Category: Alaska News

An Anchorage mother whose son died from a fentanyl overdose is continuing to champion national and statewide action to raise awareness around the dangers of the synthetic opioid and prevent future deaths.

On Wednesday, Sandy Snodgrass was recognized with a legislative citation of honor at the Alaska State Capitol by Anchorage Democratic Senator Bill Wielechowski for her advocacy work. 

In December, Snodgrass attended the signing of a package of legislation, including Bruce’s Law, which directs federal funds toward youth education and community-based treatment and recovery programs. It’s named after her son who died in 2021 and was sponsored by Alaska’s U.S. senators and signed by President Donald Trump.

“This is a different world we live in with fentanyl now,” Snodgrass said in a lunchtime presentation  after receiving the award. “We live in a world where one pill, one half pill can kill you. And it’s not a tolerance, you know, it’s one time and you can die.”

Trained as a clinical psychologist, Snodgrass founded the Alaska Fentanyl Response Project aimed at raising awareness about overdose deaths, particularly among young people, sharing stories of those who have died and advocating for legislation and resources for prevention and addiction treatment. 

“I talk about it as a three legged stool,” she said. She described demand reduction, law enforcement and treatment as the three legs of the stool. “And if we don’t do all three, the stool will fall over,” she said. 

She said her focus is demand reduction. “So I am not law enforcement,” she added. “I don’t have a treatment center. But I did have a child that died from fentanyl poisoning, and so I can tell my story to anybody, anywhere, anytime.”

“You can never die from an illicit drug if you never try an illicit drug,” she said. 

Snodgrass’ son, Robert Bruce Snodgrass, died at the age of 22 in 2021, during a wave when Alaska saw the highest increase in opioid deaths nationwide, a 75% increase from 2020 to 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, clinically prescribed for pain, and is more potent than other opioids like morphine or heroin. As little as two milligrams — an amount the size of a few grains of salt — can be fatal. 

The Alaska wave of fentanyl deaths peaked in 2023, according to state data, with 357 reported deaths. Last year, there were 245 deaths reported from 2024 to 2025, according to the most recently available data, with the majority in Anchorage.

Thousands more non-fatal overdoses were reported each month, with many surviving thanks to the use of emergency naloxone, known as Narcan, a life-saving drug that can quickly reverse an opioid overdose. 

She said it’s a difficult message to convey the risks to young people, like her son.

“Bruce was an Alaskan boy, through and through — all the Alaskan things. He was a free solo mountain climber. He was a certified mountain guide. He was an extreme sport, high adrenaline young man, just like so many of our Alaskan boys and girls, he lived on the edge and loved it,” she said.

She said she thought she’d get a call about him being injured in some kind of rock climbing accident. “That’s not the call I got. He was safe out there. He was not safe less than a mile away from our home in Anchorage,” she said.

Snodgrass said she’s glad to see law enforcement investigating more fentanyl overdose deaths as drug induced homicides, and recent legislative action to increase criminal penalties to second degree murder. But she said she recognizes it can be accidental. 

“That guy, whoever gave my son the drugs, is almost as much a victim as my son is. He likely didn’t know there was fentanyl. He likely didn’t want to kill my son. He did not do it intentionally. But that’s what happened. So I don’t call it ‘accidental overdose,’ I call it poisoning,” she said. 

She said she mentioned the idea of fentanyl as a “chemical weapon” and a “weapon of mass destruction” to President Trump when they met in the Oval Office in December — weeks later he issued an executive order designating fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.

It directs attorneys general to pursue prosecutions of fentanyl sales, including manufacturing, distribution and illicit sale of precursor chemicals, and directs the military and Department of Homeland Security to consider fentanyl in its response to chemical incidents and to conduct counter-fentanyl operations. 

Snodgrass cited estimates of hundreds of people dying across the U.S. every day from overdoses. An August 2025 estimate by the CDC showed 77,648 drug overdose deaths occurred in the 12 months ending in March 2025. Fentanyl remains the leading cause of overdose deaths. 

“We’ve got to change that,” she said. “It’s as if a jet airliner, a jumbo jet airliner, was crashing in this country every single day, day after day after day.”

Snodgrass said she’s especially focused on doing more school presentations and raising awareness in rural Alaska, which she said drug dealers target for the high retail prices for fentanyl.

“When this reached my son in Anchorage, I was shocked, and the fact that it’s now reaching our rural communities to the extent that it is, is shocking,” she said, citing recent deaths in Nome, Dillingham and Togiak. 

