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Support for Alaska Public Media on Demand comes from Siri, an Alaska Native corporation with operations and investments spanning five continents, 45 states and two US territories.
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Unfair competition from low cost producers who aren't held to appropriate labor and environmental standards. In the seafood space, the worst offender is Russia. Alaska seafood processors warn that President Trump's trade policies could hurt the industry. From Alaska Public Media, this is statewide News on Alaska News nightly for Tuesday, March 25th. Good evening. I'm Casey Grove. Also tonight, scientists work to understand how rapidly melting glaciers impact the environment around them.
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We know that glaciers are changing, we know that the ocean is changing. But how those two impact each other is kind of the edge of the field.
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The Alaska seafood industry says it's getting crushed by unfair trade and tariffs are part of the problem. Industry groups are urging the federal government to push back against international competition they say doesn't play by the rules. The Alaska Desk's Theo Greenlee reports.
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Two major Alaska seafood trade groups are sounding the alarm. The At Sea Processors association and Pacific Seafood Processors association earlier this month sent a letter to the Trump administration warning against hardline trade policies. They say new tariffs could trigger retaliation. The At Sea Processors association represents most of the vessels that catch and process pollock in the Bering Sea. CEO Matt Tinning says all of these disputes threaten Alaska seafood, which which is already at a disadvantage.
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We also face unfair competition in global markets, unfair competition from low cost producers who aren't held to appropriate labour and environmental standards. In the seafood space. The worst offender is Russia.
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Russian seafood has flooded markets in recent years. And while the Biden administration closed the loophole that allowed Russian fish into the US Market, American producers are still struggling to compete overseas. Existing tariffs are part of that struggle. Alaska seafood was hit pretty hard during the 2018 trade war with China, which still has tariffs in place on US seafood. And earlier this month, China announced an additional 10% tariff in response to the new tariffs Trump imposed days before. The European Union, one of Alaska's biggest export markets, also continues to impose tariffs from the last trade war even as their own products enter the US Duty free. In their letter, the two Alaska trade groups warn about further retaliation. Tinning says they aren't necessarily opposed to reciprocal tariffs, but the industry is particularly fragile, exporting about two thirds of what it produces. So they're vulnerable to trade tensions.
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And so we really do live and die by fair access to those export markets.
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The trade groups also raised concerns about labeling rules in the European Union with where Russian caught pollock is sometimes sold as Alaska pollock, even if it was Caught and processed entirely outside the U.S. they say the combination of foreign tariffs, labeling confusion, and global overproduction could push the already struggling sector to the brink, Especially if retaliatory tariffs from countries like China or Canada once again target US Seafood. In Unalaska, I'm Theo Greenlee.
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A murder and subsequent wrongful conviction case in Fairbanks that sparked community backlash and grabbed national headlines is coming to an end. The final member of the Fairbanks four has settled his wrongful conviction suit with the city of Fairbanks. KUAC's Patrick Gilchrist reports.
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The agreement comes more than seven years after the Fairbanks Four sued the city in federal court, claiming Fairbanks police had manufactured evidence to convict them for for a murder they didn't commit. The city will pay Marvin Roberts $11.5 million, says Fairbanks City attorney Thomas Chard. The city is going to make installment payments kind of in a structured payment for that amount. And they're working on the finalizing the settlement agreement. Chard advises city officials and oversees the third party lawyer representing the city in the case. He, he says attorneys in the case recently reached a dollar figure through mediation. It was a pretty intense negotiation and it involved a very experienced mediator that helped parties come to that to that number. The settlement means Robert's claims against the city and four of its police officers won't go to a jury for trial, which was scheduled for December. Once all the terms are finalized, charge says it will close out a lawsuit that's been ongoing since late 2017. That's when the four indigenous men, coined the Fairbanks Four, first filed the civil rights lawsuit. They were convicted for the 1997 murder of teenager John Hartman. The four were released in late 2015 after another man, William Holmes, confessed that he and a group of men had killed Hartman. Multiple witnesses corroborated that confession, and one, Arlo Olson, said Fairbanks police department officers had coerced him to give a fault false statement against the Fairbanks four. Each of the four men spent at least 15 years in prison and maintained their innocence throughout. Roberts was imprisoned for nearly 18 years. It's just happy to see Marvin finally get justice. That's Roberts lawyer Mike Kramer. That's all he's been asking for since, you know, he was first wrongfully arrested and accused back in 1997.
