Alix Soliman

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Canagold representatives faced resistance from residents about their proposed New Polaris underground gold mine at an open house in Juneau last month. 

The mine site is a remote area where the Tulsequah River joins the Taku River in British Columbia, around 40 miles northeast of Juneau. As the mine goes through its environmental assessment across the border, some Alaskans feel they don’t have a meaningful say in the process. 

The Taku River runs through the traditional homelands of the T’aaḵu Kwáan. Butch Laiti is president of the Douglas Indian Association, which represents the T’aaḵu Kwáan. He said the tribe isn’t willing to gamble with the health of the river.

“We’re not gonna back down or give way, because there’s too much at stake here,” Laiti said. “If we lose the Taku, and then that’s it, it won’t come back. And that’s the bottom line, right there.”

The mine is projected to produce around 800,000 ounces of gold over about a decade. The project is part of a controversial wave of mining expansion in British Columbia upstream of the Taku, Stikine, and Unuk Rivers in Southeast Alaska.

Laiti said past mining projects in Canada set a precedent of damaging and neglecting the rivers that flow into Southeast. 

“I know you understand our nervousness, but a lot of that’s from the history of all the mining that comes out of BC,” Laiti said.

The Tulsequah Chief mine, located just across the river from the New Polaris site, was abandoned in 1957 and has been leaching unsafe levels of toxins, including aluminum, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury and zinc into the Taku River since. 

Canagold CEO Catalin Kilofliski said that the province is cleaning up the site, but it could take a decade. And he said it’s given mining a bad rap. 

“I think the issues you mentioned, unfortunately, that’s the legacy of mining,” Kilofliski said. This is the legacy we are faced with — miners too.” 

That legacy has continued. 

For instance, the Premier gold and silver mine in British Columbia was found responsible for releasing toxic materials into the Portland Canal Watershed for years near Hyder, Alaska, and was fined in March. Also this spring, the Red Chris copper mine in British Columbia was found to have leached heavy metals into the Stikine River Watershed. In September, the province fined that mine for failing to monitor the water. Last year, a failure at the Eagle gold mine in Yukon spilled cyanide into the Yukon River Basin. 

The state of Alaska signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with British Columbia a decade ago meant to keep Alaskans informed about water quality beneath existing mines and to engage them in the public process for developing new mines. But some Alaskans say it’s not enough to make sure they’re heard or to protect the waters they depend on. 

So far, almost all of the public comments submitted on New Polaris were written with concern for the lower reaches of the Taku River in Alaska. 

Heather Hardcastle has been fishing at the mouth of the Taku River since she was a kid, and said the mine could harm this essential salmon run. She’s a campaign advisor at SalmonState, a nonprofit that advocates for salmon habitat across borders, and said the provincial government isn’t required to take Alaskans’ concerns into consideration. 

“We still don’t have any kind of binding forum through which those of us downstream have any meaningful say in whether or not and how a mining project is developed,” Hardcastle said. 

The U.S. has a treaty with Canada called the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. It states that “waters flowing across the boundary shall not be polluted on either side to the injury of health or property on the other.” 

Despite pressure from Southeast cities and Alaska’s congressional delegation, the federal government has yet to raise the issue with the International Joint Commission, which is a framework for resolving issues under the treaty. 

Canadian officials are mandated to consult with Indigenous peoples on projects that could affect their territories. There’s an ongoing dispute about whether that mandate extends consultation to tribes across the border. 

Canagold signed an agreement with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, whose territory is on the Canada-side of the border, that it won’t build the mine without their consent. It’s unclear when the First Nation will decide. The Taku River Tlingit First Nation did not respond to requests for comment.

New Polaris is now going through Canada’s environmental assessment process. A representative from Canagold said mine construction could start in 2027 at the earliest. 

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Juneau is mulling over how to prepare for next year’s glacial outburst flood.

The city’s temporary levee protected most Mendenhall Valley neighborhoods from a record-breaking flood this summer, but it needs repairs and, potentially, some upgrades. Now, the U.S. government shutdown could complicate the city’s decision-making process.

City staff presented major questions about ways to protect Valley neighborhoods from flooding to Juneau Assembly members during a committee meeting Monday. The four largest questions are how high to build the levee for next year, whether to expand it, whether to sponsor a buyout program for those left unprotected and how to pay for those projects. 