“I could not get over the statistics in Togiak of the number of seizures that the DEA was making, 3,000 pills at a time in a backpack on a plane to Togiak. Togiak has 800 people in it. It just was terrifying to me,” she said. 

“It devastates the community to lose even one person. And so the numbers coming out of those rural communities are terrifying. They’re horrible, and it just keeps happening,” she said. 

Snodgrass said she’s supportive of Senate Bill 288, sponsored by Sen. George Raucher, R-Sutton, that would require opioid abuse and prevention curriculum for students in grades 6 through 12, during an annual drug awareness week known as Red Ribbon Week. It’s currently being considered by the Senate Education Committee. 

“They’re innocuous little pills, unless someone tells you that pill is going to kill you, or could potentially kill you,” Snodgrass said. “It’s a little blue pill, and it looks harmless, and you may take it to change the way you feel. That’s all they’re doing. And so the only thing I can do as one person is keep telling that story over and over and over again, and so that’s what I’m here to do.”

SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE

The first two of 11 planned medium-weight icebreakers will be homeported in Alaska, although which cities remains to be determined, the U.S. Coast Guard announced Thursday.

The hope is a Finnish company building the vessels will deliver them by the end of 2028, according to a Coast Guard press release. That mirrors the same hoped-for timeline for the Storis icebreaker set to be homeported in Juneau once vessel updates and support infrastructure are sufficient for year-round deployment.

Coast Guard officials and Alaska’s congressional delegation hailed the announcement as a step toward the long-discussed plans to bolster the U.S. military’s presence in the Arctic. The Coast Guard in 2018 announced plans for new heavy-duty Polar Security Cutters that were supposed to be deployed starting in 2024, but with those vessels now delayed likely beyond 2030 efforts are shifting to other ships that can be put into service more rapidly.

“By strategically positioning these state-of-the-art icebreakers in Alaska, the Coast Guard will maximize our ability to defend our northern border and approaches, while reinforcing America’s maritime dominance in a crucial region of strategic importance,” Adm. Kevin E. Lunday, commandant of the Coast Guard, said in a prepared statement.

The first visit to Juneau of the Storis icebreaker — a private ship built in 2012 and purchased by the Coast Guard in 2024 in a politically controversial process due to its limited capabilities — was hailed as a significant first step toward the goal of an increased presence. The ship is scheduled to deploy to Alaska during warmer months and be upgraded in Seattle during the winter until 2028 or 2029, with up to 190 crew plus their families expected to be stationed in Juneau when the ship is homeported there year-round.

Funding for the 11 Arctic Security Cutters — to be built by companies in Finland and Canada — mentioned in Thursday’s announcement was approved by Congress last year as part of a large-scale U.S. Coast Guard expansion sought by President Donald Trump. U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said in January he was told by Lunday up to four of the ships would be stationed in Alaska.

Sullivan, during a press conference Thursday following the Coast Guard’s announcement two ships will be homeported in the state, said he isn’t advocating for which communities should be selected. He also acknowledged the hoped-for delivery date of 2028 “is a very aggressive timeline.”

“The Coast Guard has not determined where these two additional Arctic security cutters are going, but they estimate the crew ranges on these shifts would be from about 80 to 140 personnel,” he said.

Sullivan said it is not known whether any of the nine other ships might also be homeported in Alaska.

A statement issued Thursday that includes the other two members of Alaska’s all-Republican congressional delegation — Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Nick Begich III — states the Storis is the first icebreaker to be homeported in Alaska, with other existing icebreakers currently homeported in Seattle. It also notes last year’s budget bill includes funding for light icebreakers and other Coast Guard ships, helicopters and other aircraft, and shoreside infrastructure.

This story was originally published by the Juneau Independent.

The post Coast Guard says first two of new icebreakers will be in Alaska, but details such as where unknown appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

A halt on elective surgeries at Bartlett Regional Hospital has been extended through Tuesday following a fire Thursday that contaminated many of the facility’s surgical supplies, the hospital announced Friday.

The fire in a utility closet early Thursday afternoon resulted in an evacuation of the surgical area, but no damage to the operating rooms, according to an update posted on the hospital’s Facebook page. Elective surgeries were canceled Thursday and Friday as a construction crew did repair work expected to be completed Saturday.

“Unfortunately, many supplies within the unit were contaminated and we are working as quickly as possible to replace surgical supply inventory,” the post notes. “At this time, the Surgical Services unit will remain closed for elective surgeries through Tuesday.”

