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A major credit rating agency on Friday said it has placed a “negative” watch on Alaska’s credit rating after a plunge in world oil prices as the COVID-19 economic crash batters fishing and tourism that are critical to state revenue.
Fitch Ratings expressed concern that Alaska leaders would continue to pull large amounts from the state’s reserves, including by boosting the economy with a Permanent Fund dividend stimulus payout, according to the statement.
“Planned, significant draws on the state’s accessible reserves to balance financial operations or to fund other priorities in light of a likely extended period of weak natural resource markets and financial market volatility, will lead to a downgrade,” Fitch said in the statement.
Fitch lowered the state’s credit ratings in September, including lowering its general obligation bond rating to AA-.
A lower rating could force the state to pay more to borrow money from investors, as the market demands higher payments for bonds deemed to carry increased risk.
“We are signaling that if the state continues along the path we foresee, we could see the ratings go down,” said Marcy Block, a senior director for Fitch, in an interview Friday.
The next notch lower for the state’s general obligation bonds would be an A+, Block said.
“For a U.S. state, an A+ rating is considered low,” she said.
The state as of June 30 had about $670 million in general obligation debt that is outstanding, she said.
Also under watch for a possible lowered rating is about $1.1 billion in bonds from the Alaska Municipal Bond Bank Authority, she said. Those bonds are currently at A+.
Fitch’s negative outlook for Alaska’s credit “reflects the severe financial and economic stress the state is expected to undergo as a result of the recent plunge in crude oil prices,” the ratings agency said in the statement.
The situation is “compounded by the negative impact the coronavirus pandemic is expected have on the state’s important fishing and tourism industries.”
Further complicating the picture is the state’s reliance on the Alaska Permanent Fund earnings reserve, used to support state operations and the annual dividend, Fitch said.
The ratings agency said it will closely watch potential impacts to the reserve amid recent market volatility that has lowered the fund’s value by billions of dollars.
Losses in the fund’s reserve could be compounded if the state uses it to help pay an economic stimulus, something Gov. Mike Dunleavy and some state lawmakers have proposed.
“As the coronavirus crisis unfolded and oil prices plunged, the legislature is now debating further increases to the supplemental budget to fund coronavirus related costs as well as provide an additional $1,000 per capita stimulus payment to its residents by a further draw on the (Permanent Fund Earnings Reserve) in response to the oil price plunge and the coronavirus crisis,” the ratings agency said.
“These actions are expected to further declines to the state’s reserves,” Fitch said.
Years of cuts during low oil prices have reduced the state’s options for additional cuts, Fitch said. Recent plunging oil prices, related to the COVID-19 epidemic and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, have pushed oil prices well below state revenue forecasts.
“The scale of the impact to the state’s economy and revenues, which is also expected to be negatively affected by declines in the important tourism industry from the coronavirus pandemic, is currently uncertain,” the ratings agency said.
Fitch’s negative outlook may be reversed if the “state advances financial policies in the current legislative session that promote stable financial performance and make progress toward improved financial resiliency,” Fitch said.
Fitch said it will make a decision after it analyzes the state’s spring 2020 revenue forecast, expected in April.
A hsopital bed at the Sitka Community Hospital. (Photo by Emily Kwong/KCAW)
In December, budget documents for Alaska’s public health nursing program carried a warning: Years of budget cuts have starved the state’s public health wing of resources and staff.
“The reduced workforce decreases capacity to provide timely and effective response to emerging outbreaks and threats while maintaining other core services,” the program warned.
This week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy proposed $13 million in new spending to monitor and prevent the spread of the new coronavirus.
But state officials and legislators familiar with the state’s public health system say that funding injection cannot erase years of budget cuts.
In 2014, when state spending reached its modern peak, Alaska was spending $28 million per year from the state treasury on public health nursing and $7.6 million on epidemiology. Six years later, those figures have dropped to $22 million and $2 million, respectively.
That 2014 budget called for 110 public health nurses statewide, plus aides and support staff. The budget now calls for 90 nurses, but the state has been unable to fill all of those positions. Budget cuts mean the state’s pay and benefits for public health nurses now lag behind similar positions in other states. The state’s personnel directory lists 70 public health nurses on staff.
Those cuts, some legislators say, have left Alaska vulnerable to a threat exactly like the one it faces now.
“Definitely we’re in a worse spot right now. The cuts that have gone on have been detrimental to the retention of those people who are so needed at this point,” said Sen. Donny Olson, D-Golovin.
In addition to serving on the Senate Finance Committee, Olson is a doctor.
In December, budget documents for Alaska’s public health nursing program carried a warning: Years of budget cuts have starved the state’s public health wing of resources and staff.
“The reduced workforce decreases capacity to provide timely and effective response to emerging outbreaks and threats while maintaining other core services,” the program warned.
This week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy proposed $13 million in new spending to monitor and prevent the spread of the new coronavirus.
But state officials and legislators familiar with the state’s public health system say that funding injection cannot erase years of budget cuts.
In 2014, when state spending reached its modern peak, Alaska was spending $28 million per year from the state treasury on public health nursing and $7.6 million on epidemiology. Six years later, those figures have dropped to $22 million and $2 million, respectively.
