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- [00:00]
Wesley Early
Support for Alaska Public Media on Demand
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Ben Townsend
comes from alyeska Pipeline Service Company maintaining
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Wesley Early
and operating the 800 mile Trans Alaska
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Ben Townsend
Pipeline for nearly 50 years.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
That we were all caught off guard says a lot about these hazards, and we should be acting more quickly on that.
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Wesley Early
Research suggests events like the enormous Tracy Arm landslide could become more common with climate change. From Alaska Public Media, this is Statewide news on Alaska News nightly for Friday, May 8th. Good evening. I'm Wesley Early. Also tonight, state lawmakers consider legalizing electronic poll tabs.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
The concept about modernizing pole tabs or ribbons has been around for quite a while.
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Wesley Early
Those stories and more tonight on Alaska News Nightly. The Alaska Legislature is asking the federal government for some flexibility when it comes to implementing a massive program intended to transform rural healthcare across the state. Alaska received $272 million from the federal Rural Health Transformation Program, part of the one big beautiful bill that passed last summer, putting it on track to receive nearly $1.4 billion over five years. It's the largest per capita grant for any state in the $50 billion federal program. But state Senator Forrest Dunbar, an Anchorage Democrat who chairs the Senate's Health and Social Services Committee, says that funding comes with limits to what it can be spent on and when.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
Particularly because there were Medicaid cuts and other funding cuts associated with HR1, it's
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Representative Genevieve Mina
not clear that that money can go
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
where it's most needed.
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Wesley Early
It's not a huge, huge amount of
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Representative Genevieve Mina
money relative to the challenges we face.
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Wesley Early
The Department of Health says it received nearly 1800 proposals for how to spend the first round of federal funding. One major limit is that the funding can't be used to construct or expand health care facilities like hospitals or badly needed housing for healthcare workers. Another is the timing. The first round of funding has to be allocated by the end of September and fully spent within the following year. The Legislature's health care liaison told lawmakers that short timeline is challenging in rural Alaska, where a missed barge delivery or poor weather can lead to long delays. Another source of heartburn is a series of commitments the state Department of Health made in its application to the federal government. It said the legislature would pass a series of license compacts, which make it easier for healthcare providers from outside the state to practice in Alaska. The compact for nurses has been especially controversial, and it's unclear how much money could be clawed back if the Legislature doesn't pass the compact by the end of 2027. Representative Genevieve Mina, an Anchorage Democrat and the resolution's main sponsor, said during a floor debate in March the Legislature needed more information as it weighed the pros and cons.
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Representative Genevieve Mina
We want more clarity on what these provisions would mean in terms of the award that we currently have and the money that we lose. We don't have that guidance right now. So this resolution urges more clarity.
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Wesley Early
Lawmakers have yet to pass any of the license compact bills, and the end of the regular legislative session is fast approaching. The resolution says the legislature is committed to the goals of the program and calls on the governor and Alaska's congressional delegation to push for clarity and flexibility. And as a resolution, it cannot be vetoed. Meanwhile, last summer, a giant landslide in southeast Alaska triggered a tsunami nearly as tall as the 1 World Trade center building in New York City. Researchers spent months studying the event. In a new paper, they conclude the landslide tsunami was the second largest on record, and they warned that these events could become more common as the landscape shifts with climate change. As Avery Elfelt reports for the Alaska Desk, that spells trouble for those who work and play in Alaska's pristine fjords, including the cruise industry.
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Avery Elfelt
Brentwood Higman has spent years scouring Alaska's mountains for signs of potential landslides. One place he looked was the Tracy Arm Fjord, a popular cruise destination between Juneau and Petersburg.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
I did actually look there, but he
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Avery Elfelt
didn't see any red flags. So Higman was caught completely off guard when a mountainside collapsed into the fjord early one morning last August. It generated one of the largest landslide tsunamis in recorded history. Experts say it would have been unsurvivable if any boats had been there.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
I have tried to, you know, encourage, encourage my colleagues to look at this and explicitly acknowledge it as a failure. We clearly did not identify this beforehand.
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Avery Elfelt
The shock of it all underscores how hard it is to monitor for and predict these types of events, and that there's a long way to go before experts can do so reliably. It also shows the widespread nature of the risk, which is growing with climate change.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
We have lots of, like, you know, slopes that we are worried about in Alaska that are failing because of a retreating glacier.
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Avery Elfelt
That's Eizgi Korasosin, a research seismologist with the Alaska Earthquake Center.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
In the sense that we were all caught off guard says a lot about these hazards and we should be acting more quickly on that.
