KCAW - Sitka

A Sitka woman missing for nearly three years has been declared dead. Police are now investigating her disappearance as a homicide.

The inquest for 33-year-old Lael Grant was held last month in Sitka Superior Court.

Judge Leonard Devaney and six jurors gathered to hear testimony on the circumstances of Grant’s disappearance in 2012. Grant’s family filed the presumptive death request this spring in order to obtain her death certificate.

Former search and rescue director Don Kluting described the exhaustive effort his department made to locate Grant, who was last seen buying snacks and soft drinks in a local grocery store at 2 a.m.  on October 15, 2012.

Five days later, her car was found at the end of the Nelson Logging Road, with the receipt from the grocery store, her ID, her favorite pair of headphones, and other personal effects.

Kluting told the jury that he began a Type I search, which presumes a missing person to be alive. But as the days went by, and the man hours began to number in the thousands, Kluting said the search evolved into a Type III.

“We were searching for a body,” Kluting said. And he added this: “There was a criminal aspect to the case.”

Other details emerged over the course of three hours of testimony at the inquest. Former Sitka Police detective Jason Sexton told the court about Grant’s involvement with drugs and Sitka’s drug culture. He said Grant liked to hike — often alone — but the Nelson Logging Road was not where she usually went. He had no explanation why her car would be parked there.

Ryan Silva, who is still working as a detective with the Sitka Police Department, was even more direct. “This case remains open as a potential homicide.”

Silva told jurors that he was on a first-name basis with Grant. She was candid about her drug use, and her struggle to hold her family together.

He had seen her a few days prior to her disappearance — also in the early morning at the grocery store — and said she was high, most likely on meth.

Silva said Grant was under stress: She had broken up with her boyfriend and her father had just died — his funeral was the day before she was last seen.

Silva told the court he is still actively pursuing leads in the case — especially from the grocery store surveillance video taken the last time Grant was seen.

Silva was unable to talk about the details of the investigation, only to say “my focus now is to find her remains.”

That Grant never left Sitka was also the conclusion of the jury. The three men and three women deliberated less than 20 minutes before returning a verdict. They ruled that Grant died in Sitka on or about the 20th of October 2012, “due to circumstances yet to be discovered.”

Grant’s older sister, Erika Burkhouse, also testified at the hearing. She told the jury that even at her worst moments, as she was taken over by drugs, Grant always tried to do her best by her children.

Speaking to reporters while awaiting the verdict, Burkhouse said obtaining a death certificate has been an important step toward closure for her family. Grant’s two sons are age 15 and 12 now, living in Sitka with Grant’s mother, and they all would like a memorial.

Burkhouse also wants some good to come from her sister’s death.

“It is really eye-opening to see how much the drug world has affected everything in this town. My hope, obviously, is to get closure, but my hope also is that people open their eyes a little bit, that this is a huge problem. It really is,” Burkhouse said.

Burkhouse says that her sister lived and died under “horrific” circumstances. The pictures circulated by law enforcement at the time she went missing show a young woman consumed by addiction. But Grant had a caring family — a solid backstop of support. Burkhouse believes she might have made it back, if only she had the chance.

“She just got too far in, you know. She was in a really bad place after my dad had passed away … . She was a strong person, she really was, and those boys meant the world to her. Despite what was happening in her unhealthy lifestyle, she still managed to be a good mom.”

Burkhouse was aware that police were investigating Grant’s death as a possible homicide. She says rumors surrounding her disappearance complicated the investigation at first, and a large reward generated many false leads.

Nevertheless, now that the family has closure for Grant’s life, they’re hoping for justice for her death. “If I had one wish at this point in time,” Burkhouse says, “that would be the wish.”

Harbors emptied throughout Southeast this week as fishermen headed out for the beginning of the summer troll season. July 1 marks the annual start of the summer’s first king salmon opener — the most lucrative time of the year for many trollers. Signs point to a banner year for king salmon.

But Southeast fishermen say they’re not getting their fair share of those kings. The state of Alaska has been locked in a fight with its neighbors to the south over how many fish the fleet can catch.

For now Alaska seems to have lost, and that has led to calls to change the system.

It’s been an uncertain, unsettled spring for many Southeast salmon fishermen.

“It’s been real frustrating because nobody knows what’s going to happen, and usually by now, the quota’s been announced two months ago,” said Sitka troller Bert Bergman.

That would be the annual king salmon quota. Usually, fishermen have two numbers in hand before the summer season starts: an estimate of how many kings are out there and how many they’re allowed to catch. This year, with the season already underway, they don’t have either.

