Anchorage Daily News

A rockslide early Thursday closed the cruise ship dock in Skagway, prompting one vessel to skip that port altogether.

Part of the dock was damaged during the slide just before 6:30 a.m., according to Jacqui Taylor, a spokeswoman for dock owners White Pass & Yukon Route Railway. No one was injured as the slide sent rock, dirt and vegetation tumbling from a mountainside above the dock.

There were no passengers disembarking at the time, Taylor said. The railway’s geotechnical engineers were assessing the damage Thursday afternoon.

The dock will remain closed to passenger and vehicle traffic Friday to allow further assessment by the railway’s geotechnical engineers, the company said in an update Thursday afternoon.

Four cruise ships scheduled for the pier made alternate plans Thursday, the company said. The Royal Caribbean Quantum of the Seas, which can hold nearly 5,000 passengers, diverted from Skagway on Thursday morning. The Discovery Princess, with a maximum capacity of about 4,600, repositioned and planned to transport passengers to the small-boat harbor by tender.

About a dozen cruise ships use the dock every week to call on the Southeast Alaska city popular for historic buildings preserved as part of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park. The railroad runs vintage locomotives out of Skagway.

Three more ships were expected to use other docks or a tender on Friday.

“White Pass and Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska are working with our cruise partners to reaccommodate the ships scheduled for this weekend,” Taylor wrote in an email. “Ships are able to tie up on the south end of the Railroad Dock and tender guests a short distance to Skagway’s Small Boat Harbor.”

The Municipality of Skagway Borough does not own the dock and was not participating in the response to the slide as of Thursday, according to borough manager Brad Ryan.

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

This story has been updated.

Alaska’s special primary Election Day was Saturday, and officials have tallied more than 130,000 votes.

But thousands more votes remain uncounted in the race to replace the late U.S. Rep. Don Young. And an array of other questions are still swirling about how the special primary election will play out, and what the general election will look like.

The Daily News spoke with candidates, elections officials and political insiders to help make sense of what’s happened, and what comes next.

What’s this election for, again? And which one is next?

U.S. Rep. Don Young, a Republican, held Alaska’s sole seat in Congress for 49 years before he died suddenly in March while traveling home from Washington, D.C.

That set off a special election to select a new member of Congress to finish Young’s two-year term, which expires in January. It’s the first election held under a new system that Alaskans approved in 2020, with four candidates advancing from a pick-one nonpartisan primary, and a general election in which voters are asked to rank the four candidates in order of preference.

The special primary, where voters chose one of 48 candidates on the ballot, was Saturday; the special general, where voters will rank the top four candidates from the primary, is set for Aug. 16.

Simultaneously, two more elections — a regular primary and general — are scheduled to elect Alaska’s member of Congress for the next full two-year term, which starts in January. The regular primary election is scheduled for Aug. 16, on the same day and same ballot as the special general. That means voters will be asked to rank the four candidates in the special election, then pick one of 31 candidates in the regular primary.

The regular general election, where voters will rank the top four of the 31 candidates, is Nov. 8.

When will we know the final results from Saturday’s election?

By Wednesday evening, officials had counted nearly 134,000 ballots. Another count is expected Friday, with a final count Tuesday and a goal of certifying the election results June 25.

Ballots will still be counted as long as they were postmarked by Saturday and arrive by June 21.

The final count is set for June 21, and the state aims to certify the election and make the results official June 25.

Who’s up and who’s down?

Just four of the 48 candidates from the special primary will advance to the special general election in August. Right now, the top three candidates appear all but certain to move on: Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III, and independent Al Gross.

Democrat Mary Peltola currently sits in fourth place with 11,863 votes — a 4,379-vote edge over Republican Tara Sweeney, who’s in fifth. Peltola’s campaign manager has said she’s confident that result will hold when the state tallies the remaining uncounted ballots.

The top two from the primary, so far, are Republicans. What does that mean for the general election?

One quirk of ranked-choice voting — at least as it has played out in other places — is that it can incentivize like-minded candidates to coordinate. By endorsing each other, politically aligned candidates can try to maximize the number of voters who rank them second.

