Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz cancelled the Memorial Day ceremony on Monday out of an abundance of caution due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
But at the Veterans Memorial flag pole on the Park Strip, where the ceremony is held each Memorial Day, Anchorage citizens have taken things into their own hands.
A group is pulling together an unsanctioned Memorial Day ceremony, honoring the fallen war heroes of America.
Radio talk show host Eddie Burke came up with the idea late last week, after becoming irritated that the mayor cancelled the annual observance at the Veteran Memorial. Last year, Berkowitz was one of the speakers at the event.
This year’s observance will begin at 10 am and will be abbreviated from years past. It will be citizen-driven, rather than government organized.
While chairs cannot be provided for attendees — that would get the organizers in trouble with municipal code enforcers — people may bring their own folding chairs, said Bernadette Wilson, one of the organizers. She encourages people to practice physical distancing at the event and to bring nose-mouth coverings if they feel more comfortable.
Lt. Gen. Craig Campbell, (ret.), of the Alaska National Guard, will give the keynote address. He is also a former commissioner of the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs and former lieutenant governor.
John Teamer, a well known vocalist retired from the US Air Force, will sing the National Anthem and the Alaska Flag Song.
John Teamer
Wilson and Burke expect there will be a wreath-laying at the memorial, as is tradition, led by Assembly member Jamie Allard, who is a veteran. Dr. Jerry Prevo has been asked to give the invocation.
Those expecting a military band will find that Monday’s event will have a lone bugle player, who will give a rendition of “Taps.” Wilson said the purpose is not to celebrate, but to remember the sacrifices of the many who died while serving in the military.
“This isn’t a political event,” Burke said. “It’s about honoring the fallen.”
The Anchorage mayor said that a recent study in Hong Kong showed that hamsters with face masks were less likely to infect each other with the coronavirus.
Mayor Ethan Berkowitz has repeated A phrase that he is following the science and the data, not the calendar, in making decisions about when to allow Anchorage businesses to operate. He has Anchorage on semi-lockdown until Monday morning, but even when it opens, there will be rules, he said, not mere guidelines.
In his press announcement on Friday, he cited the study saying that the hamsters infected each other a lot less when using face masks.
The problem is the 52 hamsters in the study were not actually wearing the face masks. The researchers were using face masks as room dividers as they blew virus from one cage to another.
But that’s not how Berkowitz read the study.
According to Slate magazine, “Hamsters might reasonably use surgical masks as room dividers to slow the spread of the coronavirus, some unpublished research suggests. That is the real takeaway from a study that has gone a little viral, as studies are wont to do in this age of the coronavirus.
“Hong Kong University microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung first described his work to news outlets in Asia on Sunday. Fifty-two hamsters reportedly participated. Yuen and his team housed the hamsters in a series of cages, infecting the residents of half with the coronavirus (yes, a paper in reviewsuggests hamsters can get the coronavirus). The researchers paired infected cages with uninfected cages, putting each side by side, explains the South China Morning Post. In one scenario, the infected hamsters had masks shielding their cages “as if they were wearing a mask,” as a Radio Television Hong Kong story put it. In another scenario, the masks were on the cages of uninfected hamsters. Cages in a control scenario had no mask dividers at all. Fans blew air between the cages, to help the virus travel.”
Virtue signaling politicians are destructive, dangerous, and deadly. For example, the Municipality of Anchorage looks the other way when it comes to hundreds of drug- and alcohol-addicted people living on the streets.
Dan Fagan
Some call them homeless. For most of them, a lack of housing is not their problem. They just want to get drunk or high. They want nothing of accountability. They beg, often steal, whatever it takes to get their next fix.
They’re trespassing and live in filth, surrounded by stolen stuff, used drug needles, and their own feces.
It’s a horrid existence, especially for the women living in these camps. Drug dealers are more than ready to swoop in and sell their illegal goods to these poor souls who live in a prison of their own making.
This petri dish of crime, extreme human suffering, and anarchy needs three components to continue to flourish:
The drug-addicted willing to steal and beg,
Dealers willing to accommodate, and
City leaders willing to look the other way.
All three have happened under the leadership of Mayor Ethan Berkowitz.