“Nobody knows how many fish we’re catching, or why the number’s low, or how we got this way,” Bergman said. “And basically we’ve had to guess, and dock rumors have ruled the day instead of reason and facts.”

That uncertainty came from the Pacific Salmon Commission, which implements the U.S. – Canada Pacific Salmon Treaty. Each year, the commission has to come up with an estimate of king salmon abundance, determine how many kings Alaska fishermen can catch, and decide how many will pass on to Canada, Washington and Oregon. This year the Commission deadlocked over those figures leading to months of wrangling. Days before the summer opening, fishermen weren’t sure they’d be fishing at all.

Finally, in late June, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced that it would open the summer king salmon fishery, and it would be managed assuming low king salmon abundance. But the state explicitly said it believes that estimate is wrong.

“I wouldn’t say that we chose this course of action,” said Charlie Swanton, Alaska’s representative on the salmon commission. He said Alaska was backed into a corner after representatives from the Pacific Northwest and federal government threatened to take the state to court.

But, Swanton said, it’s not the end of the conversation.

“It’s hardened my resolve to turn around and find some solutions, such that Alaskans get their fair share of the fish that migrate by our coastal communities,” he said.

Alaska believes the model used by the commission is deeply flawed. Last year was a huge year for king salmon in Southeast, and the winter troll fishery was also strong.  Meanwhile, forecasts are calling for major returns to the Columbia River basin. All of that suggests a big year for Chinook, Swanton said.

But even though Alaska didn’t win any concessions this year, the commission has agreed to revisit its model before next year’s fishery.

Dale Kelley of the Alaska Trollers Association says that change can’t come soon enough.

“We’ve had 30 years of trying to pay for the sins of the south on habitat destruction,” she said. “We’ve cared for fish and repeatedly made sacrifices on behalf of our industry and the region just to rebuild runs that are through the roof.”

And now, she said, Alaskans should be benefitting from those rebuilt stocks. She said trollers don’t mind taking fewer fish in years of actual low abundance. But she warns that when the model isn’t reliable, it undermines the entire management system.

Though the Department of Fish and Game hasn’t announced a quota, Kelley fears Alaska sport and commercial fishermen will be allowed about 237,000 kings this year, down from nearly 440,000 last year.

“They’re just busting our chops with this quota, this up and down thing,” she said. “There’s no sustainability, no sense of security that they know what they’re getting year to year.”

Bergman said it’s clear the process is not working.

“I’ve never seen as many king salmon in the ocean as I’ve seen now, and I’ve got four generations of trollers in my family,” he said. “To not get part of that fish when we’ve made all the sacrifices to help rebuild the runs, and we help pay for the hatcheries, and then to not get some of that feels like we’ve been sold out by the southern states and the National Marine Fisheries Service and NOAA.”

But for now, he says, he’s got no choice. Whatever the quota is, he’s fishing it.

“I’m gonna just take a lot of ice and listen to the radio and see what happens,” he said.

Southeast Alaska salmon trollers will open their season on schedule this Wednesday, but under protest. The state says this year’s quota for Alaska fishermen under the Pacific Salmon treaty is too low.

A deadlock at the Pacific Salmon Commission delayed planning for this summer’s king salmon season by months, as representatives from Alaska, Canada, Washington and Oregon wrangled over estimates of Chinook abundance.

But on Friday, the Department of Fish & Game announced that the first king opener of the summer troll season will begin, as usual, on July 1.

This summer’s fishery will be built around a draft abundance index of 1.45 — although Alaska has refused to formally accept that number, declaring it too low.

The Alaska Trollers Association estimates Alaska’s share of king salmon this year at 237,000 fish. That’s slightly below average for the past ten years, and significantly lower than last year’s record quota of nearly 440,000 king salmon.

Trollers say the quota ignores signs that 2015 is another big year. Trollers Association Director Dale Kelley says her members are “beyond frustration” that they may have to watch a banner year for kings swim by. “So, no, we don’t feel like fishermen get a fair shake out of this agreement,” Kelley said. “And really as long as the treaty’s been in place, we never have.”

The abundance index is usually reached through consensus among scientists on the Pacific Salmon Commission’s Chinook Technical Committee. This year, representatives failed to come to an agreement for the first time in over a decade.

The Sitka Assembly on Tuesday night directed the city to explore how it might take on the functions of the Sitka Convention and Visitors Bureau.