In previous elections, political parties would hold their own primary elections and nominate just one candidate for the general — making post-primary infighting relatively rare. But at least two Republicans appear set to advance to the special general election after Saturday’s nonpartisan primary: Former Gov. Palin leads with 28% of the vote while Begich has 19%, meaning that the two of them captured nearly half of all the votes counted in the primary so far.

Some Republicans think they should be working together, and that if they fight with each other, the GOP candidates risk alienating voters who might then choose to rank only one candidate instead of two.

“When you put the two of them together, they win,” said Mike Porcaro, a GOP media consultant and talk radio host. “If we had a traditional campaign, where people started going after each other, it doesn’t do either one of them any good.”

So far, though, neither Begich nor Palin seem to be heeding Porcaro’s advice. Begich, in a phone interview Monday, said he’s heard nothing from Palin that makes him think the two can work together.

“Sarah’s strategy has been to not talk to the media, not talk to Republicans, not talk to Alaskans. Her strategy is hide in her basement as much as possible,” he said. “In terms of holding hands with an opponent, there’s been no hand to hold. She’s MIA.”

Palin responded to a question about her approach to ranked choice voting in a statement that made no mention of Begich or other opponents.

“My focus is on uniting our state to push back against the wild spending spree policies in Washington that have forced families to have to choose between a full tank of gas and a full refrigerator of groceries,” Palin’s statement said. “Washington is broken and I will fight back on behalf of all Alaskans.”

The top Democrat in the race right now, Mary Peltola, only won 9% of primary votes. Do left-leaning candidates stand a chance?

It depends who you ask.

Conservatives were quick to point out that Republican candidates captured some 60% of the votes counted Saturday, while Democrats captured some 15%. Independent Al Gross, who ran for U.S. Senate in 2020 with the Democratic Party’s endorsement — though he has run afoul of the party this year — got 12% more.

But insiders aligned with Democrats argue that GOP wins in August and November are far from certain, and say that Saturday’s results were more encouraging than they appear, for several reasons.

Among them: Peltola, the leading Democrat, was out-fundraised nearly eight-to-one by Palin and nearly 15-to-one by Begich, while Palin only won about four times as many votes, and Begich won less than three times as many. Those trends could change if Democratic donors have just one candidate to support in the special general election, down from six in the primary.

“Across the board, the money was on the Republican side,” said John-Henry Heckendorn, a political consultant whose firm is working for Peltola’s campaign. “I think Mary’s going to increase fundraising significantly, and it will be very interesting to see what she’s able to do once she’s able to achieve fundraising parity with her opponents.”

Heckendorn made two other points. Turnout in primary elections, he said, tends to skew lower and more conservative compared to general elections. And some of the people who voted for lower-performing Republicans, like Sweeney and former Fairbanks state Sen. John Coghill, might be open to flipping to a Democratic candidate, Heckendorn said.

Lindsay Kavanaugh, the Alaska Democratic Party’s executive director, made one more argument: Some voters in the by-mail special primary election sent their ballots in early, and might have changed their minds as the campaign played out and they learned more about other candidates.

“I do believe there’s a path to victory,” she said.

Who voted for Palin?

It’s no secret that many members of Alaska’s Republican establishment dislike Palin, who came to power more than a decade ago after she exposed a longtime GOP operative doing party business at a politically appointed job at an obscure state agency.

Some of the significant number of left-leaning supporters Palin garnered by taking on state GOP leaders later soured on her during her unsuccessful 2008 vice presidential bid, and after her decision to resign as governor in 2009.

So, if not GOP insiders, who were the 32,371 people who voted for Palin in Saturday’s count? Alaska lacks robust exit polling infrastructure that would produce hard data on her supporters’ demographics.

One theory is that Palin’s endorsement by Republican former President Donald Trump was a big draw. But few voters interviewed Saturday by the Daily News cited the former president as a factor.

One consistent theme repeated by politics insiders — many of them Palin critics — is that a diminishing number of voters actually remember her history in the state and her conduct as a vice presidential candidate and governor. And the data bears that out: Slightly more than half of Alaska voters, as of April, only registered to vote after Election Day in 2008, according to a review conducted on the Daily News’ behalf by the analytics firm TargetSmart.

How many ballots got rejected?

