Between Friday and Sunday, 10 new cases of COVID-19 were diagnosed in Alaska.
The total number of cases has risen to 319, with 153 of those recovered, and 166 known to be actively fighting off the virus.
There were no new deaths reported. Nine Alaskans have lost their lives to complications resulting from the Wuhan coronavirus, although just seven of those who died passed away in Alaska. The death rate is 2.82 per 100 cases, including the two out-of-state deaths.
Today’s cases include what was reported from 12 a.m. until 11:59 p.m. on April 18, and show cases that developed in three Alaska communities – Anchorage (3), Palmer (1), and Petersburg (1).
The five from Saturday’s report had cases in four Alaska communities – Anchorage (1), Soldotna (2), Palmer (1) and Wasilla. (1).
Total cases of COVID-19 that have been diagnosed in Alaska, (including recovered and deaths):
Anchorage: 154
Kenai Peninsula: 19
Fairbanks/North Star Borough: 79
Southeast Fairbanks Census Area: 1
Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area: 1
Kodiak: 1
Mat-Su Borough: 17
Nome Area 1
Juneau: 24
Ketchikan: 15
Petersburg: 3
Craig: 2
Bethel: 1
By Saturday noon, 9,895 COVID-19 swab tests had been conducted in Alaska. Approximately 3.22 percent of those who have been tested have yielded a positive lab result.
Alaska and Alaskans are in economic free fall: Forty thousand are suddenly unemployed, oil prices are crashing, new work is coming to a standstill, and tourism season is just about wiped out.
Stay-at-home orders were made, businesses were shuttered, and government declared a health emergency on a scale never experienced by any living Alaskan under 100 years old.
This is a statewide disaster.
There are those trying to help: President Donald Trump, Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer, U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and Congressman Don Young.
And then there are the majorities in the Alaska State Senate and State House.
The legislative majority guaranteed automatic pay increases for State of Alaska employees, increased the state budget by $300 million, and cut the Permanent Fund dividend by $1,300 this Spring, and another cut of $2,000 in October.
They were forced by minority members to begrudgingly allow Alaskans to have a third of their 2020 dividend ($1,000 in October).
They did this while sitting on a giant pile of money — $10 to $15 billion dollars in the Earnings Reserve Account of the Permanent Fund, the portion of the fund used to pay PFDs since 1981. During the last three years, the fund was also used to cover some of the deficit in State spending.
Who can argue this isn’t the rainiest of days?
Never before has government been directly responsible for putting 40,000 Alaskans out of work.
The governor has called for a full Permanent Fund dividend, to include all the years the legislative majority failed to approve the full PFD.
$5,044 is owed to every eligible man, woman and child in Alaska.
Gov. Dunleavy also advocates for a full PFD this year – $3,000, not the $1,000 squeezed from the Legislature. And that is exactly what existing law instructs legislators to do, a law that they ignore.
There are Legislators who support more for the PFD – but they are outnumbered by the hoarders.
Senate President Giessel and House Speaker Bryce Edgmon lead the hoarders in the Legislature.
They are proud of their hoarding. They left billions upon billions sitting in the Earnings Reserve of the Permanent Fund, disregarding the law that directs them to transfer a PFD of a statutorily calculated amount to each Alaskan.
They refused. They ignored the law. They would rather hoard the billions for the possibility that government may need the money later.
Hoarders — in a time of great need, with families who have been denied the right to work and resources in short supply. The legislative leadership are hoarders.
I have been involved politically in Alaska since 1979. I have supported the Permanent Fund and the PFD from the beginning. I volunteered in 1999 to Chair “Save the Dividend Mat-Su.”
The fact is that the PFD is your small share of the royalty paid on developing your oil. The government already taxes your royalty 75 percent to spend immediately.
The hoarders refuse. The hoarders are stuffing the vaults with billions for them to spend later.
Only you can stop the hoarders. It is time we all knew just who these hoarders are. Argue about who is most pure another time. Right now we need to know who the real hoarders are.
Through a constitutional amendment we Alaskans once voted to force the government to save and invest 25 percent of your royalties. Since 1981, the law has directed about 50 percent of the 5 year average in realized earnings be transferred to the actual owners of the oil: all individual Alaskans.
Former Gov. Sean Parnell and former U.S. Senator Mark Begich together recently urged the Legislature to act now to get more PFD out to the people.
Not every Legislator supports making good on all PFDs owed, not everyone agrees on exactly how much more PFD should go to Alaskans this year.