The compassionate thing to do is enforce the law. Lock up the lawbreakers for trespassing, stealing, public intoxication, and illegal drug use. Separate them from their addiction for at least 30 days. Give them a chance to get into their right mind. Get them help. But most of all, get them off the street.
We’re told the courts won’t let us enforce the law. Bull.
Even if it was true, enforce the law anyway and fight it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. It’s time to stop cowering to the threats of the ACLU. Other than Planned Parenthood, there’s not an organization in America in recent memory that’s enabled more destructive behavior and human suffering than the ACLU.
But the virtue signalers see it another way. I remember a debate on the subject of “homelessness” on my radio show with former Assembly member, the late Allan Teche. He loudly and piously proclaimed, “We don’t lock up the homeless in Anchorage.” He said it thinking it made him sound virtuous. Enabling bad behavior is not virtuous. It’s cruel.
Berkowitz, too, is a virtue signaler, maybe chief among them. The useless plastic bag ban for instance. It did no good for anyone other than showing us the mayor is a good environmentalist who loves Mother Earth.
After interviewing the mayor on my radio show recently about homelessness in Anchorage, listeners had the impression he viewed them as victims. They are not victims. They are lawbreakers who have made a mess of their lives. But it sounds more virtuous to call them victims.
Berkowitz was in his full virtue signaling glory on Friday when he announced he’d continue to keep his boot on the neck of the private sector.
“Our strategy is slow and steady,” he said.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy removed most COVID-19 restrictions on Friday. Berkowitz said, not so fast.
“If we are not safe, we are not free,” said Berkowitz.
How virtuous of the mayor. Saving lives and all. But freedom is important too, right? Maybe Berkowitz will next lower the city’s speed limits to 5 miles per hour. Think of the lives our virtuous mayor could save.
Friday, on my radio show we got a call from a medical professional who said he knew of five people who died of heart attacks in Alaska since the COVID-19 restrictions have been put in place. Fear and stress kill too. Alaska Public Media reported this week some Anchorage hospital emergency rooms have seen visits drop as much as 50 percent because patients stayed away for fear of catching COVID-19.
There’s mounting evidence harsh lockdown restrictions don’t work when it comes to protecting people from COVID-19. The state of New York earlier this month found 66 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations came from those sheltered at home. Another 18 percent of the hospitalized were previously nursing home patients.
“We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percentage of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work, that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. “That’s not the case, and they were predominantly at home.”
Look at South Dakota, where Republican Gov. Kristi Noem imposed no restrictions. Her COVID-19 death rate per capita is lower than 41 other states. And yet Democrats run nine of the 10 states with the highest COVID-19 death rate per capita, employing the harshest stay at home restrictions. In contrast, Republicans run eight of the 10 states with the lowest fatality rates per capita. Alaska has the lowest number of COVID-19 fatalities per capita.
And yet Berkowitz just can’t let go.
It reminds me of Sunday nights growing up as a kid when it started to get dark and my mother would call out for us to come inside. We’d beg for another 10 minutes. Berkowitz was having so much fun playing virtuous life saver, he just wants another 10 minutes of it.
Dan Fagan hosts a radio show weekdays, on Newsradio 650 KENI, between 5:30 and 8 am.
I grew up in rural Georgia in the Fifties and Sixties. I grew up with ghosts in the closet.
Old family Southerners could rattle off what company, regiment, corps, and army of the Provisional Army of the Confederate States their ancestors had served in. About a third of all the men who served in combat units of the PACS were killed. Some families had the luxury of knowing where their ancestor was buried. Some of the soldiers even lay in a marked grave.
It was March 4, 1862. Ten members of the maternal side of my family — fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, uncles — answered Georgia’s call for a militia muster at which they were “invited to volunteer or then and there be drafted by the State of Georgia” for service in the provisional army.
By April 26, 1865, the day the last Confederate force east of the Mississippi surrendered, three of them were still alive. The other seven lie in unmarked graves somewhere in Virginia, Maryland, or Pennsylvania.
Also on March 4, 1862, a fraternal great-great-grandfather answered a prior militia muster. He was a teacher and a successful small planter. He was fairly political and pretty well connected, but as it turned out, not well connected enough.
Opposed to secession, and fairly activist about his opposition, he pulled every string he could to get out of being forced into the army, but failed. He duly reported and “volunteered.”