Staff are notifying patients about the change, according to the hospital.

Thist story was originally published by the Juneau Independent.

The post Elective surgeries at Juneau’s hospital canceled through Tuesday due to supply shortage after fire appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

In February 2025, to the shock of University of Alaska faculty, staff and students, the University of Alaska Board of Regents passed a motion that banned the use of the words “DEI,” “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” reversing decades of work by the universities to better serve Alaska and its diverse population. The decision forced staff to review all UA websites and other electronic or print material and remove those words from previously developed materials. The mandate was a reaction to a 2025 “Dear Colleague” letter from the U.S. Department of Education, which threatened to end funding at any institution that continued to use the words. 

In the weeks following the passage of the BOR’s anti-DEI motion, the faculty union, United Academics, and faculty senates from all three campuses responded by passing statements and circulating a petition in opposition to the censorship and in defense of free speech and academic freedom.

Dear Colleague letters do not carry the force of law and this one was immediately challenged in court. In August of 2025, a federal court judge determined the Dear Colleague letter was illegal. The Federal Government withdrew its appeal of that ruling in February and the judge vacated the letter, making it unenforceable. Yet the UA BOR’s motion still stands, violating not only the U.S. Constitution but also the Constitution of the State of Alaska and the Board of Regents policy P04.04.010 on Academic Freedom. 

The anti-diversity motion the BOR passed was an illegal attempt to limit free speech and academic freedom and to censor words based on political ideology. It also directly contradicts the mission statement of the University of Alaska, which specifically supports the state’s diversity: The University of Alaska inspires learning, and advances and disseminates knowledge through teaching, research, and public service, emphasizing the North and its diverse peoples.

The Board of Regents’ action has compromised not only the reputation of the entire University of Alaska as a place of learning and exploring systems of knowledge, but has also made our campuses feel less welcoming and less safe. It goes against specific protections established by the Civil Rights Act to create pathways to success for marginalized peoples. In one motion, the Board of Regents engaged in illegal censorship and violated its own mission.

We should be cognizant of Alaska’s colonial history that required assimilation in education, including the banning of Alaska Native languages and customs. If we now prohibit the very word diversity, we engage in a new form of forced homogeneity and exclusion. The University cannot say it is embracing its mission and values while simultaneously banning words that focus specifically on inclusion in education. The University cannot ban words while also claiming to value academic freedom.

Faculty and students waste precious time and energy deciding when to stand fast, how to “say it in a different way,” and when to adapt without compromising academic integrity. It affects the words we use when teaching, even if only to stop and second-guess ourselves. The writing is on the wall. Or, rather, the words are no longer on the websites, in the office names, promotion files or job descriptions. This illegal and uninformed censorship won’t stop without a course correction.

As faculty, we expect our students to be informed by research and accurate, provable information. We expect them to be straightforward in their work and to rely on open exploration of topics based on logic, history, critical thinking and diverse ways of knowing. We therefore cannot accept the motion of the Board of Regents.

As educators and researchers at UA, we have no desire to wade into politics. We want to teach, create and research in our areas of expertise. But we feel compelled to speak against the censorship of words and ideas, which is antithetical to the University of Alaska’s mission and the needs of a democratic and free society. It is past time for the UA Board of Regents to rescind their illegal, harmful motion.

As faculty at the University of Alaska, we expect better, and we can do better. We seek an end to this era of censorship and word banning that unnecessarily brings the university into disrepute and demonstrates a neglect of duty by violating the constitutions of the United States and the State of Alaska, not to mention their own policy and mission statement. We owe it to the current and future students to champion and uphold academic freedom, freedom of speech, and an educational system that is welcoming of all peoples without forcing them to assimilate to reduced identities.

