KBBI - Homer

Audiences have been enjoying the sweet sounds of the Kenai Peninsula Orchestra’s Summer Music Festival this week and last. It’s about to wrap up, with noon concerts Thursday and Friday, and gala concerts Friday and Saturday.

The annual two-week summer music festival in Homer and the central Kenai Peninsula includes free noon concerts at venues around town, as well as chamber orchestra and string quartet performances from local and guest musicians.

And there’s a first this year — the Navy Band Northwest is performing on the peninsula, as well as in the orchestra’s gala concerts Friday and Saturday.

“And it’s just such a pleasure to have them here,” said Maria Allison, accompanist for the orchestra. “They’ve added so much. A couple of them are playing with us in the orchestra. And, of course, Sterling Strickler, our local celebrity, who is a bassoonist in the Navy Winds and graduated from Kenai High School. It’s just so fun to have him back here.”

A wind trio and saxophone quartet performed Wednesday in Kenai, requiring extra chairs to be brought out to accommodate the growing audience. Among the crowd was guest conductor David Jacobs, director of orchestral studies at the University of Oregon, who will be leading two pieces in the gala orchestra concerts.

“I jumped at the chance to come to the Kenai Peninsula because it’s a beautiful place in the summer, and to work with the musicians of the community. They just carry such a passion for music with them. So I really treasure the opportunity to work with those people,” Jacobs said.

The gala concerts are taking a Russian turn this year.

Jacobs is conducting Alexander Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances” and Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev’s “Overture on Three Russian Themes.”

He says that both are 19th-century Russian nationalist composers.

“Since they’re Russian nationalists, essentially the music has a lot of roots in Russian folk music,” Jacobs said. “So there are tunes that maybe people know just from hearing Russian folk songs. The Borodin is very flashy and showy, and just a real kind of showstopper pieces. And the Balakirev is just a really nice, pleasant, little variations of Russian folk songs.”

After intermission, the orchestra, as well as community choirs from Homer and the central peninsula, will perform Sergei Prokofiev’s “Alexander Nevsky.”

“Some of the movements are in Russian, some of them are in Latin,” Allison said. “And one of the movements is depicting the scene where the battle takes place on the ice of a lake. And the heavy armor of the German soldiers breaks the ice and they all go through the ice and are drowned. It’s extremely dramatic.”

Audiences might be familiar with some of these works, as some folk themes were used by more famous composers, such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Igor Stravinsky. But even if not, they shouldn’t disappoint.

“I would just encourage anyone, whether they been to an orchestra concert ever before or not to come because it’s going to be really exciting music that anyone can enjoy,” Jacobs said.

The Kenai Peninsula Orchestra’s gala concerts will be held at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Homer Mariner Theater at Homer High School, and 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Renee C. Henderson Auditorium at Kenai Central High School, with a lecture 45 minutes before each concert.

The boundary between South and Central Peninsula hospitals will stay the same.

Clam Gulch and Ninilchik residents have voiced complaints about paying mill rate taxes to support the South Peninsula Hospital Service Area, when they live much closer to Central Peninsula Hospital, Soldotna.

Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly voted at its July 26 meeting whether to ask voters in the October municipal election if the boundary line should be moved south. That vote was a tie, so the measure failed.

It was brought back for reconsideration at Tuesday night’s meeting, but assembly member Stan Welles was absent, as he had been at the previous meeting.

Since none of the other assembly members changed their mind, reconsideration failed.

The assembly OK’d summary language for four ballot propositions that will go to voters in October:

• Proposition 1 would issue general obligation bonds to expand the Central Peninsula Landfill.
• Proposition 2 is for general obligation bonds to renovate and expand South Peninsula Hospital and the Homer Medical Center.
• Proposition 3 increases the sales tax max cap to $1,000 and exempts residential rentals from sales tax.
• Proposition 4 phases out the borough’s optional senior citizen property tax exemption for new applicants by 2024.

Alaska got a glowing report in a checkup from a top federal health care official. Though there are issues that need further treatment and support, communities showed a healthy dose of innovation in delivery and integration of care.

Mary Wakefield, acting deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, toured Alaska from Aug. 1 to 4, visiting Barrow, Fairbanks, Circle, Anchorage and Kenai. But she wasn’t bringing a prescription from Washington. Instead, she got ideas for the treatment of health care in rural communities that can be brought to other areas of the country.

“I’ve seen some phenomenal examples of Alaska Native and American Indian communities that are really focused on comprehensive services that are delivered effectively and very efficiently on behalf of their communities. So there’s some wonderful examples to draw from this state and from these communities and try to think about how we might apply some of these examples in other parts of the United States,” Wakefield said.

HHS provides funding for a wide range of community services. A big part of the department’s presence in Alaska is through Indian Health Services, which funds facilities and programs administered through Native tribes throughout the state.

During her visit to Kenai on Aug. 4, Dr. Wakefield toured the Kenaitze Indian Tribe’s Head Start program, elder center, tribal court and Dena’ina Wellness Center, which offers medical and dental care, behavioral health services and a wide variety of general health and wellness programs. The center provides care to Alaska Native and American Indian people. Behavioral health services are available to anyone in the community.

Jaylene Peterson, executive director of the Kenaitze Tribe, says it was an honor to meet with Dr. Wakefield.

“This is an unprecedented visit. It was an amazing time that we were able to share with the deputy secretary, and we were able to show her what we’ve been able to accomplish with funds that have not always met the true need. So we’ve been blessed by this trip. I believe that she has learned much about the Alaskan community and why things are so different and more challenging here in an Alaskan setting,” Peterson said.

Peterson hopes the visit will help remove some stumbling blocks that come with HHS funding. She says that some of the reporting and training requirements can be onerous.

