Alix Soliman

Proposed public land sales in Alaska are no longer included in the GOP budget bill that is making its way through the Senate this week. 

A mandate to sell somewhere between 2 and 3 million acres across the western U.S. was first struck down by the Senate Parliamentarian last week because it was irrelevant to the budget. U.S. Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who introduced the provision, then tried to write about 1.2 million acres back in. 

But on Saturday, Lee withdrew the land sale provision completely, announcing on X that it was because he was unable to prevent the land from being sold to foreign interests or BlackRock.

Republicans, including U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, initially said selling the land would allow it to be developed into affordable housing. But much of the identified public lands, which could have included areas of the Tongass and Chugach National Forests and remote parts of the Interior, are not suited for housing development. 

The idea sparked public outrage among outdoor recreation enthusiasts from across the political spectrum. Some Republican representatives from Colorado, Idaho and Montana even spoke out against the sell-off. U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan indicated support for the land sales before they were stripped from the bill. 

Senate Republicans aim to pass the bill by July 4.

Update, Tuesday 11 a.m.:

The glacial outburst flood event on the Taku River has ended.

According to an update from the National Weather Service, the river crested early Tuesday morning without reaching flood stage. Water levels will continue declining throughout the day.

“People who live on or near the Taku River should remain alert of the river conditions and potential remaining debris in the water. Otherwise no impacts are expected,” the update reads.

Original story:

A glacial outburst flood is underway on the Taku River south of Juneau. Although water that was held back by glacial ice is draining out of Lake No Lake, the National Weather Service forecasts that the release is not expected to breach the Taku River’s banks. 

Aaron Jacobs, a senior hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau, said the release started Sunday night. To issue the forecast, he looked at water volumes that burst from Lake No Lake in past years and snowpack data from this winter. 

“Since we are about below normal on our snowpack, we’re not seeing any additional inflow into Lake No Lake that would have put our water volume above what the normal water volume released would be,” Jacobs said.

The water is expected to crest at 41.9 feet around 10 a.m. on July 1. That’s below the height that would make it a minor flood, which is 43 feet, so no flooding is expected at this time. 

But Jacobs said boaters should be vigilant.

“People in the area should be aware of any debris floating down the river and then also into Taku Inlet,” he said. 

Jacobs says the National Weather Service will update the forecast if there are major changes.

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A mandate to sell millions of acres of public land was struck from the Republican budget reconciliation bill that’s moving through the U.S. Senate this week. That’s after the Senate parliamentarian ruled on Monday that the public land sales didn’t clearly affect the budget. But some parcels of land might make it back into the bill. 

Two days before the parliamentarian’s ruling, dozens of people gathered on a remote beach on Prince of Wales Island, taking a picture with a large wooden board painted with three red words: NOT FOR SALE. Then they sent the photo to lawmakers.

“When we were holding that sign, I think we all felt upset,” Elsa Sebastian said. “This was happening for reasons that we didn’t understand.”

Sebastian lives in a small community near Port Protection. It’s a remote area surrounded by the flora and fauna of the Tongass National Forest — and she said that’s why people live here.

“It’s our way of life,” she said. “It’s being able to continue to hunt and fish and play and explore and, like, find ourselves in these places.”

Sebastian said the lack of public engagement from lawmakers felt like a betrayal of trust, and privatizing parts of the Tongass would significantly affect rural communities like hers.

“We need ultimate transparency when it comes to decisions around our public lands,” she said. “And that’s not what we got this time around.”

U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah,  added the proposal to the mega bill that would have required the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to sell off roughly two to three million acres of land across 11 western states. 

National parks, monuments and other protected lands were excluded, but roughly 82 million acres in Alaska could have been eligible for those sales, including sections of the Tongass and Chugach National Forests and parts of the Interior. 

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska,  told the Anchorage Daily News last week that public land sales would help Alaska develop affordable housing. But much of the identified public lands are not suited for housing development. 

The Senate parliamentarian decided that the mandate breaks a rule ensuring that reconciliation bills like this one focus on fiscal issues rather than unrelated policy changes and ordered the section’s removal.

Lee is reportedly revising the public land sale proposal to try to include BLM lands within five miles of town borders. According to The Hill, that would include a sale of somewhere between 600,000 and 1.2 million acres of BLM land nationwide. The new proposal is expected to exclude National forest lands, so the Tongass and Chugach National Forests might not be affected.

Joe Plesha, Murkowski’s communications director, said the language is currently evolving, but it’s now about selling public lands purely for housing and local needs associated with housing. He said there might also be provisions for a review process. 

