Category: Alaska News

The state of Alaska filed civil lawsuits Tuesday against six crowdfunding websites, accusing them of illegally soliciting donations for thousands of Alaska charities without consent.

In complaints filed at Anchorage Superior Court, the consumer protection unit of the Alaska Department of Law said GoFundMe, PayPal, Charity Navigator, Pledgling Technologies, JustGiving and Network For Good each violated the Alaska Charitable Solicitations Act thousands of times. 

That act, in place since 1993, requires state registration for anyone who seeks donations on behalf of a charity. 

The suits ask a judge to order the sites shut down the pages devoted to Alaska nonprofits and immediately disburse any donations to those nonprofits. It also asks for “separate civil penalties … of not less than $1,000 and not more than $25,000 per violation.”

According to the complaints, the six crowdfunding sites scraped IRS data to obtain the information of thousands of Alaska nonprofits, then set up donation pages for each of those nonprofits without their consent.

That scraping was part of a nationwide campaign that encompassed almost a million and a half federally registered organizations.

In some cases, the sites charged fees or encouraged “tips” to themselves during the donation process. In many cases, they poured donations into a third-party account and only released donations to charities who stepped forward to claim them, according to the complaints.

Attorney General-designee Stephen Cox said the state became aware of the issue after California reporters and state officials began investigating why GoFundMe created donation pages for 1.4 million nonprofits without their consent or knowledge.

GoFundMe later took down many of those pages, but other crowdfunding websites did not. On Tuesday morning, donation pages were still visible on Charity Navigator, one of the defendants named in the new Alaska lawsuits.

Earlier this week, almost two dozen state attorney generals sent a letter to GoFundMe, demanding answers to questions about its policies.

Alaska did not sign that letter, in part because officials here believed the response was too weak.

In a prepared statement, Cox said, “Alaska law is clear: if you’re going to raise money in a charity’s name, you must first get the charity’s consent. These lawsuits are about protecting donors, protecting nonprofits, and preserving the public trust that makes charitable giving possible.”

Laurie Wolf is President and CEO of the Foraker Group, which advises Alaska nonprofits and provides them with administrative support.

The Foraker Group has been issuing warnings about the issue for months, and Wolf filed an affidavit in support of the lawsuit, as did a representative of the Bethel Community Services Foundation and Bread Line Inc., which operates a food bank in Fairbanks.

By phone on Tuesday, Wolf said the issue is a matter of consent: “They are impersonating 1.2 million nonprofits across this country, they’re impersonating them without their consent or even their knowledge.”

She said the issue became particularly important last fall, when people across the United States and the world became aware of the devastation caused by ex-Typhoon Halong in Western Alaska.

Many people, not knowing local Alaska charities, simply donated via links they found on internet searches. Some of those donations may have never reached their intended recipients.

If a crowdfunding website operates independently of the charity it intends to benefit, it might interfere with the charity’s own fundraising, she explained.

Someone might never be recognized for their gift and become angry, hurting the charity’s long-term relationship with their community.

“They take away the ability for the organization to make choices for itself about how it wants to build trust and relationships with its donors, and how it wants to put its brand and its mission out in the public sphere. They’ve taken away all of our choices about that,” she said.

In addition, donations may be subject to fees or never reach a charity at all, particularly if the charity is unaware that a crowdfunding website is holding money for it to collect.

The Foraker Group went so far as to conduct an experiment and had an employee donate to the group through several of the defendants’ platforms. In multiple cases, it took weeks before the donation reached its intended recipient, and in some cases, the donor’s identity was concealed, making it impossible for the charity to properly thank them.

GoFundMe was the only defendant to respond to emailed inquiries before the Beacon’s reporting deadline on Tuesday.

“GoFundMe’s mission is to help people help each other by making it easier for donors to discover and support the causes they care about. We are committed to helping nonprofits reach new supporters by connecting them with the millions of people on our platform who want to make a difference. Nonprofit Pages were created using publicly available information to help people support nonprofit organizations, with donations going to the intended nonprofit,” said Jeff Platt, communications manager for GoFundMe. 

“After hearing feedback from nonprofit leaders in October, we acted quickly to make Nonprofit Pages fully opt-in, removed and de-indexed unclaimed pages, and turned off search engine optimization by default. The immediate changes we made directly addressed the concerns of the nonprofit community, and reflect our continued commitment to transparency, accountability, and partnership with the nonprofit sector,” he said.