Co-signed: Abel Bult-Ito, Anna Berge, Falk Huettmann, Debu Misra, Jak Maier, Sam Alexander, Jennifer Bernard, Iver Arnegard, Maria Williams, Pete Praetorius, Heather Batchelder, Robin Shoaps, Patrick Marlow, Jackie Cason, LaVerne Xilegg Demientieff, Diane McEachern, Michael Navarro, Chris Coffman, Leslie McCartney, Javier Fochesatto, Retchenda George-Bettisworth, Dave Evans, Connie Fuess, Seta Kabranian-Melkonian, Bettina Kipp Lavea, David P. Moxley, Micah Muer, Tim Hinterberger, Zoë Jones, Margaret Short, Sarah Dexter, Jamie Smith, Jessica Ross , Yvonne Chase, Maya Salganek, Deb Mole, Rachel Graham, Da-ka-xeen Mehner, Charleen Daazhraįį Fisher, Jonas Lamb, David Cox II, Eldri Waid Westmoreland, Loraliee Heagy, Mary Wegner, Kathleen Nevis, Deidre Berberich, Forest Haven, Andrea Dewees, Glenn Wright, Jay Szczepanski II, Carol Gray, Angie Goffredi, Rally Wolford, Éedaa Heather Burge

SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX

Tony Romeo is on the hunt for minerals, but he’s far from a typical prospector.

Based in South Carolina, Romeo doesn’t spend summers in the mountains with a rock pick, and he’s not interested in combing creek beds for gold.

His focus, rather, is miles beneath the surface of the ocean, where a new and highly speculative industry is racing to find and scoop up vast deposits of metals on the seafloor.

Romeo is chief executive of Deep Sea Rare Minerals, a company that recently expressed interest in mineral leasing offshore of Alaska, after the Trump administration announced earlier this year that it was considering opening federal waters near the state to miners.

The idea to mine the deep is still in its infancy, especially in Alaska: Much of the state’s seafloor remains unmapped, meaning its marine mineral resources are not well known. And the administration so far has received relatively sparse interest: Only a few companies have publicly signaled support for deep-sea mineral leasing off Alaska.

Still, the possibility has sparked discussions around the state — generating excitement among explorers like Romeo but also pushback from conservation groups, Indigenous leaders and commercial fishing groups, who say the industry could harm sensitive marine ecosystems and fisheries.

Federal regulators received more than 90,000 responses to the idea during a public comment period that ended April 1. Of the more than 2,500 comments that the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management posted online, an overwhelming majority were opposed, according to a Northern Journal review.

“Arctic offshore seabed mining would occur within core marine mammal subsistence use areas and presents unique, unmitigable risks to Iñupiat subsistence, food security, and cultural continuity,” the Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, the regional tribal government for Alaska’s North Slope, said in a comment. The industry, it added, offers “speculative benefits while exposing Arctic communities to irreversible harm.”

Supporters, meanwhile, include a handful of companies connected to the industry as well as Nome’s city government. They say tapping into Alaska’s marine minerals could reduce U.S. dependence on foreign countries for important metals, boost national security and stimulate the state’s economy.

A new kind of prospector

A former U.S. Air Force officer and commercial real estate investor, Romeo felt called during the pandemic to take up more adventurous pursuits, he said in a recent interview.

As a pilot, Romeo was fascinated by the enduring mystery of Amelia Earhart’s plane, which disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 when she was attempting to fly around the world. So, in May 2023, Romeo bought a submarine-shaped deep-sea drone equipped with sonar. He had two things in mind: “Finding Amelia’s plane, and then also getting into the deep-sea mining space.”

The plane search came first. After spending millions of dollars and scouring more than 5,000 square miles of seabed, Romeo came up empty-handed — though not without a promising sonar image eerily shaped like a plane that made global headlines. (It turned out to be some rocks.)

Last year, Romeo shifted fully to the business of looking for minerals.

Like a number of other ocean mining startups, Deep Sea Rare Minerals is now searching for ancient, baseball-sized rocks with high concentrations of metals —  nickel, copper, cobalt — used in batteries and renewable energy. In some parts of the Pacific, these metal-rich nuggets, known as nodules, are strewn about the seafloor in dense clusters, two or three miles deep.

They haven’t been found off the coast of Alaska, but they might be there, along with a few other kinds of underwater mineral deposits, according a 2022 review by federal scientists. Some 62% of the federally-managed seafloor around the state still hasn’t been mapped.

“Let’s at least find out what we have there,” said Romeo. “That’s the question mark, I think, for Alaska: Is there an abundance of nodules? If there is, I think you’ll see a whole ecosystem and industry develop in Alaska, which would be great.”

Romeo’s company is privately held and still seeking tens of millions of dollars in funding. It’s mainly focused on the preliminary steps of mapping and exploration, but it’s also designing mining equipment that it hopes one day to use if it finds enough nodules and can raise the money to extract them.

Deep Sea Rare Minerals is also wants to look for minerals near Guam and in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a region of international waters in the Central Pacific that’s become a hotbed for the new industry.

