Alix Soliman

As spring greens sprout up, black bears are emerging from hibernation and roaming around Juneau in search of food. 

They are opportunistic foragers, so they’ll go for trash, pet food and bird feeders if given the chance. Roy Churchwell, a regional management coordinator at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said residents should avoid leaving stinky or edible things out.

“Trash is the biggest attractant that causes folks to have problems with bears,” Churchwell said. 

He encourages people to follow the city ordinance to put garbage out for pick-up no earlier than 4 a.m. on trash day, and to otherwise keep bins in bear-resistant enclosures. The state euthanized a couple of bears last year after they were aggressive around trash bins downtown and entered a jewelry store on South Franklin Street.

Normally this time of year, bears should be eating grass and sedge in open areas and skunk cabbage that’s erupting from forest marshes. Later on, as salmon return upstream and berries grow plump, bears will frequent streams and shrublands.

Churchwell said hikers and others recreating outside should carry bear spray and keep dogs leashed. Another way to stay safe on trails is to call out “hey bear” every few minutes so they know to steer clear. 

Tourists visiting Juneau should be aware that it’s normal to see bears sauntering downtown.

“I know everyone wants to get their photo opportunity with a bear, but it’s better just to stand back and let the bear do what it’s going to do,” Churchwell said. 

If you encounter a black bear, he said the most important thing to do is stand your ground and don’t run. Stay calm and talk to the bear instead.

Alaska could lose several research institutions and a pipeline into science for budding researchers in the state if the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget become a reality. 

“Even the possibility of the disruption is affecting the students and the researchers,” said Joshua Hostler, a Ph.D. student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His research group met this week to discuss if they’d apply for a new federal funding opportunity. Because of the uncertainty, they probably won’t.

“Even if they do approve the funding, are they going to take it away later?” Hostler said.

He said that groups across the university system have been easing up on submitting research proposals for the same reason. 

The Trump administration proposed to slash the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget by about 27% and eliminate climate research in a memo leaked this month. The draft cuts would terminate funding for several research institutes that rely on the agency to finance their work in Alaska. Among those on the chopping block are the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES), the Alaska Ocean Observing System, Alaska Sea Grant, the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy and the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. 

The institutions share projects, faculty and student researchers with the University of Alaska so the state can understand and adapt to climate change while training the next generation of in-state experts.

Hostler is currently developing a seasonal lightning forecast system to help wildfire managers in Alaska plan for the upcoming fire season. Lighting strikes most in Interior Alaska, and that’s where the biggest wildfires in the state happen. Hostler is using machine learning models to predict the intensity of lightning a season in advance, so fire managers know where to put their resources. 

But he’s funded by a NOAA grant from the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office that would be eliminated under the draft cuts, and he applied for the grant with help from CICOES, which would also be cut. The funds cover Hostler’s wages of $29 per hour.

“Without that funding, I just wouldn’t be able to pay my rent,” he said. “I’d have to stop doing the research that I’m doing now and I’d have to go get a job somewhere.”

Hajo Eicken heads the International Arctic Research Center at UAF. He said these NOAA-funded institutes have helped create a pipeline for students to develop research in Alaska and then have opportunities to continue working here after graduating.

“These students, in particular, the Ph.D. students, they’re at the cutting edge of the field,” he said. “They help us respond much more effectively to various opportunities and challenges that we’re facing in Alaska.”

CeCe Borries-Strigle, a Ph.D. student at UAF who is set to finish her degree this summer, was planning to stay at the university for another year as a post-doctoral researcher to finish her work improving fire weather forecasts in the state. But, like Hostler, that project would be funded through a NOAA office and a research institute that may soon cease to exist.

Borries-Strigle is based in Kenai and was there in 2019 when the Swan Lake Fire jumped Sterling Highway and smoke choked the region for several months. She said she wants to stay in Alaska working on wildland fire research, but might have to change those plans due to funding uncertainty. 

“I think there’s going to be a huge generation of scientists that miss out on more early career training because the funding is not there,” she said. “Those jobs aren’t there.”

At Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Homer, 10 college students participate in community-driven research projects each year. Katherine Schake manages the reserve and said that past students have gone on to manage invasive European green crab with the Metlakatla Indian Community, track fish stocks at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and been hired on to continue freshwater research at the reserve. 

