Claire Stremple

On Friday morning, state prosecutors charged a former top-level employee at Juneau’s Bartlett Regional Hospital with two felony counts of theft in the first degree. 

State troopers arrested Bradley Grigg, formerly the hospital’s chief behavioral health officer, Thursday evening for allegedly stealing more than $100,000 from the city-owned hospital. He participated in the arraignment by video call from Lemon Creek Correctional Center.

Court documents detail two felonies: the first involving more than $25,000 in travel-related reimbursements, the second for more than $25,000 in Amazon purchases. 

The felony charges each carry potential jail time of up to 10 years and up to a $100,000 fine. But Superior Court Judge Marianna Carpeneti said that for first time felonies, the jail time is shorter — up to three years. The state is unaware of previous felonies on Grigg’s record.

District Attorney Jessalyn Gillum said Grigg is accused of stealing from the hospital over several years while in his leadership role at Bartlett, where his annual salary was $180,000. 

“His actions primarily took the form of either fraudulent reimbursement requests for travel and accommodations on trips that were never actually taken,” Gillum said. “As well as personal expenses, made through his purchase credit card issued by Bartlett, that, in fact, were not for business purposes.”

Grigg’s arrest followed an investigation by the City and Borough of Juneau. 

“We learned about that through an internal whistleblowing process and provided those details to the district attorney for their use,” said Deputy City Manager Robert Barr.

Grigg worked at Bartlett Regional Hospital for four years. He resigned from the hospital last fall, just hours after the resignation and firing of former CEO Rose Lawhorne. Nearly all of the hospital’s senior management left after Lawhorne’s and Grigg’s departure.

Barr says the city and hospital have tightened security on hospital spending “to guard against this sort of alleged activity occurring in the future.”

He said that includes a monthly review of all credit card purchases by leadership and the use of purchase orders rather than credit cards. 

Barr would not say at this time if the city will seek damages in civil court.

“We are interested and looking forward to the judicial process playing out as it is designed to do in our court and legal system,” Barr said.

At his arraignment, Grigg lowered his head while prosecution made the case for a $25,000 cash bail. He asked the court for a lower amount.

“I’m not a risk of public safety,” Grigg told Carpeneti. “I’m not a flight risk. There’s no plan, there’s no flight purchased or anything like that in order, that would get me out of town. I probably don’t have a job anymore, but, you know, I do have a life here.”

Carpeneti set Grigg’s bail at $10,000 cash, and he will be under electronic monitoring. He may not visit the hospital, and he’s restricted from contact with several witnesses in the case. He also may not leave the City and Borough of Juneau, and he may not visit the airport, the ferry terminal or any harbors. 

Carpeneti entered a “not guilty” plea for Grigg to preserve his rights until he finds an attorney.

Grigg was released from Juneau’s Lemon Creek Correctional Center under pretrial supervision on Friday evening. He’s next due in court for a representation hearing Aug. 31 at 2:30 p.m. His readiness hearing is set for Sept. 7 at 9:30 a.m.

This story has been updated to include that Grigg was released from Lemon Creek Correctional Center.

In this newscast:

• A two-year process that slowed cleanup at the Tulsequah Chief mine upriver from Southeast Alaska came to an end;
• NASA scientists have completed another summer documenting climate change in the far north;
• Neither fall chum nor coho salmon runs of the Yukon River are robust enough to open subsistence fisheries;
• Sen. Dan Sullivan intriduced ligislation that goes after illegal fishing operations in federal waters off the coast of Alaska.

In this newscast:

• A private plane made an emergency landing on a Bethel road last weekend;
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its first ever strategic plan for mariculture in Alaska;
• A Fairbanks group is fighting against goldmine development in the area;
• Governor Mike Dunleavy championed Alaska mineral development at a University of Alaska Fairbanks minerals summit this week;
• COVID case counts stay relatively stable in Juneau.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings spent $20 million for nearly three acres of prime waterfront property in 2018, beating out the City and Borough and Juneau and other bidders with an offer that was more than five times the appraised value of the land.

Yesterday Norwegian gave that property to Huna Totem Corporation, an Alaska Native corporation tied to Hoonah that’s headquartered in Juneau.

Norwegian shared its ideas for the property in 2020, but it hasn’t been developed yet. Huna Totem plans to work with Juneau-based Goldbelt, Inc. and other Alaska Native corporations to complete the project.

“This is an astonishing gift for Juneau and our Goldbelt shareholders,” said Goldbelt President and CEO McHugh Pierre in a press release. “Giving ownership back to the Tlingit people is a tremendous way to honor the culture of this community.”

Mickey Richardson, Huna Totem’s head of marketing and public relations, said the corporation likes to invest in local projects, and the majority of its shareholders live in Juneau.

“Being locally owned and operated, we hope that the project will reflect the values of the Native people from Juneau and also the community of Juneau,” he said.