One big question about Saturday’s special primary was how many ballots would be rejected.

Because the election was almost entirely by-mail, far more Alaska voters were using absentee ballots. And those absentee ballots require voters to take specific steps for election officials to validate and count them: Voters have to include a unique “identifier” on their ballot envelope, like their birth date or driver’s license number, as well as a signature from a witness. The witness signature requirement was waived in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s been reinstated this year.

In past primary elections, 5% or fewer of absentee ballots have been rejected. That rate tracks with this year’s data, which show that the state rejected 4,852 of the 139,340 ballots it received, or some 3.5% — though the overall number of rejected ballots was higher, because there were far more absentee ballots voted.

Some observers noted that a number of predominantly rural, Indigenous voting districts recorded significantly higher rates of rejections — as high as 17% in the district centered in the Southwest Alaska hub town of Bethel. But that rate also isn’t unprecedented: The voting district centered in the Western Alaska hub town of Nome saw 23%, or nine, of its 39 absentee ballots rejected in the 2016 primary.

State elections officials are not releasing a breakdown of how many absentee ballots were rejected for each of the different reasons for a rejection until after the counting process is finished. They did stress this week that the state does not use a signature verification process for voters or witnesses — so a signature not matching would not be a reason a ballot was invalidated this year.

There are 17 other reasons that a ballot could be rejected by law, said Tiffany Montemayor, a spokeswoman for the Alaska Division of Elections. Those include insufficient witnessing, a missing voter signature or a missing identifier.

The state, unlike the city of Anchorage, lacks a procedure for voters to “cure” a mistake with their ballot. A change to that rule has been discussed by Alaska lawmakers but failed to pass into law this year.

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

PALMER — Shelters around Alaska are filling with pets as a complicated mix of factors including high prices, limited veterinarians and an ongoing pandemic put extraordinary pressure on the animal welfare system.

An influx of surrendered animals from owners struggling to make ends meet has pushed the Matanuska-Susitna Borough shelter beyond its capacity.

Late last week, borough animal care officials announced they were no longer taking in animals, an unusual policy they hope to reverse as soon as next week. The night drop-off door is locked. The shelter is not accepting animals surrendered by their owners during the day.

With more than 200 cats and dogs filling kennels this week, shelter officials said more animals are coming in than getting adopted out in Mat-Su, for years one of Alaska’s fastest-growing regions.

“The primary factor that we’re seeing is economic. People just cannot afford to care for their animals,” shelter director Chris Loscar said. “It keeps coming up: They can’t afford the basic care, they can’t afford veterinary care.”

Shelters and rescue organizations around Alaska and the country are reporting similar trends: people surrendering pets amid a web of challenges including more than two years of pandemic life, a veterinarian shortage and inflation and high gas prices driving up costs for everything from kibble to kennels.

“It’s not a straightforward cause-effect,” said Kelly Donnelly, executive director of Alaska SPCA. “There are a lot of factors that are leading people to surrender this year that have been different than the last couple of years.”

The economy is making it hard to afford pet food and services, Donnelly said. Price inflation for pet food ran at a 7% annual rate in April, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The costs of veterinary services spiked to nearly 10% annually.

But pandemic isolation has also led to a generation of dogs that may have missed out on socializing skills without enough time around other dogs and people.

“They are difficult to handle in social situations. These are dogs you can’t take to the dog park. These are dogs that may be dog-aggressive,” she said. “It requires some pretty heavy-duty commitment and training and some dog owners just aren’t up to that.”

Anchorage’s animal shelter is not at capacity right now but is seeing more owner-surrendered pets, according to executive assistant Jordan Taylor.

People say they’re giving up animals for various reasons — including because they simply have too many, Taylor said, adding that may be a result of pandemic-delayed spay and neuter surgeries. There were about 440 owner surrenders as of June in 2020 and 2021 compared to 690 this year, he said. That’s also higher than in 2019, when the shelter recorded 640 surrenders by June.

“The big takeaway is the number, in general, is bigger,” Taylor said.

Juneau Animal Rescue, the private nonprofit contracted by the City and Borough of Juneau to provide shelter services, is seeing more dogs than normal and fewer people adopting, said executive director Samantha Blankenship. Some people have told her they’re reluctant to adopt more animals because of an ongoing shortage of veterinarians in Juneau.