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Avery Elfelt
Higman and Korosozen are among more than a dozen experts who spent months studying the August 10 event. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science, they answered a lot long list of questions about the tsunami, including its historic size. Perhaps most important, though, are answers around what might have caused the giant landslide that generated the tsunami. Those could be used to pinpoint new spots where similar slides might happen down the line, corus says.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
This event gave us some clues on that end.
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Avery Elfelt
One telltale sign is something called deformation. The that's when a slope's bedrock starts cracking and shifting. Notably, that wasn't really happening at the site of the landslide, which is why it hadn't set off alarm bells. But the new research pinpointed a few things that were happening. For starters, Hickman says a glacier at the base of the mountain in question have retreated rapidly in the weeks leading up to the slide, newly exposing the base of the slope.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
The result of that would be that those slopes are not able to hold themselves up when there isn't a glacier there.
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Avery Elfelt
There were other factors, too. When the researchers looked back at data from the hours before the landslide, they noticed seismic activity that looked like small, distinctive earthquakes happening over and over again. There was also a heavy bout of rain. Higman says a stronger grasp on those factors and what they mean could help experts catch the next landslide tsunami before it happens.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
In this case, it could have given us over a day of warning, plenty of time for vessels to get out of the way. Yeah, that's pretty attractive.
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Avery Elfelt
It's only becoming more important, he says, as glaciers recede and precipitation intensifies with climate change. Reporting in Haines, I'm Avery Elphelt.
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Wesley Early
Still to come on Alaska News Nightly with spring breakup underway, a look at the origin of the Kuskokwim ice Classic.
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Haley Hansen
It was cold and it was dark and it was I was sleeping on a cot. It was really terrible.
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Wesley Early
That's ahead. Stay with us. State wildlife officials say two soldiers who were attacked by a bear on Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson last month were near a bear den at the time. Officials with the Alaska Department of Fish and Games said in a statement Thursday that they've completed their investigation of the April 16 incident. Two soldiers with the 11th Airborne Division were participating in a land navigation training event on base when they were mauled by a single brown bear, according to Fish and Game, who said both soldiers deployed bear spray during the encounter. Military officials said in a statement that the two soldiers were treated for their wounds at an Anchorage hospital and they both remain on leave as they continue to receive medical care. The last known bear attack at Jay bear occurred in May 2022 in in that incident, a sow with two cubs attacked a small group of soldiers scouting an area west of the Anchorage Regional landfill. One soldier, 30 year old Staff Sergeant Seth Michael Plant died while another soldier was injured. In their statement on the investigation of last month's mauling, fish and Game officials noted that bears are more active in spring. They typically emerge from their dens between March and May and can travel as far as 600 square kilometers to forage for food. Fish and Game officials added that they are continuing to monitor bear activity across anchorage, including on J Bear. Officials with the 11th Airborne say they are also investigating the incident and are continuing to, quote, mitigate risk while still building readiness and lethality, end quote. The number of people who visited Alaska's national parks last year exceeded 2019 levels, completing the rebound from a COVID 19 slump. At the same time, National Park Service jobs in Alaska plummeted back toward pandemic lows amid the Trump administration's purge of federal workers. That's according to a report published by the state Department of Labor last week. Karina Wiebold is an economist with the department and the author of the report. She says national parks are a big draw for visitors and an important part of the state's economy.
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Karina Wiebold
When people come to visit us, obviously, they kind of drop money as they go, you know, in the ports that they stop in on the cruise ships, on the railroad or on the coach lines as they come further into the interior and of course, at the parks when they're working with concessioners.
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Wesley Early
Webold's report tracks annual visitation numbers at Alaska's national parks from 2019 through last year. It shows a huge dip in 2020 after the pandemic struck, with the state's two most visited national parks being hit the hardest, Glacier Bay in southeast Alaska and Denali in in total, just under 2 million people visited Alaska national parks last year, slightly more than the year before the pandemic. The same isn't true of Park Service employment, which dropped in 2025. And Wiebold says you can think about it in terms of supply and demand. Demand is the number of people who want to go to the parks, and
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Karina Wiebold
the supply in a lot of ways is the access to the parks, how many people can get there, how can we serve them, and what can that experience be like? And so the park employment side of that does kind of speak supply. It speaks to our ability to serve those customers.