He either became ill or was wounded in the Seven Days Battles in 1862 and connected with the Confederate hospital system. Because he was an educated man, his connection there put him on lots of administrative details into the field hospitals.
I was doing some research and connected with a guy who had an authorization for 30 days recovery leave and subsistence document signed by my great-great grandfather, who ran out of luck and connections in the spring of 1864. I have a lot of his letters home during that time. He had wanted to buy a substitute and clearly had the money, which required about $10,000 in confederate dollars at that time. I don’t have my great-great grandmother’s letters to him, letters from home to a soldier are extraordinarily rare, but it was clear that she was having none of her man “lying abed” while others were still in the ranks.
He returned to the ranks in time for The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Richmond/Petersburg, and was then killed in action, probably by friendly artillery fire, in General Mahone’s confederate counterattack at the Battle of The Crater.
We don’t know where he is buried, but the best surmise is in the mass grave of soldiers thought to be Georgians at the cemetery at Blandford Church in Petersburg, Virginia. I have a copy of the incredibly cold letter from his lieutenant to my great-great grandmother, informing her of his death; by that time there’s been a lot of dying.
A neighbor came home on leave some time later and brought some of my great-great grandfather’s personal effects. I have the blood-stained testament that was in his breast pocket when he was killed. We also have the home-made quilt that had been his bedroll, but along the way, we’ve lost track of which among the old family quilts was his.
There’d long been a tradition in America of organizing the cleaning and decoration of family cemeteries. Families and communities got together and made a “dinner on the grounds” event of cleaning up the cemeteries and placing flowers on the graves. The Civil War produced a lot of fresh graves.
Some families had the wherewithal to retrieve the body of their dead son or father, but most didn’t; many soldiers of both sides were buried hastily, sloppily, and often corruptly in mass graves or in better circumstances in individual graves simply marked as “Unknown.”
The military issued “dog tag” was almost unknown at that time. A few soldiers could afford to have some sort of ID pendant made, while others scrawled their name and address on a piece of paper and pinned it to their jacket; most were just “unknown.” Since the contractors were being paid by the body, there wasn’t a lot of distinction between dead horses and dead men. Many weren’t buried until long after the war.
The 1864 Battle of the Wilderness was fought on the same ground as the 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville, and The Wilderness was fought literally on the unburied bodies from Chancellorsville the year before. The Wilderness was as close to a vision of Hell as one might want, as the gunfire set fire to the heavily wooded area and burned long dead and freshly wounded alike.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was delivered for the dedication of a National Cemetery at the site of the battlefield. In the South, the endeavor to honor the graves was almost entirely private. The best documented, if not necessarily the first, formal event was in Savannah, Georgia to honor the graves of Georgians killed at First Manassas — or in Yankee parlance, the First Battle of Bull Run, which took place in 1862.
The North took up the practice both with the dedication of National Cemeteries and commemoration of private gravesites. In an act of spite or vengeance because of the death of his son in battle, the U.S. Quartermaster in charge of Union burials in the Washington area ordered that Union soldiers be buried on the grounds of General Robert E. Lee’s estate at Arlington. We know it today as Arlington National Cemetery. They don’t much teach that piece of history in school.
After the War, civic organizations arose in both the North and South. The predominant organization in The North was the Grand Army of the Republic. In The South there was the United Confederate Veterans, and later and still today the Sons of Confederate Veterans, but in The South the various women’s groups were much more effective and most of those monuments being torn down today were bought and installed by the work of the mothers, widows, and orphans of dead confederate soldiers.
In The North, many states established Decoration Day as a state holiday on May 30. It is said that the date was chosen because there was no battle on that day. In The South there were various state holidays but by the early 20 th Century most Southern states had settled on April 26, the date of Johnson’s surrender to Sherman of the last major Confederate field army.
When I was a youngster, April 26 was a state holiday in Georgia, while the Northern Decoration Day was little noted. In those days there were still plenty of folks who’d turn their back to the playing of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” because they well know whose vineyards the Yankees were bragging about trampling.
The South remained a separate country in all but name through most of the remainder of the 19th Century. We can talk about carpetbaggers and scalawags and rapacious banks and corporations, but that is for another piece.