“It’s not going to happen in Alaska anytime soon.”

Even in the waters outside Alaska where the industry has concentrated its attention, mining companies face major obstacles, including high costs, technical challenges and environmental opposition.

Despite substantial investment, there’s no commercial production of deep-sea minerals anywhere in the world, according to John Wiltshire, a deep-sea mining expert and former professor at the University of Hawaiʻi.

The industry, as of now, is “nonexistent,” he said.

Wiltshire expects that to change fairly soon; the first production globally could start within five years, he said. But it’s likely further off in Alaska, he added.

“The remoteness, the environmental opposition, the fact that some of the minerals are of lower grade — all of these things, in my mind, would contribute to making this whole thing a more difficult proposition in Alaska than it would be in some other places,” Wiltshire said. “It’s not going to happen in Alaska anytime soon.”

Even on land, Alaska is a notoriously difficult place for resource development, with high labor and transportation costs and environmental conditions that can be technically challenging to engineer around. Operating offshore only magnifies the costs and challenges, experts say.

Plus, the nascent industry is already drawing intense scrutiny from Alaska-focused conservation groups and Indigenous organizations, including some typically pro-development corporations like Calista Corp. in Western Alaska and Arctic Slope Regional Corp. on the North Slope.

Opponents worry that mining the seabed would harm habitat for fish, marine mammals and other wildlife and could threaten the state’s huge commercial fishing industry and its Indigenous subsistence traditions.

The areas where the Trump administration has said it could open leasing — in parts of the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutians, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean — overlap with important marine habitats where there are already some protections, said Becca Robbins Gisclair, senior director of Arctic and northern waters at the Ocean Conservancy.

A key concern is the “direct destruction” of the seabed, Gisclair said in an interview. That “really cascades throughout the ecosystem,” she added.

Romeo, for his part, said his team has worked to design a system that minimizes impacts — one with “environmental considerations in every part of it.”

He distinguished the nodules that his company is targeting from other mineral deposits called ferromanganese crusts and massive sulfides, which could require more intrusive mining methods.

“It’s not tractors on the seafloor,” Romeo said, referring to his company’s proposed method. “It’s floating, and it’s got these tines, these kind of rake-like things in the front of it.”

It “scoops underneath and pops” nodules into a collector, then pipes them up to a ship on the surface, Romeo said.

Still, he acknowledged that the plans are conceptual. Deep Sea Rare Minerals is still years away from actual deep-sea mining in Alaska, he said — and that’s only if it’s ultimately authorized by the federal government.

“We’re building a mining vessel from scratch, right?” he said. “There’s only a couple in the world that have ever been built, and they’re all novel.”

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.

SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX

The war in Iran is risking what could be a catastrophic spike in the price of fuel in the rural villages and hub communities across Alaska’s coast — and distributors are also warning of possible supply shortages.

Even before the war, fuel prices in the state’s off-road system communities were eye-wateringly high: Unleaded gas was $6.72 a gallon this winter in the Western Alaska hub town of Bethel, while in the Northwest Alaska village of Ambler, the price of gas and heating fuel has been $17.50 a gallon for the past year, according to local officials.

Vendors that sell bulk fuel to those regions are now warning that prices could rise 50% due to the war-driven supply crunch, according to Ingemar Mathiasson, energy manager for the Northwest Arctic Borough, which held a meeting attended by fuel company representatives last week in the regional hub town of Kotzebue.

Rural communities can receive as little as a single bulk fuel delivery during a shipping season that runs only through the summer — meaning that rates can be locked in at that price for the whole next year, even if global commodity prices fall. Government and Native corporation subsidies can help offset costs, but prices are still high and about to get higher.

“We’re looking at, maybe, a survival scenario for rural Alaska,” Mathiasson said in a phone interview Monday. “At those prices, I would imagine that people are going to try to move into Anchorage. I don’t know if you can heat your house at over $20 a gallon.”

Policymakers say they’re tracking the problem but haven’t announced concrete steps to protect consumers.

“This is one of the things that is top of my list right now, this week, here in Washington — to raise this within the administration to try to get in front of it,” said U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski. “It has to be a full-on effort to make sure that these communities are not left high and dry.”

The energy shock from the Iran war is landing worldwide, as Iran’s effective shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz keeps some 20% of global oil production out of the markets.