That 2014 budget called for 110 public health nurses statewide, plus aides and support staff. The budget now calls for 90 nurses, but the state has been unable to fill all of those positions. Budget cuts mean the state’s pay and benefits for public health nurses now lag behind similar positions in other states. The state’s personnel directory lists 70 public health nurses on staff.
Those cuts, some legislators say, have left Alaska vulnerable to a threat exactly like the one it faces now.
“Definitely we’re in a worse spot right now. The cuts that have gone on have been detrimental to the retention of those people who are so needed at this point,” said Sen. Donny Olson, D-Golovin.
“If we do have a coronavirus emergency, we’re ill-prepared for it,” he said.
In a Monday news conference, Dunleavy said Alaska is prepared. State officials assisted in the evacuation of Americans from the Chinese city of Wuhan in January, and the governor said the state has been planning since then.
No cases of coronavirus have been found in Alaska, but Dunleavy is asking the Alaska Legislature for $13 million — $4 million in state funding and permission to accept $9 million in federal money.
“We really do feel like we’re maxing out on Department of Health and Social Services resources … and we need help,” said Dr. Anne Zink, the state’s chief medical officer.
That money would pay for 10 temporary workers: five public health nurses, three nurse epidemiologists, one microbiologist and one emergency manager.
Zink said the worry is that the state’s health care system might not have enough resources to cope with a flood of additional patients on top of ordinary needs.
“We don’t have systems set up to deal with that increase,” she said.
Half of the governor’s request involves the state’s public health nursing system. In small communities across Alaska, public health nurses are frontline health care workers. The new additions may be based in hub cities, but they would be responsible for a swath of rural Alaska, Zink said.
“I think of public health nurses as the worker bees keeping things running,” Zink said.
Compounding the funding problem, state reports indicate budget cuts have made those nurses less efficient.
“Recruitment difficulties, including delays in recruitment of administrative staff, has required nurses to take on administrative duties,” a 2018 report said.
With nurses filling out paperwork instead of treating patients, “the Section of Public Health Nursing lost over 8,000 hours of reimbursable professional nursing time,” the report said.
“Budget cuts have consequences,” said Sen. Natasha von Imhof, R-Anchorage and co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee.
Von Imhof also serves as chair of the Senate subcommittee in charge of the state’s health budget. She said she and other lawmakers will be watching to see if the governor’s request is enough.
“It’s hard to say if this is the tip of the iceberg or this is sufficient,” she said.
RUSSIAN MISSION — One spring day in 2005, a man in a crisp brown uniform stood before a group created by Congress to fix rural Alaska’s lack of cops. In his soft-spoken way, Simeon Askoak explained his dilemma.
He was the only law enforcement officer in Russian Mission, a village of 340 people where he was born and raised. He’d worked as a village public safety officer for the previous 13 years, and while the state of Alaska covered his salary, he lacked equipment, resources and respect.
“It’s degrading me,” Askoak said of the constant search for money to pay for the basic necessities of his job. He described how his city government couldn’t afford utilities for the police station, so he dug into his own pocket to buy heating oil to warm the jailhouse. When his family of seven could no longer afford the bills, the pipes at the jail froze. Soon the water and sewer would be shut off too, he warned.
VPSOs in other riverside villages spoke of similar fears.
VPSO Simeon Askoak’s handwritten notes from April 2005.
“We are the first responders,” Askoak said, describing the unique role VPSOs play in the state. They bust drunken drivers, bootleggers and drug dealers. They listen to children tell of being molested, stand between abusers and domestic violence victims, and pull bodies from the rivers. Always unarmed and usually without backup.
Having told his story, Askoak left the meeting and flew home in a rattling bush plane above a tangle of streams and spongy tundra. Two days later, he followed a trail to a lagoon 100 yards from his front door and shot himself in the chest.
He was 50 years old. A boy found his body shrouded in newly fallen snow.
Russian Mission hasn’t had a permanent, certified police officer since. Fourteen years after Askoak’s death, a generation of children in the Alaska Native village, including his grandchildren, is growing up in a town left to fend for itself.
In a region with the highest rate of homicide and accidental death in Alaska, where half of women experience sexual assault or domestic violence, offenders here have learned they can simply hide from visiting state troopers to avoid arrest. Others face do-it-yourself justice.
Not too long ago, a group of residents tackled a man who had been firing a gun in Russian Mission. They duct-taped him and held him in the jail until the troopers landed.
Thirty-eight VPSOs statewide — and shrinking
In every meaningful way, the splintered and inequitable system of rural Alaska law enforcement described by Simeon Askoak in 2005 is worse today. An investigation this year by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found that one-third of communities now lack public safety officers of any kind. Some small cities without a VPSO or state trooper resort to hiring criminals as cops.
The creators of the VPSO program, which is funded by the state government and run by regional Native nonprofits, hoped to meet two goals: Grow local law enforcement by training and certifying village residents as police, while greatly increasing the number of communities with first responders. The officers were meant to be all-around lifesavers, trained to launch search parties, perform CPR and fight house fires.
The Daily News and ProPublica have found that despite heroic efforts by individual officers, the VPSO program itself is failing rural Alaskans and most Alaska villages it was intended to protect. When Askoak began working in 1992, there were more than 100 VPSOs deployed across the state.
Today? Thirty-eight and shrinking.
Instead of homegrown hires, the majority of officers are imported, unfamiliar with the regions and cultures they serve; many have never been to Alaska.