This week’s lawsuits in state court rely in large part on the 1993 Alaska Charitable Solicitations Act. 

That bill passed the Alaska Legislature amid a surge of concern about telemarketers soliciting donations by phone. 

Then-Rep. Ron Larson, a Democrat from the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, sponsored the act and told fellow lawmakers at the time that “lookalike organizations” were “ripping off” legitimate charities.

The act made no mention of donations by internet, and in state law, it’s still labeled as “Telephonic solicitations,” but it goes on to state that under any circumstances it is unlawful to use a charity’s name or symbol without their permission.

“Alaskans are generous people. But generosity depends on trust,” Cox said in his prepared statements. “GoFundMe and similar platforms used nonprofits’ good names to solicit donations without coordinating with the organizations actually doing the charitable work. That means some Alaskans may have donated thinking they were supporting a specific charity, when the charity never authorized the page and may never have received the donation — or may have received less than donors intended because of fees.”

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The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities is planning to relax the requirements for a subsidy program intended to attract cargo airlines to Fairbanks International Airport.

In a March 6 public notice, the department said it will waive landing and fuel fees for a year at Fairbanks for one or more airlines that provide at least three months of weekly cargo service between Fairbanks and a new destination city. 

That’s down from a requirement that they provide six months of service.

Only newly added service is eligible on a first-come, first-served basis for airlines, and the program is expected to last until 2032, according to the notice.

Currently, the Alaska International Airport System Passenger and Cargo Airline Incentive Program requires an airline to provide six months of new weekly cargo service before receiving the waiver. The new change offers an extra incentive for Fairbanks air cargo.

The overall incentive program and the new change — formally known as “Class 6” — were created by staff at DOT and the Alaska International Airport System, said Shannon McCarthy, communications director for Alaska DOT.

“The Class 6 addition concept was created to incentivize cargo carriers to temporarily move some operations during the upcoming busy construction season at ANC to FAI,” she wrote by email, using shorthand for the airports at Anchorage and Fairbanks. “Costs in Fairbanks for short term operations can be higher than negotiated contractual rates in Anchorage (hotels, fuel, etc.) so this helps offset those increases while utilizing the system and keeping the activity within Alaska and AIAS.”

McCarthy said that while the waiver “reduces revenue on those specific flights for a limited period, the program is designed to stimulate incremental operations that would likely not occur without the incentive, thereby generating new economic activity and long-term airport revenue once the incentive period ends.”

The new subsidy program is scheduled to take effect April 6; public comments on the plan can be submitted through April 5. 

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Ten conservation groups have sued the Trump administration over its decision to remove decades-old protections from 2.1 million acres of federal land in Interior Alaska.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, targets the Department of the Interior’s action to overturn public land orders dating back to the early 1970s that protect a portion of the corridor around the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

The department’s decision, finalized on Feb. 25, allows the state government to take over the land and open it to development. Potential uses for the land include construction of the controversial Ambler Access Project, a proposed 211-mile road through the Brooks Range foothills to an isolated mining district in northwest Alaska, and a long-proposed pipeline megaproject that would ship natural gas from the North Slope.

The lawsuit alleges that the Department of the Interior violated several laws with its action by failing to hold any public hearings in affected communities, failing to provide justification for removing long-established protections from “iconic areas of northern Alaska” and other lapses.

The laws cited in the suit are the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.

The 2.1-million-acre corridor and the areas around it are “profoundly important to Alaska’s wildlife and people,” the lawsuit says. It supports 25 different species of fish, including salmon, and holds habitat for migratory birds, moose, caribou and a variety of other species, making it important to subsistence food harvesters and recreational visitors, the lawsuit says.

In a statement, the plaintiffs cited mining development as a particular threat to natural resources and the people who depend on them.

“The Trump administration conjured up flimsy and vacuous reasons about ‘putting America first’ to try to justify transferring public lands out of federal management to benefit billionaires,” said Bridget Psarianos, senior staff attorney with Trustees for Alaska, the nonprofit environmental law firm representing the plaintiffs.

“The Trump administration’s destructive obsession with giving away our public lands for the benefit of mining companies has forced us to go to court,” Matt Jackson, Alaska senior manager for The Wilderness Society, said in the statement.