The effects have landed particularly hard in Asia, the destination of 80% of the oil that typically transits the Strait. And Asian refineries produce much of the supply for the more than 160 Western Alaska communities that receive maritime fuel deliveries during the May through October season, according to the Alaska Chadux̂ Network, a tanker and fuel distribution industry trade group.

Buying fuel from other sources “may be possible,” but likely at “significantly elevated prices,” the network’s chief executive, Buddy Custard, wrote in a recent letter received by Alaska policymakers.

“Despite best efforts, a supply gap remains a credible risk,” Custard wrote in his letter, dated March 31. “An undefined portion of the estimated 140 million gallons of fuel may be at risk of non-delivery, affecting dozens of communities, regional hubs, and critical infrastructure that serve as lifelines for surrounding villages.”

Custard said he was unavailable for an interview, but he shared additional correspondence with a state House member’s office from last week in which he said it’s difficult to “confirm specific outcomes or timelines” given the “highly dynamic and unpredictable” situation in the Middle East.

“It is not that alternative sources are entirely unavailable, but rather that they are constrained by a combination of limited refining capacity for the required fuel types, existing contractual commitments, and significantly higher costs,” Custard wrote. “In short, limited supply may be available, but not necessarily in the volumes, timeframe, or at the price points required to support Western Alaska communities.”

The uncertain outlook poses a dilemma for leaders at rural institutions that purchase fuel, including village governments and utilities, who are questioning whether to commit to fuel purchases now, later, in full, or in multiple orders to spread out the cost.

“I don’t know what to tell members who say, ‘Should I wait?’ I don’t know what to tell members who say, ‘I can do this much now, this much later,’” said Nils Andreassen, executive director of the nonprofit Alaska Municipal League, which supports local governments. “I don’t know how to keep ahead of it. And the current global uncertainty is not giving me a lot of confidence.”

Fuel vendors — which for Western Alaska include Vitus, Crowley and Delta Western — are urging customers to not delay placing their orders in hopes that prices will improve, according to a written summary of their comments from last week’s meeting in Kotzebue.

“We’re really getting squeezed on all this,” Tom Atkinson, the general manager of Kotzebue’s electric utility, said in a phone interview. “Nobody wants to lock in at this high price.”

Atkinson said that his utility’s diesel fuel supply for the past year cost $3.10 a gallon. This year’s delivery of a million gallons, he said, could come in at more than $6 a gallon.

In prior years, fuel companies have sometimes loaded their tankers with more supply than communities have ordered, expecting to sell the excess once the cargo arrives in Alaska. But this year, vendors say the price is too high for them to buy and transport fuel that risks going unsold.

A cold winter has also produced more sea ice than usual, which could shorten the delivery season. If communities miss the tanker delivery window, those that end up with shortages may have to turn to deliveries by plane, at even higher prices.

“We end up with situations where if the communities don’t fill their tanks, we don’t have enough airplanes in Alaska to help,” said Mathiasson, the Northwest Arctic Borough energy manager. “You just can’t wait until the last minute.”

Energy shocks have hit Alaska before, notably in a major price spike in 2008. That year, lawmakers used a huge windfall in taxes paid by Alaska’s oil-producing companies to help fund a “resource rebate” added to the annual checks written by state government to residents. The total paid to each recipient that year was $3,269, double the amount of the previous year.

This year, given the state’s tighter budget, advocates are pushing for measures that more narrowly target the communities in need. One concept supported by the municipal league is boosting the $750,000 cap on a state program that offers loans to local governments and utilities when they make their bulk fuel purchases.

“I’m not done turning over every stone and seeing what we can do,” House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, who represents a rural legislative district centered in the Bristol Bay region, said in a phone interview from Juneau. “If this war continues, there’s no question it’s going to be catastrophic.”

Edgmon noted that rural Alaska communities already were seeing higher costs for groceries and goods delivered through a federal program called bypass mail, which had a 9% rate increase last year.

A spokesperson for Gov. Mike Dunleavy declined to comment on the outlook for rural Alaska fuel prices and policies under consideration to address them.

In a worst-case scenario of a $5-a-gallon increase, the overall hit to rural Alaska from the war-driven fuel price spike could reach hundreds of millions of dollars, according to one economist’s estimate.

Each rural Alaskan, on average, requires some 1,200 gallons of fuel a year to meet their demand for heat, transportation and electricity, according to economist Steve Colt, who works with the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. By Colt’s calculation, the added expense could reach $6,000 per person and $450 million across the state’s rural communities.

