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Mendenhall Valley residents in the flood zone celebrated Thursday afternoon as the Mendenhall River crested at a level well below initial predictions. The event was much less destructive than disastrous floods that struck over the past three years.

The flood crested at 14.7 feet on the Mendenhall Lake gauge at 2:15 p.m., according to the National Weather Service. As floodwaters started to recede Thursday afternoon, only a handful of residents reported damage.

“We have crested officially, and we are now on the way back down — we did it, Juneau,” said Zoe Kaplan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, during a livestream just before 3 p.m.

Ann Lind lives in the flood zone on Marion Drive. She said she had been anxiously waiting for the flood all spring and summer. Last year, her home flooded when drainage pipes failed and water leaked through the floodwall.

“For months it was like this slow-moving bullet coming straight at me, and didn’t know if it was going to be a hit or a miss,” she said. “And today, it’s a miss.”

Lind said the water didn’t even touch the HESCO barriers that make up the flood wall in her backyard.

“This flood this year is the scenario we all wanted — we all hoped for,” she said.

A couple of riverfront homeowners on Killewich Drive said their crawl spaces flooded this year due to seepage, but they were able to pump out the water.

Riverfront homeowners on Killewich Drive pump water out of their crawl spaces on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026. (Photo by Clarise Larson/KTOO)

View Drive residents saw the worst flooding, as they have every year. This is the second year in a row they were left without the protection of the flood wall constructed by the City and Borough of Juneau and the Army Corps.

Mandy Mallott lives at the end of the street. Last year, she and her neighbors set up their own flood wall made of HESCO barriers and an earthen berm in an attempt to protect their homes. She said her home was spared, but there was still a lot of damage throughout the neighborhood.

On Thursday afternoon, she said she and others who put up barriers on the street didn’t see flooding in their homes.

“The emotions that are running through us are a big sense of relief and thankfulness to our friends and our neighbors that we got through the night and this gorgeous day together,” Mallott said.

Malachi Thorington also lives on View Drive, where he said his house and his next-door neighbors’ flooded this year, but not as badly as in the past.

Downstream on Meadow Lane, near Juneau International Airport and the mouth of the river, Bob Jacobson watched the flood from his son’s deck overlooking the river.

He described watching a tree strike the barriers across the river — just minutes before — to two U.S. Army Corps officials who had just arrived at the barrier.

Within minutes, Army Corps crews chainsawed the log away from the barrier. Pumps were stationed along Meadow Lane but did not need to be turned on as the flood peaked.

The HESCO barriers below Brotherhood Bridge are new. There was some seepage, but neighbors said it was nothing compared to last year when water rose up the bank and into yards and some driveways, just feet from homes.

An industrial-sized pump pipes water over the flood wall on Meander Way as the flood crests on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026. (Photo by Clarise Larson/KTOO)

Jeff Garmon is the meteorologist in charge at the Weather Service in Juneau, and he lives on Meander Way — a street that’s been hit hard by flooding in the past. As the flood peaked, he had minor pooling in his backyard, which was piped back over the HESCO flood wall by pumps provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“We’re fortunate this year we didn’t have an atmospheric river going into this,” Garmon said. “I think that was our saving grace.”

Garmon said he’s proud of how the city, Army Corps, U.S. Geological Survey, University of Alaska Southeast researchers, the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, flood advocacy groups and countless others worked collaboratively to support residents in the flood zone.

“It’s something Juneau should be proud of — that as a community we came together,” he said.

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Leading members of the Alaska House and Senate said this week that they will not meet to discuss Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s latest attempt to provide a tax break for the proposed trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline.

The bill, said Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon and Senate President Gary Stevens, lacks the support to advance in either body.

“The caucus is really not at this point, really not interested in having to rush a bill,” Stevens said.

“The votes just aren’t there,” Edgmon said. “The Senate made it very clear that they need more time than what could be allotted.”

Glenfarne, the firm acting as the project’s lead developer, has said that a tax break is necessary to finance the pipeline. Glenfarne had said that it was planning to reach a final investment decision on the first phase of the project by the end of this year. 