What’s more, those few remaining VPSOs are not necessarily based in the villages where they are needed most. Whether a community gets an officer depends on several factors, such as available housing, that have nothing to do with crime rates.
Near the Canadian border, the town of Eagle has a mostly non-Native population of 80 people and sits beside a state highway. It has a VPSO.
The village of Nunapitchuk, on the other side of the state, is eight times larger with a mostly Yup’ik population and does not have one. When a man fired his rifle at a family member there in June, troopers had to fly to the village and climb on a boat to catch up with him.
Despite abysmal retention rates, high overhead costs and disagreements between the state and regional employers on how to manage and fund VPSOs, the federal government is doubling down on the program. U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr in June declared a national “law enforcement emergency” in rural Alaska, promising $10.5 million in emergency funds for “hiring, equipping and training” VPSOs and other village-based police. (At the Alaska Federation of Natives convention this month, he announced an additional $42 million in tribal grants and victims assistance.)
Alaska Native leaders say the aid is welcome and necessary, but they warn that a one-time infusion of money will not fix systemic problems.
“It will do little or nothing to actually move the needle in my view,” said Ethan Schutt, the Athabascan chief of staff for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and one of the commissioners who heard Askoak’s plea before his death.
The decline of the VPSO program might be less of a crisis if more state troopers protected rural Alaska. But our investigation also found half of the state’s 236 troopers work as highway patrolmen and are de facto police for suburban, mostly white communities such as the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, home of Gov. Mike Dunleavy and where former Gov. Sarah Palin got her start.
While some troopers fly from hub cities to investigate emergencies, only 25 troopers — about 11% — were posted in remote villages full time as of Sept. 30.
All these factors result in a basic lack of first responders and emergency services in Alaska’s most remote communities. Alaska Federation of Natives President Julie Kitka said this system is unacceptable and must be overhauled with sustained and robust funding, federal partnerships and local control under village and regional leaders.
Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Amanda Price said the VPSO program in its current form may no longer be the answer.
“At what point do we say maybe this doesn’t work?” Price said in an interview in August.
‘People work together at times when things get rough here’
Simeon Askoak’s Yup’ik ancestors lived in Southwest Alaska for thousands of years. Descended from settlers who crossed on the vast land bridge that stretched between what is now Siberia and Alaska, the Yup’ik people hunted seal and beluga along the Bering Sea coast.
More recently, Yup’ik societies began to make their way from the coast up the Yukon River, building settlements and seasonal camps. The river delivered salmon; hunters stalked caribou in the fall. One such camp became a trading post and later the village now known as Russian Mission.
Syra Kozevnikoff, 9, rides her bicycle along a road on June 28, 2019 in Russian Mission. The tan building behind her is the village public safety office, which has three jail cells that are rarely used. (Photo by Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)
Elders recall growing up here and in nearby camps, attending school in a log cabin lit by kerosene and learning English as a second language. Members of the generation after that, Askoak’s generation, were shipped to boarding schools hundreds of miles away, where they were punished for speaking their Native languages and suffered physical and sometimes sexual abuse.
The oldest woman in Russian Mission is 90-year-old Marie Askoak, Simeon’s aunt. There was no electricity when she was a girl, she said. No phones. Certainly no police, lawyers or judges that she can recall. Marie thought back. Wrapped in warm layers of clothes, a lavender qaspeq and department store fleece, her brown eyes searched the room.
Marie Askoak, 90, sits at her kitchen table on March 7, 2019 in Russian Mission. Askoak is the oldest person in the village. (Photo by Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)
Maybe there were fish and game wardens, she said finally. They began to come and take people away for hunting violations. Asked how the community historically handled crimes or disputes before the arrival of the state justice system, Marie answered in Yup’ik.
“People work together at times when things get rough here. There used to be no police officers, no nothing,” she said through an interpreter. “But there was a brotherhood and sisterhood. They work together.”
The way the village resolves conflict and fights crime is not so different now.
“If it comes down to it, we have to call Alaska State Troopers,” said Daniel Askoak, the youngest of Marie’s 10 children. “But usually when something happens we come together and talk to the person.”
Sometimes it takes more than talk. When things get truly dangerous, villagers have a choice: hunker down and wait for troopers to arrive by plane or take matters into their own hands.
Making do
Across Alaska, communities that once had certified police thanks to the VPSO program now make do with low-paid, untrained police or no law enforcement all.
Alakanuk, a Yup’ik village of 728 people at the mouth of the Yukon River, had a VPSO in town until recently. In January, once he was gone, a man in the village was stabbed in the chest by a family member. The next month, on Valentine’s Day, a 43-year-old was said to have committed rape, kidnapping and assault, and to have given alcohol to a minor, according to charges filed in state court. In July, a man jumped into a river slough and drowned.
The Western Alaska region that includes Alakanuk and Russian Mission employed about 20 VPSOs when Simeon Askoak testified in 2005. Now four remain among some 48 villages.
The Southwest Alaska village of Manokotak once had two VPSOs; today it has none. In 2013, one of the officers was shot to death while checking on a man who was thought to be suicidal. The need for certified police officers remains as great as ever. A man holding a 1-month-old child in his arms punched two village elders last fall and had to be restrained by family members of the victims, according to troopers. A shooting followed in July. The month after that, troopers surrounded the house of a man threatening to “go on a killing spree” if anyone came inside.