In the past few weeks, six litters of kittens arrived at the shelter, Blankenship said. Managers are asking people to foster adult cats and kittens.

“We are still taking animals but we are really trying to navigate options before we intake animals,” such as seeing if owners struggling with behavioral issues can get help to keep their pet in the home, she said. “We have seen a lot of animals just in the past few months.”

Mat-Su shelter officials hope to bring back owner surrenders soon, possibly next week, if kennels open up through adoptions.

The facility, which is currently open for appointments only except Sundays, will add Saturdays to the mix starting this week. Shelter manager Jamie Kennedy will hold a “clear the shelter” mass adoption event starting at noon Saturday with “name your price” adoption fees.

Over time, officials hope to expand the facility, including covering outdoor kennels and creating a sled dog holding area. This week, pens held 18 huskies seized from a property in Willow.

But moving animals out of the shelter won’t necessarily help if the flood of animals keeps coming in, Loscar said. A winter event resulted in 82 adoptions, but two days later the shelter took in 36 animals in one day and hit capacity by the end of the same week.

“We adopt one out, we’re going to get five to six in the next day,” he said. “That’s just the reality of it.”

Anchorage resident Rheya DeTraglia did her part this week to reduce the dog population when she took home Peep, a sweet-tempered, small golden retriever mix with a tongue that “always hangs out just a teeny tiny bit no matter what she’s doing.”

“She literally just walked in the door and I fell in love with her,” DeTraglia said. “She walked into the room and I was like, ‘I am not leaving without this dog.’”

DeTraglia and her husband — who already have two dogs — decided to adopt from Mat-Su because of last week’s announcement.

“When they say they have to start turning away animals, that really hurts your heart,” she said.

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

A Lingít village in Southeast Alaska plans to transform itself into a cruise ship destination to create a new economic opportunity as logging fades in the area.

The Alaska Native village corporation in Klawock is working with other Native corporations to install a relatively low-cost floating dock and make other upgrades to receive cruise ships in the village starting a year from now, project officials said.

Klawock is on Prince of Wales Island, about 700 miles southeast of Anchorage. Alaska’s first cannery was built there more than a century ago and logging of old-growth trees continues, though much less than it once did.

Project officials are modeling the proposal after one in Hoonah, another Southeast village that turned itself into a cruise destination.

It plans to start with basic facilities like the floating dock, said Mary Edenshaw, chief operations officer for Klawock Heenya, the Native village corporation. Klawock is home to about 700 people, she said.

The ships will create opportunities for small business owners, wood carvers and other artisans, she said. Tour guides can shuttle guests to see wildlife and the village’s historic totem-pole park, or visit other landmarks on the island’s road system.

“This will create jobs, when jobs are potentially going away,” Edenshaw said.

The plans come after Sealaska, the region’s Alaska Native corporation, announced last year that it was ending its decades-old logging operations that had centered on Prince of Wales Island. The large Native corporation wanted to pursue more sustainable activities, it said last year.

Matt Carle, a spokesman with Sealaska, said Klawock’s plans can promote economic development not just in Klawock but in other villages on Prince Wales of Island.

The island is so remote many people never stop there, he said.

“Any time you travel in Alaska, it takes a day or two to get off the beaten path to really experience the rich and vibrant Alaska Native culture,” Carle said. “But in this case people can literally step off the ship and see this, and that’s really unique.”

The increasing emphasis on tourism in Klawock is happening two years after the COVID-19 pandemic halted most cruise sailings to the state.

In Southcentral Alaska, efforts are underway in Seward and Whittier to build new docks that will add to the flood of visitors to those towns.

Tiny Klawock plans to host relatively small cruise ships that bring about 600 people, Edenshaw said. Oceania Cruises plans to make the inaugural stop next May, she said.

Klawock’s mayor, Don Nickerson, said most residents support the village corporation’s idea. He’s heard concerns that Klawock will be overrun with people, but he believes Klawock Heenya will manage guests so that won’t be a problem, he said.

Nickerson said the village needs this opportunity. Logging opportunities have diminished and salmon fishing is struggling too, he said.

