The House and Senate conference committee finalized its negotiations over the State’s Operating Budget today, spending $4.3 billion on statewide programs and operations.
The budget includes an appropriation for next year’s (FY 2021) education budget, but the FY 2020 education budget is still likely heading to court over a disagreement about the constitutionality of “promissory note appropriating” without actually setting aside the funds.
The operating budget does not include a Permanent Fund dividend. That is being argued in a separate bill in order to avoid forcing the Dunleavy Administration to send out layoff notices due to a delay of the budget.
The Legislature intends to vote on the operating budget bill on Monday.
On Sunday, the House will take up HB 1005, the bill that would set the amount of the Permanent Fund dividend for this year. Its sponsor, Rep. Tammie Wilson, says she will now back a $3,000 dividend, after arguing for a $1,600 dividend for the past few weeks.
HB 1005 has been languishing as the sides debate whether the Legislature should stick to the statutory formula that would pay $3,000, or pick another number, such as $1,600, as the House Democrat-led majority proposed with Wilson’s bill.
The Senate has its own version of a Permanent Fund dividend bill, SB 1002, which it will take up Monday as well.
The operating budget reduction from last year’s budget came shy of the $200 million hoped for by the Senate. After negotiating with the Democrats in the House, the final reduction is closer to $190 million. The agreement transfers more than $10 billion from the Earnings Reserve Account of the Permanent Fund into the corpus of the fund, where it’s protected from future spending.
The budget agreement now must be voted on by both the House and Senate as a whole, and it appears the Legislature intends to do so before special session ends in 7 days. Otherwise, the governor will call the Legislature into special session in Wasilla, his home turf.
Statements were released by the Senate Republican Majority:
“This budget delivers solid results for Alaska families and businesses,” said Senate President Cathy Giessel. “We managed to reverse government spending back 15 years – that’s a huge achievement.”
“This budget delivers significant reductions to government spending, keeps Alaskans safe, and protects the Permanent Fund for our kids and grandkids,” said Sen. Bert Stedman, co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee. “Locking up $10 billion plus into the Permanent Fund’s constitutionally protected vault will keep it out of reach of future Legislatures. It will ensure our descendants always benefit from the resource wealth accumulated over the past 40 years.”
“The people of Alaska sent us here to make the hard decisions for the long-term benefit of all Alaskans, and that’s exactly what we intend to do,” said Sen. Natasha von Imhof, co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee. “We locked away $10 billion into the Permanent Fund’s principal, taking more than half the earnings off the table, forcing all state spending to be in line with our annual revenues and protecting our savings accounts for emergencies.”
The spending bill will be transmitted to the governor, who has said that expenditures cannot exceed revenues.
For this budget, which has a $600 million surplus, there is still as much as a $1.3 billion budget gap because the $3,000 Permanent Fund dividend has not been added to it.
If Gov. Dunleavy does what he said he plans to do, he’ll make serious vetoes in order to balance the budget and pay the dividend.
Anchorage police on Saturday evening are investigating two deaths in the 1100 block of E. 66th Avenue and are calling it a homicide investigation.
At 6:12 pm, police responded were called to the residence with a report of a dead person, but upon arrival, police found two dead adults inside. Homicide detectives and the crime scene team are on location. No other details were released.
10:45 update: Detectives believe they have made contact with everyone involved and are not currently looking for anyone. No charges have been filed at this time. The names of the deceased will be released once next-of-kin notification procedures have been completed.
(Photo: Google Street View. This story will be updated.)
A task force appointed by the University of Alaska Board of Regents is a team of Alaskans representing a moderate-to-liberal slice of Alaska politics: Four Democrats, two Republicans and four who are registered as Undeclared. It’s the reverse of how Alaskans are registered as voters. But this is academia, and left-leaning politics is not surprising.
The group is tasked with exploring options for the university system’s future structure in a time of budget cuts.
The task force includes:
One former and one current member of the Board of Regents: Jo Heckman, A former regent, co-founder of Denali State Bank, Republican; and Sheri Buretta, leader at Alaska Federation of Natives, Chugach Alaska Corporation, and former transition team member for Mayor Mark Begich, an Undeclared.
Three Alaska private sector leaders: Tom Barrett of Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., Undeclared; Aaron Schutt, of Doyon Ltd., a Democrat; and Joe Beedle, former CEO, Northrim Bank, who has published op-eds opposing budget cuts. He is a Republican.