In an interview, Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said the answers to some of those questions will depend on federal information and funding that might be delayed by the U.S. government shutdown. 

“That’s what we’ll be working on over the next week, is figuring out kind of who’s still at the table, who still can be at the table, and trying to kind of keep things moving as best as we can,” Barr said.

How high should the levee be?

Barr said the model that projected how the city’s levee would perform during the flood wasn’t entirely correct. 

“We certainly saw things in real life this summer that the model did not predict,” Barr said at Monday’s meeting. “And we got a little bit lucky with the height of the HESCOs and where things landed.”

The levee leaked, flooding a couple dozen homes. The city’s memo to Assembly members said floodwater also flowed over the top of the levee in some areas. 

So, how high should they build it? Experts won’t be able to forecast the height of the next glacial outburst flood until it’s underway. But record-breaking floods have grown over the past three years. It reached 15 feet in 2023, then 16 feet in 2024. The flood this August made the record at 16.65 feet. 

Barr said the city won’t be able to make an educated guess about how high to build the levee until researchers publish the data from this year’s flood. That data will include the volume of Suicide Basin, the speed of the torrent and how the river channel has changed. 

Aaron Jacobs is the senior service hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau and a member of Juneau’s flood science team. He said the agency is exempt from the federal furloughs that began Wednesday because its work is deemed essential for public safety.

“The Weather Service work is going to go on,” Jacobs said. “So our analysis and our work of looking at the data and forecasting the events and stuff like that, that’s still going to go forward.”

The flood science team is made up of federal workers at the National Weather Service and the U.S. Geological Survey and scientists at the University of Alaska Southeast.

Jason Amundson, a glaciologist at UAS, said the university’s flood researchers haven’t been affected by the shutdown. But he said one of his colleagues at USGS went up to Suicide Basin on Tuesday to maintain the monitoring equipment before the agency’s staff were furloughed the next day. 

“He was able to get up and make sure the cameras were up and running and should be hopefully good to go through the winter,” Amundson said. 

He said he thinks the team will be able to get data to city decision-makers without delays, but that could depend on how long the shutdown lasts.

How to fund levee upkeep?

The second big question is how to pay for the levee’s ongoing maintenance. The stacked baskets of sand, called HESCO barriers, sustained an estimated $1 million in damage during the August flood. 

Earlier this year, the city used what’s called a local improvement district, or LID, to split the cost of building the barriers 60/40 with landowners in the flood zone. It was controversial. 

Barr said it might not be the best way to pay for upkeep. 

“LIDs aren’t really a mechanism to care for ongoing costs,” he said. “LIDs are a great mechanism to pay for big one-time upfront capital expenditures. That’s what they’re designed for.” 

The other options are to pay for upkeep with general city funds or to establish a service area, a designation that allows the city to offer specific services in that area. It means the city could charge landowners in the flood zone an additional tax. It would need a majority vote from registered city voters within service area bounds. 

Barr said one drawback is that the landowners wouldn’t know in advance how much they’d have to pay in additional taxes each year.

Expand the temporary levee?

The third major question is whether to extend the temporary levee to protect more properties. A proposed Phase 2 of the HESCO project would expand the levee both upstream and downstream, so it would stretch from Back Loop Bridge to just before Juneau International Airport. 

Phase 2 is estimated to cost roughly $19 million. That’s more than double the expected cost of the existing barrier, which hasn’t been finalized yet. Barr said it would be much more expensive because the riverbanks would need more boulders to armor against erosion. 

“There’s a much, much larger number of properties that aren’t already sufficiently armored,” he said.  

City staff said Monday that getting help paying for an expansion through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or an act of Congress ahead of the next flood will depend on how long the shutdown lasts and what funding is still available when it ends. Either way, if the city decides to go forward with Phase 2, the Assembly will probably need to find a way to pay for at least some of it — perhaps through another LID or a service area.

But there’s another potential project that could expand flood protection. City Manager Katie Koester said the Army Corps is talking about a solution that could come sooner than its original seven-to-10-year timeline. 