However, a good place to draw the line is between the miserly hoarders and those who support more PFD dollars going directly you (and owed to you under existing law!)
Here are the hoarders who are up for election:
Senator John Coghill
Senator Josh Revak
Senator Cathy Giessel
Senator Natasha Von Imhof
Senator Gary Stevens
Senator Bert Stedman
Representative Bart LeBon
Representative Steve Thompson
Representative Grier Hopkins
Representative Adam Wool
Representative Ivy Spohnholz
Representative Andy Josephson
Representative Harriet Drummond
Representative Geran Tarr
Representative Zach Fields
Representative Matt Claman
Representative Chris Tuck
Representative Chuck Kopp
Representative Jennifer Johnston
Representative Gary Knopp
Representative Louise Stutes
Representative Sara Hannan
Representative Andi Story
Representative Jonathon Kriess-Tompkins
Representative Dan Ortiz
Representative Bryce Edgmon
Representative Tiffany Zulkovsky
Representative Neal Foster
Representative John Lincoln
Those who to varying degrees are in favor of following the law or getting more PFD dollars to Alaskans:
Senator David Wilson
Senator Shelley Hughes
Senator Bill Wielechowski
Senator Tom Begich
Senator Donny Olson
Representative Mike Prax
Representative Dave Talerico
Representative Colleen Sullivan-Leonard
Representative Mark Neuman
Representative George Rauscher
Representative David Eastman
Representative DeLena Johnson
Representative Cathy Tilton
Representative Sharon Jackson
Representative Kelly Merrick
Representative Gabrielle LeDoux
Representative Sara Rasmussen
Representative Mel Gillis
Representative Laddie Shaw
Representative Lance Pruitt
Representative Ben Carpenter
Representative Sarah Vance
We are not talking toilet paper here, the hoarders are taking real money out of your pockets and your bank accounts.
What the hoarders have done is not illegal, according to the court – just terribly, painfully, wrong. This fall, Alaskans will determine the political price many of the hoarders will pay.
Tuckerman Babcock has been an Alaskan since January 1966. He worked for five legislators, two governors, served 10 years with Matanuska Electric Association, 3 and 1⁄2 years as a commissioner of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. He has been a homemaker and former volunteer chair, Alaska Republican Party. Most recently, he chaired Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s transition team and was the first chief of staff (retired August 2019). He lives in Soldotna with his wife and family.
The Alaska Public Offices Commission has filed a complaint against Anchorage Assembly member Chris Constant, who ran unopposed in the municipal election, and who the commission says used a fraction of his vast campaign war chest to support his fellow liberals in their reelection efforts.
Constant ran several ads in support of Assembly members Suzanne LaFrance, Pete Peterson, Austin Quinn-Davidson, Meg Zalatel, and Felix Rivera. All won their bids for reelection.
During the last three days before the April 7 election was completed, Constant ran a Facebook ad “extolling the accomplishments the candidate had made together,” (shown above).
The ad was seen by Anchorage residents between the ages of 18 and over 65 on Facebook.
Then, on April 6, one day before the election, Contant posted individual ads for each of his fellow liberals on the Assembly who were running for reelection.
APOC staff say that Constant violated Alaska Statute 15.13 by using campaign funds to make a contribution to other candidates to try to influence other races.
The amount spent by Constant on the illegal campaign appears to be less than $100 and will likely result in a minor “cost of doing business” fine.
Constant started the year with over $27,000 in his campaign account. By the end of March, he had amassed nearly $33,000 in his campaign account and spent about $17,000 on his campaign. Constant had a lot of money to spare, and so had some cartoon ads designed to support those on the Assembly with whom he is politically aligned.
The APOC complaint does not include the cost of designing the ads, but only the placement of the ads on Facebook.
Constant has lived in the downtown Anchorage district since 1998. He is a licensed real estate agent and a grants and contracts director for Akeela, a statewide substance abuse recovery non profit. He has served twice as the president of the Fairview Community Council.
The city’s growing problem with the “homeless” at Third Avenue and Ingra Street is ugly – and getting uglier.
One can only wonder what will happen when summer arrives and city-provided shelters for the homeless at the Ben Boeke Ice and Sullivan arenas are abandoned for camps across Anchorage. What will happen when those people again take to the woods?
Already a sizable number of them, some of them alreacy kicked out of other city shelters, are roaming the streets, and many are living in a tent camp at the site of the former Alaska Native Service Hospital, much to the chagrin of nearby neighbors, who complain of the drugs, illicit activity and alcohol.
