KFSK - Petersburg

A statewide commercial fishing industry trade group has hired Petersburg Indian Association’s tribal administrator as its next executive director.

Tracy Welch, 34, is wrapping up work with Petersburg’s tribe this week and starts at United Fishermen of Alaska on Dec. 7. UFA advocates for the industry and represents commercial fishing groups from the Bering Sea to Seattle.

Welch said she was able to attend the Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle in November with UFA members.

“It was a good chance to meet some of the board of directors and some of the fishermen from around the state and on the west coast,” Welch said. “So definitely something a little bit out of my wheelhouse, but it’s going to be nice to go back to working for and with fishermen, too.”

Welch grew up in Petersburg and has a background in commercial fishing, gillnetting and long-lining with her father. She went to college at Notre Dame and law school at University of Oregon. Welch served on the tribal council of the Petersburg Indian Association starting in 2017 and became council president later that year before taking over as tribal administrator in 2019.

Welch said the tribal government has grown into a larger role over the past five years.

“The organization has really turned around and become a true partner in the community,” she said. “I think you can see that in the various services that we offer and partnership with the borough and partnership with Mountain View Food Service. You know, we do a lot of trail work, and we started a transit program that’s probably the high point of my time at PIA.”

That transit program offers free rides in the community to elders and people with disabilities. PIA also helps distribute low cost meals to seniors. The tribal government has added to its inventory of affordable housing this year and hopes to add more.

UFA executive committee president Matt Alward writes in an email that the board is excited to welcome Welch to the organization.

“She may be new to UFA, but is no stranger to commercial fisheries in Alaska,” Alward writes. “Her unique background, knowledge of the commercial fishing industry, and excellent interpersonal skills will be tremendous assets to our members.”

Welch replaces Frances Leach, who is leaving to start up a lobbying firm in Juneau. Several with ties to Petersburg have held the UFA job before, including Bobby Thorstenson and Julianne Curry.

Welch’s last day on the job at PIA is Friday, Dec. 3, but she plans to help with the transition for the new tribal administrator. The tribe is still advertising that job.

A bill that would create new Alaska Native corporations in Southeast Alaska and grant them federal forestlands from the Tongass National Forest has been reintroduced in the U.S. Senate.

Similar legislation has been introduced in the past and it was already introduced earlier this year in the House. The bill, co-sponsored by Alaska’s Congressional delegation, would amend the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act allowing the formation of five new urban corporations in Ketchikan, Haines, Wrangell, Petersburg and Tenakee. It would grant 23,040 acres of land that’s now national forest to each of the five new corporations. Natives from the five communities say they were left out of the landmark 1971 law that granted public lands to the for-profit regional, urban and village corporations.

“It’s just not a recent event,” said Randy Williams of Ketchikan, part of the Alaska Natives Without Land campaign and president of shareholders in Ketchikan. “It’s actually something that we know has been wrong with the way that the final ANCSA bill was passed and now everybody else is starting to see that. And so we’re real hopeful this time.”

The five communities did not meet certain requirements for corporation status under the 1971 law. However, other places that also did not meet those requirements were included in that legislation.

Williams said the new corporations would be helpful for the five communities and would create jobs and revenue. The land could be used for economic development like tourism, timber, carbon credits or other uses like food or cultural activities. The sub-surface or mining rights would belong to Sealaska, the regional Native corporation which has provided at least $500,000 in seed money to the landless Natives group.

The most recent versions of the bill have included specific land selections. The Senate bill’s maps for a Ketchikan corporation’s selections are different than the House’s version. The Senate version seeks parcels on Gravina Island and near Cholmondeley Sound instead of parcels near Red Bay on northern Prince of Wales Island and on Hecata Island. Williams said that and other changes were made following public feedback. In the Petersburg area, two U.S. Forest Service recreation cabins in Portage Bay have been dropped from the selection in both House and Senate versions introduced this year.