Russian Mission has had a few city-hired village police officers over the years, residents say, but no permanent VPSOs since Askoak. His absence is felt in a thousand ways. One series of attacks involving a young couple illustrates the difference between a village with a trusted local police officer and one that must rely on troopers working an hour away.
In 2004, the year before Askoak’s death, someone called 911 to say that a muscular former basketball star named Lester Pitka had slammed his 16-year-old girlfriend’s head to the floor. In an affidavit, Askoak wrote that he arrived at the scene three minutes later, saw Pitka on top of the girl and stopped the beating.
Other VPSOs called Askoak “the sweet talker” because he convinced people they shouldn’t run when facing arrest, his widow said. “If you do that, it’ll just be another addition to your charges,” he would say.
“He’d tell them, ‘I don’t want you to do this because I care about you.’”
The man he arrested was his nephew. Interviewed in a state prison, Pitka said by phone that he understood and held no grudges. “It was never personal with him. He was just doing his job.”
In the years following Askoak’s death, public records suggest, Pitka learned he had plenty of time to disappear before troopers could arrive to investigate. In 2007, a woman called troopers to report that Pitka, then her boyfriend, had spit in her face and yanked her hair at the city office. With no police in town, the woman said, she was afraid for her safety and planned to stay with her mother until help arrived.
When the trooper landed the next day, Pitka was nowhere to be found.
“I searched throughout Russian Mission … but was unable to locate him,” the trooper wrote in an affidavit filed in state district court. “I was advised by several witnesses that he was hiding to avoid arrest.”
The trooper handed the victim a pamphlet about domestic violence and flew home. A judge issued a warrant for Pitka’s arrest, but there was no certified officer to serve it. Pitka avoided capture for the next two weeks.
As Russian Mission grew accustomed to life without a cop of any kind, the attacks by Pitka continued. Sometimes troopers came within two hours. Sometimes not for days.
At 3 p.m. on Nov. 24, 2009, a woman called 911, screaming. Pitka could be heard in the background, troopers wrote. The line went dead.
A trooper flew to the village on a chartered plane, landing an hour and 20 minutes after the 911 call. He found the victim crying at the village City Hall.
“She stated Lester said he was going to beat her up, and if troopers showed up he would hide so he could not be found,” according to the charges. “And after that he would beat her up so that he would have a reason to go to jail.”
The following year, Pitka yanked the same woman by the hair so hard that a clump came loose the next time she combed. She was seven months pregnant at the time. There is no record of troopers flying to the village until 11 days later. He pleaded guilty to domestic violence assault. In 2012, Pitka pleaded guilty to a felony assault charge after a pregnant woman called for help to say he had put a cigarette out on her cheek.
Today, Pitka is in prison awaiting trial on a new felony domestic violence charge. He is accused of choking a woman in front of her children April 24 in Juneau. (In that case, the woman called 911 and a Juneau police officer immediately took him into custody. He has pleaded not guilty.)
Pitka declined to talk about specific details of various cases against him, other than to say they were all alcohol-related. But he said he felt troopers — and the state’s justice system overall — assume Alaska Native suspects are guilty.
“I’d rather have someone like Simmy. A VPSO, a Native,” Pitka said. “He would want to help somebody rather than put them in jail.”
Pitka wouldn’t say where he hid, or how, but the village sits along a steep hillside overlooking the curve of the Yukon River, with countless islands and trails spreading in every direction for 100 miles. In Russian Mission and other Western Alaska villages, residents said the tactic of hiding from troopers to avoid arrest remains common.
“They can run anywhere in the trees back here, or on a boat out to the fish camps, knowing the troopers won’t go after them,” said Darlene Nickoli, who works at the Russian Mission tribal office.
Things were different when Simeon Askoak was alive, she recalled.
“He knew the places where they go.”
‘Did anything happen to you in Wrangell?’
When the Russian Mission City Council talked about finding a VPSO for the village in 1992, it agreed that Simeon Askoak, kind and careful, would be a good choice.
Some 80% of the community was related to Simeon by blood or marriage, said Barbie Atchak, Simeon’s widow. At the meeting he warned the group there would be no favorites. “It will be my job to make arrests, family or not.”
In 2004, the Daily News interviewed Askoak in Russian Mission for a story about the village’s effort to introduce traditional Yup’ik skills into the classroom. The classes seemed to help fight crime, he said at the time.
As teenagers learned to snare marten and skin beaver or build smokehouses to dry strips of salmon the color of tangerines, he noticed fewer kids caused trouble at night. He found himself handing out fewer tickets for underage drinking.
“I’ve seen (changes) even in my own boy,” said Askoak, whose son Nicephore was in the 10th grade. “He’s looking forward to going to school every day now. Before that, I honestly thought he would be dropping out.”
Privately, Askoak struggled. He worried about money. Plus every call for service in the village carried the possibility of angry encounters later at the store, on the hillside trails, in church. He’d received death threats.
Still there was something else.
“He kept asking me if anything happened to me when I was in school, which was the year before we met,” Atchak said.
As children both had attended the Wrangell Institute, a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school for village children 5 to 15 years old. In interviews with former students, University of Alaska Anchorage researchers heard more reports of beatings and sexual abuse at the island institute than at any other school in Alaska.
