In the Palmer City elections, City Council seats were won by incumbent Richard Best and Jim Cooper, while Thomas Ojala, an incumbent, did not win another term. The vote was Cooper-121, Best- 101, and Ojala-80, with only the top two winning seats.
Proposition 1 won by a large margin. It will allow the city to borrow $10 million to make repairs to the Palmer library, which was made unusable by a heavy snow load last winter. The cost to taxpayers will be about $135 per year for every $100,000 of their property value. The vote was 235 to 64 to approve the bond.
Proposition 2 also won by a large margin. It added property tax exemptions for seniors over the age of 65 and for disabled veterans and certain older widows. The exemption means $150,000 of a person’s property value will be exempt from property tax. The vote was 277 to 32 to approve the bond.
The preliminary election results are expected to be updated on Friday, Oct. 6, in the late afternoon. The election results are scheduled for certification at the Oct. 10 Council meeting.
An annual report reveals that King County, Washington’s program to house people through 15 sites used more than $70 million to house 803 people, due to incomplete construction and other issues.
The Health Through Housing initiative’s primary goal is to open 1,600 units of affordable housing for people who are homeless or at risk of becoming unhoused in King County. The county previously anticipated it would meet the 1,600 unit goal by the end of 2022, but fell short with 1,366 units of housing being ready to use, or under construction at the end of the year.
The initiative’s 2022 revenue totaled $68.8 million, including $67.9 million from sales tax revenue and $800,000 from interest. TheHealth Through Housing Initiativereceives one-tenth of a cent of sales tax revenue for the purchase and operation of hotels to convert into emergency and permanent supportive housing.
Actual expenditures for the initiative in 2022 totaled approximately $70.2 million. According to the Health Through Housing 2022 Report, the slightly higher expenditures than revenues in 2022 are consistent with the approach in the initiative’s implementation plan.
In its first year of full operations, the initiative brought 803 homeless people into temporary or permanent housing in Health Through Housing units.
Out of the 803 people, 348 received permanently housing or moved on to permanent housing elsewhere with the aid of Health Through Housing resources.
The 803 people that received shelter make up 6% of the 13,369 homeless people tallied in the county’s 2022 point-in-time count.
The Health Through Housing’s 15 sites are located throughout King County, including in seven of the nine King County Council districts.
The initiative’s 2022 report found that the average per-unit acquisition cost of Health Through Housing properties is $229,314. The report notes that the cost per unit for each site varies based on the circumstances of each acquisition, as well as site development process and timing.
The site located in Seattle’s Capitol Hill District was omitted from the calculation as the full acquisition costs for this property were not incurred until 2023.
Conclusions from the report found that the initiative is proceeding slower than planned by the county.
Challenges listed in the report include negotiations to purchase sites and establish operational agreements, high site-specific facility needs and community engagement efforts, and COVID-era challenges.
Health Through Housing acquisitions are expected to be completed in 2024. Once that is done, the initiative will focus exclusively on opening buildings and supporting contracted providers to continuously improve onsite supportive services.
Juneau residents were split on the question of whether a new city hall should be built, one that would cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. On Tuesday, the general sentiment in the all-mail-in election is “no.” Proposition 1 is facing 2,552 to 2,470, but there are still many more ballots to be counted, as mail trickles in.
Juneau voters have been asked this question before and turned it down just last year. This year, the Juneau Assembly spent $50,000 of taxpayers’ money to try to convince voters that a new city hall is needed; the old one has been allowed to deteriorate and many opponents of the question believe that the deferred maintenance is part of the strategy to convince people to build a new structure. The Assembly also restructured the plan to make it appear to cost less, but it seems voters were not persuaded.
Juneau had 10 candidates on the ballot for the two areawide Assembly seats. Paul Kelly leads the pack with 1,946 votes, and Ella Adkison appears to be winning the second seat with 1,698 votes so far. A total of 9,565 votes were counted in that race last night.
For Assembly District 1, it appears incumbent Alicia Hughes-Skandijs has been reelected with 2,872 votes. Joe Geldof got 2,033.
For Assembly District 2, incumbent Christine Woll won with 3,094 votes. David Morris had 1,703.
For the Board of Education, David Noon, 3,216 and Brittany Cioni-Haywood with 2,993 won seats.