The reserve receives more than $800,000 per year from NOAA, and a 30% match from the University of Alaska Anchorage. That covers facilities and half of the staff’s salaries, Schake said. Without the base NOAA funds, she said that the staff would likely drop from 10 to four, and they wouldn’t be able to continue mentoring students.

One key service that students help with in Alaska is collecting data at sea. Seth Danielson leads an oceanography lab at UAF. His team tracks ocean conditions such as the temperature, nutrient content and salinity off the coast of Alaska over long time periods. That data, which shows how the seas are changing, feeds into how fisheries are managed.

“So NOAA develops the ecosystem status report for the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council every fall, and the council uses the assessments of ocean conditions as they set harvest levels for next year’s catch limits,” Danielson said. “So not all that data is collected only by NOAA — some of it’s collected by university researchers like us.”

More than 60% of Danielson’s funding comes from NOAA through the Alaska Ocean Observing System, one of the institutes that would be closed under the proposal. If that happens, he says he would probably have to lay off four of his five staff members. 

He’d lose more than staff. Last August, his team moored half a million dollars worth of equipment to the bottom of the ocean. To get the data it’s been collecting all year, they need funding to sail out there and retrieve it. 

“So not only is the data at risk and the students who are relying on that data for their graduate research, but the equipment itself is at risk — the batteries don’t last forever,” he said. 

If the batteries die before Danielson can secure funding for the expedition, all of the data would be lost.

In Juneau, Curry Cunningham runs a fisheries lab through UAF. He estimates that NOAA pays for at least 30% of his research and staff, and said that the bleak funding outlook means he’s planning to scale back the number of graduate students and research projects he’ll take on in the future.

Right now, Cunningham oversees six graduate students and four post-graduate researchers. Three of them are working on NOAA-funded projects. 

“A lot of the job opportunities that may have been available in the recent past are unlikely to be available for some of our students as they exit our program,” he said.  

The proposed cuts come as UAF has set a goal to become one of the top-tier research institutions in the nation, called R1 status. To qualify, the university needs to award an average of 70 doctorates per year. Laura Conner is vice chancellor for research at UAF. She said that roughly a quarter of the university’s operating budget comes from the federal government, and graduate researchers rely on federal dollars.

“It’s likely that large decreases in federal support could impact R1,” Conner said.  

But, she said it’s hard to predict how it will play out and UAF is still hopeful it can achieve the status. 

Even so, she said that a deep cut to NOAA funding, “will have a chilling effect on research across the nation, more generally.”

Staff at NOAA’s Juneau offices and the White House declined to comment, and final funding decisions have not yet been made. 

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Some federal workers in Juneau were fired again this month after the Supreme Court declined to reverse the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce. This comes after the employees were fired earlier this year, then reinstated last month.

The federal workforce is a mainstay for Southeast Alaska’s economy. According to numbers from Southeast Conference, a regional economic development organization, more than 2,000 federal jobs brought in nearly $200 million in earnings in 2023. In Juneau, the federal government is the second largest employer after the state with 709 workers, according to city data from last year.

Aaron Lambert was a fisheries management specialist at NOAA’s Alaska Regional Office in Juneau when he was part of the national wave of terminations in February. He was reinstated and put on administrative leave, with pay, in March when a U.S. District Court judge in Maryland ruled that the firings at several agencies were illegal. 

But Lambert was fired again on April 10. 

He said his supervisors didn’t know until he told them, and he hasn’t received a separation package yet. 

“It’s tough to make decisions right now,” Lambert said. “I honestly feel a little bit lost.”

He’s 41 years old. His wife works for the state and his young daughter goes to day care in the Federal Building downtown, where his former office is.

Lambert said he’s picked up some work through the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Curry Cunningham’s Juneau-based lab where he did his graduate research, but has taken a 50% pay cut. 

“Being back at the university, most of the graduate students there were hoping to get federal jobs in the future, whether it’s at NOAA or Fish and Wildlife Service or something similar to that — and the mood there is really not good,” he said. “People aren’t feeling great about their decision to go into science.”

In addition to the local economic effects of losing federal jobs, there are physical impacts when work goes undone. At NOAA, Lambert’s job was to estimate how many salmon are in Southcentral’s Cook Inlet, and how many need to reproduce each year to support a sustainable fishery. 

He said that without enough staff monitoring fish stocks, “certain fisheries may not open, or decisions might be made on information that’s not complete or that’s old, and so it could affect how well we sustainably harvest fisheries.”