One rural Alaska leader: Reggie Joule is a former legislator and mayor, now lobbyist for K-12 education with Sen. Tom Begich’s wife’s advocacy group. He is a Democrat.
Three retired UA faculty members: Terrence Cole, of UAF, far left faculty member, an Undeclared; Cathy Connor, leftist former faculty member at UAS, a Democrat; and Gunnar Knapp, retired UAA, an Undeclared.
One former UA executive: Wendy Redman, former UA executive vice president of Fairbanks, an Undeclared.
One student: Joey Sweet/UAA and former UA student regent, no voter registration found.
The task force is charged with evaluating the following structural options and others for the UA system and providing an update to the Board of Regents in September, and a final report in November. The options they will look at include:
Status Quo – Three separate accredited universities with the community college campuses part of their respective regional university.
Lead Campus – Three separately accredited universities but with more focus of specific academic programs at each single university along with expanded availability of courses across the system via distance delivery. Also, reorganize the community college campuses to report to one of the lead campuses.
One University – A single accredited university for all of Alaska with the community colleges organized as a unit within the university.
Three independent universities– Three separately accredited universities and associated community colleges with independent administrations and no statewide administration.
The members will gather input and evaluate how to move forward with what will be a smaller budget. Gov. Michael Dunleavy has proposed cutting $134 million cut, roughly 40 percent of the state’s support for the university system.
University of Alaska President Jim Johnsen has fought those cuts and said they would “devastate” Alaska’s university system and lead to campus closures, tuition hikes, and layoffs of as many as 1,300 university employees.
A second suspect has been arrested in connection with the death of 19-year-old Cynthia Hoffman, pictured above, who was shot execution style near Thunderbird Falls in Chugiak. She had been reported missing on Monday.
Denali Brehmer, age 18, is facing charges of Murder 1 and Evidence Tampering, as well as other charges. Earlier, 16-year-old Kayden McIntosh was arrested in the case.
Cynthia Hoffman was reported missing by a family member on Monday. The family member said that the young woman had been seen by a friend at Polar Bear Park, possibly on Sunday at 4 pm. She was in blue jeans, a hoodie, and tennis shoes.
Detectives believe the family was given false information about Hoffman’s whereabouts and that she was killed — shot in the back of the head after being bound with duct tape.
The victim and her two alleged killers knew each other and friends are reporting that there was a romantic entanglement between them.
When we last heard from Bob Lacher, a fellow pilot who accompanied him on the trip had just suffered a bad beach landing and they have a damaged aircraft to deal with. This is part 3 of the 8-part serial of Chapter 1 of Lacher’s new book, which can be purchased at the links below.
After some time collecting Frank’s rattled ego and focusing on the problem, we got out all the tools we thought necessary to do the required body work. We did not have many.
It takes some amount of resolve to finally decide you are going to attack a near new $125,000 aircraft with a Leatherman, a crescent wrench, a small sledge hammer (brought to drive tent stakes)and an ax.
But once it had been decided, we went to work like a cluster of Bangladeshi rickshaw repairmen.
Soon we had the offending sheet metal hacked off, the bent tip surfaces hammered into rough shape, and space freed up for the aileron to move up and down again.
The aileron was bent up about 30 degrees and kinked. Once we made space for it to move within the wing, it was still crippled because of the range limitations and interferences caused by the kink. The big hammer was just bouncing off the bound up metal. The noises from each blow sent shudders rippling through what was left of Frank’s bruised disposition.
There was nothing left to do but perhaps get up on top of the wing and jump on it. That seemed rude. I finally tried a chin up, grabbing the end of the aluminum section and reefing down with all my weight. It finally started to come into shape. A few more reps of that and we were able to swing it through the full range of motion.
We face-checked each other for full approval and satisfaction.
In flight, it clearly would pull to the left, but we all agreed it should fly. In fact it might fly reasonably well. After another cigarette and more jaw jacking about how fortunate we were, the conversation finally got back to the dead walrus that was half in the water, half out, just a hundred yards away.
We were for sure going to cut its head off. Nothing would be more humiliating than wrecking an airplane and getting nothing. The act of beheading would begin the man-healing process. We rounded up the tools for the task, big ax, bone saw, serrated long-bladed Cutco knife, rubber gloves, hip boots and long rain jackets to shield us from the putrid splatter of magnificently rotten walrus goo.
Dad and a dead walrus found on the way to Unimak Island.
