Alaska Public Media

As the winter solstice approaches and daylight hours are short in Alaska, public safety, medical groups and other Alaska businesses are calling attention to pedestrian safety.

Marcia Howell, executive director of the Alaska Injury Prevention Center, said there are lots of things pedestrians can do to be safer while walking along Alaska’s roadways — including increasing visibility with bright-colored clothing, reflective tape and blinking lights.

“Things like crossing at crosswalks, but not trusting drivers to necessarily stop for you,” Howell said. “So just like for cyclists, we say make eye contact with a driver before you cross an intersection, if there’s maybe somebody at a stop light or a stop sign.”

Howell said the responsibility for safety is shared by drivers as well, especially in light of a recent accident near Beans Cafe, a homeless shelter in Anchorage, that sent four people to the hospital.

“There’s new signs up all around town where some of the high-risk areas are for both cyclists and pedestrians where there have been crashes in the recent past,” Howell said. “And, you know, paying attention to those signs and really when you’re in one of those areas, be on the lookout for people walking and maybe not always making the best choices.”

Howell said in 2014 about 20 percent of traffic fatalities in Alaska involved pedestrians, which is up 29 percent since 2005.

To address the needs of its clients in Anchorage, Beans Cafe is asking for donations of high-visibility gear, ranging from reflective tape and safety lights, to safety vests and jackets.

Big changes could be ahead for Anchorage’s taxi industry.

During it’s meeting Tuesday, the Assembly will vote on a measure that aims to eliminate the fixed number of cabs operating in the city, which would happen in a phased approach over the next few years.

“What the ordinance does is basically (end) the sort of monopoly the municipality has created around the number of taxi-cabs that are allowed to operate in the city, and moves towards a more open market,” said Bill Evans, the South Anchorage Assembly member who introduced the ordinance.

The measure would get rid of the secondary-market for cab permits, which can cost more than $100,000 according to documents submitted by the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce.

Currently, Anchorage has less than 200 taxi permits.

Evans’s measure would allow 20 more permits to come online every year for five years, transitioning toward a totally open market.

At that point, taxis would be more like a regular business license, with an annual fee of $1,980 to maintain annually.

Evans and other critics of Anchorage’s cab industry say there are not enough vehicles to meet demand at times like bar-break, and that far-flung parts of the municipality like the Hillside and Eagle River are underserved.

“It’s not deregulation of the taxi industry, because we’re still going to have all the same safety regulations on drivers and on vehicles that currently exist,” Evans said. “We’re only changing the number of taxis that can be allowed to operate.”

The measure would not bring in app-based cab services like Uber and Lyft, which are currently blocked from operating in Alaska under state laws.

There are pieces of the bill which open the door to such companies, and Evans is planning on introducing a subsequent measure that would give them the green light if state law’s change.

There’ll be a separate measure also up for a vote on whether to attach a $1 charge to cab fares where the customer pays with a credit card.

Public testimony before the Assembly starts after 6 p.m. in the Loussac Library.

In the last few weeks, as commercial marijuana inches closer to a reality across Alaska, a lot of people are asking: why doesn’t Anchorage have a pot shop yet?

After store openings in Fairbanks, Juneau and Valdez, Anchorage is still weeks away from having an open retailer.

Jane Stinson is one of the owners of Enlighten Alaska, a business trying to open on a busy corner in the Spenard neighborhood. She showed off a brightly painted space with shelving and half-finished construction projects.

“This room is where we’ll be selling most of our marijuana products, in fact all of them,” Stinson said.

The store was on track to open any week now. But over the Thanksgiving holiday it was robbed.

“Everything that had a plug was gone, which was mostly construction equipment,” Stinson said.

The thieves even stole a broom. Stinson said the theft set them back about five days and $5,000, pushing them even further past their opening deadline. A main reason for the delay in opening is the difficulty it had getting the older building it rents up to par with the city’s elaborate building codes.

“We have to come up to compliance, and it’s costing a lot of money to make sure that we have enough parking, snow removal, gates around our dumpsters and those kinds of things,” Stinson said.

Anchorage revised it’s building code in 2013, implementing the so-called “new Title 21.” It requires that when a property like this goes through what’s known as a “change of use,” becoming, for example, a legal weed store, it has to be physically improved in the process. That means ironing out many of the old design features that are out-of-date and no longer acceptable in the building code.

To demonstrate, Stinson showed off the tiny parking-lot out her back door.

“The problem is is that we have parking for maybe two cars here,” Stinson said, and explained she’s working on a parking arrangement with neighboring businesses to accommodate the issue.

Right now, getting these kind of building features up to modern standards is the biggest reasons why Anchorage retail shops are weeks behind their counterparts elsewhere in the state.

Dick Traini is a long-serving member of the Anchorage Assembly, who explained these additional prerequisites are “just the cost of doing business” after a recent meeting on marijuana business licenses at the Planning and Zoning Department.