Even before the spike, electricity and heating fuel can cost households in one region of Western Alaska, the Kusilvak Census Area, some 45% of their income, according to data collected by the energy center’s founding director, Gwen Holdmann. That area already faces a poverty rate of more than 30%, triple the statewide level.

“It’s definitely a serious issue that we’re raising up to the highest level,” Mathiasson said.

Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at natherz@gmail.com or (907) 793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link.

The post A war-driven spike in fuel prices could produce a ‘survival scenario’ in Alaska villages appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has been appointed to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission at a time when the federal agency is pivoting from its longtime focus on environmental science to more emphasis on military defense and economic development.

Dunleavy is an ally of President Donald Trump. Dunleavy’s presidential appointment, announced by the commission this week, comes five months after Liz Qaulluq Cravalho’s position on the commission was terminated. Cravalho is vice president of lands at NANA Regional Corporation, the Alaska Native corporation for the state’s northwest region. She was initially appointed by then-President Joe Biden in 2021 and reappointed in 2024.

The commission, created in 1984, advises the president and Congress on research policy. Its seven commissioners are appointed by the president.

Dunleavy is the first sitting governor to be appointed to the commission, which advises the president and Congress on Arctic research. Past Alaska lieutenant governors have served on the commission, but not during their time in state office. Mead Treadwell chaired the commission prior to being elected in 2010 as lieutenant governor in the Parnell administration, and Fran Ulmer chaired it after serving as lieutenant governor in the Knowles administration and after serving as chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage.

In 2019, his first year in office, Dunleavy used his veto powers to cut state funding of the University of Alaska system by 41%, an action that at the time was characterized as devastating to the university’s Arctic research, among other activities. Much of the funding was later restored through a compromise Dunleavy made with the university.

In a statement released by the commission, Dunleavy praised the role of Arctic research, saying it helps Alaskans.

“Alaska sits at the forefront of the Arctic, and our communities, resources, and strategic position make us essential to advancing responsible research, economic development, and national security in the region,” he said in a statement released by the commission. “I look forward to working with fellow commissioners to ensure that Arctic research reflects the needs of Alaskans while strengthening America’s leadership in the Arctic.”

The Trump-appointed chair of the commission, speaking Wednesday at the Arctic Encounter Summit in Anchorage, said the organization is “tremendously thrilled” to have Dunleavy as a member.

“We’re super excited about that,” said Thomas Emanuel Dans, appointed in December. “We’ve got the very experienced hand and voice at our commission, and we’re looking to do big things here.”

A pivot to security needs

Dans, who also served on the commission during the first Trump administration, expressed an expansive view of the Arctic that he likened to that of 19th century explorers.

“We want to create the conditions that really unleash human flourishing. We want more. We want human life. We want people to have big dreams,” he said.

Rather than focusing on pure science, the commission is focused on security, as Dans described it.

“Security is probably the overriding, overarching theme of things,” he said.

But security has several facets, he said. It includes military security, international security, energy security and community security, “which can be interpreted broadly in terms of health and well-being” for Arctic residents and others in the nation and the world, he said.

Dans, who lives in Texas and spent most of his career in finance, served on the U.S. Arctic Research Commission during the first Trump administration. But his comments on Wednesday indicated some gaps in his Arctic and Alaska knowledge.

He mentioned Russia’s Wrangel Island, off the northern coast of Siberia, as a security threat. Wrangel island “is close to Alaska here,” he said in his speech. “And for a long time it was incorporated as part of the United States. Today we face missiles pointing at us from Wrangel Island.”

Wrangel Island was never part of the United States. There is a place with a similar name – Wrangell Island – that is located in Southeast Alaska. Since 2004, Russia’s Wrangel Island, located 300 miles from the nearest point in Alaska, has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is famous for its Arctic biodiversity, including the world’s largest concentration of Pacific walruses.

A decade ago, Russia built a military base on the island with a focus on radar systems to monitor airspace. The military use of the island is part of Russia’s military buildup in the Arctic, which has worried U.S. officials, and it is also considered to pose a potential threat to the natural resources there.

In his Arctic Encounter Summit comments, Dans hailed the planned expansion of the U.S. Coast Guard’s icebreaker fleet, saying the fleet has “gone from zero to maybe 14.” However, the Coast Guard for decades has operated two polar-class icebreakers: the Healy, which performs annual missions in Alaska and the wider Arctic, and the Polar Star, which usually sails in the Antarctic. The Coast Guard recently acquired another icebreaker for Arctic operations. Originally an oil industrial vessel called the Aiviq, the ship was renamed Storis and commissioned in a Juneau ceremony in August. The fleet is poised to expand: there was funding for more than a dozen new icebreakers in the Trump administration spending bill known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Concerning Russia, which holds more Arctic coastline and land than any other nation, Dans urged more cooperation and communication. “I’d love to have the younger generation in Alaska learn Russian,” he said.

