KFSK - Petersburg

Petersburg’s borough assembly on Monday voted to send a letter opposing a bill that would create five new urban Native corporations in Southeast Alaska and transfer land from the Tongass National Forest to those corporations. Some on the assembly thought there should be more chance for public comment.

Alaska’s congressional delegation has repeatedly introduced legislation that would change the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. It would provide new urban corporations in Petersburg, Wrangell, Tenakee, Haines and Ketchikan each with just over 23,000 acres of national forest land.

Petersburg’s vice mayor Jeigh Stanton Gregor proposed a letter opposing the bill.

“I have a real heartache with taking for any reason lots and lots of public land and giving it to private business with the sole goal of for-profit use,” Stanton Gregor said. “That’s the goal of that land if this goes through will be to maximize profit that’s what that does.”

The five communities did not meet certain requirements for corporation status under the landmark 1971 law. However, other places that also did not meet those requirements were allowed to form corporations and granted land.

Supporters say the legislation would return a tiny fraction of aboriginal territory taken from Alaska Natives. Future shareholders say the new corporations would spur economic development with possibilities for tourism and carbon credits or other uses like food or cultural activities. The sub-surface or mining rights would go to Sealaska, the regional Native corporation. Natives in the five communities have identified the parcels they’d select.

Petersburg assembly member Dave Kensinger said he’s against the legislation because of those selections.

“I’d have a lot easier time supporting this if it was one block of land but it makes your head crazy if you look at all the selections they’ve made,” Kensinger said.

He also thought those land choices could impact the U.S. Forest Service’s ability to offer timber sales in the area. Other opponents have been concerned about the potential for logging on the land or loss of access. There’s language in the bill that would allow public access but also allow a corporation to restrict access in certain situations.

Mayor Mark Jensen requested the assembly take a position on the bill and thought it could have a hearing in a Senate committee. Two years ago, local elected officials asked for more time to learn about impacts. Since then supporters and opponents from Petersburg and elsewhere testified at multiple assembly meetings. The assembly also drafted a long list of questions about the bill’s impacts. Supporters of the legislation provided detailed answers.

Assembly member Jeff Meucci wasn’t ready to take a position and said he still had unanswered questions.

“It’s a real emotional issue in Petersburg and I get that and I want to make sure before I vote one way or the other that I’ve had the opportunity to listen to the folks in town and some of the folks who are involved with it who don’t live in Petersburg but just hear what they have to say and see what we can do,” Meucci said.

The vote was 4-3 to send a letter opposing the bill. Bob Lynn joined mayor Jensen, Stanton Gregor and Kensinger voting “yes” to send that statement of opposition.

Meanwhile, landless communities last month advocated for action at Tlingit and Haida’s Tribal Assembly.

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Anacapa is leaving Petersburg this year after more than three decades of fisheries law enforcement, rescues and patrols in Southeast Alaska. The Coast Guard plans to reassign the vessel after an overhaul.

The captain and crew of ship welcomed the community for tours this week as they get set to depart Alaska.

“There’s not a lot of creature comforts on this boat. This boat is to do a mission,” said Petty Officer Second Class Caleb Tower as he lead one of the tours. “The 154s down in Ketchikan, they’re built to a commercial standard. So it’s much more luxurious — essentially take a yacht and put guns on it and say it’s for the Coast Guard.”

The fast response cutters are 154-foot replacements that are being deployed to other Alaskan ports. Local officials fought to keep a cutter stationed in Petersburg after the military branch announced plans to replace the 110-foot Island class ships like the Anacapa. Named after an island in California, the Anacapa arrived in Petersburg and was commissioned in 1990.

Tower said the constant use in Alaska is hard on a 30-year-old ship.

“The only other boat I’ve been on that is equivalent to what we do here in Alaska is over in the Middle East,” he said. “And it’s high op tempo, constantly just go, go, go, go. So the boat gets tired — it’s a 30-year-old boat. She’s tired. But she’s in very good condition for her age.”

Deep in the stern, senior chief petty officer Jeffrey Wilkes showed off the two large engines for propulsion and two for electrical power. At top speed, the ship can burn around 300 gallons an hour. At lower speeds it can go almost 5,000 nautical miles on a tank of gas. Wilkes said it’s been challenging to be on an older ship.

“It’s getting harder and harder to maintain the asset with the limited resources,” he said. “Parts are hard to find.”

The Anacapa will head to Ketchikan and will spend about a month there, swapping out engines and generators before heading to its new homeport of Port Angeles, Washington. A new crew will take over there as the Petersburg crew heads to new postings.

It’s bittersweet for some on board, including Wilkes.