“Eligible BLM lands could be made available to build housing for communities after a significant process that involves nominations, consultation, review and first right of refusal for local governments,” Plesha said in a statement to KTOO. 

The Forest Service and BLM declined to comment on pending legislation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which manages the Forest Service, did not respond. 

Kate Glover is a Juneau-based attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm. She said the Forest Service and BLM already have the authority to sell or exchange land under current laws.

“But in those cases, the agencies have to take a look at the public interest and decide whether it makes sense to sell the land or not,” Glover said.

She said what’s different about a mandate is that it would require sales whether or not they are in the public interest.

Also, Glover said that selling steep and rugged public lands won’t solve Alaska’s affordable housing problem because many of those areas are not connected to existing infrastructure. 

“It’s more likely that that’s going to allow for building new mansions and second homes for people from out of state,” she said. 

The Wilderness Society published a map showing swaths of land that could qualify for sales under the original bill, fueling public outcry on social media. Josh Hicks is the organization’s director of conservation campaigns in Denver, Colorado. He said the controversial idea to sell off public lands is widely unpopular. 

“We’re seeing people from across the political spectrum in opposition to this proposal,” Hicks said. “A lot of folks in the sporting community who go and hunt and fish in our public lands absolutely are rising up.”

Some Republican representatives from Colorado, Idaho and Montana spoke out against the sell-off. Alaska Congressman Nick Begich III, who voted for the bill when it passed through the House, did not respond to a request for comment. Sen. Dan Sullivan, who has indicated support for public land sales in Alaska, also did not respond. 

Amendments to the bill have not yet been made public, and it’s unclear whether revised public land sales will be approved by the parliamentarian. Senate Republicans are aiming to vote on the bill by July 4. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced plans to rescind the Roadless Rule yesterday, aligning with President Donald Trump’s executive order earlier this year to end a ban on constructing roads in undeveloped areas of the Tongass National Forest in order to stimulate more logging in the region.

The Roadless Rule has flip-flopped multiple times since it was established to protect undeveloped lands in 2001. It was rolled back during Trump’s first term before being reinstated by former President Joe Biden. 

Mike Jones is the Tribal President for the Organized Village of Kasaan on Prince of Wales Island, an area of the Tongass that has been logged heavily. 

“It’s the largest temperate rainforest in the world … it’s the northern lung of the planet,” Jones said of the Tongass.

He said new roads and additional logging would degrade the landscape and harm salmon streams that people rely on. 

Rolling back the Roadless Rule in Alaska hasn’t been popular in the past. When the U.S. Forest Service considered exempting the state from the federal Roadless Rule back in 2019, more than 144,000 people submitted public comments and most were opposed to opening up the Tongass to new roads. 

U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan both welcomed the rollback. 

“Repeal will not lead to environmental harm, but it will help open needed opportunities for renewable energy, forestry, mining, tourism, and more in areas that are almost completely under federal control,” Murkowski said in a statement today.

Kate Glover is an attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm that has challenged past rescissions of the Roadless Rule on behalf of tribes, conservation nonprofits and tourism and fishing groups. 

“It’s disappointing to see the administration doing something that’s so clearly contrary to what the public is asking for and is contrary to the public interest,” Glover said. 

More than 9.2 million acres of the Tongass are inventoried as roadless areas under the rule. Nearly 330,000 acres of the 16.7 million-acre forest are considered suitable for logging, according to the U.S. Forest Service’s latest 2016 management plan. That plan is currently going through a revision. 

The USDA did not respond to a request for comment. Viking Lumber and Alcan Timber, the largest logging companies operating in the Tongass, also did not respond.

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Invasive species are everywhere, but the people who dedicate their lives to battling them believe they can win, especially in Alaska. 

Last week was the state’s invasive species awareness week. On a walking tour around downtown Juneau, Emily Reed, the regional invasive plant coordinator at the Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition identified some of the pesky plants that have taken root in the region. 

She started with a tree just a few steps outside KTOO’s front door. It’s an invasive European mountain ash and it’s blooming with small white flowers that will give rise to bright orange and red berries in the early fall. 

Reed said that birds choose to eat these berries over native berries. 

“Because the birds fly long distances and the seeds can germinate after being pooped out, we’re finding these in really kind of more natural areas,” she said.

There are thousands of European mountain ashes around Southeast, she estimates. They are still planted ornamentally here, and are hard to get rid of because they can resprout from a stump. Reed says the best way to kill the tree is to apply a bit of herbicide to the stump after chopping it down. 