“People in the industry, no matter what you do, are going to say you’re trying to be obstructionist,” Traini said.

Since the state-wide passage of Ballot Measure 2 in 2014, Traini has led the charge adding local regulatory steps for would-be pot businesses. Measure that do not exist elsewhere — or if they do, not as robustly.

“Because we’re the largest urban area in Alaska. The dynamics that come with an urban area requires us to be a little more precise than say Fairbanks, or Valdez or any other place.”

The key mechanism for giving Anchorage officials more control over the marijuana industry is enforcing the Title 21 building code through a land-use permit, which some say is just as complicated and dense as the state license application.

Traini insists the Assembly is not trying to block marijuana businesses, but in keeping with the will of voters is treating pot like alcohol.

For Traini, that means not replicating what he sees as the mistakes of the alcohol industry — a perennial source of problems for the Assembly. It comes up in the form of bar break violence, crime, and a perceived imbalance of influence stemming from the state having more control over alcohol licensing than local governments.

“If we have a problem, we’re the ones that have to deal with it,” Traini said. “The state’s not gonna send their code-enforcement officers to deal with a bad licensee or a problem. They’re gonna say ‘we really can’t deal with that.’ It needs to be done here locally. It needs to be a code enforcement issue that’s handled by the citizens of this town.”

Traini cites the recent example of a business that was set to officially open, until it was claimed the owner was giving away small amounts of marijuana on the premise. The state took no punitive action after reviewing the evidence, but the Assembly opted to delay the business’s final inspections.

The issue is exacerbated by what properties are actually available to new cannabis businesses.

Erika McConnell is the city’s marijuana coordinator, and during an interview at her office explained that since so many marijuana businesses are moving into older properties there is more work that has to be done to bring them up to code.

“They can’t get finances from banks, can’t get investments from out of state from larger companies, (so) they presumably don’t have very much capital available to them,” McConnell said. “So they have to look for these properties that are older, or vacant or less well-kept-up.”

McConnell also pointed out that states like Colorado and Washington that have implemented commercial cannabis already had a medical marijuana industry up and running. There were buildings, businesses, capital, and regulations that could be adapted for the recreational industry. Alaska didn’t have that. Here, the legal pot industry is starting from scratch.

Of the handful of retail shops closest to opening in the municipality, two of them, Alaska Fireweed and Dankorage, say they’ll be ready later this month — with the caveat, though, that there might not be enough product to keep on the shelves for more than a few hours. Because even with just a few stores open in Alaska, demand, so far, is outpacing supply.

A new federal rule will ban smoking in public housing nationwide. The notice was released Wednesday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and will take effect in 18 months. But Alaska is looking to do that a lot sooner.

Cathy Stone is the Director of the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, which runs public housing throughout the state.

“(In) April or May, when it’s a little warmer and people can adjust to the requirement that they have to go outside to smoke,” Stone said.

The federal ban applies to lit tobacco products like cigarettes, pipes and cigars. It doesn’t apply to electronic cigarettes, but the state is leaning towards eliminating those as well. Smoking marijuana in public housing is a federal offense regardless of state law.

Stone said that the reason Alaska’s ban would come early is because the state’s public housing has already been developing its own non-smoking policy.

“So it was just very ironic,” Stone said, “That this announcement came out on the same day we were having a board meeting and advising our board that in January we would come out with our own policy.”

Here’s how the state’s draft policy works: residents receive mailed notice of the change and are allowed to submit comments. Next, residents sign a lease agreement regarding the new rule, and if residents are caught smoking they receive several warnings before an eviction process begins. Stone said the intent is not to kick people out, but to encourage compliance. And residents are on board.

“It’s actually been requested by multiple residents,” Stone said. “We’ve done two surveys of residents, and the majority did not want to have smoking in units. The majority of the smokers even said they thought we shouldn’t allow smoking in the units.”

Bethel has 117 single-family public housing units. Over 500 people live in the units and over half are children. Stone says that the ban would prevent staff and non-smokers from being exposed to secondhand smoke within the housing and would save the department money.

“It’s very expensive to turn a unit once someone’s been smoking in it. Sometimes you have to replace the carpet. You have to paint the wall multiple times,” Stone said.

All that work can cost an extra 30 percent to 50 percent and tack an extra two to three days onto the time required to flip a non-smoker’s unit.

Once the transition begins, Alaska’s public housing wants to offer resources like hotlines and classes to help people quit smoking for when the ban takes effect. Those resources would vary by area and interest.

FBI statistics show the number of hate crimes is on the rise nationally, but very few are reported in Alaska.

Local officials say that’s not necessarily because they aren’t happening, they just don’t know about them. A recent class taught community members how to recognize and report a hate crime.