“The town has been real welcoming to me and my family, my kids, my wife works at the school. We just love it here, but work-wise it’s been a difficult tour,” Wilkes said.

The Anacapa was to be decommissioned, but that’s no longer the plan. It will be replacing a ship that’s in worse shape. The crew says there are maybe a dozen of the 110s left in the Coast Guard, and this one may have another two to five years left in it.

Out on the front deck, Tower shows off the 25 millimeter cannon, which is usually kept under cover.

“It’s a fun gun to shoot,” he said. “It shoots about 175 rounds per minute.”

The Anacapa also has two .50 caliber machine guns and some smaller arms onboard.

In 2012, the crew used the cannon to scuttle a derelict Japanese fishing boat that wound up off the coast of Alaska after the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami.

Over the years the Anacapa has responded to natural disasters, freed entangled whales, and searched for missing aircraft and hunters.

Michaela McKeown has been commanding officer on the Anacapa for about a year. It’s her first command. She says the ship has character, and it’s been a privilege to work with her crew.

McKeown said one of the tougher missions during her time was a search and rescue for a sailboat in distress north of Sitka

“The weather was rough, of course, as it is with SAR cases,” she said. “We steamed through the night, got there first light in the morning and went into this remote bay and had to come up with a pretty creative plan. We used our small boat to get the sailboat under tow and then transfer the tow over to the cutter and were able to rescue the sailboat and the couple individuals onboard and bring them back to Sitka.”

The Anacapa’s replacement in Petersburg is an 87-foot San Francisco-based Marine Protector-class cutter called the Pike, built in 2005. The smaller ship means around 7 fewer crew.

The Pike is expected to arrive in Petersburg in June.

The U.S. Forest Service is proposing a young growth timber sale near Thomas Bay in Southeast Alaska that’s seeing opposition from environmental groups. It’s one of the first sales to focus on second growth logging, following a federal plan to stop cutting down old growth trees.

The proposed sale at Thomas Bay could mean logging 22 million board feet of timber from about 840 acres of forest. It would focus on second growth trees that have regrown from logging back in the 1950s and 60s.

“So much has changed since the 1960s,” said Eric LaPrice, Acting District Ranger for the Petersburg Ranger District. He says the previous Thomas Bay logging came before laws restricted how it was done. “So, how areas were harvested in the 50s and 60s — how it’s done today would look nothing like that at all,” he said.

The proposed sale includes smaller plots within the original logged areas. LaPrice says there could be one sale for all of the 800 acres or several smaller sales over a number of years. Either way, it would likely involve clear cutting.

But LaPrice says the logging that’s allowed today does more to take into account wildlife habitat.

“We would have provisions to retain, for example, a buffer along a stream so it would keep the stream shaded,” LaPrice said.

These days, the Forest Service assesses the environmental impacts through workers that didn’t exist decades ago: silviculturists, hydrologists, archeologists and salmon biologists. In the past, areas were clear cut without thought about the regrowth. The forest would regrow pole-like trees too close together to establish limbs or spaces for wildlife. Left alone, it would take hundreds of years to become old growth again, requiring blow downs and other natural developments.

Now, the forest service monitors logged areas and can do restoration treatments like thinning if needed, says LaPrice.

“Right when things are beginning to re-grow, that’s the really critical time to monitor that things may be coming back the way we want them too,” he said.

Several environmental groups, like Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, are opposed to the Thomas Bay sale as planned. The sticking point for them is the size of the possible clear cutting, which they say is bad for habitat.

“Essentially, it will be clear cut,” said Katie Rooks, a policy analyst at SEACC. “The entire area will be harvested using clear cut.”

Rooks says that type of logging doesn’t follow the Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy, which the federal government announced last year. That plan looks to “support forest restoration, recreation and resilience.”

In addition, the Forest Service released a plan in 2015 that outlined a transition from old growth to young growth logging. And just weeks ago, on April 22, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to inventory old growth forests.

SEACC wants the Forest Service to stand behind its new plans. The environmental group is proposing some alternatives to the Thomas Bay timber sale that includes breaking it up and offering smaller sales to smaller operators. Rooks says that would be better for the environment and would likely keep the product in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.

One reason for the timber sale is to restore the area from the old logging. Although most of the sale money would go to the U.S. Treasury, some would go to restoration work in the area, including improving old culverts.

“There were roads and trails that were left in from that, that altered drainage patterns, for example,” LaPrice said. “So, we would be looking at opportunities where if there was a drainage pattern that was altered we might want to restore it back to its original water course.”

SEACC is skeptical of restoration as an incentive for the timber sale. Rooks says other logging restoration projects in the region — like culvert work — have proven that it’s too expensive to get it all done just from timber sales.

