Mayor Dave Bronson’s first five cabinet members to pass the Assembly confirmation process did so with flying colors: Amy Demboski, municipal manager; Travis Frisk, Chief Financial Officer, Niki Tshibaka, director of Human Resources; Doug Schrage, Anchorage Fire Department Chief; and Patrick Bergt, Municipal Attorney.
Several other appointees will have hearings in committees before they are voted on in subsequent Assembly meetings.
Photo credit: Michelle Bryant-Wrightson
The Anchorage Assembly unanimously voted down Mayor Bronson’s plan to erect a temporary homeless shelter/navigation center on Tudor Road near the Alaska Native Medical Center.
Mayor Dave Bronson’s plan was to erect a large fabric structure at the cost of $15 million; but wrapped into the plan was the former mayor’s plan to purchase the old Alaska Club on Tudor Road for $5.4 million, which would take $2 million to remodel. The two plans were intertwined in a last-minute revision on the plan by Assembly members Meg Zaletel and Forrest Dunbar, and the plan included limiting a facility to 150-beds.
It was a plan by the two on the Assembly to hold the mayor’s plan hostage by tying the two projects together.
Several members of the public testified against the plan; they appeared to be Dunbar supporters. Dunbar lost his bid for mayor this spring to Bronson.
Now, by killing the project, there is no place for the 380 homeless people living in the Sullivan Arena to go, and the city can’t, by law, abate and clear the homeless camps in the greenbelts unless it has a place to house people safely.
There are hockey games scheduled as early as Oct. 5 at the Sullivan Arena, but it appears the Assembly wants to keep the homeless there; this could infuriate the hockey community, which represents a powerful voice in Anchorage.
By DAN FAGAN
Why would Alaska’s Congressional delegation support the Jones Act when it clearly and indisputably significantly drives up the cost of just about everything in the state?
The Jones Act embodies crony capitalism in its purest form. The 101-year-old federal statute mandates only U.S. owned, flagged, crewed, and built ships can transport cargo between two domestic ports.
The law eliminates most competition for U.S. shipyards and their labor unions. But it is a huge financial burden for the citizens of Alaska.
And yet Rep. Don Young, and Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan are big supporters of the law.
According to a study by the CATO Institute, it costs eight times as much to build a ship in the U.S. than it does to build one on foreign soil.
The Heritage Foundation reports it costs more than $20 thousand per day in 2010 to operate a U.S. flagged ship, compared with less than $8 thousand per day for those foreign flagged.
These higher costs are absorbed by Alaskans pushing up the price of all goods arriving to the state via ships. It’s not difficult to understand the more it costs to ship stuff to Alaska, the higher the price of the goods coming to the state.
“The Jones act is a typical example of political cronyism at work and perverting economic policy,” wrote Patrick Tyrrell with the Heritage Foundation in a 2019 column entitled “The peculiar case of Alaskan senator’s support for the Jones Act.”
“A small group of people lobby extensively to receive a government economic benefit whose cost is spread widely over the entire population,” wrote Tyrrell.
Tyrrell also blames the Jones Act for the price of groceries costing 38 percent more in Juneau, Anchorage, Kodiak, and Fairbanks than the average U.S. city.
There was a day when Alaska state leaders were, unlike Young, Murkowski, and Sullivan, willing to take on the special interests like ship builders and their unions.
In 1955, former Alaska territory Gov. Ernest Gruening described the Jones Act as “ruining business and imposing heavy expense” on the state.
Then in 1969, Sen. Ted Stevens introduced legislation demanding the federal government compensate the state for the extra expenses caused by the Jones Act. His bill failed.
In 1984, Alaskans overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure mandating the governor persuade Congress to repeal the Jones Act and then submit an annual report detailing progress toward this goal. The Alaska Legislature later removed the yearly reporting requirement.
Back in 1982, the Alaska Statehood Commission estimated the Jones Act added $1,000 per year in additional expenses per family in Alaska. The commission also found Alaska’s oil industry suffered an additional $600 million in yearly expenses because of the Jones Act.
But in 1988, a study published by the U.S. Government Accountability Office discovered the Jones act alone imposed a cost equal to 2% of each Alaskan’s personal income.