The U.S. needed safe passage through the former Confederate States for prosecution of the Spanish American War, and the former Confederate States still weren’t particularly enamored with the United States. The U.S. even dredged up a former Confederate Cavalry general to command troops in the attack on Cuba. They picked Joe Wheeler, who commanded a small cavalry unit in Georgia that fired a few shots for their manhood against Sherman’s massive army. Southerners didn’t offer any opposition to U.S. mobilization, but neither was there any outpouring of Southern support.
The U.S. imposed conscription on all male citizens for World War I. Again, the South offered little opposition, although though many Southerners were not qualified for service because of health and education considerations. My grandfather was drafted and seriously injured in a gas training accident and spent the rest of his foreshortened life with serious respiratory problems.
By World War II, The South was somewhat a part of the United States. It was still poor, ignorant, segregated, and xenophobic, but it was beginning to have paved roads. FDR liked to hang out in Warm Springs, Georgia, and the Central of Georgia Railroad could luxuriously take him there. By then, Southern volunteers and draftees served proudly in the U.S. military. Whether the issue is The South or the largely Northern immigrant population, World War II was the “melting pot” that made modern America before, the “diversity” types took it all apart.
Fast forward to the Cold War and Vietnam; the military had become heavily Southern. Especially during Vietnam, the draft hit the working class boys of The South a whole bunch harder than it hit the Ivy League preppies of The North.
Which brings us to the modern Memorial Day.
Along the way, the U.S. had agreed to provide grave stones to Confederate soldiers’ graves and give some recognition to them as legitimate combatants. Only the dedicated hardasses still wanted to execute Southerners for treason; don’t you think they would have done it in 1865 if they thought they could?
President Nixon finally offered reconciliation in 1971. He combined the old Confederate States Memorial Days and the Northern Decoration days into a Federal Holiday, Memorial Day.
If it weren’t for COVID-19 we could be doing beaches, barbeques, and beer for three days.
Maybe we can pause for a moment to consider the men who bled and died to give us our beaches, burgers, and beer.
ONE BUSINESS OWNER, HOWEVER, LEADS AN INSURRECTION
Mayor Ethan Berkowitz said Anchorage will take his slow approach to releasing Anchorage from its economic handcuffs.
Monday he’ll allow businesses to operate at full capacity, but there will be rules, he said.
“The state has guidelines, we have rules,” he announced today during his press conference. Those rules will dictate how close people can be to each other at restaurants and other establishments. There won’t be absolute capacity counts, but there will be mandates the municipality will post for every sector.
“Our strategy is ‘slow and steady.” It has been successful, and we’re sticking with that strategy because it has kept people safe,” he said.
“If we are not safe, we are not free,” Berkowitz said.
It was a Berkowitz twist on the old Benjamin Franklin quote: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
At least one business owner was having none of it. The owner of the Red Chair Cafe had already said online that she would open her doors to full capacity today in defiance of the mayor’s orders.
“We’ve been following the rules (unfair rules, btw) to the ‘T’ to be open, (with the Mayor sabotaging small businesses to benefit his own), but our dining room won’t allow for many tables. Today, I’m making a stand against the Mayor. I’m choosing to OPEN MY CAFE at almost full capacity. I’ve been in touch with a few people that have empowered me to take a stand. I truly feel that if we play the victim, we are the victim. I’m choosing to EXERCISE MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO EARN A LIVING,” wrote Chef Barb Whitney on the Facebook Group “Open Alaska.”
By the accounts, the Red Chair did more business today than it had done in the past many days combined, as people flocked to support the rogue downtown Anchorage restaurant.
Samaritan’s Purse, a faith-based organization based in North Carolina, has committed one of its emergency field hospitals to King Salmon, Alaska, as the commercial fishing season brings an influx of workers that could bring a localized outbreak of COVID-19 with them.
Photo above: Franklin Graham with Naknek Mayor Daniel O’Hara.
“Many locals are frightened, remembering what happened when the Spanish flu came through in 1918 and wiped out entire families,” Samaritan’s Purse President Franklin Graham posted on Facebook. “Thankfully, the government of Alaska has set up many protocols to identify possible cases and mitigate the spread.”