Koester said Army Corps staff are working on a recommendation for what that solution would be and construction could start as early as the end of 2027. But she said moving that quickly would restrict the opportunity for public feedback, and the project still depends on continued federal funding. 

City staff said they don’t know where that plan stands now amid the shutdown, but if it moves forward, it could influence how much of Phase 2 the city decides to build.

A spokesperson at the Army Corps said agency staff were still working as of Wednesday. The spokesperson said it’s too early to comment on how quickly an expedited enduring solution could come.

Sponsor a View Drive buyout?

Finally, the fourth major question is whether to sponsor a federal buyout program for View Drive, the street that’s been hit hardest by flooding and is left unprotected by the city’s levee. A buyout would pay residents to leave, demolish their homes and transform the land into a park. 

If all 18 eligible properties participated, it would cost around $25 million. If the Juneau Assembly votes to sponsor it, the city would have to pay around $6 million. Federal staff working on this project at the National Resources Conservation District have been furloughed due to the shutdown and were unable to respond to a request for comment. 

The city plans to hold a special Assembly meeting to discuss these questions in detail on Oct. 30. City staff said final decisions won’t be made until December. 

Update: This story has been updated to clarify a statement made by a city official and include a statement from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center, or AK CASC, is so far spared from closures coming to a third of such climate science centers across the country, as first reported by The Washington Post. 

In other regions of the U.S., some centers are expected to run out of money soon because the federal government has stalled funding and essential agreements with universities that the U.S. Geological Survey needs to manage the centers.

But Alaska’s center is safe for now.

Kristin Timm, AK CASC’s university co-director at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said the center’s funding through next summer has already been disbursed. 

“But of course, we’re worried about how long our funding will continue to last,” she said.

The center’s budget is roughly $2.2 million dollars per year. AK CASC signed an agreement with the University of Alaska in 2023 that maintains their partnership through July of 2028, which should ensure the center’s existence until then.

Timm said that about 25 university employees receive a significant portion of their salary through the CASC.

But she said that two grants through the USGS are on hold. One would have funded communications interns and the other would have funded a study on how climate change could affect a caribou herd that’s important to subsistence hunters. 

She said the center does projects that Alaskan communities and decision makers have asked for. 

“If we don’t get funded, you know, one of the major projects that would really affect Alaskans is the work around the glacier outburst flood and Suicide Basin,” Timm said.

The center funded the interactive website that helped inform Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley residents about the threat to their homes during August’s flood. The center has also funded research around improving wildfire forecasts and how climate change is affecting salmon in the Yukon River Basin.

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In Bridget Cove, Meta Mesdag grows thousands of oysters arranged in rows of floating mesh bags. She owns Salty Lady Seafood Co., the only Pacific oyster farm in Juneau.

Some years, naturally occurring toxic algal blooms have shut down her farm for weeks at a time. That motivated Mesdag to ask researchers: Can she predict when it will happen? 

“It’s such a mystery,” she said. 

On Mondays, Mesdag takes samples of her oysters and sends them to the state lab in Anchorage to test for toxic algae called Alexandrium catenella. The algae produce a neurotoxin that builds up in shellfish when they eat it. Just one milligram can kill a person. Testing is federally regulated. 

If the test comes back clean, she harvests. But if the oysters test over the FDA limit for the toxin, the farm shuts down.

In 2023, Mesdag said she had to shut down for half of her 20-week harvest season. 

“When you’re not making any money, but you’re spending money on labor, that can be really expensive and hard,” she said.

Since the farm couldn’t sell oysters at the time, she said she lost clients and had to lay people off. Once a closure is in place, the farm has to pass a series of tests to reopen. 

“We just have to wait, and we don’t know how long it takes,” she said. 

That loss of sales isn’t great for business.

The federal government is invested in boosting mariculture in Alaska’s waters, and there are still questions about how the environment here affects the health and quality of oysters. The state is invested in those questions too – about a decade ago it set a goal to grow Alaska’s mariculture into a $100 million industry by 2040, with 40% of that revenue coming from oysters. 

Researchers studied Mesdag’s oyster farm between 2021 and 2023 to understand the environmental conditions there and what it might say about the challenges and opportunities for growing shellfish in Southeast Alaska. So far, 20 oyster farms have permits in the region.