The Jones Act driving up the cost of just about everything in Alaska has gotten much worse in recent years since fewer U.S. ships are being built. The U.S. shipping industry is in serious decline driving up the cost of the Jones Act limitations to Alaskans even that much more.
The Jones Act also drives up the cost for energy companies operating in Alaska.
Remember the 2007 closing of the Agrium fertilizer plant on the Kenai? Plant officials lobbied Congress for an exemption to the Jones Act. One was not granted. The plant couldn’t compete, in part because of the high cost of shipping and closed, ending the jobs of 400 Alaskans.
“How much more energy exploration would be taking place in Alaska and how many more energy related businesses would be prospering without the Jones Act standing in its way,” asked CATO Institute researcher Colin Grabow in a 2018 report.
Former President Donald Trump was contemplating issuing waivers to the Jones Act to lower the costs of shipping natural gas from U.S. ports.
But according to the Heritage Foundation, Murkowski and Sullivan convinced him otherwise during a 2019 meeting.
“The president’s apparent change of heart may be due in part to the advocacy for the Jones Act at the meeting by Alaska’s two Republican senators, Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski,” wrote Tyrrell with the Heritage Foundation.
“Why would Alaska’s senators be arguing in favor of a law that so clearly raises costs for their constituents? For whatever reason, the vested interest of the sea transport industry have won the day in the competition for the senator’s ears,” wrote Tyrrell.
In a recent newsletter the president of the Sailors Union of the Pacific singled out Sullivan and fellow Sen. Bradley Byrne of Alabama for bragging about their role: “both spoke directly to their influential roles in the recent rejection of a proposed Jones Act LNG waiver.”
Sullivan recently claimed he and Murkowski make a good team. They do indeed.
Dan Fagan hosts the number one rated morning drive talk show in Alaska on Newsradio 650 KENI.
Rep. Tom McKay of Anchorage has filed a bill for the coming legislative session to prevent Alaska public schools from allowing students to be instructed in, adopt, or adhere to the tenets of Critical Race Theory. The bill, which is unnumbered until it’s read across in the House of Representatives, says:
“A public school may not direct or otherwise compel a student to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to, or provide a course of instruction or unit of study that directs or otherwise compels a student to affirm, adopt, or adhere to, the following tenets:
The 1619 Project is a product of a New York Times, which frames United States history in a way that wholly centered on the effects of slavery. The project is being used in classrooms across America.
Critical Race Theory is a large and undefined of academic scholarship that seeks to explain the concepts of white privilege, colonialism, and whiteness as a general concept. The theory supports the idea that racism is found in every transaction in life and that people, especially whites, are racist even if they don’t know it.
The topic has been controversial because in many classrooms, white children are being discriminated against, and made to feel badly about their race or heritage, leading state legislatures across the country to debate bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.
Legislation similar to the one filed by McKay has been proposed in at least 22 states, and five governors have signed these anti-CRT bills into law: Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, and Tennessee.
“The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies,” according to Education Week.
Col. Allen West, former congressman from Florida and candidate for Texas governor, gave a captivating speech to over 160 Republicans in Fairbanks on Friday night, and many came away saying that West has the qualities of President Ronald Reagan, in that he is both a patriot and a great communicator.
West started his remarks by humorously pushing back against all the jokes he had heard in Alaska about the small state of Texas. His answer to Alaska pride? Belting out the Texas State Song, “Texas, Our Texas.” In full baritone.
West touched on the themes of what makes America great and the ways that the so-called progressive culture is destroying America. He had harsh words for Critical Race Theory in schools, and said the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association have no business pushing the faddish racist theory in schools.
“Who ever thought we would live in an America where teachers would align themselves against children and their parents,” West said. “As the governor [Mike Dunleavy] has said so appropriately, now is the time to stand up. Now is the time for us to make this right. We’ve got to take back our schools, we’ve got to take back our communities. We’ve got to stop the indoctrination of our children. The teachers unions are going after the parents,” he said. NBC News is reporting that if you say Republicans should run for school board, you are now a QAnon conspiracy theorist.”
Read NBC: QAnon hatches new plan. Run for school board.
West admonished the audience to push back on the rise of anti-Americanism. Jesse Owens, the track athlete who stood and saluted the American flag on the Olympics medals stand at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, even though the nation he represented was still segregated, West said, was a true American. He criticized Gwen Berry, who last month turned her back on the American Flag and National Anthem during the U.S. Olympic track and field trials.