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It's been a long, hard journey for.
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Him, and I'm just very happy to have helped him, you know, get to this point in his life where, where he saw that the justice system can actually work. Roberts couldn't be reached directly for comment, but he said through a press release from his lawyer's office that no amount of money can make up for his time in prison. He added, quote, this settlement, however, gives me freedom with my life and most importantly, more time with my daughter and my parents who supported me throughout this nightmare. End quote. The other three members of the Fairbanks four, George Freese, Kevin Peace and Eugene Vent Savannah, settled with the city of Fairbanks insurer in 2023. They agreed to drop their portion of the federal civil rights lawsuit for about $1.6 million apiece. Neither settlement required the city to admit fault or issue a formal apology. In Fairbanks, I'm Patrick Gilchrist.
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A Fairbanks Republican lawmaker wants to put the governor's mansion on Airbnb. Representative Will Stapp filed a bill last week that would require the governor's office to offer the Juneau residents up for rent on a short term basis while the legislature is not in session.
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I always try to look for ways to make government more efficient and when you see that you have facilities that are underutilized, you should try to maximize them so they at least cover their own operating expenses expense, you know.
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The state pays a full time staff of four to run the more than 14,000 square foot mansion, including a manager, a private chef and two housekeepers. The three story home, with 26 rooms, 10 bathrooms and eight fireplaces was built in 1912 with a stipend of $40,000 from the federal government. Salaries and upkeep on the mansion currently cost about $800,000 a year, according to budget documents. Stapp says he'd like to defray that cost. He says it's a great place for any number of events, parties, weddings, even overnight stays for Instagram influencers.
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I don't think a normal person would pay an exorbitant amount of money to stay at a normal hotel room, but they would actually if, you know, they could rent the governor's mansion. For example.
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Dunleavy spent a total of roughly two weeks in Juneau during the first two months of the year, according to his public calendars. Even so, Stapp told the Juneau empire he did not intend the bill as a swipe out the governor. The governor's office did not respond to emails seeking comment. Most bills, though, introduced in the legislature, have little chance of passing and this one is no different. Senate President Gary Stevens is not taking the new bill seriously.
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Well, that's pretty silly and I'm sorry to hear that happen. We have some serious things to accomplish here. I mean, silly things happen. I introduced a bill once to change the name of Fairbanks just for the fun of it.
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Stevens, a Kodiak Republican, introduced a resolution in 2005 that aimed to change the name of the Golden Heart city to Barnett's Cash. Still to come on Alaska News Nightly, cuts to federal grants and staff could reduce food security for indigenous communities.
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We lost our entire team of people.
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That are working to get native communities greenhouses.
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That's ahead. Stay with us. Two injured climbers were rescued Sunday from a site high up on the slope of a mountain in the eastern Alaska range south of Fort Greely. KUAC's Tim Ellis reports.
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Alaska State troopers say they got a call just before 11am Sunday from a wildlife trooper who said he'd gotten a 911 call from one of the climbers who said they needed help. According to a trooper dispatch, the climber said they sustained injuries after getting caught in an avalanche while ascending the 11,400 foot McGinnis Peak. Troopers contacted the Alaska Rescue Coordination center at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, which sent an Alaska Air National Guard 8 HH 60 Pavehawk helicopter and an HC 130 fixed wing aircraft. Spokesperson Dave Bedard said the helicopter crew located and extracted the climbers from a high elevation.