The study had a humble start. Mesdag’s question about harmful algal blooms landed on Courtney Hart’s desk when she was studying paralytic shellfish poisoning as a graduate student at the University of Alaska Southeast. Now she’s a crustacean shellfish program manager with the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe in Washington. 

“The first year, I was just trying to figure out if there was an easy way to monitor for Alexandrium or harmful algal blooms on her farm so I could help warn her essentially when a bloom was coming,” Hart said. 

But she hit a dead end.

“We didn’t really solve that problem,” she said. 

Sometimes the researchers would detect the toxic algae in the water and not see it in the oysters. Other times they’d see it in the oysters but not the water. Hart said the problem is not unique to Alaska — harmful algal blooms are notoriously unpredictable.

“Whether that bloom becomes toxic for shellfish really depends on so many factors that scientists have been studying for a long time and haven’t quite pinned down,” she said. 

But Hart said the study morphed when NOAA researchers joined. They wanted to answer a bigger question: What environmental conditions impact the overall health and quality of oysters in Southeast Alaska?

The scientists found that the spring phytoplankton bloom provides oysters a feast for only a short period, and they practically starve over the winter. 

“Often it may mean that it takes three years for your oysters to reach the right size, versus just two years, which is more typical down here in Washington,” Hart said.

The research team also looked at salinity. In the summer, during the primary harvest season, freshwater flows into the cove from melting snow and ice, making Mesdag’s farm less salty. Calm seas can prevent the freshwater from mixing into the saltwater below. 

When that happens, Mesdag said she can taste the difference — sometimes her oysters aren’t briny at all. 

But there are benefits too. The consistently cold water prevents oysters from spawning, so they retain high levels of lipids — healthy fats that make for a high-quality oyster. 

“As far as health of an oyster for humans, it’s good,” Hart said. 

While environmental conditions play an important role in how the industry develops, Bobbi Hudson said reaching the market is key. 

Hudson is the executive director of the Pacific Shellfish Institute. She splits her time between Washington state and Gustavus and is working with Southeast Conference, the region’s economic development agency, on an upcoming report about investments in the mariculture industry. 

“Alaska can have tremendous goals, but at the end of the day, if there’s not a market for those products, or a really strong market for those products, they’re not going to be able to reach those goals,” she said. 

She said that scaling up production, setting up cold chain distribution networks and making paralytic shellfish toxin testing more efficient could help Alaska’s shellfish farms grow. 

It’s officially autumn, and with the season comes more stormy weather. The National Weather Service issued a high wind warning and flood watch for Juneau Monday.

Meteorologists say wind gusts could reach 60 miles per hour. Gales are forecast to peak between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. and then subside around 4 p.m. The National Weather Service advises residents to secure vessels and loose objects that could be blown around or damaged by the wind. 

Forecasters expect one to three inches of rainfall in Juneau Monday. That could cause minor flooding in low-lying areas near creeks and rivers following heavy rain over the weekend. The flood watch will last overnight, until 4 a.m. Tuesday.

Andrew Park, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau, said people should pay attention to the weather and plan accordingly. 

“The weather today will impact your life, especially if you’re trying to get on the water,” he said. “We’re starting to see 50 to 60 mile an hour gusts.”

Park also explained how the air flows into the steep terrain to create persistent rainfall.

“You have this moist southwest flow, and that just continues to feed against the mountains,” he said. “So the mountains act as a source of like a lifting mechanism, and just drives showers.”

On Saturday, the City & Borough of Juneau closed Auke Lake Trail. The city reported that heavy rainfall triggered landslides in the area. City staff urge residents to stay off the trail and out of the lake until it reopens. 

Ryan O’Shaughnessy is the city’s emergency program manager. He encourages those living in landslide-prone areas to be mindful of the weather forecast. 

“If anyone who lives on a steep slope does observe any downslope movement of soils or trees — definitely the best thing to do is to get out of the area — then, once you’re safe, to call 911.”

The National Weather Service will issue updates on its website. If there is a weather-related emergency, O’Shaughnessy said the city will send text notifications through its voluntary alert system. 

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Juneau might lose its ability to say that its electricity is created entirely by renewable hydropower if the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA, prevails in a lawsuit over the ownership and sale of renewable energy credits created by the Snettisham Hydroelectric Project, which currently supplies two-thirds of Juneau’s electricity.