The administration’s action poses special threats because the corridor now stripped of protection lies between Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the plaintiffs said.

Revoking protections that had been in place for half a century is “a blatant effort to avoid national environmental laws to allow construction of a road that will enrich foreign mining companies and harm wild lands, Alaska Native communities, and America’s conservation legacy,” Jim Adams, senior Alaska director of National Parks Conservation Association, said in the statement. “Ending these public land orders also exposes the entire eastern side of Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve to state management practices along its border that devalue park wildlife and the needs of rural residents.”

The Department of the Interior declined to comment on the lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Promoting ‘Energy Dominance’ agenda

When he announced the action on Feb. 20, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said it will help achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of “unlocking opportunity for American Energy Dominance.”

“By opening these lands, we are empowering Alaska to chart its own course and develop energy, minerals and infrastructure that strengthen America’s security and prosperity,” Burgum said in a statement then.

At the time, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the state’s all-Republican congressional delegation hailed the decision as important to the state’s resource-extraction-based economy.

“Alaska has a right to produce, and Alaska has a right to benefit from our God-given resources,” U.S. Rep. Nick Begich. R-Alaska, said in a joint statement issued by the delegation.

But the Tanana Chief Conference, an organization of Interior Alaska tribes that is not part of the latest lawsuit, condemned the administration’s action.

The decision was made without necessary tribal consultation, and it could strip federal subsistence-harvesting protections from important food-gathering sites, TCC said in a statement.

“This decision opens the door to development that puts our lands, animals, waters, and subsistence resources at real risk,” TCC Chief and Chairman Brian Ridley said in the statement. “For our communities, these are not remote acres on a map. These are the places where our families hunt, fish, and gather to feed our people. Protecting these resources is critical to our food security, our culture, and our future.”

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Wind and snow whipped at Kotzebue preacher Rusty Dimmick and three travelers as they stood in a circle holding hands. The travelers, all from the Northwest Arctic, planned to drive over 600 miles to dozens of remote villages across Western Alaska by snowmachine, educating rural residents about voting.

But weather wasn’t part of that send-off prayer on Feb. 12. Back-to-back snowstorms, along with some mechanical issues, forced the group to return to Kotzebue after about 80 miles.

Now the group plans to fly to Emmonak, pick up snowmachines, and travel to villages from there.

“Our people need to be heard in their voice,” said Aucha Kameroff, the group’s leader. “One of the voices that we have as people in rural Alaska, or any place, is by voting.”

Voting in Northwest Alaska is down from historic highs decades ago. In 1982, for example, state election data shows that more than 80% of the region’s registered voters participated. A little over 30% voted in the 2024 presidential election.

“It’s so important for our peoples to carry on what our peoples before us started,” Kameroff said. “So we need to tuupaq — that means ‘wake it up’ — and really look at what’s going on so that we can make an impact.”

The communities they plan to visit – around the Lower Yukon village of Emmonak and around the Northwest Arctic – are not connected by roads. Visitors usually arrive by small plane.

But Kameroff said traveling by snowmachine will make it easier to connect.

“I say, ‘go back door’ into the village,” she said. “It’s so important to be at the level of our peoples, no matter where.”

The group plans to give presentations in local schools to help educate high school seniors and community members about the issues, who is on the ballot and how to register to vote.

The trip is funded in part by nonpartisan organizations Get Out the Native Vote and the Rural Mobilization Center.

The group plans to give their first presentations in Emmonak. From there, they’ll head inland, visiting villages as far up the Yukon River as Pilot Station. Then they’ll head down to Nunam Iqua before flying back to Kotzebue.

After that, they plan to visit all 10 of the Northwest Arctic villages.

Although the trip is focused on voter education and advocacy, Kameroff said the group just enjoys being out in the country. And there’s another goal – healing and processing grief.

“It’s for me to be out there in the country where I love to be and get my mind clear,” said Arthur Richards Sr.

Richards lost his wife, the mother of his four children, to cancer this fall. He said it’s been hard, but things are getting better, and he’s looking forward to the trip.

Raymond Brown Jr., is traveling with Richards and Kameroff. His brother, Elmer Brown, died in November after falling through thin ice near Kotzebue. Brown also thinks the trip will give him perspective.