Our trip plans were seeing some daylight again. The plane looked airworthy and the walrus was about to receive serious neck surgery. Given all of that, it seemed like it was about the right time to drag out into the open the notion we had all been thinking about since the Great Mistake: If the plane flew reasonably well, did Frank have the appetite for limping on down to Unimak and completing the trip?
What was unthinkable several hours ago was now thinkable, at least to me. I threw it out there. My father’s response was to give me his best confused and disoriented look like he misunderstood what I said, like maybe if he ignored the crazy street person who was smelling of urine and asking for spare change….he would eventually escape his piercing stare.
Frank, apparently all jacked up on the fetid fumes of the nearby rotten walrus, did not take long to agree, at least to the concept. With an introspective tilt of his head he mumbled something about “if it flew, why not finish what we started?” This would be easy. If it pulled to the left, just steer more to the right, like a car with a low tire. The structural analysis was completed with confidence and, even more amazingly, without any beer.
Nods of affirmation were being exchanged and re-exchanged all around. Let’s do this!
All further issues would be worked out during the test drive. Dad was slowly coming around to our position to keep the venture on schedule and we set about soothing disrupted feelings and jangled nerves by acting normal and beheading the walrus.
It was a dandy. Half of the animal’s head had been buried in the sand and the tusks were bigger than previously scouted from the air. It was an hour and a half long job since Frank wanted the entire skull to clean and mount, rather than just the tusks.
Incoming tidal breakers were rolling the 3,000 pound carcass up and down the inclined beach like a massive beach ball caught in the surf. We’d make a few cuts in the three inch thick neck hide while standing in three foot deep water, trying to time the waves so we could run back up the bank each time a big one came in and swamped the operation.
Back and forth, cut, slash, hack, chop, hack…outrun the incoming wave…follow the outgoing sea back out, jump on it again and repeat. The blood and snotty decomposed flesh swirled in fetid pools around us. Thigh deep in the cold surf and bathing in the revolting stench, we cannibalized the huge head off the body and dragged the prize up on shore. We felt back in charge.
Both airplanes were loaded to near capacity given the fuel we still had, so we decided to stash the head well up the bank in some tall grass, marking it with a GPS and brightly colored flagging to allow retrieval on the home bound trip. Frank and I cleaned up and sacked and sealed our bloody, rancid clothes and gloves in big garbage bags and loaded for the flight further south.
After liftoff, some back and forth on the radio between us confirmed the Maul was flying well enough. It would be a couple hundred more miles to get to Unimak and I was hoping to get another walrus head, or even better, a couple more.
We got back into the low level, throttled-back flight pattern along the ocean’s edge and picked our way down the beach at just 100 feet elevation.
Although we did not find another walrus head to harvest, we did find a spot where several hundred walrus were hauled up on a sandy shore to build up some body heat and take a break. There was a beach area several hundred yards away that appeared flat enough to get the planes landed on and we decided to stop and take a closer look. These were a batch of mature bulls and weighed 2,500 to 3,000 pounds. Stacked shoulder to tail, flashing long ivory tusks. They clearly did not see us as predators and didn’t get the least bit agitated about getting visitors.
The smell made our eyes water and throats burn, the bitter fumes of ammonia in their excrement was not just really unpleasant as in a humid, confined chicken coop or the worst corner of a dirty barn, it was physically overpowering, seizing your lungs if you got a big hit of it straight in. After a good half hour break and a snack and taking a round of pictures, we walked back up the beach to the airplanes and continued on.
The next stop would be Cold Bay, a place to regroup, fuel up and possibly stay overnight.
The wind was picking up. What had been 25- to 30-mph was now 35 to 40 and spitting rain harder than when we began. It’s difficult to keep a small aircraft parked and stationary in wind over 35 mph unless you can find a washed up log or heavy brush to tie it down to or unless you drive your own earth anchors, which we carried with us but were a pain to install and remove. If it did not slow down we thought it may be best to overnight in Cold Bay and see what the next day brought.
Mile after mile of black sand came and went. The winds continued sharply. When we finally arrived in Cold Bay there was no question the best plan would involve finding a tie down and waiting out the weather. A quick check revealed the winds were to slow to 25 or 30 mph by the next morning and stay that way for at least one day.
Come back on June 9 for the next installment, Part 4: A night in the Cold Bay ‘hotel’, and beach landing in a howling gale.
Compared to 2017, chlamydia is up 4 percent statewide, gonorrhea is up 3 percent, and syphilis, while the raw numbers are small, is up 289 percent. Year after year, these numbers keep creeping higher.
