KRBD - Ketchikan

The Ketchikan Public Library will not host another drag queen storytime as part of its Pride Month programming. That’s according to Ketchikan’s city manager, who recently reversed course and canceled the event, citing the public’s response to last year’s reading.

Ketchikan City Manager Delilah Walsh told the mayor and City Council in an email dated April 17 that drag queen storytime would not return for a second year.

“As the chief administrative officer for the City, I am ultimately responsible for all operations of the organization and I am directing that the Library not program a drag queen story time,” Walsh wrote in an email obtained by KRBD through a public records request. “I apologize for the change and appreciate the opportunity for me to dig a bit deeper; I am now very firm in my resolve moving forward.”

The city of Ketchikan has a council-manager system of government, meaning the city manager acts as the city’s chief administrator, subject to direction by the City Council.

The decision is the latest development in a long-running debate over LGBTQ programming at Ketchikan’s library. Last June, the Ketchikan Public Library held its first-ever storytime with a drag queen to celebrate Pride Month and promote inclusivity.

The drag queen Luna, portrayed by high school drama teacher Tommy Varela, read a picture book to dozens of children and guided them through a series of simple dance moves alongside a children’s librarian.

The event was wildly popular: Luna had to read the book three separate times to accommodate all the attendees. The library director said it was the biggest storytime on record.

But the runup to the drag queen event was marked by controversy. The issue dominated two Ketchikan City Council meetings, with dozens of residents both for and against testifying for hours.

The council ultimately voted 5-2 to allow the drag queen event to proceed.

Fast forward to this April, when city officials were considering another drag queen storytime, and the firestorm erupted anew.

Walsh cited public pushback in her decision to cancel the reading. She pointed to two factors: disagreement about last year’s event among City Council members and a citizen-led effort to cut library funding that was in part spurred by drag queen storytime.

“It is a well-attended event. It also had very negative feedback from community members,” Walsh said in a phone interview. “My focus is education in our community, and the event is not necessarily leaning towards that objective.”

In her email, Walsh said “there are many ways our City can celebrate diversity and inclusivity without being polarizing in our community.”

“This includes offering educational materials and providing a safe space for all people of Ketchikan to learn; a drag queen story time sponsored by the Library has proven to not be one of those methods,” she wrote.

Walsh offered a couple of alternatives. She suggested a library screening of a PBS documentary on the Stonewall riots, a series of protests widely seen as a watershed moment in the fight for LGBTQ civil rights.

Walsh also said any nonprofit group would be welcome to host its own reading with a drag queen. Banning drag queen readings outright could violate the First Amendment and nondiscrimination laws, including a local ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression, Ketchikan City Attorney Mitch Seaver wrote in a memo last year.

But leaders of Ketchikan’s biggest LGBTQ-focused nonprofit say they have no plans to fill the gap left by the city’s cancellation. JD Martin is the president of the Ketchikan Pride Alliance.

“At this moment in time, we have no intention of hosting a drag queen storytime,” Martin said.

The Pride Alliance said in a statement that it’s concerned that stepping in to host the storytime would strengthen the city’s case for canceling the event.

“The Ketchikan Pride Alliance refuses to partake in the marginalization of our own community,” Martin said in the statement.

The Pride Alliance says it instead plans to host a drag show at a different venue.

Concern for LGBTQ community members

Frankie Urquhart teaches health at Ketchikan High School, instructing neary all freshman students. She says she’s concerned about the impact of the cancellation on students’ mental health.

“One part of your positive social and emotional health is love for yourself and feeling like you are a part of a community,” she said in a phone interview.

She says a drag storytime would have been one of a few places where LGBTQ teens could see themselves represented in public life in Ketchikan. Urquhart says she attended last year’s reading with her 11-year-old son. More than anything, she says she thought the reading made LGBTQ students feel more at home in Ketchikan.

