsored by the late Rep. Don Yong that was signed by President Barack Obama in 2013. There was a formal decision by the ANTHC board, which has members from all of the state’s regional tribal health organizations, on how and when to take ownership. And there was an official request submitted to the federal government a little over a year ago, Singh said.

“It’s been our longtime vision, but I think our federal partners acted quickly when we put in the request,” she said.

Even before the ownership changed, the board approved over $462 million in improvements, including an expansion of the emergency department, Singh said. It was the largest investment in the hospital’s history, intended to counter “decades of underinvestment,” she said.

“So half a billion dollars (was) essentially planned to go into a building the Tribes did not even own, but the ANTHC board knew how much it really matters,” she said.

The transfer also followed a $400 million settlement with the federal government for shortfalls in funding of administrative services, facilities maintenance and other functions.

The modern hospital evolved from historic services provided by the Indian Health Service, which began serving Alaska Natives in the 1940s, according to a summary compiled by Southcentral Foundation. In 1953, the federal government opened a hospital in Anchorage, primarily to serve patients suffering from a tuberculosis epidemic, according to the summary. Despite impacts from the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake, it continued to operate through the disaster, and even cared for patients evacuated from Providence Hospital. The modern hospital replaced that facility.

The modern hospital was designed with elements of Alaska Native cultures, and it and its adjacent facilities have won awards for their innovative architecture, including one in 2018 for patient housing and one from last year for the emergency department expansion.

With the transfer of ownership, ANTHC now owns most of the buildings on the campus. There is still a federally owned building that houses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Arctic Investigations Program, and Southcentral Foundation owns some other buildings.

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