“I definitely think this will boost our economy,” he said. “This was a log-booming community in the ‘80s and ‘90s and part of the 2000s, and that has all gone away.”

The town’s weavers and carvers, including youth learning from elders, will be able to sell their work and share their talents, he said. It will be an authentic cultural experience compared to larger ports like in Juneau, he said.

“There is a lot of talent and history on our island,” he said. “Nothing will be manufactured, and everything will be man-made.”

Klawock Heenya is working on the project with Na-Dena`, an Alaska Native company focused on providing cultural-based tourism in Alaska.

Na-Dena` said in a statement last week that the Port of Klawock can accept cruise ships traveling from the north and south.

“With two separate fjord entrances, sailing in and out of the port treats cruisers to scenic views of the wildlife-rich archipelagos, dramatic mountains and lush islands,” the statement said.

Na-Dena` consists of Huna Totem and Doyon. Huna Totem is the village corporation for Hoonah that built Icy Strait Point into a cruise destination recognized for its ecological and cultural values. After starting with a small float dock in 2004, Icy Strait Point can now handle two massive cruise ships at a time, each bringing thousands of guests, with amenities that include a giant zip line ride and high-speed gondolas that replace buses.

Doyon is the Alaska Native regional corporation for the Interior that provides bus tours of Denali National Park and Preserve where it owns a nearby lodge.

Na-Dena` will work with Klawock to emphasize its traditions and values, said Russell Dick, president of Huna Totem, in a statement about the project.

Officials with the Klawock project declined to provide cost estimates.

The floating dock will be anchored to an old timber loading dock that today sees only a handful of ships a year through a private logging company, project officials said.

The village will build the dock and other facilities soon, Edenshaw said. Drinking water and bathrooms will be a construction priority.

“We’ll have to start with plumbing,” Edenshaw said. “There’s electricity to the dock, but we’ve never had to worry about that many people coming to this area.”

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

A new report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides the most comprehensive look so far at the disproportionate toll COVID-19 is taking on Alaska Native and American Indian people living in Alaska.

Overall, Alaska Native and American Indian people have made up just about a fifth of the state’s population but nearly a third of all deaths, the report found.

Between the start of the pandemic in March 2020 and last December, Indigenous Alaskans were hospitalized with the virus and died from it at rates three times that of white residents, according to the report released Thursday.

The report is based on data shared with the CDC by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services between March 2020 and December 2021.

Many Indigenous Alaskans face multiple barriers to health equity and access, including historical trauma and structural racism and remote or rural living that makes it harder and more expensive to access care.

The findings from the latest report showed that the virus’s mortality rate was about three times as high for Alaska Native and American Indian people living in the state (297 deaths per 100,000) when compared to white Alaskans (104 per 100,000) once adjusted for age.

The adjusted hospitalization rate was similarly high: 742 hospitalizations per 100,000 Indigenous Alaskans compared with 273 hospitalizations per 100,000 white Alaskans — representing a nearly three-fold risk for Alaska Native people.

The findings echo previous Alaska studies — including those conducted by the state health department and tribal health organizations — which found clear, race-based disparities affecting who gets COVID-19, who is hospitalized for it and who dies.

Nationwide, COVID-19 has affected Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and other people of color the most, data has shown.

On its website, the CDC cites “long-standing systemic health and social inequities” as a major contributing factor to why people from racial and ethnic minority groups are at an increased risk overall of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.

Discrimination, lack of health care access and poverty are all “inequities in social determinants of health that put racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk,” according to the CDC.

But despite these inequities, predominantly Alaska Native communities have long had some of the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates in Alaska and in the U.S., to the credit of tribal health organizations and health aides who have deep roots in the communities they serve.

The recent CDC report recommends that public health professionals “continue to work with tribal health organizations in Alaska to provide culturally competent and regionally required health interventions,” and that existing health care initiatives should “respect the knowledge and wisdom of these communities as experts on their own needs.”

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

More and more Alaskans need help with food as prices spike at the gas pump and on grocery shelves, while pandemic relief dollars dry up, local providers say.

“Most of our partners are saying they’re seeing the need really ramp up in the last one to two months,” said Cara Durr, chief of advocacy and public policy at the Food Bank of Alaska, which distributes food to some 150 agencies statewide.