Within a few miles from the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center, where Dans spoke at the Arctic Encounter Summit, classes were being conducted in Russian language at elementary, middle and high schools through the Anchorage School District’s Russian immersion program. It was launched as a full-time program in 2024, according to the school district.

The post Alaska Gov. Dunleavy joins Arctic research commission as focus turns to security appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

On March 31, President Trump issued a new executive order on citizenship records and mail‑in ballots entitled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” The order has nothing to do with election integrity — the name is like “Newspeak,” Orwell’s fictional language for a totalitarian state. It is an unlawful attempt to seize control of how Alaskans vote and to make an error‑ridden federal database the gatekeeper of our ballots.

Ever since statehood Alaska has built an election system that reflects our geography and our values. By‑mail and absentee voting are not mere conveniences here; they are how thousands of our neighbors who live in remote areas accessible only by air or sea participate in democracy at all. Yet the president now proposes to tell Alaska when and to whom we may send ballots by mail, based not on Alaska law, but on whether a voter’s name appears on a new federal “citizenship list.”

The order directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile state‑by‑state rosters of presumed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in federal elections and then directs the Postal Service to withhold mail ballots from anyone not on those lists. In one stroke, the president purports to rewrite who may receive a ballot by mail, how ballots travel through the postal system and which government gets the last word on whether an Alaskan can vote. That authority does not belong to him.

The U.S. Constitution is explicit in this matter. It reads in pertinent part: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections . . .shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations . . .”   Alaska’s Legislature has determined who may vote absentee, how those ballots are requested and mailed, and how they are counted. An executive order that conditions ballot delivery on a federally controlled citizenship list displaces those laws with presidential preference. That is not faithful execution of the law; it is legislation by directive. And it is patently unconstitutional.

The order also collides with bedrock principles of federalism. The federal government may not simply commandeer state election officials or local postmasters to administer a new federal scheme that overrides state choices about mail voting. By insisting that Alaska adapt its procedures to match a federal citizenship database that we did not design, do not control and cannot effectively challenge, the administration seeks to turn state election workers into unwilling agents of a national policy they never adopted.

Even if the president had such power—which he does not—the policy itself is dangerously unsound. The citizenship records he proposes to rely on are notoriously unreliable. Federal and state databases routinely misclassify naturalized citizens as non‑citizens, lag months or years behind status changes, and contain basic errors in names, dates of birth and addresses. Tying ballot delivery to a single “State Citizenship List” assembled from these imperfect sources is a recipe for widespread disenfranchisement.

Those errors will not fall evenly. Naturalized citizens, Alaska Natives whose names and records do not conform to federal bureaucratic expectations and rural voters with inconsistent or non‑standard addresses are all especially vulnerable to being left off or misflagged in a national database. If the Postal Service is instructed not to send a ballot unless it can confirm a match on that list, many eligible Alaskans will simply never receive a ballot at all.

In urban areas, some voters might fall back on in‑person early voting or Election Day polling places. In much of Alaska, that is unrealistic. An elder in a village accessible only by plane or boat, a deployed service member relying on an overseas ballot or a college student temporarily out of state cannot easily “work around” a missing ballot. For them, the executive order does not mean extra paperwork. It means no vote.

The order also offers no meaningful, timely remedy for those wrongly excluded. By the time a voter discovers that no ballot has arrived and tries to untangle why their name is missing from a federal citizenship list, the election may be over. We will never know how many voices were silenced by database error rather than voter choice.

Alaska has used absentee and by‑mail voting for years without any evidence of widespread non‑citizen voting or ballot fraud. Our challenges are logistical, not criminal: weather, distance and infrastructure, not hordes of ineligible voters swamping the polls. Imposing a rigid, centralized federal screen on top of that system does nothing to address real problems, and threatens to create a new one that is far worse: a loss of confidence that ballots will arrive at all.

Let’s not attempt to dress this order up as a mere “data‑sharing” exercise rather than the federal takeover it truly is.

The post Trump’s latest elections order is an unlawful assault on Alaska’s elections appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.