The SCVB has been operating under a cloud of uncertainty since February. That’s when the assembly voted to dissolve the bureau and issue a bid for an outside entity to do its work marketing Sitka and coordinating visitor services.

That request for proposals was issued, and there was only one bid — from the bureau itself, in the process of transforming itself into an independent nonprofit.

But city administrator Mark Gorman said the bid was “non-responsive.” The budget was too high, and the bureau didn’t have its nonprofit status in order.

So the assembly faces several options. It can seek other bids, continue on as-is or absorb the bureau’s functions into city government.

Gorman said he reluctantly supports that last option.

“I think status quo is not good,” he told the assembly. “The current situation is not functioning well. That’s why I was directed several months ago to try to find a new option. And so to continue the current system, knowing that there is dysfunction, in terms of it being a quasi-government service, but I don’t have oversight of what’s happening there, is problematic.”

Several local business owners spoke against dissolving the bureau, saying it provides a crucial service in advertising Sitka and connecting visitors with their businesses. Bureau director Tonia Rioux warned the assembly against putting the bureau’s work at risk.

“Once you start outsourcing things like this, or if you split it up, you lose the momentum that’s been happening through the visitors bureau,” she said. “Destination marketing is something that you can’t understand unless you work in it a lot.”

But assembly members said they are uncomfortable dedicating city money — about $300,000 in bed taxes in the current fiscal year — to an organization over which they have little oversight or control.

“Now, almost finishing my third year on the assembly, I still don’t really understand how the money gets spent at the SCVB,” said member Matt Hunter. “I don’t know how much people make, I’ve not seen a line-item budget … I don’t understand how the city money is getting spent.”

The assembly asked city staff to return at the July 14th meeting with a plan to absorb some of the visitor services into Harrigan Centennial Hall while contracting out most marketing. In the meantime, the bureau will be funded through September 30th.

 

As the Sitka Assembly dealt with its budget this spring, the city got one more piece of tough news — the state would cut $300,000 in funding for Sitka’s jail.

Last year the Department of Corrections provided about $700,000 to the city to run the jail – that’s essentially Sitka’s entire jail budget.

But with the state cutting costs this year, DOC received about 30-percent less funding for its community jails program.  Now cities are feeling the brunt of those cuts.

The way the DOC chose to dole out their remaining funds came down to what jails are being used the most. They measured that through bed utilization–or, how many beds went used and unused last year.

“The funding was not originally appropriated based on bed utilization, it’s based on jail operations. But we had to have some way of finding a reasonable approach to determining who’s using the funding most,” said Remond Henderson, the Department of Corrections’ Deputy Commissioner.

For Sitka, that amounted to a 45-percent cut. Sitka Police Chief Sheldon Schmitt says it’s going to be difficult — and is frustrating, given that most of the jail’s inmates are there on state charges.

“I think the state has a larger responsibility for keeping the jail funded than they’ve come up with. $400,000 just isn’t enough to safely run a jail. If that jail was standing alone, and they were running it, there’s no way they could run it at that level with that amount of money safely,” Schmitt said.

For this year, the city of Sitka has stepped in to fill that gap. But Schmitt says that’s not sustainable. He’s working with representatives from around the state to advocate for more funding in the future.

“It’s not just Sitka,” he said. “There’s 15 jails around the state. I had a teleconference with the other community jails on Monday where we put together a community jails board, to try to lobby and advocate for what we feel like is minimum funding levels,” Schmitt said.

But Henderson says it’s difficult to say if jails will get more funding anytime soon.

“If the trend continues, and oil prices stay where they are and the state has to continue to make reductions in state funding, then I don’t see how the money will be reinstated at this point in time.  But as you say, it’s all subject to change depending on what happens in the future,” Henderson said.

For now, at least, the jail will be running as usual.

 

Smaller boats in Alaska’s offshore fisheries may no longer have to carry human observers in the future, if a plan to deploy cameras proves feasible.

At its Sitka meeting this month, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council gave the green light to an inter-agency effort to develop Electronic Monitoring. The council would like to see cameras in action within three years.

Although the headline news out of the council’s contentious June meeting focused on bycatch, there wouldn’t even be a bycatch debate without human observers.

Bycatch is what you get when you’re trying to catch something else. Halibut or chinook when you’re trawling for pollock; rockfish when you’re longlining for halibut.

Year-round, observers fly to Alaska’s remote ports, board fishing boats, and go out on trips. They monitor the bycatch, sample the harvest, and collect the reams of data needed by organizations like the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to sustainably operate commercial fishing in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska.