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Wesley Early
According to the report, Park Service jobs in the state sank close to pandemic lows last year as a result of the second Trump administration sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. Webold says it's too soon to tell exactly how that supply and demand relationship will play out, but she says there's a possibility for additional cuts to park service jobs to materialize this year and that the state is gearing up for what could be its busiest tourist season ever. Meanwhile, for decades, Alaskans have peeled open paper pull tabs in bars and bingo halls across the state. Now lawmakers are debating whether electronic pull tabs should be added to the mix. The debate comes as increasing costs and decreasing demand are hurting nonprofits that benefit from the games. KoM's Ben Townsend explains.
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Ben Townsend
Paper pull tabs haven't changed much over the years. Most are two layers of paper about the size of a credit card, cards sandwiched together. Players rip small perforated windows to reveal colorful combinations of fruits or figures. Just the right combination could land you 300 bucks. It's a game of chance. Some strike gold, others count their losses. But the operator always wins with the odds engineered to make enough to cover the cost of the game and leave a little left over. Those leftovers go to Non Profits under 1960s Alaska charitable gaming Act. Over half a century later, the paper pull tab's much younger brother, the etab, wants to play, too.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
So the concept about modernizing pull tabs, or ripes, has been around for quite a while.
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Ben Townsend
This is Senator Jesse Bjorkman, a Republican from the kiski. He's sponsoring a bill that would overhaul the state's pull tab laws.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
But the need as costs for labor, insurance and then the paper pull tab costs themselves for the paper tickets really has eroded charities and nonprofits ability to make money from charitable gaming.
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Ben Townsend
Most pull tabs sell for a buck and depending on the game, about 85 cents go back to the players as prizes. The other 15 cents are split between a designated nonprofit, the distributor and the venue that sold the pull tab. In this scenario, the state also collects a fifth of a penny as tax. Bjorkman says increased shipping costs for the heavy paper product is putting a squeeze on money going to nonprofits. And statewide overall revenue is trending down. According to the Alaska Department of Revenue, the amount going to nonprofits peaked at just over $30 million in 2022. It was down about $8.5 million in 2024. Rather than shipping massive pallets of paper, the etabs would run on tablet computers. Think an iPad? People would buy a number of plays and tap, tap, tap until they're out of turns. But don't call it gambling, bjorkman says.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
I think it's very important for people to know and rest assured that we are not expanding gambling with this bill.
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Ben Townsend
Senator Jesse Keel, a Democrat from Juneau disagrees fundamentally.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
I have an objection to the bill's expansion of gambling in Alaska of adding
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Matt Fisher
a newer, more addictive method with the screens.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
I have spoken with the sponsor. He's not caught by surprise here, but spill has a long way to go. More opportunities to work on it.
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Ben Townsend
Matt Fisher runs Alaska Wholesale, a Soldotna based distributor of pull tabs.
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Matt Fisher
My dad started this business 30 years ago. He was a paper guy. A lot of the paper players are getting older and the younger players, they've already got a phone in their pocket that they have access to an online casino.
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Ben Townsend
The U.S. supreme Court legalized sports betting in 2018. In the five years that followed, Americans spending on online sports betting ballooned from five to over $120 billion a year, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. Sports betting is illegal in Alaska, but some platforms exploit loopholes to reach people in the state.
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Matt Fisher
So what you'll see is they're popping their phone out and they are playing some type of game that isn't generating any money for nonprofits in Alaska and it's going to some international gambling outfit.
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Ben Townsend
Fisher is an advocate for Bjorkman's bill. He says by eliminating the cost of paper tickets, the games can pay out more to players and non profits.
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Matt Fisher
And so what the etabs does is it allows that entertainment to be in the bar and the bar generates a little bit of revenue. The nonprofits generate a whole lot of revenue. What we can do with this is amazing.
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Ben Townsend
The bill would also allow charitable gaming on Alaska Marine Highway System ferries, which Bjorkman says would supplement revenue from fares. Co chair of the House Finance Committee Neil Foster, says this bill is one of hundreds he's seen since this group of lawmakers first convened last year at the end of April. He thought it was likely to die when the regular legislative session ends on May 20th.
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Wesley Early
I just don't see it making it
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
through the entire process.
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Ben Townsend
In fact, Bjorkman's bill has been ripe since the end of March for the full Senate to send it to the House. Bjorkman wasn't immediately available to comment on why it stalled or why now, about seven weeks later, his bill is moving again. With reporting from Juneau. I'm Ben Townsend in Nome.