The numbers reported on Election Night included ballot return envelopes that were received before Election Day that had been reviewed and approved for counting. Ballots returned on Election Day will be processed after Election Day and will be reported in updated results in subsequent days. The Canvass Review Board process for ballots is Oct. 16, and the election will be certified on Oct. 17.
Wasilla Mayor Glenda Ledford glided to reelection, overcoming her challenger, Bee Rupright, 266-105, with absentees and early voting yet to be counted.
The election Tuesday was a test to see if Wasilla is still a conservative stronghold in Alaska, and it appears to be.
Ledford is a strong political figure throughout the state, having moved to Alaska in 1986, and running her own small business, a salon, for many years. Rupright was not able to define a lane for herself, with Ledford retaining strong support from the conservative heart of Alaska.
Unofficial results in the Fairbanks North Star Borough show that in the borough-wide races, the liberals swept the board, while conservatives got slaughtered during Tuesday’s local election. In the city of Fairbanks, conservatives won.
Mayor Peter Micchiche easily won reelection in the Kenai Peninsula Borough. He had won in a special election earlier this year to finish the term of former Mayor Charlie Pierce. No one challenged Micciche, who was formerly a state senator, serving on behalf of the Kenai Peninsula, and before that had served as the mayor of Soldotna.
Other unofficial results:
Assembly District 2 – Kenai – Ryan Tunseth won, as he was unopposed.
Assembly District 3 – Nikiski – It’s a close one, with Peter Ribbens edging out Adam Bertoldo, 367-362.
Assembly District 5 – Sterling – Incumbent Bill Elam easily won, 336, to Nissa Savage, 85.
Assembly District 8 – Homer – Incumbent Kelly Cooper won, 398, over Heath Smith, 290.
Board of Education District 3, Nikiski – Jason Tauriainen won, 418, to Lyndsey Bertoldo, 317.
Board of Education, District 4, Soldotna – Penny Vadla was unopposed.
Board of Education, District 5, Sterling – Kelley Cizek won, with 270, over Beverley Romanin, 130.
Board of Education, District 7, Central – Dianne MacCrae is in the lead with 223, to Debbie Cary, 209
Homer City Council – Incumbents Rachel Lord and Caroline Venuti appear to have won handily.
Kenai City Council – Incumbents Henry H. Knackstedt has a strong lead with 318, and Teea Winger appears to have also been retained with a slight lead of 262 over third-place Phillip Daniel, 256.
Seward City Council – Robert Barnwell has the lead with 225, and Julie Crites also appears to have won with 223.
Seward voted no to selling the city’s utility, 170 to 143. This is the third time voters have rejected the question.
An Anchorage man was arrested on criminal charges after he allegedly tried to rob a bank Monday morning, but has his timing off.
According to court documents, Michael Nash, 49, tried to enter the First National Bank branch located on West 36th Avenue in Anchorage just after 9 a.m. on Oct. 2. Nash was unable to enter because the bank’s lobby did not open until 10 a.m. and the doors were locked.
Nash slipped a note through the doors to a bank supervisor stating that this was a robbery. The bank was secured immediately, and police were called. A bank security officer requested Nash leave but he refused. Law enforcement officers arrived and arrested Nash in front of the bank.
Nash is charged with one count of bank robbery. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
It was the third attempted bank robbery in two weeks in Anchorage. The first and second were allegedly committed by Tyler Ching, who was arrested after someone recognized his photo from the dating app called Tinder.
Rep. Mary Peltola posted online on X/Twitter about non congressional election matters on Tuesday during the most historic vote of the 118th Congress, when Speaker Kevin McCarthy lost his gavel after all Democrats voted with eight Republicans to strip him of his speakership.
But also today, Peltola encouraged Alaskans to vote in local elections. Not all local elections — just Juneau, Fairbanks and the Unorganized Borough elections.
“If you live in Fairbanks, Juneau, or outside of an organized borough – today is Election Day! Be sure to get out and vote or fill out your ballot at home by the end of today,” she said on X.
Peltola didn’t encourage Wasilla, Palmer, the Kenai Peninsula, or any conservative-leaning town to go out and vote, however.
In Congress, the vote to remove McCarthy was binding voice vote, and was the first time in history that such a move had been taken.