“Having that event, I think, was such a great thing for people to say, ‘Oh my gosh, these are my people. This is where I’m welcomed. This is where I’m safe. I do belong in this community,’” she said.

Urquhart says she worries that canceling the event sends the wrong message.

“The kids are always watching. And some kids are watching more than others,” she said. “The kids who really need the representation — they’re the ones who are watching the most closely.”

Martin, the Pride Alliance president, said her group would be more than happy to explain to Walsh the importance of the event in more detail.

“I think when we’re talking about diversity and inclusivity, there are always going to be people who feel polarized by that,” she said.

Though Walsh told council members in her email that she had “many discussions with community members on both sides of the issue,” Martin says Walsh did not consult the group before deciding to cancel the event.

City Council members weigh in

Several of the Ketchikan City Council’s seven members praised Walsh’s decision in email replies obtained by KRBD. Riley Gass, a conservative member of the council, led the charge last year to cancel the drag queen reading.

“I know this is a very difficult topic (speaking from experience last year) and I truest appreciate you making this tough decision, I will stand with you on this and I feel it’s the right thing to start taking steps towards making many people who felt unwelcome at the library feel welcome again,” Gass said.

Some on the council who voted to go forward with last year’s reading also offered support for canceling the drag queen reading.

“I find this to be an excellent decision. They are free to set up their own program but not have it be city sponsored,” Lallette Kistler wrote. “I would have suggested it myself, if I had understood it to be an option.”

Council member Mark Flora, Ketchikan’s vice mayor, offered more measured comments.

“Not an easy decision either way,” Flora said. “I appreciate the resolve.”

But one council member is vocally pushing back.

“I’m not happy with it. I think that the council was very clear last year,” said Janalee Gage, a progressive member of Ketchikan’s City Council.

Like Urquhart, Gage says she’s concerned about the precedent the decision sets.

“If we’re going to start choosing and picking and dissecting every event because it polarizes, then we are going to have to eliminate multiple activities,” Gage said. “There’s people that don’t believe in Halloween. Who’s to say now they won’t come forward and say, ‘That shouldn’t be in the library’?”

Like Urquhart, Gage says she’s also worried about the message Walsh’s decision sends to LGBTQ residents.

“Although I know that the manager has the right to decide what each department does, I think this sets a precedent that goes a lot deeper than what a department does in the nature that it implies that our LGBTQ community is not allowed to exist in public,” Gage said.

Walsh defends cancellation

For her part, Walsh says she fully supports making Ketchikan a diverse and inclusive community where all feel welcome. She says it’s especially important to her, given her background.

“I’m from New Mexico, but I’m a Hispanic female, I grew up in a rural community. … Being a Hispanic woman, when I went to school, it was three to one, men to women — I went to a technical engineering school, so I — also very rare to be Hispanic,” she said. “In my own experiences, I understand what it feels like to be different.”

Walsh said in her email that “there is no protocol for determining appropriateness” of city programming, saying that she’s ultimately responsible for making decisions in the best interest of the city. Asked about other city events or programming that might face cancellation for their polarizing or controversial nature, Walsh struggled to come up with an example.

“You know, obviously, the city wouldn’t support, you know, like, anti-minority storytime, or, you know, something to that effect, but I can’t imagine anything like that ever being proposed,” she said. “So it’s really a difficult reach for me to come up with a comparative.”

Walsh defended her decision to cancel the event. But she says she’s expecting pushback from people who’d like to see the storytime go forward.

“I’m sure we’re going to see the same exact responses as if we held it. We’ll have a group of people who are opposed, a group of people who are against, and everybody absolutely has a right to their opinion,” she said. “My goal is just to make sure that I’m making the right decisions operationally for the city.”

The issue is likely to return to the City Council soon. Gage, the City Council member opposing the cancellation, says she plans to bring it up for discussion at a council meeting scheduled for Thursday, May 4.