There’s wording in the bill that would continue public access for non-commercial hunting and fishing on the land. However, the measure allows a corporation to restrict access for several reasons, like limiting conflict with commercial use of the land.

Cecelia Tavoliero is president of the Alaska Natives Without Land campaign and would be a shareholder of a new Petersburg corporation. She said the concern she’s heard from conservation groups has been that the new corporations will log the land.

“We can’t speak for the future board when this bill passes but we have a lot of young people who are very environmentally conscious,” Tavoliero said. “So I’ll just leave it at that. We are hopeful and we hope it will go through committee and then go to mark up and go further than it has been before.”

Look to Yakutat for the most recent example of logging on Native corporation land that has neighbors and community members upset. Boards of the proposed corporations would decide how to make money off the lands granted in the bill.

Petersburg resident Becky Knight remains a vocal critic of the bill.

“For years (Senator) Murkowski’s consistently sought every possible avenue to carve land out of the Tongass and put it in the hands of the timber industry or to privatize it for resource extraction,” Knight said. “The situations for whether the five communities in her bill were eligible to establish ANCSA corporations were agreed and settled on in ANCSA itself. And so their noneligibility stood up to land claim attempts in following years.”

Besides the potential for logging on the parcels, opponents have been concerned that public access could still be restricted in certain situations. Others have asked for certain parcels to remain part of the Tongass, or don’t support the transfer of logging roads and other infrastructure that’s on some of the land.

Still others see room for compromise.

Meredith Trainor is executive director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council or SEACC, a Juneau-based conservation group. She said her organization recognizes that the lands that make up the Tongass were unjustly taken from the Indigenous peoples of Southeast.

“SEACC supports the efforts of our Alaska Native partners to advance a meaningful resolution to the claims of the landless communities,” Trainor said. “Following the introduction of the bill today, we look to the Alaska delegation to lead in the ongoing collaborative effort to advance the solution that will restore balance and honor the sovereignty of the original people of these lands.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski urged passage of the measure during a hearing in the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee this month. It’s part of a larger bill to make changes to the landmark 1971 law.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated five new Alaska Native corporations would each be granted 23.040 acres of land. This was a typo. The new corporations would receive 23,040 acres each.

Fourteen-year-old Joseph Tagaban returned home Saturday after nearly a year of cancer treatment in Seattle. Many community members met him at the airport.

Dozens of people watched through a chain-link fence as Joseph and his family got off the jet. Wet snow was coming down but no one seemed to care.

It was just after Christmas last year when Joseph first learned he had a rare form of cancer known as acute myeloid leukemia, or AML. It started with swollen gums and ended with four rounds of chemo over several months.

In February, he spoke with KFSK over the phone. He said the treatment was more difficult than he imagined.

“Especially the pain,” Joseph had said. “Like extreme pain; it skyrockets sometimes and I just feel that it gets unbearable sometimes.”

On Saturday, he was out of the hospital gown and into a black puffy coat, khaki pants and a red stocking hat. As he approached the crowd, people chanted, “Joseph Strong! Joseph Strong!”.

“Joseph Strong” is a slogan that’s been all over Petersburg for months, on T-shirts and posters throughout town.

Joseph addressed the crowd.

“I just want to thank you all so much for the amount of support, for the amount of prayer, and the thought that you guys have all put into our journey back in Seattle,” he said. “I just wanted to thank you guys so much for always being there by my side.”

People approached him for hugs.

“Welcome home, buddy,” a friend said while patting his back.

Even though they were outside, everyone was masked. A long embrace came from classmate Iris Case. She later said that they kept in touch while he was away.

“The first couple of months a lot of people were in contact with him and then he went through a really rough patch and we just FaceTimed a lot and he kind of helped me with school work,” she said.

On most days, if Joseph wasn’t too tired, he could attend school remotely from the hospital. Some teachers were in the crowd. He got straight As the first quarter of this year.

Watching it all from a distance was his mom, Je Tagaban. She was overjoyed with the homecoming.