The corporation aims to submit plans to local planning officials for a tourism facility and dock by the end of the year. Richardson said the goal is to complete the project for the 2025 cruise season.

Alexandra Pierce, Juneau’s tourism director, says the change is unlikely to lead to an overhaul of Norwegian’s concept.

“We have been told that they’re planning to maintain the core elements as presented to the community: the underground parking, public open space and ocean center,” she said. “But we haven’t seen a revised plan yet.”

Pierce has worked with Norwegian on its plans since the company purchased the property. She said Huna Totem will need to show the Juneau Planning Commission that its plans are consistent with the goals and criteria set forward by the Visitor Industry Task Force.

She says the next step for Huna Totem will be to apply to the Planning Commission for a conditional use permit. That will be the public’s next opportunity to provide comments.

Huna Totem and Goldbelt still need permission from the city to develop and operate in the city-owned tidelands around the property. The Coast Guard and NOAA must also be on board if the project impacts their water access.

Pierce said she’s looking forward to having a definitive answer on what development at the parcel will look like so the city’s own long-range planning can move forward.

“We’re just looking forward to having an answer, yes or no, on this project,” she said. “We have a lot of plans and ideas that hinge on whether or not a fifth cruise ship dock is constructed.”

Norwegian did not immediately respond when KTOO asked why the company gave away land it spent millions to acquire. But in a press release, a Norwegian executive said the company wanted the project to be integrated with the local community and that it became “abundantly clear” that Huna Totem should lead the effort.

Norwegian and Huna Totem have worked together before. This March the companies agreed to develop a dock in Whittier.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

In this newscast:

• Students and teachers are transferred to other school on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson after Ursa Major Elementary School closed over earthquake safety concerns;
• A Soldotna family was named the 2022 Alaska Farm Family of the Year;
• Homer’s Sandhill Crane Count starts up again this weekend;
• The Federal Aviation Administration cleared Aleutian Airways to begin flying in Alaska.

Skagway Mayor Andrew Cremata calls the most visible boulder above the rockslide path the “Death Rock of Doom.” It’s about the size of a small house, and it teeters above Skagway’s busiest cruise ship dock.

After leading the town of 1,000 people through the pandemic, he has a dark sense of humor about the latest threat to Skagway tourism. The town depends on a million visitors coming every year — it’s practically the only industry in town.

“What people think is the Death Rock Of Doom is just a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s looming up here,” Cremata said. “It’s not just a rock, it’s a mountainside.”

He pushed through some hemlocks on the ridge above town to survey the collection of loose boulders that hang far above the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad dock. Down there, in a typical season, half a million tourists meet their tour guides or board buses and trains. City-hired geologists say there could be a catastrophic slide here with little to no warning.

“The side of this mountain will come down,” Cremata said. “It’s just a matter of when.”

There have been four serious rockslides on the dock since June. Boulders have punched a hole right through the concrete and rebar, so you can see the water below. Others damaged a cruise ship docked there. Residents say cruisers and local children selling newspapers were in the impact zone just minutes before the rocks came down.

Now, some ships are skipping Skagway and taking their business to Sitka or Hoonah. And instead of four ships, the city can accommodate only three at a time.

It’s easy math. The closed dock is one that can take the biggest ships. That means a loss of almost a quarter of the traffic — or about 100,000 passengers for the rest of the season.

The town is scrambling to fix the problem and salvage its economy.

The view from where Cremata stands on top of the slide path is stunning. A glacier-carved fjord reflects a jagged crown of mountains to the south. To the north are the town’s brightly painted, Gold-Rush era buildings. The port is studded with three huge cruise ships. Everything looks tiny below — people are just specks on the dock. A few small rocks tinkle down the slide.

“Look at all the loose rock up here. Look at that one. That one right there destroys the dock,” Cremata said, pointing at smaller boulders. “That one punches a giant hole in it.”

He gestures at the town’s fuel tanks and the helicopter pad and says he’s worried that if enough rock came off the mountain, a massive slide could take out everything. He says the city needs to do something about the slide so it can get back to the full load of cruise ships its economy depends on. And that needs to happen fast.

“We’re going to have to mitigate that rockslide. It’s gonna be very expensive. But come next April, we need to be able to put four ships here and make sure that our business owners have the best chance they can have of making as much money as possible as the cruise industry rebounds,” he said.

The city could build a new dock, but officials say that would cost even more than a plan to reshape the mountain — a possible solution with a price tag in the tens of millions of dollars.

Hard choices

The loss of ships has been partly voluntary — after the latest geotechnical report was released, the city assembly asked the railroad company that runs the dock to close one berth. The decision was unanimous, even though the assembly knew what it would do to the economy.

“We’re between a rock and a hard place. I mean, there was no winning,” said assembly member Rebecca Hylton.

She said her phone blew up with calls and texts after the municipality posted the geotechnical report online. The landscape hadn’t changed, but the town’s understanding of the risk had.