“It’s really gonna give me fresh air,” Brown said. “It’s going to be awesome.”

The group plans to arrive in Emmonak as early as Feb. 27. Kameroff said she’ll give updates on the group’s travels on social media.

This article is republished with permission from KOTZ Local News.

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The Dunleavy administration has proposed a $523 million budget for the Alaska Department of Corrections for the next fiscal year, which House lawmakers with a finance subcommittee advanced without substantial changes last week. 

It’s the largest corrections budget proposal to date, according to state data. It includes just over $514 million requested in state funding, $475.5 million of which is unrestricted general funds for the agency’s 13 state prisons and jails and estimated 2,127 employees. DOC officials expect an additional $9.3 million in federal funding for inmates held on federal charges.

The Department of Corrections has become one of the state’s most expensive departments in recent years. This year the Department of Health, which has requested $1.1 billion in unrestricted general funds, and the Department of Education and Early Development, which has requested $1.4 billion, would spend more. The Permanent Fund dividend could also be a bigger expense — if the state pays out a $1,000 dividend like last year, it would cost the state $660 million. 

While the number of people in Alaska’s prisons and jails has remained relatively consistent, costs are soaring. Last year, DOC officials reported that state corrections booked nearly 26,000 people and just over 16,000 unique individuals, so roughly 9,000 people were repeat offenders. DOC also held nearly 450 people in involuntary commitments, which is for those who are deemed a danger to themself or others, or gravely disabled as a result of mental illness. The state cost for incarcerating an individual is an average of $223 per day. 

Initially, corrections officials submitted a $500 million budget request, but later added an additional request for $20 million for staffing and inmate transportation, and $3.3 million for healthcare and medical staffing. 

The proposed budget breaks down to roughly 60% for state prison institutions, lawmakers heard on Feb. 24. Roughly 20% is for health and rehabilitation, 10% for pretrial, probation and parole, 4% for administration, 3% for maintenance and operations and just 0.4% to administer the Board of Parole.  

Costs to staffing Alaska’s prisons have ballooned in recent years, along with healthcare costs for an aging inmate population and increasing health needs, DOC officials told members of a House finance subcommittee for corrections. 

“Staffing being the first, and then the second being our medical costs,” Jen Winkelman, corrections commissioner, told lawmakers. “The fees for medical in Alaska is through the roof, and every single individual that’s coming to us — that we don’t know we’re going to be getting — have significant medical issues.”

DOC has a 11.5% staff vacancy rate statewide, according to a spokesperson in February. DOC officials told lawmakers that recruitment and retention is an ongoing challenge, especially because prisons must be staffed 24/7.

DOC reports staffing and decade of ‘policy changes’ as major cost drivers

April Wilkerson, deputy commissioner for the department, told lawmakers in a presentation on Feb. 24 that DOC officials analyzed the budget over the last ten years, and saw a total increase of an estimated $182 million for operational costs in that time. She said roughly one third of cost increases since fiscal year 2016 were driven by employee contracts, salary and benefit increases.

“Collective bargaining agreements, salary adjustments and health insurance changes — that makes up over 30% of the growth of the general funds within the department’s budget, which is outside of the department’s control,” Wilkerson said. 

Wilkerson said an estimated 40% of cost increases have been due to “policy changes” from the Legislature. She pointed to the repeal of Senate Bill 91 enacted in 2020, when lawmakers increased prison sentences for most felonies and misdemeanors, and increased penalties for violating conditions of release. She also pointed to the state’s increased contributions to employees’ retirement benefits in 2022. 

Lawmakers asked DOC officials for policy recommendations to curb costs across the department. Rep. Donna Mears, D-Anchorage, also asked the commissioner to address the problem of the department spending over its allocated budget. 

“Funds allocated to DOC last year included cuts that the department just said, ‘Nope, we can’t do that.’ I think on a larger basis, there needs to be more discussions about that,” Mears said. “There’s this tension between the executive branch and requests for the department to make cuts, and that’s not happening.”

DOC officials reported all 13 state prisons spending over budget for the fiscal year ending in June, resulting in the department requesting an additional $20 million from the legislature to cover personnel costs, plus an estimated $3 million to cover health care costs.

Winkelman said the department had to partially make up for legislative cuts in their budget last year. A department spokesperson confirmed the supplemental budget request makes up for a $13.8 million reduction made by lawmakers last year. 