“Joseph’s here, he’s whole, he’s alive!” she said.

Tagaban’s immune system is still weak. The community has the worst outbreak of COVID its seen since the pandemic started. As of Saturday, it’s the highest case count per capita in the country.

Je says her son asked her about being around the crowd.

“Mom, should I be hugging?” Je said. “I was like, ‘You know what, you have to be careful.’ But he was like, ‘But mom, I can’t promise, I want to get all the hugs I can.’ And I said, ‘Go for it’, you know.”

It might be a few weeks before Tagaban can safely return to school in person. But he said the community support now, as it did before, keeps him looking to the future.

“One of the most important things that I had to keep in mind was to stay positive and stay confident that I was going to beat cancer,” he said. “So, I just kept that in the back of my mind and even though, I mean, I had my moments, I just couldn’t deal with having all this pain but I knew that there was light at the end of the tunnel.”

The welcome didn’t end there. People got into their cars and Tagaban climbed into a fire truck for a noise parade through town.

The U.S. Forest Service is proposing a project to help restore some young-growth forests in central Southeast. It’s seeking funding and approval to treat areas that have been logged in the Petersburg and Wrangell Ranger Districts. If funded, field work could start next year.

If you live in Southeast Alaska, you’ve likely seen young-growth forests. They crop up after clear cut logging.  The trees are all the same age — pole-like, with minimal low branches.

“Trees come in really thickly, and they can fully occupy a site,” said Sheila Spores, a silviculturist with the U.S. Forest Service. “Oftentimes there’s nothing in the understory. You know, it will be sparse and dark, no shrubs, no forbs and no other little trees.”

Besides logging, young-growth forests can occur naturally if there is a disturbance like a major blow down. Eventually, the forests evolve into old growth with a healthy ecosystem that is better for wildlife. But it takes a very, very long time.

“A few hundred years,” Spores said.

The U.S. Forest Service is proposing to help speed that process up by manually thinning stands on about 110,000 acres.

The process also allows them to encourage the growth of certain species of trees.

“You know, yellow cedar is a slow growing species that is being impacted by yellow cedar decline,” Spores said.
“So, we can go in and if we have two trees that are really good, solid trees but you have to pick one, we’ll pick the yellow cedar over the other one, for example.”

For the most part, the cut trees would be left on the forest floor to create a natural understory.

Spores says they hope to get funding to continue the work for a decade. The cost will depend on how much is approved and for how long. Most money will come through a restoration trust fund, which gets funding from tariffs on imported timber and other wood products.

The forest service started this type of young-growth restoration in the 1970s.

Encouraging old growth is not only better for wildlife habitat and water sheds but also for future logging.  The thinning is actually referred to by the forest service as “pre-commercial thinning” because eventually it could be logged again.

And that’s a sticking point for some conservation groups, especially when some of the young growth is in roadless areas where development has been prohibited in the past. Alaska currently has a roadless exemption from the Trump administration but the Biden administration has said it would seek to reinstate it.

“Our main concern at SEAC is inclusion of the inventoried road less areas,” said Meredith Trainor, Executive Director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

She says SEACC will be keeping an eye on how the project develops.

“In general, I think this is a good thing that they’re doing this thinning work, and they’re doing sort of what is effectively restoration work in areas that have been previously logged,” Spores said. “We’d just like to see the roadless areas treated separately since they have different management requirements and are a different category of forest.”

It’s not certain who will do the work, which usually includes people walking through the forest with chainsaws. Spores says they sometimes partner with conservation groups or tribes. But mostly, they contract out to companies that specialize in it.

“I have to say that this work is really extremely physical and it’s hard, and we don’t often have large, local workforce that want to do this kind of work,” Spores said.

The Forest Service is taking input this November and hopes to make a decision by the end of the year. If funded, the field work could start next spring or summer.

Petersburg’s latest outbreak of COVID-19, its worst since the start of the pandemic, has meant staffing shortages at the hospital, local schools and multiple borough departments this month.