Disclosure: Reporter Eric Stone has accepted a job with Ketchikan Public Utilities, an entity owned by the city of Ketchikan and managed by Delilah Walsh. He starts work May 5.

Neither the city of Ketchikan nor any city official has control over Stone’s work as KRBD news director. No city official reviewed the contents of this story prior to publication. Stone has had no access to privileged city information as a result of accepting this new position.

The former president of Ketchikan’s tribe has stepped down from her role on Ketchikan Indian Community’s Tribal Council.

Trixie Bennett announced her resignation during a this week’s council meeting. She cited frequent travel away from family and long hours.

“I love what I do and the people I serve,” Bennett said. “And even though I only have a few months left in my term, I know I need to step down now.”

Bennett took over as the president of the federally recognized tribe early last year, replacing Gloria Burns. She spent a year as president before turning over the reins to Norman Skan earlier this year.

She made access to traditional foods one of her top issues, along with increasing subsistence hunting and fishing opportunities for Ketchikan residents through a new federal designation.

Bennett said she plans to keep working on those issues, and hopes to work for Ketchikan Indian Community or another tribal organization in the future.

“What I want to do in my work going forward, I want to work closer,” she said. “I want to be closer to the work, I want to work closer with the people.”

The tribe is now looking to fill Bennett’s seat. Bennett gave some advice to her successor.

“Someone told me once before, a good leader needs to know when to listen, when to speak up, when to apologize when we are wrong, and push forward with that is what is needed, regardless of what people can think sometimes,” she said.

Any adult member is eligible to apply, and will have the option of giving a 10-minute presentation to the council during a meeting next week. Interested applicants need to submit a letter of interest by noon on April 26.

The Alaska Folk Festival wrapped up last weekend in Juneau, drawing artists from across the state and the country.

KRBD sat down with the Ketchikan-based psychedelic rock trio Dude Mtn, who played four shows around Juneau during the weeklong festival.

Some bands are hard to describe. Not Dude Mtn, says frontman and guitarist Cullen McCormick.

“Psychadelic, jam, rock band, blues – and three cool dudes,” McCormick said in an interview.

The band officially got its start in McCormick’s garage in 2020, but two of the members had been playing together for years in Ketchikan’s interconnected music scene.

McCormick and bassist Chazz Gist first got together in the late 2010s in the Ratfish Wranglers, a “subaquatic rock” band led by Ketchikan artist Ray Troll. Then the pair joined up with drummer Kalijah LeCornu as the backing band for open mic nights in Ketchikan.

Gist says that experience gives them a wide range.

“We have different sets for all these different sorts of venues,” Gist said.

Before long, they were gigging all over Ketchikan. At first they were called the Dude Mountain Boys.

“It sounded a little too ‘O Brother Where Art Thou,’ and it didn’t really represent us,” McCormick said. “Dude Mtn really sounds like a psychedelic rock band, you know?”

The band’s name is an homage to a mountain with a popular hiking trail north of downtown Ketchikan. McCormick says it’s a way of bringing a little of Ketchikan with them anywhere they play.

McCormick says he started playing guitar after mastering the Guitar Hero games as a child. He remembers showing off to his dad after nailing a song on the game’s hardest difficulty.

“He was like, ‘Why don’t you put down that piece of plastic and just pick up a real one?’” he recalled. “So they got me a guitar, and it kind of just became an obsession.”

Dude Mtn played four shows on a swing through Juneau during the Alaska Folk Festival, culminating in a Saturday night show at the Alaskan Hotel and Bar on April 15. McCormick says the gig at the Alaskan was special — they played for upwards of four hours straight with no breaks.

“We just kept playing and kept playing because it was so packed in there — you couldn’t just leave that,” he said. “Didn’t even look at a clock. We just let it rip.”

Bar manager Morgan Gaither says it was the biggest night in terms of sales she’s ever seen in her three years at the Alaskan, and maybe the biggest in the hotel’s 110-year history.