The camp’s occupants, many of them impaired or mentally ill, openly are ignoring, even challenging, Mayor Ethan Berkowitz’s hunker down orders in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rob Cupples, a longtime resident of the area, tells MustReadAlaska.com things are as bad as he ever has seen them in the area and the camp only continues to grow.
“With this growth has come a substantial increase in garbage on our streets, partying, loitering on our private properties, and an increase in mob mentality due to the lack of community presence under the hunker down order,” he says. “The occupants of the camps have demonstrated aggression on multiple occasions to members of this community including aggressively chasing an ADN photographer from the area who reported to me personally being very fearful just last week.”
Such open disregard for the law to the detriment of the law-abiding presents a thorny problem for the Berkowitz administration, which already is spending millions on the homeless only to have the problem worsen. Do you enforce the law or turn a blind eye?
Something must be done. We wish we had an answer, a magic solution. We do not. It is a complex problem that puts individual rights at odds with the law and what is best for the community.
Only one thing is certain: As time goes on, and when the weather gets better, the problem only will get worse.
KENAI BOROUGH MAYOR PIERCE SENDS PLEA TO GOV. DUNLEAVY
A 23-hour Facebook poll on the Must Read Alaska page ended late Friday with over 1,500 participants; 82 percent of them said they are ready for the Alaska economy to be released from the government mandates that have destroyed many businesses and that are driving some Alaskans into poverty.
With tens of thousands Alaskans in the private sector suddenly unemployed by those who still have jobs in the public sector, a divide is developing between some who want the shutdown to continue as a health and safety measure to slow down the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus and others who say the cure is worse than the disease.
On Wednesday, April 22, a group of Anchorage residents plan a rolling protest through downtown Anchorage. They’ll be meeting at the Loussac Library at 11:30 am with cars, trucks, and flags. (By coincidence, that is also Earth Day).
Similar protests are taking place across the country as citizens bristle against seemingly arbitrary decisions that have created winners and losers in the commercial sector.
The Dunleavy Administration acted quickly in building the supply of personal protective gear, testing capacity, and numerous mandates, but the vast majority Alaskans participating in the MRAK poll say they’re now ready to get back to work. Several posted comments to the effect that safeguards still need to be in place, such as wearing face coverings and taking extra precaution with hand hygiene.
One Alaskan who is ready to restore Alaska’s economy is Kenai Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce, who wrote a letter to Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Friday:
“I have talked to many business owners on the Kenai Peninsula over the last several weeks and they are all struggling. If they have not been labeled essential, then they have been closed. Even so, all of their businesses are still down in revenue. Sadly, some have already failed and will never return. It will take years to recover economically from this COVID-19 event,” Pierce wrote.
“We all need to be safe, but it’s time to return Alaskans to work, as soon as, possible. We must do both! Alaskans are smart, resilient, dependable, safety-conscious, hard-working and want to persevere through this crisis. Failure for Alaskans should never be the only option.
“The time is now, we need COVID-19 testing for all ASAP, its overdue. Waiting months for this virus to pass will be more than devastating. If we continue to wait, we risk losing the last bit of economic viability that we have left in our state.
“The Alaska Legislature has not been focused on the hardships we are experiencing. They have ignored important needs and have acted as if this event isn’t a problem? We need solutions now, not next week.
“So, Governor, while they play politics with our daily lives, please return our liberties so we can succeed. Trust the people of Alaska! Execute your plans now to open Alaska.
“If you are sick or in a high-risk group, please stay home. Let those that can work safely, work.
“Governor Dunleavy, Alaskans are counting on you to lead and help is needed now,” Pierce concluded.
Alaska has gone from historic low unemployment this winter, at 5.8 percent, to the highest unemployment in state history, due to the economic shutdown at the federal, state, and local level.
Some 40,000 Alaskans applied for unemployment since the governor declared a state of emergency, with 38,000 of those claims are already processed, according to the Department of Labor Commissioner Tamika Ledbetter.
President Donald Trump has set May 1 as the goal for opening the economy, but has said he is leaving it to governors. Gov. Mike Dunleavy has hinted that he’ll lift mandates soon, but has not given specifics beyond the ending some — but not all — prohibition against doctors providing “elective care” for non-COVID-19-related procedures.
What are your thoughts about lifting mandates? Share them in the comment section below.
Paul O’Neill, who was dismissed after a tumultuous two years as President George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary, died on Saturday at the age of 84, according to the Wall Street Journal.