The clerk called out Peltola’s name once, twice and finally four times, but Alaska’s only representative was not there to say yes or no on McCarthy. She has missed hundreds of votes this year and now has the worst attendance in Congress by far, out of the 435 members.
Some of that is because Peltola’s husband died Sept. 13 in a plane crash. She has been in grieving ever since. But before the crash, she was already 12th from the bottom for showing up to vote.
Local elections in Alaska ended Tuesday at 8 pm in most jurisdictions, except for the Mat-Su Borough, which votes in November, and Anchorage, which votes in March-April.
Last month, I wrote about Chugach Electric Association’s new dalliance with renewable energy, pursuing a pair of projects, a 122 MW wind farm west of Mount Susitna and a 120 MW solar farm near Point MacKenzie. The piece went on to note a few obvious problems with pursuing solar and wind projects for basic generation. This one will take a closer look at solar energy in the Railbelt.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) describes solar energy generation in Alaska as mostly in the form of small-scale application for off grid, remote use. There are about 2,000 of them connected to the Railbelt grid, producing perhaps 5% of the total energy of the three existing utility-scale solar farms statewide.
Today, there are two operating solar farms in the Railbelt. Golden Valley Electric Association (GVEA) operates the GVEA Solar Farm, currently rated at 563 kilowatts (kW). It has an 8.4% capacity factor, meaning that on average, it generates 8.4% of its installed rated capacity. An interesting twist to the GVEA project is dual sided solar arrays which produce a bit of electricity from light reflected off snow. On its best day, the GVEA solar farm generated 69% of its rated capacity.
Golden Valley is rightfully quite pleased with their foray into solar and was very helpful gathering information about it. Sadly, they were the only Railbelt solar farm owner / operator / contractor who responded to queries for information.
The other Railbelt solar farm is the Willow Solar Farm, initially a 140-kW pilot project. An expansion to 1.2 MW was approved in 2019. None of the entities involved in the project, Renewable Independent Power Producer (Renewable IPP) or the Alaska Energy Authority (AEA) were interested in providing any information about performance of this project, so I will assume it is not more efficient than the GVEA project.
Suzanne Downing covered installation of 78 kW of solar panels on top of the Egan Center in 2020. I did a follow-up piece a month later. This installation was completed under the auspices of then Mayor Berkowitz’s Climate Action Plan, written and executed by recently elected Chugach Board Member Suzanne Fleek-Green. Attempts to get performance information out of the Muni at the time and recently were ignored, so once again, the only conclusion is to use GVEA’s performance data for this installation.
In addition to highly variable output and low average output compared with other forms of generation, solar farms require a lot of land. GVEA’s solar farm occupies 12,000 m2 (0.01 km2, 3 acres). The Willow project is larger, occupying 69,000 m2 (0.7 km2, 17 acres). It also uses nearly 3 times the land per kilowatt produced than GVEA. Land use comparisons between different types of electrical generation suggest area needed for Chugach’s proposed solar farm may be in the 4 square kilometer (km2) range.
If we choose to expand solar use to the size necessary for utility-level generation requirements, we will consume massive amounts of land in the MatSu, where the locals are fighting tooth and nail to defeat the proposed West Susitna Access Road. If you build something this big, you are going to need access to it.
There are three conclusions that we can arrive at from this analysis:
Solar output is very low compared with installed generation, averaging 8.4% here in the Railbelt. It is also highly variable, ranging 8 times over its average output at its maximum, all the way down to zero during the height of winter where electrical generation is most needed.
Solar farms use a lot of land. We are looking at square kilometers necessary for Chugach’s proposed solar farm.
Finally, governments, advocates, and their contractors are remarkably tight lipped when asked about performance data on their installations. My experience is when they are not answering questions, this means they are hiding something, lying by omission to the taxpaying public.
From my perspective, GVEA is doing this right as best I can figure out. They are to be commended. All other utility sized solar proposals need to be engaged with a very, very high level of skepticism, as unicorns and pixie dust aren’t going to keep us warm or the lights on in the dead of winter should these guys make their promised substantial move to renewables.
“I’ve got a secret” is hardly a positive governance model, though increasingly popular these days on the political left.
Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.