A non-native species becomes ‘invasive’ when it throws off the balance of an ecosystem and starts taking over. Alaska’s geographic isolation and low population make Reed optimistic that invasions can be kept at bay, since the state isn’t completely overrun by noxious weeds yet — unlike most of the U.S. 

She walks down Egan Drive to the back of the Four Points hotel parking lot, where the hillside is covered in one of the most invasive plants in the world: Japanese knotweed. The plant mainly reproduces by spreading underground rhizomes, which are modified stems that are known to crack roads and building foundations.

“They go pretty deep, and a new plant can regenerate from a piece of rhizome as small as your fingernail,” she said. 

That makes ripping the plant out of the ground futile and controlling it extremely difficult. She and her colleagues return to the same patches year after year to apply herbicide to the plants. 

Reed continues up Main Street and takes a left on Fourth Street, where creeping buttercup blooms along the sidewalk with yellow flowers reaching toward the sun. This invasive plant has spread through most of Southeast Alaska, and it does well wherever there is bare ground. 

“We’re in this kind of final stage of invasion, where it’s more like we’re not going to get rid of it,” she said.

So instead of trying to get rid of it, Reed says she’s focused on keeping it from creeping into new habitats. She’s particularly worried about uplift meadows, which are tidal flats and marshes that are now rising above the seawater as the land sheds the weight of melting glaciers. They offer a lot of bare ground for buttercup to take over.

Reed disappears into the brush behind an old, broken-down truck on Village Street and emerges with a long stalk that has small white flowers on top. 

“Yeah, they can be quite satisfying to pull, you just have to be really on top of it,” she said, gesturing to the long taproot.

It’s garlic mustard, and it’s on the opposite end of the invasion spectrum. So far, Reed says Juneau is the only place in Alaska where garlic mustard has been found, though it has invaded much of the lower 48 already.

“It’s also what we call allelopathic, which means that it puts out chemicals into the soil that prevent other plants from growing,” Reed said.

That gives it a competitive advantage over native plants.

But she has hope about managing invasive plants in Alaska because many of them, like garlic mustard, are in the early stages of invasion.

“An ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure,” Reed said. “We’re in a place where we can be thinking about prevention and rapid response, which is very different than anywhere else I’ve lived or studied invasive species.”

The more people know what to look out for, the better those efforts can succeed. Reed recommends learning to identify the invaders near you, washing your shoes and brushing your dog when leaving an area and taking pictures and GPS locations to report invasives when you get home. 

As for aquatic invaders, Juneau has not yet seen European green crab, but appearances in the Metlakatla Indian Community and Ketchikan have confirmed that it is spreading north. The Alaska Department of Fish & Game recommends Alaskans keep an eye out for green crab and other potential aquatic invaders like zebra and quagga mussels, and to report sightings so that ecosystem managers can quickly respond.

Reports can go to the Alaska Invasive Species Partnership, the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, or the Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition. Reed says it’s helpful to use an app called iNaturalist to make sure you include all the information needed to make a report.

The City and Borough of Juneau and the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska released a draft risk assessment for the capital city on June 17.

The updated risk assessment will help the city and tribe update the borough’s hazard mitigation plan, which expired in 2017. That plan will include projects to reduce the threat of hazards and a draft is expected in July. 

The 328-page risk assessment includes risks posed by severe weather, fires, tsunamis, floods, erosion, glacier changes, avalanches, volcanoes, dam failures, cybersecurity and pollution. Unlike the last assessment, this draft includes social and cultural vulnerabilities including food security and sovereignty, sensitive sacred sites and housing.

Sabrina Grubitz, the public safety manager for Tlingit & Haida, said this is the first time the tribe has been included in the borough’s hazard planning. 

“We want to make sure that that traditional knowledge is folded into the risk assessment and considered and how we approach disasters,” Grubitz said. “We have a lot of value to add to it.”

She said the next iteration of the draft should include more traditional place names and stories about disasters that have been passed down. 

Ryan O’Shaughnessy, the city’s emergency manager, said that an updated plan is required for Juneau to qualify for FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, which the city plans to apply for to alleviate flooding in the Mendenhall Valley. 

“We are pursuing a really aggressive timeline with this particular plan update because we want to be eligible for an application deadline in October,” he said. “We’re hoping to use this plan to apply for funds that could help us find a long-term mitigation solution for Suicide Basin.”

Community members are encouraged to read the draft and attend a public meeting on June 30 at 5:30 p.m. Residents can submit public comments via email to laura.young@fairweather.com by July 1.