Petersburg Medical Center reported 16 new cases Monday night, bringing the active case count in the community to 63. PMC says the spread of the virus is not decreasing and asks residents to follow mitigation measures.

The hospital remains in red status and is experiencing staff shortages, which means some patients’ appointments may be rescheduled.

Meanwhile, students at Rae C. Stedman Elementary School in Petersburg have switched to remote online learning for the rest of this week after cases impacted staff.

That’s despite a drop in overall active case numbers in the school district Monday. That count dipped was at 3o on Monday afternoon, down from 37 last week. Another 32 students and staff are in quarantine. Officials says cases and possible exposures have mostly happened outside of the school setting.

The school district says multiple staffing issues will require the remote learning in the lower grades.

For the moment, classes remain in person for middle and high schools. However, superintendent Erica Kludt-Painter says that could change based on cases and their connections to staff and students.

The district has announced two additional vacation days for students next week, Monday and Tuesday. That will mean a full week out of the school buildings for students in the upper grades because of the Thanksgiving holiday, and nearly two weeks in preschool through fifth grades.

Borough manager Steve Giesbrecht is reporting to the assembly this week that multiple borough departments are short of workers because of the outbreak, including the police department, dispatchers, public works, motor pool and parks and recreation.

The borough allowed the Viking Swim Club back into the swimming pool last week and restarted some morning swims for others this week. Otherwise, borough buildings have been closed to the public since Nov. 3.

Other Southeast communities are also seeing spikes, with COVID-19 numbers up in both Wrangell and Ketchikan.

The number for Petersburg’s COVID-19 information line is 907-772-5788.

Fishery scientists are forecasting a region-wide catch of around 16 million pink salmon for 2022.

That would be a big drop from this past year, but it’s about double the 2020 harvest from the parent year of those pinks in 2020 and the catch from 2018.

“Although it sounds like a low harvest forecast, it’s actually a large improvement over the last two even years,” said Andy Piston, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s pink and chum salmon project leader for Southeast.

The Southeast harvests in both 2020 and 2018 were around 8 million fish, and among some of the lowest in decades.

Pinks are more difficult to forecast than other salmon, spawning every two years and with only one age group returning. A big piece of the outlook is based on data from trawl surveys, now a joint effort by Fish and Game and NOAA Fisheries. The annual research catches young pink salmon migrating from their freshwater rearing streams to the open ocean. It gives a snapshot of how many young fish have hatched and survived rearing.

Piston said the survey catches were poor this past summer, but there’s reason for some optimism.

“All the concerns people have had starting in late 2013 about the Blob and anomalously warm conditions have largely gone away,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll start seeing some turnaround in some of our marine survival for salmon with conditions being close to normal out in the Gulf.”

Many pointed to warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures as a possible culprit for poor ocean survival over the past few years. The poor catch in 2020 was compounded by low prices during the pandemic, making it worth just over $6 million at the docks that summer. But 2021 saw a stronger than forecast run and a rebound in prices.

Scientists forecasted a region-wide catch of 28 million fish going into this summer. Instead, the catch topped 48.5 million pinks, worth over $48 million at the dock based on an average price of 36 cents a pound. That was the thirteenth-highest catch since statehood.

Piston said the numbers of fish escaping, or making it back to spawning streams, were higher around the region.

“We had very large escapements throughout southern Southeast Alaska this year. And in northern Southeast Alaska, where we had pretty poor escapements in the parent year of 2019, we saw a big improvement and we met our escapement goal in all three sub-regions of Southeast Alaska. And generally in the northern Southeast inside areas we saw pretty decent escapements in most areas this year,” he said. “So that was a really big improvement over what we saw in 2019.”

This year, fishing fleets caught 38.1 million pinks in the southern panhandle and 10.4 million in the northern part of the region. That’s a big improvement for returns in the north, which have been weak in both odd and even years recently.

Pinks are targeted by purse seiners and most are canned or frozen.