“I don’t disagree that we should be accountable for the funds that we receive, but sometimes it can be a lot more than should be required. So, there are ways that I believe that we can be smarter with our money,” Peterson said.

Primarily, though, the tribe wanted to show its holistic approach to health care.

“It’s just phenomenal. The leadership, the commitment, the approach that is innovative in terms of the integration of a wide range of services on behalf of the people who are served here is absolutely exceptional,” Wakefield said.

Before her trip to Kenai, Wakefield participated in a summit in Wasilla on opioid abuse.

“It is an absolute epidemic in every state the across the country, including right here in Alaska. And there are some pretty serious problems in communities within the state that are really adversely impacting families and putting special burdens on law enforcement, (and) special burdens on health care providers,” Wakefield said.

She says the Obama Administration is focusing efforts on making sure health care providers have the clinical skills necessary when prescribing opioids, closing the gap between people who want treatment and access to that care, and making sure people who have overdosed have immediate access to life-saving medications.

Among its many social services, the Kenaitze Tribe offers a chemical dependency recovery program.

A common phone scam is once again making an appearance on the Kenai Peninsula. But this time, scammers are targeting seniors.

Michelle Tabler, Alaska Regional Manager for the Better Business Bureau, says she has gotten several reports of the so-called “Publishers Clearinghouse scam” in Homer and Soldotna.

“It’s a typical lottery scam, but in this situation, they’re telling people that they’ve won Publishers Clearinghouse or they call it PCH. The amount varies several million dollars. Then they call back and say, well there’s some fees associated with this and that there’s some taxes,” said Tabler.

The scammers tell victims they must send money or gift cards before they can receive their sweepstakes prize.

“We just want people to know that these are not legitimate phone calls and you should never have to pay any fees if you ever have won. We advise people just to hang up the phone. You didn’t really win,” said Tabler.

Residents who suspect they were a victim of a phone scam should report it to their local police department. More information can be found on the Better Business Bureau website, www.bbb.org.

Quixotic, an aerial performance group, will perform at Salmonfest, a three-day music festival that occurs the first weekend of August at the Kenai Peninsula Fairgrounds, Ninilchik.

This year, the festival will showcase an artist who grew up in Homer, Mica Thomas who helps produce lighting for an aerial group from Kansas City, Missouri.

Thomas said, describing Quixotic as creating an experience. “It’s kind of where you’d go to watch a performing arts piece mixed with a concert, and how you merge all those things together to create spectacle and broaden the imagination,” Thomas said.

Quixotic will perform Saturday, Aug. 6, at midnight during the festival, and their performance is scheduled to go until 2 am.

Thomas and his business partner, Anthony Magliano, are the producers of Quixotic. Magliano is the founder and artistic director of the group, whereas Thomas mostly focuses on the lighting aspects of the show.

This year, Quixotic is one of four headliners for the Kenai’s annual Salmonfest.

Jim Stearns, the director and producer of Salmonfest, says that this year has one of the strongest line-ups the festival has had yet.

“Indigo Girls are the top act, although Trampled by Turtles is a very, very close second,” Stearns said. “They’ve been on a mediocre rise since they were here (at Salmonfest) three years ago.

Although Thomas is the only member of the group from Alaska, this is not the group’s first performance in the state. Quixotic did an Alaska Tour two years ago, and performed in Fairbanks, Anchorage and at the Mariner Theater, Homer.

Getting the entire group and all of their equipment up to Alaska requires a lot of work, Thomas says, so they can only bringing a few members of their cast and crew with them. They even had to ship a portable aerial truss all the way from Kansas City to make this performance happen.

The group is bringing some great aerial performers, live music from percussionist Simon Huntly and violinist Shane Borth and some light to accompany the darkness of the midnight show, Thomas said.

“We’re doing lots of fire performances as well within the show we’re bringing to Salmonfest,” Thomas said. “So we wanted to make sure that we could work with kind of having darkness around to help make all the fire performance shine a little brighter.”

The fire acts will be integrated into the performance, alongside aerial performers and dancers, who will perform in front of a canvas screen that Thomas will produce the light shows on during the performance.

Quixotic are comparable to the famous Cirque du Soleil, whom the group have collaborated with in the past. Thomas says that he’s looking forward to sharing the Quixotic experience with fellow Alaskans.

“I mean I’m excited for the whole festival,” Thomas said. “I’ve never been able to go to the festival before, and I’ve been hearing about it for years and years and years, and so I’m really excited to just go check out the whole experience as a whole.”

Quixotic also is providing aerial-teaching classes in Homer, Aug. 9-13, in the Mat Room at the High School.

You can find more information on how to sign up for the classes by calling the Homer Council on the Arts at 907-235-4288, or by visiting their website at www.homerart.org.

The tiny town of Seldovia bills itself as a place where everybody knows everybody. But this summer has brought a new face to town. Tod Larson is a retired lieutenant colonel who spent 25 years in the Army National Guard before getting his master’s in public administration. Now he’s Seldovia’s new city manager.

“I’ve spent my life in public service, so this is just kind of an extension of that,” Larson said.

His main priority as city manager is to continue providing the services Seldovia residents have come to rely on.

“We are a small community — small budget itself,” Larson said. “(I) really want to try my best to maintain all of our current services through fiscally difficult times. My whole purpose here is to maintain those basic services – drinking water, sewer, trash collection, senior meals.”

Larson also is working on several other projects. He’s acting as the city representative for Seldovia’s new $5.4 million water treatment facility to be completed in July 2017. And he’s hoping to attract a variety of new businesses to the area.

“Our goal is to have some economic development so we can have year-round businesses,” he said. “We really want to diversify. There’s a fishing nexus, there’s tourism, there’s a lot of biking, and hiking,” said Larson.

Larson started the job in June and is enjoying his first summer in Alaska.