He was born in St. Louis, but was raised on the base at Fort Richardson in Anchorage, and graduated from Anchorage High School in 1954. His high school jobs included delivering newspapers and working as a clerk in a convenience store, the Journal obituary stated.
O’Neill attended Fresno State College, but was bored by his studies and dropped out to become a highway surveyor in Alaska. He also supervised construction of communication towers for the military. He married Nancy Jo Wolfe, who he had met in high school, the Journal reported.
He returned to school and received a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Fresno State, studied economics at Claremont Graduate University, and received a Master of Public Administration from Indiana University.
Later, he went into federal service, working for the Veterans Administration and the Office of Management and Budget. He joined the Bush Administration in 2001 and was fired in 2002.
O’Neill was the CEO of Aluminum Co. of America (Alcoa), and also the CEO of the Rand Corp.
“As Treasury secretary, he wanted to make tax cuts conditional on targets for limiting federal debt. He also wanted more aggressive measures to counter global warming. Those positions put him at odds with Mr. Bush and some of his closest political advisers,” the Journal stated. “Mr. O’Neill loved to delve into the minutiae of policy initiatives and hash out the pros and cons with people of all political stripes. A lifelong pragmatist, he loathed ideologies.”
O’Neill died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Pittsburgh, Penn. The Journal obituary made it clear he did not die of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
A Federal District Court judge dismissed a case brought by environmental groups opposed to the Pebble Project. The groups had challenged a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency that reversed an earlier preemptive denial of the Pebble Project before the project proponents could even apply for permits.
Pebble CEO Tom Collier called the decision by Judge Sharon Gleason a major victory for Pebble, the State of Alaska, and the rule of law.
“For years, we have sought basic fairness for the Pebble Project to be fully vetted under the regular permitting process and to block attempts to preempt that fundamental right. Once again, a coalition of anti Pebble groups including national environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council have been proven wrong in their ad hominem attacks on Pebble. This time a Federal District Judge in Alaska has ruled that their most recent attack did not even state a cause of action that required review by the court. Therefore, their lawsuit against EPA was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction,” Collier said.
“We have long held that the preemptive veto against Pebble was poor public policy and that decisions about the merits of developing a mine at the Pebble Prospect should be made through the traditional permitting process. The preemptive veto was brought against the project by the Obama era EPA and before a single permit to develop had been filed with a regulatory agency. The current administration made the correct decision to withdraw the preemptive veto and allow the project to be reviewed in the normal state and federal permitting process.” Collier said in a statement.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers schedule calls for the Final Environmental Impact Statement and the Record of Decision for the project to be issued by mid-year.
“We see no reason why this schedule will not be met, especially now that this meritless litigation has been dismissed,” Collier said.
However, the environmental groups calling themselves The Defense Alliance are well-funded, motivated, and lawyered-up, and might be expected to pursue the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The groups stated on Friday that they are considering all legal options.
The Defense Alliance members are the Bristol Bay Native Association, United Tribes of Bristol Bay, Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, Bristol Bay Reserve Association and Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation.
Those of us who’ve been in Alaska longer than the day before yesterday remember when the Permanent Fund was cast as a “Rainy Day Fund.”
What informed most of the political discussion about establishing the Permanent Fund was a simple question: “What happened to the $960 million?” Back in the 1960s, the State budget was barely over $100 million a year. Then one day we chartered a jet to take a check(s) for $960 million to New York. That was what Alaska got paid for the Prudhoe Bay oil leases.
Most Alaskans don’t realize what a truly scruffy place Alaska was back then. Our economy was mostly based on washing each other’s clothes and working on Federal projects. Alaska had some lawyers, doctors, and merchants, but the drivers of the Alaska economy were the guys wearing Carhartts and Helly Hansens.
Art Chance
Back then Anchorage was bigger, but Juneau was much richer, (still is actually). The money wasn’t made from government but rather from gold. Juneau had the government because it had the gold, and was probably the richest city in the world during the height of Alaska-Juneau Mine production.
After the Prudhoe Bay leases, The New Yorker sent some reporters to Alaska and they concluded that, “the people who built Anchorage, Alaska should never be allowed to build anything ever again.” A lot of the stuff the Noo Yawk snobs complained about is still here.
Then came the pipeline boom. I was one of the long-haired, bearded guys wearing Levi shrink-to-fits who invaded Alaska looking to get by and high; Alaska was a very druggy place in the mid-Seventies. And we got rich! When the oil began to flow, we became the “blue-eyed Arabs.” We had fabulous dreams of domed capital cities and huge Soviet-style hydroelectric dams. Everybody who knew a legislator had some project he or she wanted funded. A lot got funded; almost all failed.