Winkelman told lawmakers the department has not been able to fill its vacancies, which has resulted in high overtime costs. She said DOC has had to manage a legislative directive to cut costs by closing a housing unit at Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward. “We were tasked with closing a housing unit, and we did that, and it is not achieving the savings, and as a matter of fact, it’s bottlenecked some of our population management,” she said.  

Winkelman also pointed to unexpected health care costs for inmates as a driver of the department’s increased budget need. “We just recently had an inmate leave us that was with us for a year, that cost us over a million dollars in medical. We didn’t plan for that. We didn’t know that she was going to have that much of a cost associated. So going back to your question, and not being able to achieve some of these,” she said, referring to state budget allocations. “Because we don’t know what’s going to come through the back door.”

Winkelman recommended the creation of a new task force to tackle the question of how to curtail and manage the corrections budget.

“We were going to need some sort of a task force with other agencies, with the legislature, with law enforcement,” Winkelman said. “Some sort of a group to take a look at the broader system to figure out which policy changes are going to make that difference in order for us to be able to stay within our means.” 

Rep. Ky Holland, D-Anchorage, said he found the proposal concerning: “If a task force is needed, why aren’t all the folks that are doing these jobs coming together and doing the work of a task force? Why do we have to somehow create that and then fund it?” 

Holland said it was difficult for him to see that lawmakers are required to pay increasing budgets for DOC because of legal staffing requirements and said he wished the state’s education system had the same safeguards. “I wish we could tell our teachers that they had a maximum class size of the number of students that they had in a classroom because we had a standards council that had the force of law,” he said. 

Winkelman said DOC officials are trying to address the budget challenges. “We are constantly at the table trying to figure out how to solve this, if you will,” she said.

She then walked back the task force idea, and said hiring a consultant could be another option. “I think our recommendation is to maybe hire a consultant, hire an expert in this world, to kind of take all the pieces together,” she said.

Winkelman acknowledged Holland’s concerns about the state’s financial pressure with competing budget priorities, and said she understands the corrections budget is eating into funding for schools.

“Right now, above working for the Department of Corrections for 25 years and fighting this battle, I’m a mom with two kids in school, and that’s most important,” she said. “I’m fighting this battle every day of how expensive Corrections is, and I know it is taking from our school systems.” 

House members with the finance subcommittee for corrections heard several weeks of presentations about the department’s budget and asked questions of DOC officials. Rep. Mike Prax, R-North Pole, introduced several amendments to the budget, proposing millions in cuts until the department could provide further explanation on how the items would be spent and fulfill the department’s goals. But the committee voted them down before advancing the budget proposal without changes. 

The corrections budget now moves to the full House Finance Committee for further consideration.

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The Haines Assembly is set to meet on Tuesday. The Chilkat Valley News’ Will Steinfeld joined KHNS’ Melinda Munson, to discuss what’s on the agenda.

Melinda Munson: “It is a dense agenda for the March 10 meeting. Let’s start by talking about the quote, “safety belt” ordinance.

Will Steinfeld: It’s something that was put together by assembly members Kevin Forster and Gabe Thomas, and for me, at least, it’s a little out of the blue. I hadn’t heard about this, but it’s seems related to the ore containerization ordinance that the two assembly members introduced last Assembly meeting. 

What this is, is it looks to be a really comprehensive, wide-ranging set of different proposals all packaged together towards one goal. The two assembly members say they’re trying to find a way to balance two competing issues in the borough. One is securing an economic future for the economy, and the other is also protecting the land, putting into place environmental protections for the community to be able to get value out of whatever economic activity is going on. And they say they want to do it in a way that is both effective and avoids litigation from firms, companies, anyone coming into the borough. 

It’s targeting large scale, what they call mega-industries. So it wouldn’t apply new regulations or payments or anything like that to small scale, local industries that are already here.

It looks to my first read to have two broad categories. One is codifying environmental protections and borough codes, so putting into place in writing things like spawning stream setbacks, or containerization that they brought up last meeting. 

And then the other half of this that I saw was ways to retain value for the borough. So that’s when companies are coming in for, let’s say, timber harvest or mining, that the borough finances see some measurable bump from that. 