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Wesley Early
Interest in aquaculture is booming in Alaska, and the federal government is trying to help the industry grow by mapping out aquaculture opportunity areas, specific patches of the ocean where kelp and oyster farming are most likely to succeed. KMXT's Katherine Irving has more.
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Representative Genevieve Mina
The fisheries department of the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is looking for input on their plan to identify these opportunity areas in the Gulf of Alaska. The designation won't change regulatory or permitting requirements, but NOAA's multi year process generates a lot of environmental data, indigenous knowledge and public input. Alicia Bishop is the regional Aquaculture Coordinator for NOAA Fisheries. She says that information can help both state regulators and potential farmers.
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Karina Wiebold
NOAA's role here is that we are trying to provide the best available information to help those managers make informed decisions and to also help future farmers find appropriate locations for farming.
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Representative Genevieve Mina
A presidential executive order aimed American Seafood More Competitive kicked off the project at the national level in 2020. At the time, NOAA got more letters in support of starting the identification process in Alaska than any other region in the United States. NOAA has already assessed the Gulf of Mexico and Southern California, where they identified 13 final areas across more than 21,000 acres. The scale in Alaska could be smaller in acreage but broader in scope. NOAA is considering 77 potential spots across more than 13,000 acres in the Gulf of from Ketchikan to Kodiak. Kodiak alone has 13 preliminary locations covering nearly 2,000 acres, which is the most of any other part of Alaska. Missy Good is a mariculture specialist based in Kodiak with Alaska Sea Grant, which is a partnership program between NOAA and the University of Alaska Fairbanks that conducts ocean research and outreach. She says Kodiak is an ideal place to expand.
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Wesley Early
Kodiak in particular has a lot of
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Representative Genevieve Mina
upwelling, so we have a lot of
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Wesley Early
nutrients available so we can have really
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Representative Genevieve Mina
good productive growth here. We don't have sea ice to contend with. We don't have the freshwater influences that you see like Prince William Sound where you have glacial runoff. And Bishop says Kodiak is the only place in Alaska where people have actually been asking NOAA to expand the study area. Last month, NOAA opened a public comment period asking for scoping input on one of the final documents it will produce in the project, which is a programmatic Environmental impact Statement. NOAA will assess the potential impacts of putting aquaculture facilities in the areas they've identified, as well as the conducting the assessment itself. NOAA is aiming to publish the final document in 2028. Alaskans can submit their comments online at regulations.gov Bishop says her agency is looking for comments about how aquaculture affects local economies, social and cultural practices, marine ecosystems and more. The comment period closes on May 28th. In Kodiak, I'm Katherine Irving Construction of
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Wesley Early
a long awaited connection between two popular trails in Anchorage is set to begin this summer. Plans to connect the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail to the Ship Creek Trail have been around for more than a decade. According to Beth Nordland with the Anchorage
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Haley Hansen
park foundation, this is the biggest trail connection that Anchorage has seen for decades. Connecting the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail to the Ship Creek Trail has always been a dream. It's been on the books for a
- [19:34]
Wesley Early
long time and both trails are part of Anchorage's 32 mile Moose Loop. The connection will add another mile by routing the loop near the city's small boat launch and away from Alaska Railroad Depot on First Avenue. Nordland says Anchorage's trails are not only helping residents stay healthy, but they also contribute to the economy by enticing tourists to the city. The project's estimated cost is $15.6 million and will be primarily funded with federal and state dollars. The Anchorage Parks and Recreation Department is matching nearly 10% of that contribution using voter approved bond funding that has accumulated over the last five years.
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Haley Hansen
The voters of Anchorage have spoken many, many times in all kinds of different public meetings and ways to tell us that this is a priority, that connecting our trail system is a priority.
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Wesley Early
The connection is also part of a statewide project dubbed the Alaska Long Trail, which hopes to connect Seward to Fairbanks through various existing trail systems along with some planned new trails. A groundbreaking ceremony for construction on the Coastal Trail Ship Creek Connection is set for Saturday. The project is anticipated to be completed by 2027. Meanwhile, for many on the YK Delta, the breakup of the Kuskokwim river is the official indicator of spring, and in Bethel, it could be just days away. Waiting for breakup is a collective experience, as is the community's annual game of guessing exactly when that will happen. Reporter Samantha Watson dug deep into kyuk's archives to trace the event back to its official start.
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Samantha Watson
This is my second year reporting on the Kuskokwim Ice Classic and there are many who have come before me.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
So what's the grand total, Kathy? How much is the lucky winner going to get?
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Haley Hansen
$12,000. We're very happy to be able to offer such a big prize.