Some described a “concentration camp-like atmosphere,” recalling how larger boys were given razor straps to beat younger boys who were caught singing Native songs. In 2005, the year the study published, Simeon began to ask his wife about her time there.
“Did anything happen to you in Wrangell?”
No.
Simeon kept at it. The couple had been married almost 30 years. This subject had never surfaced before and suddenly he wouldn’t let it go. Finally Atchak pressed him.
“What kind of thing are you looking for?”
“When I was there,” Simeon began, “I went to an appointment and at the time there was a male doctor. I got sexually abused at the (school) clinic.”
Simeon recently had heard from old classmates, he told his wife. They had been sexually abused too. “That was about two weeks before he committed suicide,” Atchak said.
People living in Southwest Alaska, the region that includes Russian Mission and dozens of Yup’ik villages along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, kill themselves at a rate three times the national average. Alaska Native men are particularly at risk.
There was a time when Atchak thought about suicide too. While growing up in the Tlingit village of Angoon in Southeast Alaska, she said, five men sexually assaulted her on different occasions. She’s since been to counseling and volunteers to speak publicly about suicide and sexual abuse in Bethel.
“I learned that it wasn’t my fault that it happened to me,” she said. The thing she learned about suicide: There is never a single cause.
No one was ever charged with the sexual abuse of Simeon as a boy at the boarding school. None of the five men was charged with sexually assaulting his wife when she was a girl. In the village, the rape of a family member went unprosecuted when the two men claimed the encounter was consensual, Atchak said.
Simeon told the family not to take revenge.
“He didn’t want anybody to do anything to those guys,” Atchak said. “(He said) that God will take care of it when they come face to face.”
In Russian Mission today, villagers say they sometimes have no choice but to take the law into their own hands.
‘A cop shop but no cops’
Basil Larson shifted his weight on the runners of a homemade dog sled as eight panting huskies carried him across the frozen Yukon River on a Thursday in March. The afternoon was silent except for the wind and the dry sound of the sled gliding on snow, like the tearing of paper.
The musher parked and set to making breakfast for the team, a stew of fish and moose meat (fur still attached), and warmed it in a steel drum. With no cop in town, residents like Larson are sometimes deputized by elders or relatives to handle trouble, he explained.
“If somebody is going nuts in one of my aunties’ or relatives’ house and they need some help, I’ll stomp on in and straighten ’em out,” Larson said, mixing the stew with a 6-foot stick.
Watching from bare branches, ravens warbled and croaked.
“You just challenge them until their tail goes between their legs,” he said of people who must be restrained until troopers can fly in. “Try to calm them down and talk them down and use physical force if you have to.”
Basil Larson stands in his dog yard on March 8, 2019 in Russian Mission. He often carries a handgun while mushing for protection from wildlife. (Loren Holmes / ADN)
Larson, 35, grew up here. Playful and winking, a bear in overalls. He’s had to bring people to the City Hall building or the new public safety building, he said. Built after Simeon Askoak’s suicide, the two unpainted jail cells are mostly used by visiting troopers.
When a reporter asked for a tour in mid-March, it took officials a day to find the key. “We have a cop shop but no cops,” Larson said.
Under a state law, Mayor Sheila Minock is the chief of law enforcement for Russian Mission. A former health aide, she said neighbors like Larson are happy to help in a crisis.
This spring, a 10-year-old had to stop his father from choking a woman in his home. The victim fled the village without her belongings, according to a request filed for a domestic violence restraining order. The month after that, a father and his friend were able to restrain a 19-year-old who tried to drive drunk and had armed himself with a loaded 9 mm handgun. When the same teenager punched his sister in the face in September, bad weather prevented a Fairbanks trooper from flying in to investigate for two days.
The village would love to have a VPSO again to handle these problems, the mayor said. That would require the regional nonprofit employer, Association of Village Council Presidents, to recruit, hire and deploy someone to the community.
Finding anyone willing to lift the burden full time is a challenge, especially following Askoak’s suicide, which villagers attributed to job strain. His widow said such things are never so simple.
A spring morning
Barbie Atchak doesn’t remember any sounds on the morning that her husband shot himself. She had left the house to return a few DVDs, and she returned to find Simeon gone.
Maybe he’d walked to his sister’s house, where the church was holding choir practice.
“I stepped out on the porch and looked around to see if he might have been walking anywhere,” Atchak said. As she strolled toward the village center, someone stopped her. There had been a discovery.
No footprints surrounded Simeon’s body in the fresh snow. Troopers investigated and declared it suicide. The Alaska Department of Public Safety soon absolved itself.
In an opinion column published in the Daily News a month after Simeon’s death, the commissioner of public safety at the time, Bill Tandeske, wrote that his troopers concluded the suicide was not related to the VPSO program despite Simeon’s sharp criticism of the program 48 hours before taking his own life.
Tandeske did not say what that conclusion was based on. “Funding for the VPSO program as it is currently operating is adequate. I would like nothing better than to seek additional dollars for the program, but I’m not going to do so until we have qualified VPSOs to fill the positions,” he wrote. “The unfortunate death of Simeon Askoak leaves one more position to fill.”
Like many current and former public safety officials, Tandeske now says the program that Askoak worked for has morphed into something it was never intended to be, and a course correction is needed.