So what we’re looking at is suggestions of a severance tax, which would tax goods that have been extracted in the borough, but are being exported and sold elsewhere. 

And so, there’s a lot going on here.

And so, while the Assembly is a nonpartisan body, where do Forster and Thomas generally sit politically?

They included this as part of their pitch for this legislation. They say, in their words, that often they’re on different sides of the so-called aisle. They don’t always agree on everything. And what they’re saying is the fact that they can come together and find common ground on this is a sign that it’s necessary and balanced. And so they’re hoping that’s the message that citizens residents take away from this.

Up again is cell tower regulations. This is the final vote. Tell us about that.

This could be the end of the road for now, at least for this legislation, that has been running back and forth and through and through the Assembly for months and months now. The main part of this would be a 1,500 foot setback for any proposed cell tower, setback from schools, daycares, youth centers. If it’s voted into place, which it seems like it has a lot of support from the Assembly, that’ll kind of close this chapter of cell tower regulations. 

But at the same time, it’s probably not gone for good. The Assembly said last meeting that they hope to send this to committee even after it passes, to keep trying to refine it, make edits and then maybe bring forth an amendment in the future.

Where did the borough land for conditional use permits on cell tower regulation?

If this passes, as it’s written right now, the commercial cell towers – the ones you’re thinking of, when you think of cell towers – would have to go through conditional use permitting process to to get built.

There’s an accessory dwelling unit ordinance on the agenda. We’ve seen this before. It’s come back.

This is something that the Assembly talked a lot about last year, accessory dwelling units. It’s pitched as a way to increase housing supply in the borough in a way that’s pretty low impact. That’s what the proponents of this would say. It was eventually just tabled by the Assembly last year. They said we’re going to put it aside, not vote on it. No one’s ready for that. No one wants to vote on it. Yet, it’s now come back after a few months with some changes, and so we’ll see if the Assembly chooses to take it up. And if so, that that debate will be revived again.

Let’s talk about what happened at planning and zoning with [George and Lynette] Campbell’s conditional use permit for their heliport.

If this sounds familiar to you, that’s because it probably is. This is an issue about a proposed heliport at 26 Mile that has been in and out of litigation for three years. The borough has faced four different lawsuits over this heliport. And most recently, this was brought back to the Planning Commission. Last month, the Planning Commission denied the conditional use permit for the Campbell’s heliport, and it’s back to the Assembly now as an appeal of that decision. 

And something there’s been a lot of chatter about is the public hearing on taxability of mobile homes.

Based on public comment in recent weeks, I think this is something that at least some people will want to weigh in on. There’s a proposal to change how mobile homes are taxed.

In the past, mobile homes that were on the land connected to utilities, if they were in a designated trailer park, they  weren’t taxed as as property. And now, with this change, all mobile homes, whether they’re in a trailer park or not, would be taxable as an improvement on the parcel.”

The post Listen: Assembly to consider ‘Safety Belt’ ordinance, cell towers, mobile home taxes appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

Microplastics are super small pieces of plastics that come from the breakdown of all kinds of larger plastic products. In 2025 Alaska Research Survey and AK Community Action on Toxics did a survey that showed that 75% of respondents see microplastics as a major or moderate threat to contaminating our drinking water and food, including fish and wildlife. 

It also showed that 68.7% of Alaskans say state legislation should be among the actions to prevent further health harms from microplastics and chemical exposure in Alaska. Recently proposed legislation would begin to address the microplastics issue in our state.

Microplastics expose consumers to additives and chemicals used to provide desired color, appearance, density and flexibility to products depending on their use. Some examples are single-use water bottles, cosmetics or Styrofoam products. For example, Styrofoam breaks down easily into microplastics and it is the least recyclable of single use plastics.

The chemical industry and plastic producers disregard their safety for human health. Science shows that microplastics have been found in human placentas, and that there is evidence of microplastics in our brains and reproductive tissues. Also, several studies have found microplastics in the blood, lungs and other internal organs. There is strong evidence that microplastics and their additives are linked to many of the major chronic diseases that we see in the U.S. and many other parts of the world, like cancer, heart disease, diabetes and chronic inflammation.

State legislatures like those in Maine, Minnesota, Washington, New York and New Jersey are leading the way by enacting protective policies on chemicals and plastics because people are deeply concerned about the health of their families and communities. More than 366 policies have been adopted in 40 states to protect people.