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They were hoisted by an Ave Hawk helicopter and transported for release to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. This was done at an elevation of 7,000ft, which is pretty remarkable.
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A trooper spokesperson said Monday that one of the climbers was unable to walk and the other suffered a severe laceration on his arm and broken ribs. Bedard said the two victims were stabilized by the two medics aboard the helicopter and taken directly to Fairbanks Memorial.
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Both aircraft have pararescue men on board.
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And these are highly trained, highly skilled paramedics who are not only experts in.
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Medicine, they're experts in Arctic medicine.
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The trooper spokesperson declined to identify the victims, but he said both were from Fairbanks. In Delta Junction, I'm Tim Ellis.
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Friday was the first ever world day for glaciers meant to sound the alarm on the pace of global melting. These rivers of ice shaped the land and lives of Alaskans. KTOO's Alex Solomon spoke with glaciologists who are trying to answer big questions that remain about their future.
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The ice cracks, fizzles, drips and calves. These are the sounds of Glacier Bay national park in Alaska's southern region, where most of the state's glaciers are concentrated. Glaciers funnel cold freshwater into rivers, carry nutrients from the mountains to the sea and reflect sunlight back to space. The scientists who study them are uncovering how these rapidly changing systems affect our world and how much more we need to know Kaia Riverman is a Portland, Oregon based glaciologist and associate director of the Juneau Icefield Research Program. She studies what makes glaciers flow.
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Often we have this sense that glaciers are this really static thing before and after.
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Pictures show glaciers retreating, sure, but usually over long periods, it's much faster than that.
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They're almost like living, breathing creatures that change a little bit every day.
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They speed up in the heat of the day and slow down as they cool at night. Glaciers make up an area of land in Alaska nearly equal to the size of West Virginia. But we're losing them quickly. The state is warming two or three times faster than the global average, and glaciers here have shrunk more than anywhere else since the turn of the century. As the ice melts, the average global sea level rises. Though this doesn't affect much of southeast Alaska, where the land is rising faster than the sea as it sheds the weight of glaciers. Riverman says it's challenging to predict and quantify how much melting glaciers cause sea level rise.
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So we know that glaciers are changing, we know that the ocean is changing, but how those two impact each other is kind of the edge of the field still. And that's a problem because millions of.
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People in low lying coastal areas around the world will get hit hard. Alaska's glacial meltwater has already contributed significantly to sea level rise, and scientists predict that will continue. To understand what's happening under the ice, Riverman and her team ski out onto the Juneau Ice field every summer and put out seismometers that measure vibrations. They strike the surface of the ice with a sledgehammer or shoot it with blank shotgun shells.
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And we use those miniature earthquakes to study how thick the ice is and what materials sit underneath the ice.
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Other scientists look at glacier mass, how much glacier there actually is. Louis Sasse is part of the oldest study of glacier mass in North America as a glaciologist with the U.S. geological Survey's Alaska Science Center. It's called the Benchmark Glacier Project. It started tracking a few of Alaska's glaciers. Lemon Creek in Juneau, Wolverine on the Kenai and Golkhana in the Alaska range in the 1950s and 60s. Back then, Sass says, it wasn't clear whether Alaska's glaciers were retreating continuously or if they had just shrunk some after the Little Ice Age and then stabilized.
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People didn't really know what was happening because people hadn't paid really close attention. They were just very few glaciers that had any sort of picture record or enough data.
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These days, rapid melting has created a relatively new problem for people who live in the freezing water's glacial outburst floods. In Juneau, Suicide Basin is a pool contained in steep rock and dammed by Mendenhall Glacier. During the summer, the pool fills and puts pressure on the ice dam until it suddenly breaks and drains into Mendenhall Lake, which then floods parts of the neighborhood in the valley below. Jamie Pierce is a hydrologist at the U.S. geological Survey who monitors Suicide Basin. One summer day in late June of 2018, when he was setting up some monitoring gear in the basin, he thought he was witnessing the dam break in real time. Bubbles started to rise up to the water's surface. It was noisy, crackling and popping.