When someone commits a crime like vandalism or assault because of a bias against a certain group, that’s a hate crime.

That includes things like spray painting racist messages on a mosque or threatening to hurt a transgender person for moving into a certain neighborhood.

Some things – like harassment or vandalism at a school – are usually investigated at a local level.

Some are taken on by the FBI.

FBI special agent Steve Forrest, who taught the class, said it’s often really hard to prove that a violent act is a hate crime. Hate has to be an obvious factor – like someone shouting derogatory terms while assaulting someone else.

“Other hate crimes that involve violence, if you’re going to report those as a hate crime, we’re gonna need to prove that the individual targeted someone because of their race,” Forrest said. “So any sort of history, maybe, of racial animus toward a group. Maybe something we could use to build a case if it’s not more obvious than that.”

Forrest said only eight hate crimes were reported last year and none were reported directly to the FBI. But he doesn’t think that’s because they aren’t happening.

“I really doubt that we’re getting full reporting on the incidents that happen,” he said. “And that could be that they not being reported to the police properly or the police aren’t categorizing them as hate crimes. We don’t get a lot of calls about them, but I think the public in general has a lack of awareness that the public would investigate a hate crime.”

Forrest said he wants people to call him if they suspect a hate crime or see vandalism at a religious building. But some things that people may think fall into the category, like hate speech, are legally protected.

“People say a lot of horrible things, unfortunately, and there’s not much we can do about that,” Forrest said. “But it can evolve into threats and harassment. It can evolve into harassment, or some type of thing, but for the most part that’s going to be free speech, as bad as that may seem.”

Bajek Deng, from the South Sudanese community in Anchorage, attended the class so he could teach others about their rights.

He said he sees discrimination but many people in the community don’t know that they can report it to local police and the FBI.

“We need to learn the law and to tell our community that some people they don’t know their rights and some people do something bad to them but they don’t know where they go,” Deng said.

Lucy Hansen with the Polynesian Association of Alaska helped coordinate the event

“You know with what’s been going on around in the world and with our new leaders for America coming up, I think it’s an important time for everyone to learn and understand hate crimes and to know your rights as an individual,” Hansen said.

Hansen said oftentimes people don’t report hate crimes because they are afraid of interacting with the police but classes like this can ease the problem.

FBI agent Forrest said they want to know about potential hate crimes. Even if they don’t rise to the level of federal crimes, it can help the agency track potential trends and threats.

You can call the Anchorage field office at (907) 276-4441.

Updated 9:37 a.m. Dec. 2: The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development announced Thursday the new vendor for statewide student assessments, to replace the problem-plagued Alaska Measures of Progress test.

Brian Laurent, with the state Department of Education and Early Development, said the company has a history in Alaska.

“DRC obviously has experience with technology and infrastructure in Alaska,” Laurent said. “Specifically the challenges in parts of our state; specifically rural Alaska with the technology.”

The corporation partnered with the state for nearly a decade to administer the statewide student assessment prior to the more recent Alaska Measures of Progress test. The company currently administers the state’s English language proficiency assessments.

The state’s former test was plagued by technical issues, which interrupted testing and delayed results.

Teachers and school officials also questioned the usefulness of the old test’s results, saying it lacked detailed enough information to properly assess students’ learning.

Laurent believes the new test addresses those concerns.

“With the example reports that were provided, just on their own, were an improvement compared to the reports that our previous assessment vendor released in 2015 for the Alaska Measures of Progress,” Laurent said.

Laurent said some of the customization options for the reports include the balance between text and graphics, and the types of graphics used in the reports in a effort to make them more user friendly for teachers, parents and others who may be reviewing the results.

While the vendor has been chosen, many of the details of the test itself have not yet been finalized.

An exact price tag has not been determined, though Laurent said it will fit within the state’s $4.45 million assessment budget for the upcoming year – of which, the federal government contributes approximately $3.5 million.

The corporation assessment covers English language, arts and math as well as separate, less-frequent testing in science.

The next testing window for Alaska schools is March 28 through April 28, 2017.

Alaska announces new vendor for statewide student tests

Originally posted 3 p.m. Dec. 1, 2016: The Alaska education department has chosen a new vendor for its statewide student tests after glitches earlier this year prompted cancellation of the tests.

The department announced Thursday that tests from Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corp. will be given to students in 2017.

In April, the department cited technical disruptions and concerns with the validity of tests results in cancelling computer-based testing administered by the Kansas-based Achievement and Assessment Institute.
Districts will be able to decide whether to give the new tests by paper or computer.

The estimated testing budget for the current school year is about $4.5 million. The contract is being negotiated. The department says the federal government contributes about $3.5 million annually toward the cost of Alaska’s statewide testing.

The department said it considered comments from teachers, superintendents, educational groups and others in choosing Data Recognition Corp. from among six applicants.

— Associated Press