West told about how during his travels he had recently been sitting across from a white woman whose cell phone case had a Black Lives Matter sticker on it. How should a person respond to that, he asked the crowd.
“All lives matter,” the Fairbanks audience said in unison.
“I don’t want you to say that, because you’re buying into their language,” he said. Instead, ask the question, “Can you tell me which black lives matter? That’s how you turn the argument on them. That’s how you go on the offense and not buy into what they are saying. Because when you ask them which black lives matter, they can’t respond.”
West continued: Was it the black lives shot in Chicago or Detroit, “Or the lives of the 20 million black babies that have been murdered in the womb since 1973? Or how about those kids who are stuck in failing schools in the inner cities all across the United States of America? The inner cities who your [Democrats’] party controls. That is how you go on the offense.”
West said, “We’ve got to go on offense. Too often Republicans are on defense. Too often Republicans have been reactive and not proactive. Too often Republicans sit back and let the Left say you’re a QAnon conspiracy theorist if you want to run for school board. And then all of a sudden, we’ll stop talking about running for school board. Now is the time for us to attack!
“I think its time Republicans take back the narrative. I think it’s time to take back the history of our party. In 1854, the Republican Party was founded in Ripon, Wisconsin, on one single issue, folks. And that issue was to end slavery. And the first Republican president dedicated this country to fight to end that scourge of slavery. It was the very first Republican president who advocated for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments,” he said. Those amendments were to end slavery, grant citizenship for former slaves, and give them the right to vote.
“The very first members of the Congressional Black Caucus were all Republicans,” West said. “We don’t remember that history, and we don’t talk about it,” he said. And he reminded the audience that the largest state Republican Party in America, the Republican Party of Texas, was established on Independence Day of 1867 in Houston, by 150 black men, who had just learned two years prior that a Republican president had honored the platform of the Republican Party and abolished slavery.
What was the Democrat Party’s response? They created the Ku Klux Klan to suppress the vote and intimidate blacks into not voting.
“That’s their history,” he said. “Our history is not Jim Crow. That’s their [Democrats’] history. Our history is not poll taxes. That’s their history. Our history has nothing to do with lynching. That’s their history. Our history has nothing to do with the decimation of the traditional, nuclear black family,” he said.
Continuing on that theme, West told the audience that in 1961, when he was born, 77 percent of black families nationally were intact.
“Today, a traditional nuclear black family, a man and a woman in the household, is only 24 percent,” West said. “You see, we don’t talk about these things. We allow them to try to put us in a box, call us conspiracy theorists, call us all these different names. Understand, we have everything that is right in our hearts, and with our principles and our values, the things that made this America great. If we don’t profess it, if we don’t understand, if we don’t go out and talk about it, if we don’t tell people that this is the party that makes you a victor, and they’re the party that makes you a victim, the next thing you know, they will listen to the story about being a victim more than the story about being a victor.”
West said that when he joined the military, his father told him that there is no greater honor than putting on the uniform to defend the nation. Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia in the same neighborhood where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once preached, West is the third of four generations of combat veterans from his family.
His speech was a warm-up for a theme he would advance the next day at Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas: Stop seeing blacks as victims, and tell the stories of them as victors. Push back against “cancel culture” and don’t let the Left define the narrative.
“If you’re a conservative in America — Black, white, Hispanic, Asian — it doesn’t matter. You are free,” West said.
Joshua Decker, the executive director for ACLU Alaska, is leaving to pursue a PhD in political science.
Decker has been the head of the organization for 10 years. He has been executive director since 2013, and was staff attorney before that. Decker is said to have been a card-carrying ACLU member since age 18.
The board of the organization will conduct a search for his replacement. In Alaska, the ACLU is considered by many in politics to be an extension of the Alaska Democratic Party.
Mayor Dave Bronson’s first day in office came with an executive directive that made good on one of his campaign promises: No more masks for employees or visitors are required at municipal facilities. And there will be no vaccination mandates for city employees.
“As COVID infection rates decrease and vaccination rates increase across Anchorage, it is time to re-open our businesses, community activities, and government operations. With hospital ICU beds usage down, and sufficient availability of ventilators to manage potential future COVID infections, we must start the process of returning Anchorage to the vibrant community we experienced prior to the pandemic,” his directive says.