“Ultimately, with the push over time for more law enforcement services, is the VPSO program the appropriate platform to build upon?” Tandeske asked in an interview in September. “These issues have (been) going round and round for some time. Simply throwing more money at it is not the answer.”
Today
When Simeon Askoak was alive, the family always traveled together. Picking berries, hunting, cutting fish. After his death, they scattered.
Atchak moved to Bethel and remarried; her husband is the head of search and rescue for the region. Her son began to raise his family in the home she’d shared with Simeon.
Cassandra and Nicephore Askoak and their children, Amelia, 2, and Blake, 5, in their home on March 9, 2019 in Russian Mission. Nicephore’s father Simeon Askoak was a Village Public Safety Officer in Russian Mission when he committed suicide in the spring of 2005. (Photo by Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)
Nicephore Askoak — the boy who Simeon said was eager to go to school to learn Yup’ik hunting skills — is now 31. On a recent weeknight he returned from a day of trapping, hanging his parka alongside the family rifles and carrying two limp martens in his arms.
He said he hopes people remember his father as a kind man, and he can recall missing him when Simeon went away for VPSO training. While still in high school, Nicephore told a Daily News reporter, he’d grown tired of village life and was thinking of moving.
After the suicide he stayed. For a time, he attempted to follow in his father’s footsteps. Nicephore worked for 18 months as a city police officer, recruited by the Russian Mission city manager. People expected him to stop violent encounters and investigate felonies as his father had.
On the day he was called to a home and discovered the suicide of a friend, he quit for good.
Asked about his father’s death, Nicephore said that all these years later he doesn’t know what to say about it. After a long pause, he stood from the kitchen table, excusing himself to go prepare for dinner.
It’d been a long day, he said, and there was still much to do.
The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica are spending the year investigating sexual violence across Alaska. Read the full series here. We’re particularly interested in hearing from Alaska residents and others about possible solutions. Here’s how you can stay in touch with us:
An Anchorage Superior Court Judge has ruled that the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services may have falsely conjured an “emergency” to push through cuts to Medicaid payments the department is now being sued over.
The Alaska State Hospital and Nursing Home Association sued the state in July, saying that the DHSS unlawfully declared an emergency to cut Medicaid payments to healthcare providers by up to 7%.
The emergency regulation went into effect July 1.
The order by Judge Jennifer Henderson, released Friday, found that the lawsuit by the hospital association raised “at the very least, serious and substantial questions regarding DHSS’ finding of emergency.”
Becky Hultberg, president and CEO of the Alaska State Hospital and Nursing Home Association. (Video still courtesy 360 North)
“The judge’s order is encouraging,” said Becky Hultberg, president of the Alaska State Hospital and Nursing Home Association. “She seems to agree that the situation was not an emergency justifying the use of emergency regulations.”
In late June, DHSS Commissioner Adam Crum, an appointee of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, issued a finding of emergency that allowed it to almost immediately institute the rate cuts while circumventing some of the lengthy public input process usually required.
The emergency, the state said, was that the Dunleavy administration’s 2020 fiscal budget “significantly underfunded” the Medicaid program.
But that was no emergency — or surprise — to the state, Henderson wrote in the order: DHSS had known about and even planned for the reductions at least six months in advance.
“The state budget and DHSS’ response to it have none of the hallmarks of an actual emergency,” she wrote.
Henderson did not rule on the health care association’s request for a preliminary injunction that would force the state to retroactively pay providers at the higher rate.
The order asked for more briefing on other legal issues raised by the case, due by Sept. 6.
A spokesman with the Department of Health and Social Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday, Labor Day.
Volunteers help set up for the food pantry at Muldoon Community Assembly Church in Anchorage in this 2015 photo. Overall, Alaska is ranked 45th of 50 states for child welfare, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s health indicators. It has fallen from 27th in 2015. (Photo by Anne Hillman/Alaska Public Media)
Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s vetoes that radically, and in many cases, unexpectedly cut funding for homeless services, housing programs, pre-K, behavioral health grants, Medicaid and the University of Alaska will be felt heavily by Alaska’s 17,000 low-income families, and poor children will likely carry a disproportionate share of the weight, providers say.
“What these cuts are doing is impacting every aspect of the system that can make it or break it for children and families from a health and well-being point of view,” said Tamar Ben-Yosef, executive director of the All Alaska Pediatric Partnership, a nonprofit that works with health care, community and education organizations on improving child welfare.
Around 42,000 Alaska children live in households receiving some form of public assistance, according to the most recent data from the Alaska Children’s Trust. The state’s cuts will likely touch all of them, a number of providers said in interviews this week.
The cuts have immediate, quantifiable impacts for the more vulnerable among them, such as hundreds of homeless and low-income children likely to lose shelter and low-income children who will lose early childhood education. But beyond that, providers and child advocates say, is a ripple effect that will disrupt nutrition, school attendance, housing stability, access to health care, and whether some children end up in foster care or are able to earn a college degree. The cuts also make it hard for parents because they may impact the availability of child care, education, housing and access to dental care, counseling, psychiatric care and addiction treatment, all of which makes life harder for children.
“It’s the trickle-down effect of this, it’s way more than you can count with numbers,” Ben-Yosef said.