Federal agencies are also losing support staff, like Taylee Escalante. She was an administrative assistant at the National Weather Service forecast office in Juneau, where she was born and raised. Like Lambert, she was fired in February, reinstated in March, and fired again this month. 

“It really sucks, feeling like I finally got a really good job, and … it’s not my own fault for it getting taken away,” she said.

She processed payroll and helped manage the budget, and said her job included finding ways for the office to save money. 

About 95% of the land in Southeast is federally owned. Robert Venables, the executive director of Southeast Conference, said that influences every economic sector here, including recreation, timber, mining and energy development.

“We’ve seen the president say it’s a priority of his administration to make the natural resources more readily available — and it’s going to take federal personnel to do that,” Venables said. “You have to have specialized employees to be able to permit, oversee, manage and support the priorities that the federal government has stated.”

The Supreme Court did not rule on the legality of the firings issued by the Trump administration, leaving that to be decided in lower courts where cases are pending. Federal agencies have not released a tally of the workers who were fired, nor have they reported reinstatements or re-firings.

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Tensions over a levee that’s taking shape in backyards along Juneau’s Mendenhall River have come to a head, with one homeowner filing a lawsuit against the city seeking to exempt his property or be paid for it. 

Win or lose — city officials say the levee will go up. 

Stephen Bower owns a home beside the river and alleges that officials did not go through the right process for approving the levee intended to keep floodwaters out of Mendenhall Valley homes. 

The court filing asserts that the barriers will not benefit Bower’s property, as his home was not damaged during the 2023 or 2024 glacial outburst floods.

“He doesn’t want to pay for this barrier,” said Scott Perkins, Bower’s attorney. “He doesn’t want this barrier on his property — and, in the alternative, if the barrier has to be on the property, he deserves to be compensated for the amount of land that he has lost.”

If he prevails, it would upend the city’s plan to pay for the levee. 

The lawsuit takes issue with an ordinance the Juneau Assembly passed — it created a Local Improvement District, or LID, in order to spread 40% of the barrier construction cost among 466 landowners who would pay about $6,300 each for flood protection over the next decade. Landowners had the opportunity to vote down the LID in February, but only a quarter formally objected. 

Both the U.S. Constitution and the Alaska Constitution forbid the government from taking private land for public use without paying them for it. “Taking” is the key word here.

Emily Wright, the city’s attorney, said the city isn’t taking the land, since Bower will still own the part of his property with the levee — which is meant to be temporary. But she said if a judge rules that the land is being taken, the city would have to pay all of the landowners hosting the barriers. 

“Then we probably have to pursue an eminent domain action, which requires just compensation, because if we’re not on people’s property because of the LID, we have to have permission to be on their property somehow,” Wright said. 

If a judge strikes down the ordinance that created the LID, the city also wouldn’t be able to charge any landowners for the project and the Assembly would have to decide whether and how to cover the estimated $3,132,000 that was to be divided among landowners. City Manager Katie Koester said that the full cost of the project won’t be known until it’s completed.

“We’re still actively pursuing grants, working with Tlingit and Haida on CDBG community development block grant funding,” Koester said. “We will continue to aggressively pursue those funding sources.”

The court filing also alleges that the city didn’t get the right permits through the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to do the project, which would have required an environmental assessment. Nate Rumsey, a city engineer, said the city didn’t need that permit because the last flood prompted an emergency declaration. Instead, the city got what’s called a nationwide permit through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Rumsey said he anticipated a lawsuit like this, and if Bower wins, the levee would still be built — with some alterations.

“We have alternatives, from an engineering perspective, available that could allow us to still provide protection to the rest of the community,” Rumsey said.  

The city has to file an answer to the complaint by the end of the month. Perkins said a handful of other landowners may soon join the lawsuit. A court date has not yet been set.

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More than 1,300 people in Juneau joined nationwide protests through the Hands-off rally at the Alaska State Capitol on Saturday.

It was Juneau’s largest demonstration opposing the Trump administration’s actions so far this year, and many protestors used music as a way to voice their frustration.

Two days before artists were set to perform on the mainstage at the Alaska Folk Festival, hundreds of demonstrators of all ages took to the street in front of the capitol in opposition to the deluge of executive orders President Donald Trump has issued in his first two months in office.