It has already missed several self-imposed deadlines, and it isn’t clear whether it will again change its plans. The company did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

As proposed, the pipeline project would be built in two phases, with the first completed no sooner than 2029. The first phase would deliver gas from the North Slope to Southcentral Alaska for in-state use. The second phase would allow international exports. 

Official estimates state that the total project will cost as much as $54.5 billion, making it one of the largest natural gas projects in the world. Unofficial estimates are significantly higher. 

The governor released his proposal 17 days into a 30-day special session about pipeline taxes. This is the third special session of 2026 devoted to the issue; the second special session ended in July after the state House voted down a compromise bill.

The governor’s new bill appears similar to that failed compromise. It would replace the state’s petroleum property tax with a tax on gas shipped through the pipeline, a change that would help the project pencil out financially, and it would cap the cost of gas for in-state use and shield the state from cost overruns.

It also includes a 2% corporate income tax on certain privately owned oil and gas companies that don’t pay the state’s existing corporate income tax. That’s a little over a fifth of the size of a similar tax proposed by the Senate.

The so-called “pass-through entities” tax was a key condition of skeptical state Senators and helped last month’s compromise bill pass the Senate.

But business-friendly trade groups and legislators opposed the tax increase, causing it to fail in the House, and Dunleavy said before the House vote that he would veto the Senate’s version if it reached his desk.

Dunleavy’s proposed tax rate is lower than the one approved by the Senate, but it nonetheless represented a major concession. The governor had said in June that the tax was “a line in the sand.”

On Wednesday, he had a different perspective.

“This bill is a compromise that removes a significant barrier to moving the gas line forward,” he said in a written statement.

But the compromise appears to have satisfied no one. 

A coalition of trade groups and the Alaska Chamber of Commerce issued a letter opposing it, and Stevens said by phone on Thursday that lawmakers will need to review the governor’s changes.

In a Tuesday news conference with reporters, Stevens said 2% is “not very much. … We need to do a careful analysis of that. I think the intention of the Senate was a higher tax than that.”

The 35th Alaska State Legislature is scheduled to convene in January, after this fall’s election. Incumbent Gov. Mike Dunleavy is term-limited and will leave office in January. The Legislature will have new leaders, too. Stevens is retiring and Edgmon is running for Senate. 

“I think we’ve reached the point, honestly, where we need to turn it over to the new governor, whoever that would be, and a new legislature,” Stevens said.

Glenfarne, the development firm that owns 75% of the pipeline project, did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday about the governor’s latest proposal and did not answer a question asking what it thinks about the potential for there to be no bill this year.

Earlier this year, Glenfarne officials said the tax break is necessary for the project to obtain financing.

Some state legislators say Glenfarne supported a prior compromise bill but subsequently withdrew its support under pressure from the oil and gas company Hilcorp. 

Hilcorp killed Alaska LNG bill, some legislators say, but governor calls the claim ‘bulls**t’

In response to a request for comment about the latest bill, Hilcorp spokesman Matt Shuckerow said the company doesn’t support the governor’s proposal.

“The underlying issues with this structurally incomplete and insufficiently developed income tax language remain unchanged and unresolved,” he said by email. “Hilcorp supports the Alaska LNG Project, but legislation intended to improve the project’s commercial viability should not impose a new tax that increases the cost of producing its gas, further complicates long-term investment and commercial negotiations, and challenges Cook Inlet development at a time when continued investment is critical to maintaining reliable natural gas supplies.”

Hilcorp offered a longer statement about its position on July 23, shortly after the failure of the prior compromise proposal.

Late Wednesday, the leaders of the 21-person coalition in charge of the state House issued a statement declaring that “intractable differences have emerged on the Governor’s bill relating to property tax relief for the gas line. The proposed HB 4001 does not appear to have the support needed to pass the Alaska House, with opposition being expressed by both Majority and Minority members.”

The 19-person, all-Republican House minority caucus responded with a letter asking the Majority to call the House back to Juneau anyway in order to continue talking about the gas pipeline.