Expenses for the program top $4-million a year, with about one-quarter of that funding coming from the federal government, and the other three-quarters from fees collected from the fishermen, who also have to feed and house the observers while they’re on board.

On a big boat with a large crew, like a factory trawler, an extra person isn’t necessarily a big deal. These ships may carry an observer every single voyage. On small boats, that extra person can be a bit of a wild card.

“Our observer was on board. And our observer was seasick for about half the days. Conditions were cramped, and I got to sleep on the galley table,” said Steven Rhoads, who owns a 55-foot longliner based in Sitka. Rhoads explained to the council why he’s one of over a hundred boat-owners in this size range who ask for exemptions when they’re randomly selected to carry an observer.

“The observing was not approaching anything I would call complete. It greatly disrupted our regular fishing functions.”

This so-called “observer effect” is a concern. If fishing trips are miserable with an extra person on board, or if boats manipulate their normal fishing patterns in order to return to port sooner and shed their observers — how does it affect the quality of the data?

Recently the council authorized a research program to test electronic monitoring, and Rhoads was one of eleven boat owners to volunteer to have cameras installed on his deck.

“This year every trip, every set, every haul, every hook was observed. It is a wonderful alternative.”

 

Another one of those volunteers was George Eliason. I visited him aboard his 50-foot longliner in Sitka’s Crescent Harbor. The TammyLin has six bunks.

“My boat’s big enough that there’d be plenty of room for an observer. I don’t think we’d do anything differently than we do now. I don’t think I would have a problem with that person, unless we have a conflict in personalities. That always happens.”

But Eliason has not had to test his patience with a human observer. Because he’s got room for only four people in his life raft, he’s successfully applied for an observer exemption. Instead, he’s had cameras on the Tammylin for two years running.

“This wire here goes over to the hauler. Soon as the hauler turns on, it starts the cameras up. Two (seconds) after the hauler goes off, the cameras go off.”

Eliason says he was worried at first that the cameras might catch him in a mistake, throwing fish overboard that he ought to have kept. Unlike gulf trawlers, who are prohibited from keeping some species aboard, longliners like Eliason bring their bycatch back to port and sell it. It’s species like yelloweye and demersal shelf rockfish — but if they catch too much it can restrict their ability to target halibut in some areas.

Eliason’s fears did not come to pass.

“After the person looked at the videos, they said that they could tell what each species was, because what they saw is what they’re going to get.”

Unlike salmon, bottom fish species are managed in weight, and not quantity. Accurately converting the video image of fish into weight remains one of the biggest challenges to be solved by electronic monitoring. But the upside is so compelling: Removing human observers from boats — of all sizes — reduces an element of risk, both for the crew and for the observer. Those “personality conflicts” Eliason mentioned can escalate to abuse — even assault — in the high stakes world of commercial fishing.

Why not just work out the bugs in electronic monitoring, and go for it?

“It’s a challenge. Because federal funds are tight.”

Chris Rilling manages the North Pacific Groundfish and Halibut Observer Program. Because of problems with federal funding, he’s scraping bottom just to pay for the human observer program.

So, organizations like the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association in Sitka are finding money on their own. Just this month they received nearly $500,000 out of a total of $3-million awarded by the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation to develop electronic monitoring. The funding will put cameras on 120 boats in Sitka, Homer, Seward and other ports.

All the boats receiving the equipment will be in the 40- to 57-and-a-half foot range, the so-called small boat fleet. But Rilling doesn’t rule out the possibility that electronic monitoring will have applications in bigger classes.

“There are a lot of promising applications for EM technology, whether it be accounting for halibut discard on some of the larger vessels, compliance monitoring for retention of species in some of the trawl fisheries, and for catch accounting on some of the smaller boats. There are a variety of ways we could use the technology and we’re exploring all of those.”

The council voted unanimously in Sitka to move forward with a pre-implementation design this year, with the hope that electronic monitoring could be integrated into the management of the small-boat fleet by 2018 — when it then could be subsidized by observer fees.

Back on the TammyLin, George Eliason has mixed feelings. He believes electronic monitoring is an important goal, but that doesn’t mean he’s fine with it.

“It’s not fine to any one of us. It’s a direct intrusion on our liberties. Nobody likes it, but nobody sees a way out of it.”

Relatively speaking, Eliason and skippers like him are a small part of the bycatch problem in the Gulf. But if electronic monitoring becomes viable, they’re hoping to play a big part in the solution.