Renewable energy credits, known as RECs, are much like carbon credits. Utilities that burn fossil fuels can buy them to say they’re powered by renewable energy, allowing them to claim carbon emissions reductions.

But, once sold, the utility that generates the renewable power — in this case Alaska Electric Light & Power, or AEL&P — could no longer claim it produces entirely renewable energy. The City & Borough of Juneau, along with businesses and nonprofits that use this power, would lose the claim too.

Randy Ruaro, the executive director at AIDEA, said selling the credits is a way for the state to make money.

“Frankly, it was an oversight, I guess, by previous AIDEA staff and employees to recognize that this opportunity was out there,” he said. “But once it came to our attention, we’re obligated to take steps to create and generate revenue for AIDEA and for the state of Alaska treasury.”

Exactly how much revenue the agency could make is unclear. On the open market, RECs are priced at anywhere from $1 to $700 per megawatt hour. Snettisham produces roughly 281,000 megawatt hours annually and AEL&P estimates the credits would sell for between $281,000 and $421,500.

Although the dispute comes down to who gets to say what — in essence, a matter of reputation — the impact of selling the credits could be financially detrimental for those who use the claim in Juneau.

Steve Behnke is a founding board member of Alaska Heat Smart, a nonprofit that installs heat pumps in homes across coastal Alaska. He also leads Renewable Juneau, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy.

“Renewable Juneau and Alaska Heat Smart have created the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, which raises money by saying that we’re using this nice clean hydroelectricity, a renewable resource, to put heat pumps in low-income Juneau homes, saving them 50% on their heating bills, and demonstrating a reduction in carbon emissions,” he said.

He says the fund relies on individuals and companies contributing to offset their carbon emissions.

Alaska Heat Smart is also rolling out a program to install 6,000 heat pumps funded by a $38.6 million dollar federal grant. Behnke said that if AIDEA is allowed to sell the credits outside of Juneau, then local nonprofits would lose their claim to renewable power, making them less competitive in seeking grants that score project applications based on clean energy.

Robert Barr, Juneau’s deputy city manager, echoed Behnke’s concern.

“I certainly understand (AIDEA) wanting to bolster their bottom line, but in this case, they’re doing that at our expense, and that is certainly frustrating,” Barr said.

Barr called the sales proposal short-sighted and said AIDEA didn’t consult with the city before starting the process.

Greens Creek Mine, the largest silver mine in the country that’s located near Juneau on Admiralty Island, runs partially on surplus hydropower supplied by Snettisham through an agreement with AEL&P. Hecla, the company that owns the mine, claimed a 38% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions between 2019 and 2024. Last week, Hecla filed a complaint against AIDEA, asking the Regulatory Commission of Alaska to determine that AIDEA doesn’t own the renewable energy credits and therefore can’t sell them.

On Thursday, AEL&P filed a lawsuit against AIDEA alleging the same thing. Although AIDEA owns the Snettisham Hydroelectric Project, it long ago sold the power generation rights to AEL&P.

In the court filing, AEL&P asserts that any renewable energy credits created at Snettisham should belong to the utility, not AIDEA.

Most states have laws governing how renewable energy credits are created, traced and transferred. The Alaska Legislature considered a bill a few years ago that would have done that, but it didn’t make it out of committee, leaving it unclear how renewable energy credits work here.

Alec Mesdag, the CEO of AEL&P, said the utility looked into the credits a while ago and decided not to pursue selling them.

“It’s been something that has just provided substantially more value than what we would obtain by selling the RECs to someone who doesn’t live here at all,” he said.

Mesdag said the credits make more sense for energy grids that have a mix of power generation. Utilities buy and sell them to meet renewable portfolio standards set by state laws — but Alaska doesn’t have one of those laws either.

Now it’s up to the Alaska Superior Court to decide whether Juneau’s only operating electric utility owns the renewable energy credits that until now, local businesses and nonprofits believed they could claim. The court issued a temporary restraining order on Friday preventing the sale of RECs until the issue can be discussed in court. A hearing will be held Sept. 18.

Correction: This story has been updated to better distinguish between two separate heat pump installation programs.