Alaskans are more concerned about microplastics than other well-known hazards like asbestos, lead, and second-hand smoke, according to our survey. Alaska can be part of the legislative movement that is leading the way to a safer environment and better health protection from harmful chemical exposures. This will have a significant positive impact on the health of Alaskans, especially children and the most vulnerable.

As a public health professional, environmental scientist, mother and grandmother, I strongly support House Bill 25, which aims to phase out polystyrene food packaging, also known as Styrofoam, and House Bill 332, which calls to establish a statewide strategy to address the huge microplastics issue. Prevention is the smartest way. Alaskans deserve a healthy and clean environment. We owe it to our children and future generations.

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Billionaire investor John Paulson made a splash in Alaska’s mining industry last year when he paid $800 million for a 40% stake in the huge Donlin gold project.

But while working to advance Donlin, Paulson quietly sold his position in a separate Alaska-focused company that soared in value after the Trump administration approved the Ambler Road.

That’s according to a recent filing with federal securities regulators from Paulson’s investment office, Paulson & Co.

The disclosure, first reported by Bloomberg, indicates that Paulson sold all of his nearly 9% stake in Vancouver-based Trilogy Metals between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31.

It was a much smaller investment than Paulson’s ownership of Donlin and a separate gold and antimony project that he has been pushing in Idaho. But the transaction is notable given the investor’s significant role in Alaska’s mining industry and his relationship with President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration said in October that it would pay some $35 million for 10% of Trilogy and approve the Ambler Road — a controversial state-proposed mining haul route in northern Alaska that’s viewed as critical to Trilogy’s mining plans. (Those plans are being advanced in partnership with an Australian company, South32.)

The announcement boosted Trilogy’s stock by more than 200%. Paulson sold his entire stake in the company, more than 14 million shares, within a few months, though his disclosure does not specify the exact date.

The shares would have surged in value from about $30 million to more than $100 million in October, when the stock price briefly climbed past $10 per share. But it has since dropped to around $4.00.

Paulson has not publicly discussed his divestment, and a spokesperson declined to comment. A Trilogy spokesperson also declined to comment.

Investors buy and sell shares in companies for any number of reasons, and Paulson’s move is not necessarily a sign that he soured on Trilogy’s potential, according to Ian Lange, a professor of economics and business at Colorado School of Mines.

“Could it be a reason? Sure. It could. We don’t know. But there are many other [possible] reasons,” Lange said.

Paulson may have sold the shares simply so he could focus more on other priorities, like Donlin, Lange said.

Other Trilogy shareholders, including longtime Alaska Native leader Willie Hensley, who’s also a board member of the company, disclosed gains of hundreds of thousands of dollars following the news of the Ambler Road’s approval and the government’s own investment.

Paulson initially made a name for himself, and a fortune, by betting against the housing market before the 2008 financial crisis.

Since then, he’s become known as a leading investor in companies developing gold mines, and for his ties to Trump: He hosted a Florida campaign fundraiser in 2024 and reportedly was a candidate to be secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Donlin is Paulson’s biggest mining investment in Alaska. Beyond his direct stake in the project, he’s also a major investor in Novagold Resources, which owns the other 60% of Donlin and which Trilogy initially spun out from. And Paulson owns about 38% of another Alaska-focused company, International Tower Hill Mines, which aims to develop a gold deposit north of Fairbanks.

Meanwhile, another billionaire who’s heavily invested in Alaska’s mining industry, including in some of the same companies as Paulson, has kept his shares in Trilogy.

Investor Thomas Kaplan’s New York-based Electrum Group owns some 18.5% of the company — a stake worth more than $136 million, according to a recent securities filing by Kaplan’s firm.

Electrum also owns about $865 million in shares, or some 24%, of Novagold, the firm that’s pushing Donlin along with Paulson.

Both Donlin and the Ambler Road have generated vigorous debate locally and statewide. Supporters say the projects could create much-needed jobs and stimulate rural economies, while critics are concerned about impacts to the environment and traditional hunting and fishing.

Northern Journal contributor Max Graham can be reached at max@northernjournal.com. He’s interested in any and all mining related stories, as well as introductory meetings with people in and around the industry.

This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Nathaniel Herz. Subscribe at this link.

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