Graham has earlier this month met with officials from the Dunleavy Administration, as well as military and local leaders. Samaritan’s Purse staff members participated in assessing the region’s needs and capacity.
“This response anticipates the possibility of novel coronavirus affecting Bristol Bay communities, including Naknek, South Naknek, and King Salmon. Beginning in June, more than 10,000 fishermen and workers from across the globe are expected to travel to the ‘Red Salmon Capital of the World.'”
“With so many outsiders descending on the area, any virus spike could overwhelm local medical services and prove catastrophic for the region’s several hundred permanent residents, about one-third of whom are Native Alaskans,” the group said on its website.
“We are also prepared to send COVID-19 response teams into the surrounding communities to help with prevention and awareness.”
Samaritan’s Purse has worked in Alaska for many years, bringing the hope of the Gospel to dozens of communities. Since 2006, its volunteer teams have completed 31 construction projects, including worship centers for congregations that need a warm, safe place to meet for services.
In Port Alsworth, Samaritan’s Purse has hosted more than 1,100 U.S. military couples through Operation Heal Our Patriots, with Bible-based marriage enrichment training and spiritual refreshment.
Most recently, in April, Samaritan’s Purse airlifted to Alaska over eight tons of supplies critical for the fight against the pandemic. At Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s request, the group provided hospital beds, thermometers, and personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves, and gowns. The critical resources were delivered through the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium to rural areas of the state that are extremely vulnerable to the virus due to a lack of medical infrastructure.
Samaritan’s Purse has been at the forefront of the international response to COVID-19, deploying emergency field hospitals in Cremona, Italy, and New York City. Both sites closed recently after treating hundreds of COVID-19 patients over the past two months.
The Alaska Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development and the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority have partnered with Credit Union 1 to offer federally funded emergency relief to Alaska’s small businesses.
Grant amounts are $5,000 to $100,000, based on eligible expenses.
The CARES program details are not finalized and the state says the criteria may change, but the preliminary details have been released:
Who Can Apply
Small businesses including C-Corps, S-Corps, Partnerships, nonprofits (501(c)3 or 501(c)19), or sole proprietorships with a current Alaska Business License that:
Did not qualify or were otherwise unable to obtain SBA PPP or EIDL funding
In operation for at least one year prior to March 11, 2020
Have on average 50 or fewer employees
Who Is not eligible to apply
Marijuana related businesses.
Secondary income sources.
Out of State business.
Business that has received funding or have an approved application for SBA’s PPP or has EIDL funding in excess of $5,000.
Business with more than 50 full time equivalent employees.
Businesses that have filed bankruptcy.
Businesses that do not meet the eligibility criteria outlined above.
Eligible Expenses
Amount of grant award based on the following COVID-19 emergency related eligible expenses during the period 8 weeks prior and 8 weeks following the application date:
Payroll costs and expenses;
Payment of any short term (less than 24 months) or credit card debt incurred by the applicant to support the applicant’s business during the emergency;
Rent or mortgage payments (unless otherwise waived by lessor/lender);
Utilities payments;
Purchase of personal protective equipment required by the business;
Business related equipment; and
Expenses incurred to replenish inventory or other necessary re-opening expenses.
Technical Assistance
Division of Economic Development – Investments is providing technical assistance for small businesses:
President Donald Trump has declared churches and other places of worship are considered “essential services.” Across the country, houses of worship were closed by governments during the coronavirus pandemic.
The president declared “houses of worship, churches, synagogues and mosques” to be “essential places that provide essential services.”
“Some governors have deemed liquor stores and abortion clinics as essential, but have left out churches and other houses of worship,” Trump said. “It’s not right. So, I’m correcting this injustice and calling houses of worship ‘essential.'”
“I’m call governors upon governors to allow our churches and places of worship to open right now,” he said during a press availability at the White House on Friday afternoon.
By March 16, there were 52 cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in Alaska, and the first Alaskan had just died of the coronavirus. The case load was just about to spike. Between March 17 and 23, more than 100 cases of COVID were diagnosed across the state, mainly in urban areas.
By now, Gov. Mike Dunleavy was closing state-operated facilities like libraries and museums, and suspending public programs. Residential school programs were told to send students back to their home communities. Mayors in some communities took even more drastic actions.