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And then all of a sudden, a massive iceberg started to overturn and it kind of set off a chain reaction.
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The glacier calved off a chunk of ice roughly 100ft deep and 200ft long. Pearce and his colleagues thought it was going to trigger the big release. It didn't. But it showed the huge scale of change the glacier is undergoing and meant that the ice dam went quite deep. Major questions remain about Alaska's glaciers. How long will they last? How big can glacial outburst floods get? And what will happen when the ice is gone? Researchers are chasing answers to help Alaskans navigate a rapidly changing relationship with ice. In Juneau, I'm Alex Solomon.
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Alaska already imports most of its food, but for many tribes in rural areas, cuts to federal grants and staff by the Trump administration could make food security even tougher. As the Alaska Desk's Ilona Nydin reports, that includes communities from Cook Inlet to northwest Alaska.
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Spring is a busy time. At Tioni Grown, a community farm located on the west side of the Cook Inlet, local students come to plant seeds, water them, and then harvest organic fruits and vegetables. This summer, the farm managers had even bigger plans. They wanted to set up a community food forest that would include indigenous plants and fruit trees. But the forest and many more of Taiyoni grown plants are now up in the air because of cuts to federal staff and funding. That's according to Lori Stewart, the executive director of Tajonic Tribal Conservation District that manages the farm.
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The loss of those funds in the coming years is going to have a big impact on the growth that we.
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Were building in Alaska. Nearly all produce is imported, which makes the food supply vulnerable, especially in rural areas. Some support to local producers comes from the US Department of Agriculture. The department is among many agencies that cut programs and staff in response to Trump's executive orders. In recent weeks, the agency reinstated some of its employees but then put them on administrative leave. This is the case for Amanda Compton, who lives in Palmer and works in the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service. The program helps landowners in Alaska, mainly tribes, sustainably manage their natural resources. They helped villages set up fish passages, reindeer farms and community gardens. That is until the layoffs and disruptions, compton says.
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We lost our entire team of people.
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That are working to get native communities greenhouses.
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Our team that's getting the native entities fish passages. We lost our entire team that communicates between the engineers and tribal entities.
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Tajonic, an off road community of about 300 people, is located about 40 miles southwest of Anchorage. As the crow flies, produce needs to be flown in, and fruits and vegetables grown at the Taonic Farm give locals a rare chance to enjoy affordable, fresh food. The USDA's Forest Service in December awarded $900,000 to the Conservation district operating the farm. Stewart, with the district, says the grant was meant to grow their team and set up a community food forest. The forest would promote food sovereignty and traditional ecological knowledge, but the department terminated the award in an effort to comply with Trump's objectives.
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There's a lot of caution going into the summer, so even if we were to find that no funding was impacted, right now we're making decisions as if it might be, and so therefore the season will be impacted.
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Dajonek worked with tribal liaisons like Compton and her team, who helped them navigate the grant opportunities. The conservation district staff also doesn't know if they will have engineers to assist them in building fish passages this summer. Meanwhile, about 500 miles northwest around Nome, reindeer herders are asking similar questions. Nathan Baring works for the Reindeer Herding association, and he says tribal liaisons used to help herders apply for grants and establish rotational grazing plans. The Trump administration also halted a USDA grant meant to support indigenous peoples animal harvests and help communities expand their meat processing.
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And having all of that kind of just thrown either into the air or outright eliminated just simply means that we start over. In terms of shopping those projects around again, which then further delays what I would describe as Alaska's untapped potential in a pre existing livestock industry that is both culturally tied and has incredible potential.
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For herders like Boniswania Schiel, interruptions in federal programs mean that it's harder to find funds to build temporary housing for workers and corrals for holding animals. Despite the challenges, Scheele believes the herders will figure out a way to continue the practice, even if it means providing food for just their village instead of expanding their operations.
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It's going to come back around.