The direct financial impact is to the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad, which is privately owned but leases land from the city. The scenic train ride up the historic Klondike Gold Rush route is the biggest attraction in town. It draws the cruise tourists that fuel the town’s economy.

“We’re just coming off of years of a pandemic. And our economy has been in dire straits, because we are completely reliant on the cruise ships coming in,” Hylton said. “It reaches every aspect, from the population of our school to the municipal employees that rely on the sales tax money that runs our government here.”

Hylton said a major or lethal rockslide could destroy the town’s tourism prospects long-term. That possibility would be worse, in her opinion, than the economic hit the town is taking now.

Safety and the bottom line

Billi Jo Clem owns Smart Bus and Klondike Tours, which has suffered since the dock closed.

“It has been financially devastating for us,” she said.

Her buses used to wait right at the dock for passengers to get off the ships. That’s not happening now, since the remaining cruise ships are sending people ashore on small boats.

Clem said tourists struggle to find her buses as they get rerouted around the slide area. She estimates that the changes have cut her earnings in half, and she’s had to lay off four drivers.

“We just didn’t have any financial means of keeping them on if we don’t have the tours and we don’t have the people from the ships,” she said. “We just can’t afford to keep them, and we’ve cut everybody else’s hours down.”

Business owners further downtown are feeling the pinch, too. Tina Cyr owns and operates an art gallery several blocks from the railroad dock.

“We’re happy to be open, we’ve got business and it feels good to be ringing up the register. But really, our sales are way down,” Cyr said, surrounded by bright watercolors, silver baubles and carved bone.

She estimates sales are down by more than a third. She says it takes longer for visitors to get down to her shop, and they leave earlier because they have to stand in line to get on a small boat back to the cruise ship.

“We’ve never been where people are tendering and taking the small boats. And so that just sucks up a lot of time for people,” she said.

Gauging risk 

It’s about a half mile walk from the dock below the rockslide to the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad station. Throngs of tourists wait to board one of the trains that run hourly up the winding rail to the White Pass summit.

The railroad — now a joint venture including Ketchikan’s Survey Point Holdings and the Carnival Corporation — has been the town’s largest employer for nearly 125 years. The company says the city’s geotechnical survey overstates the imminent risk of a rockslide.

“It’s been an ongoing issue for a lot of years,” said Tyler Rose, executive director of human resources and strategic planning for the railroad.

 

Rose said White Pass identified a slide risk as early as the 1990s and started monitoring the area in earnest after a 2017 earthquake let loose two rockslides. The company repurposed shipping containers as a protective tunnel for cruise ship passengers to walk through and put up barriers to catch falling rocks.

That appeared to solve the problem, until the rockslides this June. The ensuing geological report said that this new, smaller slide zone was likely a one-off, but it put a new spotlight on the much larger historic slide area that’s right next to it, aimed at the same dock.

“For us, it’s not a heightened concern, because we’ve always taken it very seriously,” Rose said.

The railroad also contracts with geologists, and they released a memo in response to the city geologists’ report. It said that their research has been more extensive than the review the city’s consultants gave the area, and that the “risk of catastrophic failure of the rockslide is not elevated compared to previous years of monitoring.” It also said the instrumentation on the mountain would forewarn the railroad of any movement indicating a rockslide was imminent.

Rose had hoped to reopen the dock this season. It’s clear now, after several more slides came without warning, that that’s not going to happen. July rockfall smashed holes through the railroad’s protective walkway, so now cruisers take small boats into the harbor.

“We want to work closely with the municipality to both solve this problem and seek funding wherever we can, because it will be a financially challenging proposition for both of us,” Rose said.

How to move a mountain

Before managing the city of Skagway, Brad Ryan was manager and facilities director in Haines. In 2020, landslides there killed two people, destroyed homes and devastated that community. He said what happened in Haines is a strong reminder of the consequences of natural disasters.

“You’re talking about a road that had a few people, you know, 30 people living on it, versus half a million people walk down that dock in a year,” he said.

He says there will be time and space to figure out a long term plan after the tourist traffic clears out this fall.

“That’s a very expedited timeline, considering this project is in the tens of millions of dollars,” he said. “And so we’re lobbying for funds, but we’re also pushing the engineers that we’re working with to get this done. And then we’ll just have to figure out how to fund it.”

They don’t have the money yet, but Ryan said the plan would be to fly heavy machinery up to the top of the mountain by helicopter and start taking pieces of it down “five yards at a time.” The goal is to decrease the steepness of the mountainside so rocks don’t tumble off. A team of design contractors will be in Skagway next week to see how — or if — it can be done.

“I don’t think there’s any choice. We have to mitigate that rock and figure out what we’re going to do to save the infrastructure below it,” Ryan said.

The plan sounds fanciful, and it might not even be enough to secure the dock. But the 2023 season is just a winter away, and Skagway’s future depends on a safe, open port.