Matt Shuckerow, Dunleavy’s spokesman, did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Dunleavy has repeatedly said the cuts are necessary to bring state spending in line with revenue. A majority of legislators in both houses voted to override his $444 million in vetoes, but the effort failed when they fell short of the three-fourths majority needed to override Dunleavy and restore the cuts. Earlier this week, the House and Senate passed a measure to restore most of the cuts, but Dunleavy has indicated he intends to veto most, if not all, of the money put back into the budget by lawmakers.
Amber Frommherz, director of Tlingit & Haida’s Head Start program, pictured in one of 5 Juneau Head Start classrooms on July 24, 2019. Head Start pre-K classes in Southeast Alaska usually start in late August. But Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed state funding for the program, and now some Head Start classrooms might not open at all. (Photo by Zoe Grueskin/KTOO)
Alaska struggled with child health before the cuts
Important well-being measures for children in Alaska have declined in recent years, in particular the percentage of children living in poverty, low birth weights and child death, according to data collected by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Overall, Alaska is ranked 45th of 50 states for child welfare, according to the foundation’s health indicators. It has fallen from 27th in 2015.
“It’s not that our kids are getting worse, but other states are doing something to change statistics,” said Trevor Storrs, president and CEO of the Alaska Children’s Trust.
These cuts, he said, erode progress the state has made or is planning to make. Data also connect poverty, hunger, homelessness to childhood trauma to other negative social outcomes, he said.
“These cuts are specifically hitting key social determinant areas we know impact the rates of child abuse, neglect, suicide,” he said. “When you combine it together, you are creating a tsunami that is going to devastate our most vulnerable families and work its way up.”
Catholic Social Services Executive Director Lisa Aquino in the storage area of the St. Francis House Food Pantry. Aquino said Clare House is looking for volunteers to help keep the shelter open in the short-term. But, she said, that solution “is not sustainable.” (Photo by Elizabeth Harball/Alaska Public Media)
Immediate problems for homeless families in Anchorage
Among the most immediate issues at hand are the closure of Safe Harbor — a 47-unit transitional housing complex for homeless families in Anchorage that may have to shut down in the next three to four months because there is no money to staff it — and Clare House, an Anchorage shelter for women and children, which will no longer be open during the day providing child care for working mothers. There are more than 80 children living at Safe Harbor and more than 50, including 12 infants, living at Clare House. Safe Harbor serves more than 400 people annually.
Clare House is looking for volunteers to help keep the shelter open in the short-term, said Lisa Aquino, head of Catholic Social Services. But, she said, that solution “is not sustainable.” A few families who lose shelter at Safe Harbor could find a temporary solution with Anchorage churches. Four churches have said they are prepared to house 20 people, each taking them for a night at a time, possibly as early as August, said Dave Kuiper, associate director for Christian Health Associates, who coordinates the emergency cold weather shelter system in churches. But that, also, is not enough.
Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz declared a civil emergency last week because of the cuts, particularly those to homeless services, which are projected to cause between 800 to 1000 people to lose shelter over the next year. On Tuesday the city’s emergency operations center sent out a plea for volunteers and donations to help support shelters and other services.
Galen Huntsman feeding his two-month old daughter Aurora in the family’s one-room apartment at Safe Harbor, a supportive housing facility for families transitioning out of homelessness. There are more than 80 children living at Safe Harbor. (Photo by Zachariah Hughes/Alaska Public Media)
Health care and hunger
Medicaid coverage is another factor for child health, though there are many unknowns. The governor originally asked for $233 million in cuts to the funds that receive a large match from the federal government. The Legislature accepted only $70.7 million of those. With his vetoes, Dunleavy cut $50 million more along with $8.3 million in dental coverage, for a total of roughly $129 million in cuts, according to the Legislative Finance Division. Those reductions come on top of a planned reduction of $15.9 million.
It’s not clear where the all the cuts will be made, but there are no plans right now for changes to eligibility for Denali KidCare, the program that covers low-income children, according to Legislative Finance. Certain types of providers, such as specialists and behavioral health providers, will see a reduction in their Medicaid reimbursement. That may, in turn, cause them to stop or see fewer low-income patients, including children, Ben-Yosef said.
The expansion of Medicaid allowed for the coverage of some adults in families where children were covered by Denali KidCare, helping bring access to medical care for parents, Storrs said. Taking that coverage away, especially when a parent has health care needs, can impact all the family finances, having a negative result for kids, he said.
Similarly, cuts to social and health supports for kids, families and older people are expected to increase hunger in the state “exponentially,” according to Eve Van Dommelen, policy and advocacy manager with the Food Bank of Alaska.
“Food is kind of one those budget items that is the easiest to cut first, you don’t really have a choice about what you are paying for housing and utilities and medicine,” she said.
Even before the cuts, the state has struggled to keep all children fed. Roughly one in five Alaska children don’t have enough food, she said.
“Hunger doesn’t exist in a void, it’s tied to everything. … Kids that can’t eat don’t do as well as in school, that can jeopardize their job prospects,” she said. “It’s really kind of that community impact.”
The Glory Hall homeless shelter in downtown Juneau. The recent cuts to the Homelessness Assistance Program and Community Initiative Matching Grants Program mean the shelter will have to reduce its hours. (Photo by Adelyn Baxter/KTOO)
School success, college options
Dave Mayo-Kiely runs the Child in Transition program for the Anchorage School District, helping homeless students. He’s anticipating more children will need services, though quantifying what that looks like isn’t easy, especially because it’s unclear which of the budget vetoes might be reversed.