House Minority Leader DeLena Johnson, R-Palmer, said the letter doesn’t mean that all members of the minority support the governor’s bill, just that they want to continue talking about the issue and trying to find a path forward.

But Edgmon said that doesn’t make sense.

“It costs a lot of money to reconvene the Legislature,” he said. “It doesn’t make fiscal sense to just go down and talk about something with no resolution at hand, or no means to achieving a resolution, and so here we are.”

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In May 2024, when then-Congresswoman Mary Peltola introduced a Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act and Bottom Trawl Clarity Act, the bills drew immediate backlash. 

Peltola, a Democrat, received a letter signed by 53 trawl interests and nationwide fishery stakeholders urging her to withdraw the proposed legislation saying, “These new federal mandates and timelines are utterly unworkable.” 

Fast forward to 2026.

In her current campaign to unseat 12-year incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, Peltola introduced a similar “Fighting for Alaska Fisheries” platform to no reaction from the trawl sector. Sullivan quickly followed by proposing a Bycatch Reduction Act,  a revamped version of a 2022 Alaska Salmon Research Task Force bill that produced a report recommending more research. Again, no trawler reaction.

What’s the difference?  

This time around, Peltola’s push is a campaign policy platform, not a proposed congressional bill. While Sullivan’s Act fits that description, the trawl sector apparently views him as its strategic shield against Peltola. If they aggressively attack his bill, they could politically weaken their strongest ally in Washington. 

There are fundamental differences between the two bills.

Peltola’s approach leans toward statutory restrictions that would force the government to draw hard lines on where trawling is allowed — the goal is to stop “multi-species collapse.” It would make changes to language loopholes in the outdated Magnuson-Stevens Act, such as “minimizing bycatch to the extent practicable.” Her proposal would remove “to the extent practicable”  as it is widely regarded as the phrase that allows trawlers to declare under the law that they “are doing the best they can” to reduce bycatch. It has been included in management decisions for decades as a way for the trawl sector to avoid more stringent bycatch rules. Peltola’s approach calls for restructuring the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to dilute trawler influence, and adding seats for subsistence and small-boat fishermen. It calls for investment in Alaska seafood processing innovation, fish by-product utilization and seaweed and shellfish mariculture.

Sullivan’s bill offers industrialized trawlers a heavily subsidized pathway to compliance rather than an eviction notice. It requires stricter operational rules like mandatory salmon excluders — devices built into trawl nets that can allow salmon to escape — and tougher seafloor contact accountability. It focuses heavily on using advanced data, real-time technology and gear innovations to mitigate bycatch and ecosystem impacts without adding regulatory burdens. Crucially, it includes massive federal carrots: funding for a flume tank, electronic monitoring upgrades and streamlined Exempted Fishing Permits that allow vessels to conduct experimental fishing activities that would otherwise be prohibited.

Instead of resorting to angry rebuttals, the trawl sector has outsourced its messaging to new advocacy fronts like The Truth Alaska, Sustaining Alaska’s Future and the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance. One originates in Texas; the others are fronted by former state directors for Republican Congressional delegates Sen. Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich III. 

This strategy lets the trawl sector counter anti-trawl sentiment without making it look like they are fighting a sitting US Senator. They reframe the debate as “supporting science and Alaska jobs,” allowing Sullivan to position himself as the reasonable middle ground.

During his tenure, Sullivan has been one of Big Trawl’s top recipients of campaign contributions. He obfuscates the fact that those cash cows all are homeported in Seattle or Oregon. 

In recent social media ads, for example, he calls for reining in chum salmon bycatch by “holding foreign fleets accountable,” knowing full well that foreign fleets have been banned from Alaska waters out to 200 miles since the mid-1970s. 

Sullivan dismisses the fact that each year 75% of the value of all groundfish taken from Alaska waters by industrialized trawlers leaves the state; for pollock, it’s 82%.  

It looks like Sullivan’s prime objective is maintaining the reliable donor flow from the Outside trawl sector. His sudden campaign year concern about reducing trawl bycatch and protecting Alaska’s marine ecosystem has as much staying power as a fish out of water. 

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