“There’s always this backlog of things that need to happen,” said Rooks. “Creating more need for that to happen seems problematic.”

Final approval for the Thomas Bay project is at least a few years off. LaPrice says they hope to have the environmental analysis done in 2023.

It’s unknown how much money the timber sale will make for the government. LaPrice says he can’t speculate until the projects are appraised.

There is another smaller proposed timber sale on Mitkof Island that includes one million board feet on 40 acres located along Upper Falls Creek. It’s possible that logging could start there by the end of this year.

LaPrice says they’ve heard from some small Petersburg companies that are interested in both of the timber sales.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s proposal to overhaul environmental regulation of cruise ships has passed a key Senate committee. But the bill would also permanently repeal the Ocean Ranger program passed by voters in 2006.

That would eliminate the independent observer program on cruise ships. It would be replaced with direct oversight by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and rely on self-reporting of wastewater discharges permitted by the state.

Sen. Jesse Kiehl, D-Juneau, proposed a compromise, a scaled back program with Ocean Rangers on one of every five ships.

“I think there were some strong arguments made by the administration that just as we don’t have a police officer on every single corner in town, they have built out capacity so that they don’t strictly need an Ocean Ranger on every single cruise voyage in Alaska,” Kiehl said. “But deleting them entirely I think we’ve heard from strong public comment is not what Alaskans are looking for in this self-funded program.”

A fee charged to cruise companies paid for the program for licensed marine engineers onboard the majority of voyages by the larger ships. However, Gov. Dunleavy has vetoed money for it and it last operated during the 2019 season.

Written public testimony has been overwhelmingly in support of keeping or even expanding independent oversight by the marine engineers. The Petersburg borough passed a resolution asking to reinstate funding. Dozens of Alaskan fishermen and processors have signed on to a letter highlighting their importance.

Senate president Peter Micciche, R-Soldotna, supported the state’s plan to end the Ocean Rangers and opposed Kiehl’s amendment during a Wednesday, April 20 hearing of the Senate Resources Committee.

“The Ocean Ranger program was a great program,” Micciche said. “I think what it did was demonstrated that we have a compliance program that works. I think they were engaged and I know that it’s popular, but frankly I think that what’s in this bill has the potential to deliver much greater performance than the previous program.”

State regulators made a pitch for the governor’s plan. DEC Water Division Director Randy Bates told lawmakers his state agency is expanding and hiring staff to review discharge records and take samples when vessels are in Alaska waters.

“We’re going to be on vessels 100 percent of the time, 100 percent of all vessels early in the season, those first three or four weeks,” Bates said. “We’re going to follow up with scheduled and unscheduled inspections as necessary and we’re going to do, for those vessels, large vessels, discharging in state waters, we will do a ride along.”

The state agency projects 41 large cruise ships and 18 small cruise ships to operate in Alaska this year, bringing an estimated 1.6 million passengers to the state.

Kiehl’s amendment to keep Ocean Rangers deadlocked at 3-3 and failed before the bill ultimately advanced.

At first the committee didn’t have the votes to move the bill out of committee, but a late arrival helped it pass. The vote was 4-3, with Micciche, Natasha Von Imhof of Anchorage, committee chair Josh Revak of Anchorage and Click Bishop of Fairbanks, who showed up late, voting yes. No votes were Scott Kawasaki of Fairbanks, Jesse Kiehl of Juneau and Gary Stevens of Kodiak.

The legislation would also establish a new fund to pay for sewage treatment plant upgrades for Alaska communities and eliminate citizens’ right to sue companies for pollution.

Next stop for the bill is the Senate Finance Committee. But its ultimate trajectory is less clear in the House. That’s because the companion bill has not advanced, with time running short for this legislative session.

With no Ocean Rangers for a second year running, the DEC says it plans to inspect cruise ships during the season in port and while underway — both large and small ships. The Ocean Rangers program only focused on ships that carry more than 250 people.

Researchers from New York were in Petersburg, Sitka, Juneau and Cordova last week gathering information on salmon gillnetters as part of a study on sleep deprivation.

The research organization is the Northeast Center for Occupational Health and Safety. It’s a non-profit that’s funded through the Centers for Disease Control to come up with solutions for work-related issues with fishermen, farmers and forestry workers.

Right now they’re studying the relationship between commercial fishermen’s sleep and health.

The research team is on the tail end of their data gathering. They’ve already collected information from scallop fishermen in Massachusetts, Dungeness fishermen in Oregon and salmon gillnetters in Alaska. As a control group, they’re studying inshore lobster fishermen because they just go out on day trips.