“Finding space to do homework is difficult,” he said.
The biggest expense Mayo-Kiely is anticipating is an increase in transportation costs. The program tries to keep students in their same school, even as their parents move around, and gives families gas cards and taxi vouchers to help them, he said.
What happens when families lose shelter is they tend to double up, staying with friends or family in crowded conditions, he said. That has been shown to negatively impact academic success.
“With the reduction of prevention services, there will be families that would have gotten assistance to keep them from entering homelessness who will enter homelessness,” he said.
For 193 recently resettled refugee children in Alaska, the cuts will place barriers on families as they work to integrate into life in America, said Issa Spatrisano, state refugee coordinator with Catholic Social Services’ Refugee Assistance and Immigration Services. On Tuesday she was working with a family that had a family member in need of urgent dental care who lost services to pay for it because of the vetoes. The family had come from a refugee camp, and parents were working. They would have to find the money elsewhere, she said, but that means cutting into other essential things.
In many refugee families, older children also work to contribute to the household. The University of Alaska Anchorage has offered them a way to earn a college degree, she said, which is a major accomplishment for young people whose parents frequently come from places where they were not educated at all.
“The cuts to the university will impact that generational improvement we see in families,” Spatrisano said. “If you decimate the university system, there is no place for these children to go.”
People hold picket signs at the Alaska Marine Highway System ferry facilities in Juneau during the Inlandboatmen’s Union strike on July 25, 2019. (Photo by David Purdy/KTOO)
Alaska’s state ferries remained docked Monday as union workers entered the sixth day of their strike over contract negotiations.
Representatives with the Alaska Department of Administration and with the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific met over the weekend with a federal mediator in an effort to make progress on those negotiations, which have been ongoing for years.
After more than 20 hours of negotiations, the mediator “has recessed talks until a later date,” the Department of Administration said in a written statement Monday afternoon.
“While we were encouraged the IBU finally returned to the negotiating table with the Federal Mediator, this strike and the harm it’s inflicting remains a significant concern to the State, Marine Highway System employees, their families, and the entire coastal region,” Department of Transportation & Public Facilities Commissioner John MacKinnon said in the statement.
“There were positive steps in our meeting that should allow both sides to reach a solution,” Trina Arnold, director of IBU’s Alaska region, said in a written statement from the union Monday morning.
Robb Arnold, vice chair of the IBU board, said Monday afternoon in a phone interview that “there’s issues and we’re working through them.”
All vessel sailings are canceled through Tuesday, according to an update posted on the state’s website Friday. The ferry Kennicott is canceled through Wednesday, Aug. 7, the post said.
The strike started last Wednesday, and is the first strike of IBU’s ferry workers since 1977.
The Malaspina moored in Juneau during a strike by the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific on July 25, 2019. (Photo by David Purdy/KTOO)
Alaska’s ferry system has 11 ships, with nine in service: Aurora, Columbia, Kennicott, LeConte, Lituya, Malaspina, Matanuska, Tazlina and Tustumena. Suspended ferry service has halted state sailings along the Alaska Marine Highway System, a key transit route for dozens of Alaska coastal communities, many of which don’t have road access.
IBU’s last three-year contract expired in 2017, and the union has been working under interim agreements ever since. Mediation under former Gov. Bill Walker and also under current Gov. Mike Dunleavy has not resulted in an agreement. (You can read more about the specifics of what the IBU is seeking in the contract here.)
“We continue to try and come up with a package that both sides can live with,” Dunleavy said in a phone call Monday afternoon with reporters. “We are concerned that the ferry workers who are our friends, neighbors, and family, our state workers — we want to come up with a fair package that, under the current fiscal situation and what is projected, we can all live with and we can afford, and is sustainable.”
The state has said the IBU strike is illegal because of a provision that was included in the union’s demands. While the group said its demands did not include a violation, it changed its proposal, but the state still sees the stoppage as unlawful.
In a cease and desist letter dated Friday, an attorney for IBU told Department of Administration Commissioner Kelly Tshibaka that such claims are false and “amount to unlawful threats.”
Since presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden’s tweet about the work stoppage Friday, other 2020 candidates have also weighed in. U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, both running for president, commented on the strike via Twitter.
The IBU just voted to strike for the first time in 42 years. They are striking for better working conditions and fully-funded ferry service for the community. I stand with the IBU in this and urge @GovDunleavy to bargain in good faith with these workers. https://t.co/IWgcMMJdKK
“The IBU just voted to strike for the first time in 42 years,” Sanders said in a Monday tweet. “They are striking for better working conditions and fully-funded ferry service for the community. I stand with the IBU in this and urge @GovDunleavy to bargain in good faith with these workers.”
Harris tweeted about the strike on Saturday.
“I stand in solidarity with the hundreds of Alaska ferry workers who are currently on strike,” she wrote. “Alaskans deserve safe transportation options and the Inland Boatmen’s Union and its members deserve fair wages and safe working conditions.”
I stand in solidarity with the hundreds of Alaska ferry workers who are currently on strike. Alaskans deserve safe transportation options and the Inland Boatmen's Union and its members deserve fair wages and safe working conditions.