“Effective today, mask mandates in all Municipality of Anchorage owned, leased, or used buildings is rescinded. While individuals may make personal choices to wear a mask as a protective health measure, masks will not be required to be worn b y anyone entering or while with a municipal facility. In addition, the Municipality of Anchorage will not require any employees, or applicants for city employment, to be vaccinated.”
She’s white. She has taken a Native Student Services job. And the University of Alaska Anchorage seems to think it has some explaining to do.
The Native Student Services office at the University of Alaska Anchorage hired a woman the school describes as having “Settler-Colonizer heritage (mostly Czech and German).” The settler-colonizer “grew up in what is now Colorado on the land of the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples.”
Valerie Svancara is the new assistant director for NSS. She came to UAA as an admissions counselor with a focus on rural Alaska students. With a Master of Education in Teaching and Learning from UAA, she has immersed herself in a “Participatory Action/Indigenous Methodologies research project focused on university transition and retention experiences of Alaska Native students.”
This settler-colonizer label is part of Critical Race Theory. Brown University’s Critical Race Theory course uses the Settler-Colonizer term to educate whites about whose land they occupy.
“This week we start to engage ideas around settler colonialism, and the ways the racialization of Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans emerged with and through the process of colonization in (what is now known as) the United States. Often conversations about race and racism ignore indigenous peoples, or fail to address the role of ongoing settler colonialism in creating racial stratification. The readings offer theoretical foundations into understanding just what settler colonialism is (and what it shares and how it differs from other forms of colonialism), as well as two Indigenous scholars approaches to CRT and indigeneity. Native identity is both racialized and also political/legal (Native peoples in the US are considered a racial group as well as citizens of sovereign nations), which we will work to unpack and put in conversations about racial formations and the tenets of CRT,” the course authors write in introducing the subject of Settler-Colonialism
“Questions to ask yourself this week: Whose land are you on? Which tribal nation(s) specifically? How are the Native people in your community represented (or not)? For non-Native people: in what ways have you benefitted and continue to benefit from settler colonialism?” the Introduction to Critical Race Theory 2017 class asks students to consider about their own flawed identity.
Not all are happy with the emphasis on Critical Race Theory in the hiring practices at UAA. “
“UAA may discover that labeling people as settler-colonizers has a dampening effect on raising funds from those very people who they hope will support their programs,” noted one observer and critic.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka raised more than $750,000 in the first 94 days since declaring herself a candidate, according to a second-quarter Federal Election Commission report she will file this week, her campaign said. The reports for federal candidates are due by July 15 for the quarter ending June 30.
Ninety-four percent of Tshibaka’s donations were in small dollar amounts of under $200, and half of the funds she raised came from Alaskans.
“It is inspiring to see that so many Alaskans are supporting our campaign to take back our Senate seat from the Washington, D.C. insiders,” Tshibaka said in a statement. “I am standing up for the people of Alaska, because they have always stood up for me.”
Tshibaka, who has been endorsed by President Donald Trump and the Alaska Republican Party, will report an average donation of $98, with the average donation from Alaskans coming in at $177. A total of 2,122 donations have already been received from Alaskans.
Tshibaka received small dollar donations from Alaskans from all walks of life, including: an Uber driver from Anchorage, a saw cutter from Wasilla, a boat captain from Ketchikan, an electrician from Kenai, a nurse in Seward, an entrepreneur in Aleknagik, a homemaker in Nenana, a longshoreman in Dutch Harbor, a retiree from Utqiagvik, a maintenance worker from Bethel, a pipefitter from Chugiak, a babysitter in Delta Junction, a heavy equipment operator from Fairbanks, a fisherman from Metlakatla, a construction worker in Homer, a pilot from Juneau, a welder from Kasilof, a plumber from Kodiak, a teacher in North Pole, a truck driver from Skagway, and a hairdresser in Soldotna, her campaign reported.
Tshibaka had raised $215,000 in her first two days after she announced and before the first quarter ended.
Tshibaka is using the WinRed platform for raising funds, which makes it easier for people around the country to donate to her campaign.
Read: Alaska Republican Party votes to endorse Kelly Tshibaka for Senate