The case count kept growing and by March 31, there were 187 active cases of coronavirus, 66 had recovered, and four Alaskans had died. That was the peak of the first viral storm for Alaska, and by then personal protective gear for medical providers was a problem all over the country, including Alaska, to the point where the joint commission that governs hospital standards issued a statement saying health care workers could bring their own masks to work from home, and use whatever PPE they could get their hands on.
These were unusual times for a field that is highly regulated. Alaska was by no means fully prepared.
Mask-makers all over the state were busy sewing masks, trying to keep up with the demand by medical professionals and first responders, as well as those with public-facing jobs.
Also unusual: At the governor’s request, distilleries begin making hand sanitizer, which was in short supply. They were suddenly pumping out hundreds of gallons of the virus-destroyer.
Fairbanks had emerged as a “hot spot” for the spread. So had Ketchikan, and cases were popping up in Juneau. Gov. Dunleavy and his team were working 20 hours a day, by now.
“There were times when we’d just stop and look at each other and realize, ‘Seattle is falling apart. They’re dying left and right like Italy. We have to make decisions. We can sit here like sitting ducks, or we can make some changes pretty fast and save this place’,” Dunleavy said.
At one point, Seattle was even asking Alaska hospitals for help, he said.
Dunleavy has a great deal of respect for the team that helped lead through the storm. Dr. Anne Zink, the state’s chief medical officer, was tough, but he said she understood that while her focus was to be on health, his focus had to be on the entire health of the state — including the economic well-being of Alaska. The state could not endure an indefinite lockdown, and he would not allow it to go on long.
But he also knew that no matter what the outcome, the person at the helm takes the blame for what goes wrong.
“I told my people back in January, ‘We won’t survive this politically. If it’s a nothing-burger, and people survive, we will be crucified. If we don’t act fast enough, we will be crucified. We just have to do the best we can to maintain our health care system,'” Dunleavy said. “That’s our responsibility. We told people we needed time to build up our health care capacity, and we did that.”
Now, on May 22, it seems like a lifetime since Dunleavy and his team warned Alaskans to stock up on their prescription medications and prepare to hunker down. Dunleavy has now declared the state reopened.
Some communities will lag, such as Anchorage, which is governed by a mayor who follows his own political compass.
Western Alaska communities that are starting the fishing season will also have their own rules, Dunleavy said. Next week, Samaritan’s Purse will open a field hospital in King Salmon to be ready for a possible outbreak.
It is up to Alaskans to take personal responsibility to guard their health and their families from infection.
“We’re going to have to live with this virus. We’ve now got the Alaska Airlines Center in Anchorage set up, with 150 beds ready. We’ve got response teams to go out to rural Alaska and pull people out by helicopter if needed,” Dunleavy said. “But we need to manage this in our lives.”
Every night, Dunleavy thinks about the business community and the misery they have endured. He knows it’s an economic disaster that is just beginning. He sees it in the tourism businesses struggling to stay alive in hopes of a better year next year. He hears about it from business owners, many of whom are his friends and supporters.
There will be another surge of virus, and maybe another one after that until an effective vaccine is available, Dunleavy said. The surges will not care that there’s an economic crisis afoot.
Now that he has lifted nearly all of the mandates, Alaskans should brace themselves for clusters of cases to pop up.
Meanwhile, nearly every state is going through the same disaster — Hawaii, which has an economy dependent 100 percent on tourism, is in big trouble, Dunleavy said. He hears about the other states on phone calls with the White House and other governors: Boston is on the verge of having its hospital system collapse. In North Dakota and Texas, the oil economy has decimated the economies.
“In conversations with other governors, it’s the same kind of story. They’re in bad shape, like we are in Alaska,” he said. “California just cut $18 billion from their education budget — and yet some in our own Legislature was trying to figure out how to override my vetoes.”
Dunleavy hinted that he has some tough management decisions ahead for state government. Even with federal funds, the price of oil is far beneath what is needs to be to pay for the fiscal year ahead.
“This story is far from over. We are facing great economic perils,” Dunleavy said.
But he’s done with closures; the state and the people of Alaska have taken all they can bear of the mandates. The world will have to figure out how to move forward with this virus for some time to come.