In Anchorage, syphilis cases went from 21 in 2017 to 85 in 2018. The statewide total jumped from 25 to 113, so most diagnosed syphilis cases are in Anchorage.
Also in Anchorage, there were 1,283 cases of gonorrhea reported in 2017. By 2018, the case count rose to 1,375.
Unsurprisingly, the state’s largest city also has the highest raw numbers of chlamydia, jumping from 2,522 to 2,677 between 2017 and 2018.
Chlamydia also puts Alaska on the map, as the No. 1 state. In 2017, more than 1.7 million cases of chlamydia were reported to the CDC. But Alaska is No. 1 for this disease, which is most often asymptomatic. 85 percent of those diagnosed with it had no symptoms.
As in Alaska, gonorrhea rates are rising across the country, and the medical community is running out of treatment options to cure what is becoming increasingly drug-resistant infection. Since 2012, gonorrhea in Alaska is up 208 percent.
Alaska has the highest rate of the infectious sexually transmitted disease in the country. Half of STDs are among young people ages 15 to 24 years.
So be sure to have fun this weekend, and if you swipe right on that dating app, don’t bring home anything you don’t want to tell your doctor about.
April employment was up an estimated 0.9 percent, or a 2,800 job increase from April 2018, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
Construction added the largest number of jobs (1,800), followed by health care and oil and gas, which each added 500 jobs.
Manufacturing jobs are down, with a decline of 700 jobs, mostly in the seafood processing sector. Financial services and information technology dropped 500 jobs.
Federal jobs in Alaska also declined by 200, but was made up for by local government jobs, which grew by 200, and state government jobs, which grew by 100.
Alaska’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate remained at 6.5 percent, and the comparable national rate fell to 3.6 percent.
Not‐seasonally adjusted rates have fallen in nearly every area of the state as summer ramps up.
Unemployment rates increased slightly in Aleutians East Borough and Aleutians West Census Area, although they remained among the state’s lowest due to winter fishing.
The state’s largest decline in unemployment was in Bristol Bay Borough, where the rate fell from 14.9 percent in March to 7.7 percent in April as the area’s fishing activity picked up.
The unemployment rate in Anchorage is 5.1 percent; Fairbanks 5.8 percent and Juneau 4.6 percent. Sitka had 4.2 percent unemployment and Kodiak was at 5.1 percent.
Granny’s Guns, a mom-and-pop firearms dealer in Anchorage, has been the victim of a brazen robbery, where two vehicles were rammed into the front of the store on Dowling Road near Peterson Street.
Men wearing gloves entered and took an unknown number of firearms from the store, said to be 26 guns.
Owner Barry Barr said he can’t talk about the firearm heist because authorities have asked him not to. But for Anchorage, in the middle of a crime wave, there are dozens of stolen guns now on the streets, serial numbers unknown to the public since they have not been released by authorities.
Anchorage Police have made no public announcement about it in an effort to pursue quiet detective work out of the media limelight, but the news is being circulated across Facebook pages devoted to crime-fighting.
JUNE 7 UPDATE
According to Anchorage Police today at noon, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for the firearms industry, announced a reward today for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the persons responsible for the June 6 burglary of Granny’s Guns in Anchorage, in which about 26 firearms were taken.
ATF is offering a reward of up to $5,000, matched by the NSSF for a possible reward of up to $10,000.
Anchorage Police Department and ATF are investigating the burglary, in which four suspects drove a stolen vehicle through the front doors of the business at 3:59 a.m. The burglars loaded the rifles and handguns into a separate vehicle.
Photos of three of the four suspects are included in this release. Suspect one was wearing a blue long sleeve with dark hair and a white cloth over their nose and mouth. Suspect two had dark pants, dark long sleeve shirt, black vest and a hoodie on. Suspect two also had red shoes on and a dark bandana covering their face. Suspect three had gray pants, a white under shirt and a blue hoodie with “Bartlett 17” on the back. Suspect four was the passenger in one of the suspect vehicles. All of the suspects wore gloves.
Both vehicles have been recovered. The stolen vehicle used to break through the front doors was left on scene. The other vehicle was recovered later in the day of the burglary.
Anyone with information about the persons responsible and/or information leading to the recovery of the stolen firearms should contact ATF at 1-888-ATF-TIPS (888-283-8477), email[email protected], or contact ATF through its website at www.atf.gov/contact/atftips.