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Wesley Early
Our first year, it's the early 80s,
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Samantha Watson
and KYUK reporter Rich Trotto squeezes into a small wooden shack with local Kathy Hansen. In today's dollars, that jackpot she's talking about would be over $40,000. Kathy was hired as the first official organizer of the Kuskokwim Ice Classic. It's an annual jackpot based on when the river will break up in Bethel.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
So I see the rigging Here it looks pretty interesting. Maybe you can tell us a little about it.
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Samantha Watson
In the pixelated video, Kathy explains how the tripwire mechanism connects the shack to a tripod on the river.
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Haley Hansen
It's actually pretty simple. It's unusual, but it's simple.
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Samantha Watson
Reporter Rich Trotto calls it a masterpiece of ingenuity. Nearly 50 years later, Kathy still agrees.
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Haley Hansen
It's just kind of nutty. We had a halibut reel mounted on the wall, and the line goes from the reel out to the tripod.
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Samantha Watson
Kathy sits at a table selling tickets inside the local grocery store. Now she participates as a member of one of the nonprofits the event helps support each year with a cut of the kitty. Even though nearly half a century of history has passed in the town, not much has changed when it comes to the Kuskokwim Ice Classic. When the tripod looks close to going out, an organizer will sleep in the shack to make sure there are no hitches and the reading is correct.
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Haley Hansen
I had to do it one time.
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Samantha Watson
Was it cold in there?
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Haley Hansen
It was cold and it was dark, and it was. I was sleeping on a cot. It was really terrible.
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Samantha Watson
Today, that shack by the riverbank is still housing the annual operation. A painted calendar on its wall lists the breakups that have unspooled since its first official year, with dates as early as April 12 and as late as early June. The event's current organizer, Haley Hansen, looks for its Most recent entry, May 5th.
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Haley Hansen
Oh, yeah, it's written. Somebody wrote it in pencil. Yeah, we just have to come down here and paint over it with some. Some black paint.
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Samantha Watson
But growing up in Bethel, she says the Kuskokwim Ice Classic is part of life's fabric. She says her family would take drives down to the river on Sundays to see how the river was thawing.
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Haley Hansen
We go through such a long winter period, and especially this year, it was very long and cold and dark, and Ice Classic is just. It signifies the season change. And I know that sounds really basic, but it isn't, because until that ice goes out and the river opens right, people are in this holding pattern.
- [24:06]
Samantha Watson
As anyone on the YK Delta knows, the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers are the connective tissue between communities off the traditional road system. Breakup season is often a claustrophobic and landlocked period. It's unsafe to snow machine or drive on the ice, and too early to boat.
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Karina Wiebold
We can't wait to go out in our boat and go boating and go hunting, fishing, especially for subsistence. We always look forward to that.
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Samantha Watson
That's 2023 jackpot winner Mona Morrow. She lives upriver in Antioch and says the $30,000 she won helped her family pay for her father's medical care and trips to the hospital in Anchorage. And she says there was a little extra left over.
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Karina Wiebold
We took a three day trip to Vegas.
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Samantha Watson
This year, she's placing her bets again, using the birthdays of her grandchildren to conjure lucky guesses. She says each time breakup rolls around, she pays attention to the Ice Classic. I guess that goes for news reporters, too.
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Senator Jesse Bjorkman
From the timing cabin of the Cusoquin Ice Classic, I'm Rich Trotto for Kyuk News.
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Haley Hansen
Reporting from the riverbank by the timing
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Wesley Early
cabin, this is Marie Jankowski for Kyuk
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Samantha Watson
News from the Kuskokwim ice shack in Bethel, I'm Samantha Watson.
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Wesley Early
And finally tonight, a correction to a story Tuesday about missing persons death declarations, which misstated where Rebecca Coford works. Coford works for the Alaska Court system. And that's all for this edition of Alaska News Nightly. If you missed any of tonight's stories, we're online@alaskapublic.org and wherever you get your podcasts. We had reports tonight from Eric Stone in Juneau, Avery Elphelt in Hanes, Patrick Gilchrist in Fairbanks, Ben Townsend in Nome, Katherine Irving in Kodiak, Michaela Finnerty in Anchorage, and Samantha Watson in Bethel. If you want to send us a news tip, question or comment, email us@newslaskapublic.org Our audio engineer is Crystal Hyde. Kirsten Dobroth is our producer. And I'm Wesley Early. Have a great weekend. This is statewide news on Alaska Public Media.