Julie Sorensen is the director of the research center. She says they hope to finish analyzing the data this summer and be able to share some of the findings in the fall.

Speaking with KFSK’s Angela Denning while she was in Petersburg, Sorensen said there’s a lot of research on shift workers like truckers, but nearly nothing on fishermen.

Listen here:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Julie Sorensen: Does having an erratic sleep schedule affect their ability to get good sleep when they’re not working? Or, years from now, if they’ve had erratic sleep schedules, you know, in their past as they get older, is it harder to sleep? And then, how does that affect their cognitive decline? Does it affect their memory? Does it affect other aspects of their health?

So we’re looking at cardiac health, we’re looking at kidney function, we’re looking at many, many different things. And I think what we hope to do is, we’ll look at associations between some of the things that they’ve experienced and their health outcomes. And that’ll be a basis for kind of doing a deeper dive in the years ahead. You know, how those two things intersect.

But I think through this initial round, what we hope to do is take that data back to the fishing community and say, well, this is what we’ve learned so far. So now, what do you think is the next logical step?

Angela Denning: And so [you’re studying] specifically, gillnetters?

Julie Sorensen: Yes, yeah, salmon gillnetters. And the reason for that is in our work with partners like AMSEA, they felt like, oh, probably salmon gillnetters have one of the most erratic sleep schedules. So that might be a good group to focus on.

I think what we’re learning through the research is that the fisheries are really fluid. So if somebody might fish for salmon, be a salmon gillnetter but then switch to another fishery. And so it’s really hard to kind of say, you know, that person just does that. So that’s one of the things we’re learning in the research.

Angela Denning: What are some of the questions that you’re asking the fisherman that you see?

Julie Sorensen: So we’re asking them to talk about sleep schedules, work schedules, we’re asking them to talk about nutrition, how they caffeinate, strategies they develop to stay awake, strategies they’ve developed that help them sleep when they have time to sleep.

Questions, like, you know, what are some associations you see between your sleep and your health? What are things that you worry about in relation to your health and sleep? So those are some of the questions were asking.

Some of the additional data we’re collecting are things like BMI, vision, hearing, glucose levels, cardiac health, respiratory health — those are all collected as part of the health assessment.

There’s increasing research on how sleep is so essential for your brain health, your cognitive health. And so you know, sleep is important. You develop waste products throughout the day, and your downtime, your sleep time, is your brain’s time to kind of clean out that waste and kind of renew for the next day.

It’s also an important part of your ability to remember things. So, you know, when you’re going throughout your day, and you’re experiencing different things, those things get stored in your hypothalamus. And then when you sleep, they get transferred back to the neocortex process — they’re brought back to the hypothalamus. So you know, those stages in your sleep cycle, light, sleep, deep sleep, REM — those are all important for processing memory.

And so I think people feel like, oh, you know, I can do without it. I learned to do without it this long. But I think more and more, we’re understanding how important sleep is.

But what we hope to do is, once we analyze the data that we’ve been collecting, we want to share that back with the fishing community and participants. And one way we’d like to do that is to have a webinar or a training session that would be live and interactive. So we can say, well, this is what we learned. And there are some solutions that we think might work for your specific fishery.

And then it also gives people a chance to ask questions or ask for clarification, because sometimes research can be very confusing, right? Like as researchers, we talk about an association, so this exposure may be associated with this outcome. It doesn’t mean that that caused that. But, you know, it’s possible. And so we have to do more research. So that just gives us an opportunity to kind of explain the results in a way that’s accurate and that people can understand.

The commercial herring fishery in Sitka Sound wrapped up Sunday, April 10, with its largest harvest on record.

The sac roe fishery had daily openings last week, with the last one on Sunday. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game estimates the catch totaled over 26,350 tons, more than half of this year’s guideline harvest level of 45,164 tons. That beats the previous record for the fishery from 2011, when the fleet caught 19,419 tons.

Fishing started on March 26. The herring are caught for their roe, which is processed in Petersburg and other Southeast communities and sold in Japan.

The fishery did not open in 2019 and 2020 because fish were too small for buyers. Last year’s catch was 15,164 tons.

This year Fish and Game has reported herring spawning along more than 74 nautical miles of coastline around Sitka Sound.

Meanwhile, herring are also spawning further south, near Prince of Wales Island. A roe-on-kelp fishery opened near Craig on March 17. Fishermen have been given extra time to transfer fish into pounds, or floating net pens, where the herring lay their eggs on kelp.

During an aerial survey Sunday, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported over 26 nautical miles of active spawn in that area. Managers say herring have been placed in most of the 65 pounds. They’re released after laying eggs.

Both herring stocks are strong this year because of big numbers of six-year-old fish born in 2016.