Tips may also be submitted to ATF using the ReportIt® app, available on both Google Play and the Apple App Store, or by visiting www.reportit.com.
I attended the Anchorage Museum’s media preview of its new exhibition of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, which had been seeking the Northwest Passage in 1845.
The European powers had been fascinated with finding a Northwest Passage and with Polar exploration since the late Middle Ages. If you’re old enough to have had a U.S. or World History course, you’ll remember names like Hudson, Cabot, and Cartier, who made their mark on maps.
The Napoleonic Wars interrupted exploration but with the return of peace, the great powers returned to exploration of the unknown areas of the planet, and especially the fascinating Arctic and Antarctic regions.
The British Admiralty was seeking to complete the mapping of a Northwest Passage in the mid 1840s. Sir John Franklin was not on their short list to command the mission.
Franklin was a failed governor of Tasmania but wealthy and well-connected, and he had a well-connected and aggressive wife. He wanted to restore his reputation so ultimately he was tapped to command the expedition to the Arctic.
We have no idea how good Franklin was as a commander and ship’s master and a somewhat deeper than superficial look doesn’t give us much indication. It really doesn’t matter; Royal Navy capital ships were nominally commanded by some guy who could afford to buy the flag; some guy who’d worked his way up from a ship’s boy at 14 to become the sailing master really ran the ship, though his uniform wasn’t as nice.
HMS Erebus and Terror were “bomb ships;” heavily built ships built for shore bombardment. Both were reinforced for Arctic service and both had new steam engines for auxiliary propulsion, fresh water production, and steam heat. Both, however, were quite old, one built in the ‘Teens, the other in the Twenties. Despite their formidable reputation, the British Navy’s vessels were notoriously cheaply, corruptly, and shoddily built; a British frigate captain’s fondest dream was to be assigned to a French or American prize vessel.
We may be allowed to wonder just how substantial the two aging vessels really were, despite their modernization and their lavish provenance.
We really don’t know and aren’t likely to definitively know what led to the demise of the Franklin Expedition. It is pretty clear that command and discipline disintegrated, but that could have been from death and attrition or from something like a mutiny; we just don’t know.
The British elite had a fit of apoplexy over the allegations of cannibalism, but cannibalism has been with us for a very long time in survival situations, and the infamous Donner Party cannibalism episode was only a couple of years after the Franklin event.
The only thing we know is that everyone died, and at least from the view of 150 years later, it looks like there might have been some chance of survivability had the right decisions been made. All we can do is speculate, so let’s turn to the exhibit.
I like this exhibit; it has some really cool maritime archeology.
That said, if you can’t read a Patrick O’Brien book without looking up a term, you’re not going to understand a lot of this exhibit. It is pretty thin gruel about what life on a 19th Century sailing vessel was like; “Master and Commander” will give you a better view.
The Museum needs to bulk up the narrative or provide some docents. The guy in charge of the exhibition couldn’t tell me if the crew were primarily Naval ratings recruited to the mission, or simply guys “shanghaied” from British bars for service on a ship; the Brits did that sort of thing.
As for the cannibalism, the British elites had a fit about the allegations, saying that the Royal Navy’s men would never do such a thing, but the question unanswered is whether the men were the Royal Navy’s men. Once that is answered, then we can talk about whether the Royal Navy’s men would have eaten their fellows were they hungry enough.
Then, we get into the political correctness of whether or not the Franklin Expedition could have survived had they reached out to the Native people for local knowledge.
First, the crew of the vessels were as old or older than the average Inuit adult they might have come in contact with. The Inuit life skills didn’t give them a particularly impressive life expectancy in the harsh Arctic climate. I’ll grant some over-weaning British arrogance; the British elite could not have conceived of asking aboriginal people what to do.
But then there are questions of just how well they could communicate with the language differences, and just how much interest either would have had in helping the other.
The great sin of historiography is presentism; looking at the past through the eyes of the present.
“Death in the Ice” looks at the events of the late 1840s through the politically correct eyes of the 2000-teens. A sailing ship in the early 19th Century left port even more alone than a space ship today would leave for Mars. A sailing ship leaving for the far side of the world, whether the Arctic or the Pacific, was totally out of touch until it returned to its home port or ran into another ship that could forward some communications.
Franklin and his crew left England as well prepared and equipped as the knowledge of their time allowed. They screwed up, and they died; that’s what happens if you don’t get it right. That is a lesson we today should take to heart instead of looking for politically correct ”life hacks.”
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.