We had a helluva party in the early eighties; if you didn’t have a Porsche in the parking lot and a gold coke spoon on a chain around your neck, you were a nobody.
And then it all ended. What nobody in Alaska considered was that U.S. policy was to flood the market with Alaska oil, along with British and Norwegian North Sea oil, to collapse the OPEC oil price paradigm. The strategy succeeded, and the price of oil collapsed in the mid-eighties.
We went from $billion capital budgets to a few million to meet the federal match requirements in a year or so.
I won’t tell you stories of what it was like to deal with that because the world has changed, but we’re once again dealing with US policy collapsing the price of oil.
So, here we are again; the price of oil is lower in real dollars than it was in the mid-80s and early- 90s. We’re barely above the cost of production and transportation, and Alaska has almost no oil revenue. The first of the big producers, BP, has abandoned us and left us to the scavenger producers.
The brutal fact we must face is that the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is at or below the limit of economic viability. What most Alaskans don’t seem to grasp is that when that pipeline is no longer viable and gets shut down because there is no money to be made from the oil, the pipeline as a matter of law has to be disassembled, removed, and the right of way restored. At that moment, Alaska returns to the economy of 1967, but with a whole lot less federal defense spending.
Right now, the unions and the healthcare industry own the Legislature. I dealt with this conundrum in the 1980s. What we had to decide was whether we should lay off a lot of State employees so the money could be sent into the economy or whether we kept them working so we didn’t add more foreclosed houses and repossessed cars to the faltering economy.
I don’t know that we got it right by preserving the State workforce and making them able to make their mortgage payments and car payments. Actually the only things that got us through it were the economic boost of the Exxon Valdez clean-up followed by the Gulf War, which ticked oil prices up significantly.
Right now, we have a perfect storm. The price of oil is swirling in the drain because of the price war between the US, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Added to the price war is the fact that oil product demand is in the toilet because of trade and travel restrictions.
Then, we have all the port closures that have ended our tourism industry added to the Canadian government’s restrictions on travel through Canada to Alaska.
We only have an economy based on washing each other’s clothes. In short, Alaska is broke and bankrupt.
Now with all due respect to my “pay the full Permanent Fund dividend” friends, and my ideas and yours aren’t mutually exclusive, we have to change our ideas about the fund; the rainy day is here. The whole idea of the fund and the dividend was to be able to build it so there would be enough money in it for this day.
I could take a sharp pencil to an organizational chart and cut the State government by at least 30 percent and no citizen would lose any government service.
That said, the 30 percent I would cut pays a rent or mortgage, makes a car payment, and does all the things that support a consumer economy. So when I make that cut I take one helluva chunk out of the consumer economy. These are people who patronize your favorite restaurant, your mechanic, your grocery store, your clothing store. If I take them out of the economy, I take them out of the economy that you’re a part of, too.
It is a delicate balance. If you sit on the 10th Floor of the SOB in Juneau or the 3rd Floor of the Capitol, the only people who have more power over the Alaska economy than you are in Washington, DC and in boardrooms in London, Riyadh, and Houston.
The rainy day we anticipated in the 1970s is here. I went through it in the 1980s and 90s; we could have avoided most of the serious economic consequences of those times if we’d used the Permanent Fund as it was intended to be used. Back then I likened it to the farmer who lived in poverty to pass his land on to his kids who sold it to become millionaires.
I’m not defending the legislators who are whoring for their sponsors, but the real issue is that we have the rainy day the people of 40 or 50 years ago anticipated and we need the State government and the Permanent Fund to protect us from the rain.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
Nine new cases of COVID-19 have been diagnosed in three Alaska communities – Anchorage (7), Kenai (1), and Juneau (1). This brings the total case count in Alaska to 309.
However, 128 people have recovered in Alaska. That leaves 181 active cases of the Wuhan coronavirus that are known about in the state. Nearly half of all diagnosed cases are in Anchorage.
Of the new cases, two are male and seven are female. Two are aged 10-19; one is aged 20-29; two are aged 30-39; one is aged 40-49; one is aged 50-59; and two are aged 60-69.
There have been a total of 36 hospitalizations and nine deaths; this includes the one new hospitalization and no new deaths reported yesterday.
Total cases that have been diagnosed in Alaska, (including recovered and deaths):