Toddlers in rainsuits and young children on tricycles waved miniature American flags as an organized list of singers and speakers took turns at the microphone.

Claire Richardson, a volunteer with the group, ReSisters, that organized Juneau’s version of the nationwide rally, led the crowd in a chant.

“We are here to tell Donald Trump and Elon Musk, hands off our democracy,” she said, as the crowd shouted back. “Hands off our children’s education. Hands off our jobs. Hands off our veterans. Hands off our bodies and gender choice. Hands off our elections. Hands off Medicaid. Hands off our libraries and museums. Hands off Social Security. Hands off Greenland and hands off Canada.”

People carried signs with slogans like “No Kings,” “Fight Fascism,” “Save our democracy,” and “The only immigrant taking away American jobs is Elon Musk.”

Heidi Drygas, executive director of the Alaska State Employees Association, called for protestors to stand up against Trump’s executive order stripping the collective bargaining rights of federal workers.

“We say this in organized labor a lot: an injury to one is an injury to all,” Drygas said. “We have to stand in solidarity with our federal workers, and that means holding our congressional delegation to account.”

Odin Brudie sang a rendition of “Stand by Me” by Ben E. King, and early childhood educator Supanika Ordóñez encouraged the crowd to take three actions in their everyday lives.

“Number one: shop local. Do not support large companies who have shown they don’t support our democracy,” Ordóñez said. “Two: share your stories. Continue those letters and calls.”

And third, she said, is practicing self-care and finding joy amid the political turmoil.

The rally ended with local musician Colette Costa leading the crowd in a spirited rendition of “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes.

Organizers with ReSisters say they plan to hold another rally on Saturday, April 19.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Supanika Ordóñez’s name and the headline has been updated to more accurately reflect Saturday’s turnout. 

 

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The low growl of machinery has been resounding through Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley for about two weeks, where dump trucks filled with sand rumble through backyards and the air smells of diesel. 

Robert Moore works for Admiralty Construction and spent his morning Wednesday inside HESCO barriers threading steel rods and coils through the metal cages that make up the growing flood wall. He said he’s grateful to be working on this project to protect Juneau neighborhoods from the annual glacial outburst flood. 

“I’m a carpenter by trade, so I want to protect those beautiful homes,” Moore said.

So far, crews have installed barriers on part of Riverside Drive across from Melvin Park, and have stacked them eight feet high along the river behind houses on Killewich Drive. The city plans for the levee to be done by mid-June — before a torrent of glacial meltwater is expected to release from Suicide Basin.  

But plans might change. The U.S. Geological Survey just released revised estimates of the volume and speed of the water that raged through Mendenhall River during the 2023 and 2024 floods. 

The preliminary estimate was that 34,400 cubic feet per second (cfs) were released into the river last year. Now, the USGS estimates it was actually 42,700 cfs. 

Jeff Conaway, associate director for water, ice and landscape dynamics at the USGS Alaska Science Center, said it’s typical for the agency to publish preliminary results right after a flood and then update them later.

“The reason we have a new rating is because there’s higher flows and the channel is changing,” he said.

Scientists physically measure those changes in the months after a flood to recalibrate their estimates, then go through a peer review process to verify the numbers.

“We’re out there with meters measuring the velocity and the depth and the width of the channel” which have shifted with erosion, altering the “relationship of how the lake drains and how much flow is coming down the river,” Conaway said. 

Nate Rumsey, Juneau’s Engineering & Public Works deputy director, said that the inundation maps that were scheduled to be released at the end of March had been based on the preliminary results since the revision wasn’t available at the time. 

When the new numbers came out, “it was a large enough shift that we needed to go back and rerun our models,” he said. 

Critically, the maps will model how well the flood wall will perform. Rumsey said that while the city is prepared to adjust its plans depending on new information, “we do feel extremely confident that even though we’re deciding to go back and recalibrate the models, that the HESCO barrier will work as it is intended to work.”

The maps will include inundation scenarios for a flood height up to 20 feet. Last year, the river set a record of 16 feet. A litany of changing factors influence how high glacial outburst floods could get, and USGS researchers say they don’t know yet what the maximum could be. 

Rumsey said that modeling for a 20-foot flood seems practical for the next several years. 

“It doesn’t seem like there’s knowledge that an event higher than 20 feet is foreseeable based on what we know right now,” he said. 

The city plans to publish the new inundation maps by the end of April.