Agencies are now seeing demand approach what it reached in the early months of the pandemic, when providers saw a roughly 75% increase — which at the time reflected record-breaking levels of need, Durr said.

The Food Bank of Alaska operates a series of mobile food pantries, and the number of households served at each has been trending upward lately, Durr said.

While the food bank doesn’t yet have numbers for May 2022, the number of households served at the pantries went from 1,926 in February to 3,738 in April. In April 2020, they served around 3,400 households, before reaching a high for that year in October with over 4,700 households served.

“It’s easy to feel like, ‘Well, things are back to normal, and there’s tons of jobs available,’ ” Durr said. “But for people that lost wages, and maybe were struggling already, it takes a while to dig out of that hole.”

Irene Brooks is a community worker at the Copper River Native Association Food Bank, the only food bank in the greater Copper River Basin, serving clients from Eureka to McCarthy. Brooks said the number of clients right now is the highest it has ever been.

People are telling her that while they’ve never used food banks in the past, prices are so high they can’t afford to feed their families.

“I’ve literally had people tell me that if it wasn’t for food banks, they and their families would have gotten hungry,” she said.

Groceries up 10% as rental assistance ends

Several factors may be contributing to this increase in demand for help with food right now.

Over the past year, the price of groceries rose 10.8% while the prices for meat poultry, fish, and eggs increased 14.3% — the biggest yearlong increase since 1979, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Inflation is significant right now, said Neal Fried, an economist with the state. But Fried said that may not be the primary reason people’s incomes are strained. Pandemic relief money, including rental assistance, is running out right now too, and that could be an even more significant contributor to that strain, Fried said.

“The transfer payments that come from government, of all varieties, have been dropping off significantly and have probably a disproportionate impact on lower-income households,” Fried said.

People receiving food tell those working at Lutheran Social Services that their dollars just aren’t going far enough at the store right now, said Alan Budahl, executive director there.

Plus, many have high utility costs and are facing shutoffs. He said he receives some 20 to 30 calls a day for rental assistance.

“I tell them, ‘Well, use your money to keep your utilities on and pay the rent, and it’s easier for us to feed you,’ ” he said.

Durr with the Food Bank of Alaska said the level of need at food pantries makes sense, given prices people are paying for things like fuel right now. Food is a relatively easy resource to get help with, as opposed to something like getting rental assistance, which is more challenging, she said.

Often when people’s budgets are strapped, food is something they can get ahold of, and the last thing they give up when getting back on their feet.

“They could come to a food pantry and get a week’s worth of food,” Durr said. “That’s a big help in the budget.”

‘The exact same numbers as fall 2020′

Last fall, demand slowed, said Greg Meyer, director at the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank in Soldotna. But recently, it increased, he said.

The food bank serves several remote areas where need is especially high right now. And not only are food prices high, the cost of fuel has risen, too, which makes coming to pick up the food challenging as well, he said.

At the same time need is rising, Meyer said the organization doesn’t have the same ability to serve as it did earlier in the pandemic, after certain CARES Act programs lapsed. They have less food and variety than they did previously.

“Our numbers have gone up,” Meyer said. “But some of our programs that were in response to the pandemic have gone away, so our ability to provide as much has gone down.”

On a recent Tuesday, cars lined up to receive food from St. Francis House Food Pantry in East Anchorage. Robin Smith, a volunteer who was helping pack boxes of food to be given out, said they used to put together four pallets’ worth of boxes. Lately, she said, that number climbed to six and sometimes almost seven pallets.

“If you asked us three months ago, it would not look like this,” said Claire Lubke, who directs the food pantry, as she walked along the line of cars toward staff giving out boxes.

In the first week of May, they served 400 households. By mid-May, they served 430. By the third week of the month, that number had risen to 480 households. They used to see some 70 households come through each day the pantry was open. Now it’s up to 120.

Lubke said that demand at their food pantry was most intense during the fall of 2020 after people were out of work, COVID-19 relief money hadn’t kicked in, and people had used up their reserves. That’s when the numbers peaked.

“We are now up to the exact same numbers as fall 2020,” she said.

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.