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We're still here.
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We're still herding reindeer. We're still providing for communities.
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While some of the USDA employees in Alaska were reinstated, many have not received an official notice to go back to work. As of Tuesday, several USDA grants remained frozen or terminated. In Anchorage. I am Alyona Nyden.
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Layoffs at the National Weather Service have touched communities throughout Alaska. In Bethel, it meant the termination then tentative reinstatement of a social scientist position. As KYUK's Samantha Watson reports, the position would be a return to a time of community engagement on the yukon Kuskokwim. Delta 1 lost due to cuts in the past.
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When Amy Hendrix was hired by the National Weather Service in January, she came stocked with ideas for weather themed movie nights and community temperature blanket making workshops. And while cute and crafty, they were also ways to get at something bigger.
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So I had this idea coming out here, reopening up the weather office. I told the guy that was training me that I wanted like couches and I wanted a nice seating area because I wanted people to come in and talk about the weather.
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Her position as a social scientist stationed in Bethel was newly created. It was designed to learn from YK Delta communities about what weather information they use and how they're using it to help the National Weather Service create more specific and useful reports. And for Hendricks, after pursuing a PhD on climate variability on the Waiki Delta, it was kind of a dream job. She moved to Bethel with her husband, three month old baby, and two dogs in tow. She said she was excited to call Bethel home. So they jumped all in and everyone.
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Was so sure that the National Weather Service was going to be safe because it does provide life saving information for protection of life and property. And so nobody expected the weather service to get hit as hard.
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Weeks later, at the end of February, Hendricks received a letter announcing she'd been laid off.
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It was like living in a sea of unknown, living in the dark for weeks. And so when it did come, it was like, okay, like now I know for sure this is a certain thing in my Life.
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As of March 19, 23 National Weather Service employees in Alaska have been laid off across departments, according to reporting from Alaska public media. Like Hendricks, some terminated probationary workers have been reinstated and put on administrative leave, though that number is not currently known. That's following a March 13 federal court decision which found the firings had been carried out unlawfully. The reinstatement is temporary and one the Trump administration says it aims to see through to elimination. Hendricks says she isn't hopeful the temporary reinstatement will mean she'll eventually get to go back to work. It's left her and her family in a kind of limbo and looking for more secure options.
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Both my husband and I are working on finding jobs. We're just applying to some positions that we see in Bethel. We're happy to do anything. Pretty diverse skill sets. I think the biggest thing right now is just getting my four month old baby on some health insurance.
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On administrative leave, Hendricks can't resume her work, which means it's also meant the loss of a step in connecting the weather forecast to the community it served. The National Weather Service once had a fully staffed station in Bethel running manual balloon launches in addition to snowpack and climate reports. But over years of budget cuts, the station was closed, switching to automated balloons. Rick Thoman is a climatologist at the Alaska center for Climate Assessment and Policy, but before that he spent over 30 years working for the National Weather Service. Thoman says these in person weather stations served more than just a data collecting purpose. They were a dependable bridge between rural communities and the less and less predictable force of weather. The way Thoman describes it, these stations were the utopian opposite of automated bundled meteorologists saying hi as they measure snowpack levels, answering local calls to the station about the forecast.
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You had a handful of people that were there for a long time. Part of the community knew the ins and outs of the regional weather and were able to interface with the community and that was all lost.
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Though Hendrick says this job was the long term vision, she and her family are planning to stay in Bethel regardless of how things panned out and find new ways to keep doing climate work outside of the federal job in Bethel. I'm Samantha Watson.
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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 Theo Greenlee in Unalaska, Eric Stone and Alex Solomon in Juneau, Patrick Gilchrist in Fairbanks, Tim Ellis in Delta Junction, Ilona Nydin in Anchorage and Samantha Watson in Bethel. Our audio engineer is Chris Hyde, Tim Rocke is our producer and I'm Casey Grove. Good night. This is statewide news on Alaska Public Media.