“The crowd didn’t take a break. Everybody was just totally enthralled the entire time, which is very impressive,” she said via phone.

And the show featured a new addition to LeCornu’s drum set found at Juneau’s Salvation Army thrift store: an old fire alarm.

“Nobody’s ever seen a fire alarm solo? Who can say honestly, they’ve ever seen a fire alarm solo?” McCormick said.

Dude Mtn also played Juneau’s Crystal Saloon and the Sandbar and Grill in their swing through the Capital City, plus a pop-up show at the iconic downtown dumpling shop Pel’meni.

“It was on a kind of ‘if you know, you know’ basis,” he said. “And that place is already small, but it was packed shoulder-to-shoulder. We were playing all acoustic.”

It was Dude Mtn’s second trip to Juneau, after a Crystal Saloon show last Octoer that was billed as a “Ketchikan takeover.” McCormick and his bandmates say it was a special trip up the Inside Passage.

“We feel the love here in Ketchikan, but to go somewhere else, as a band, and just be well received like that definitely made us feel really good inside about what we’re doing,” he said.

McCormick says Dude Mountain is recording an EP of original songs that it hopes to have out by late spring or early summer. They plan to gig around Southeast this summer, including a summer solstice party at Ketchikan’s Hole in the Wall Marina in June. They’ll be back in Juneau for Alaska Fashion Week in July.

It’ll be at least another year before the first large cruise ships visit Prince of Wales Island. A consortium of Native corporations working to transform a former logging dock in Klawock into a destination for tourists has delayed the cruise port’s opening until 2024.

The Oceania Cruises ship Regatta was originally scheduled to tie up at the dock owned by the village corporation Klawock Heenya next month. The roughly 650-passenger vessel was originally slated to visit Klawock four times this summer. 

But getting the former logging dock ready for visitors is a big undertaking. Nick Nickerson, Klawock’s mayor and a member of Klawock Heenya’s board of directors, said the port just isn’t ready yet.

“We felt it would be better to wait a year, you know, that way we have everything lined up, all our ducks are in line, and we would have a better port to present to the tourism industry,” Nickerson explained.

According to Klawock Heenya, the port will include a welcome center, retail, a cafe, walking trails, historical displays, buses and bathrooms once it’s open.

“It’s going to be done in stages,” Nickerson said. “We’re looking at a port reception, we’re building reception. Of course we have to develop the, you know, the port facility, you know, so the ship can come in and we’re looking at transportation.”

The port is a collaboration between Klawock Heenya and Na-Dena, a partnership between Doyon Limited and Huna Totem Corporation. The project is modeled after Huna Totem’s Icy Strait Point port in Hoonah. It’s expected to be the first port to host large cruise ships on Prince of Wales Island.

Despite an outcry from residents in the small Prince of Wales Island town, a nearly 300-acre timber sale in and around the city of Whale Pass is poised to go forward. After months of advocating for changes to the plan, residents are now worried about what their town will look like once cutting begins.

Whale Pass is a quiet town, tucked out of the way on the northern tip of Prince of Wales Island. It’s a good place to escape the hustle and bustle of larger communities. James Greeley lives in town.

“People are coming to Whale Pass to get away from all that, for fishing adventures and such,” Greeley said.

The city’s 100-some residents hunt and fish and rely on natural resources.

But Greeley expects an upcoming 292-acre timber sale to change a lot about his town. Greeley said he’s concerned log trucks will clog up the only road in and out of town and bring this quiet community a steady stream of mechanical noise. He explained he’s concerned the planned clearcut on a hillside overlooking town could also hurt the town’s status as a destination for fishermen and other tourists.

And he’s also worried about what it will do to residents’ way of life. There are concerns about how the clearcut might affect fish and deer habitat — even though the state’s best interest finding dismissed those concerns.

The sale could become final on April 26. And residents who live on the hillside worry that their houses will face landslides, floods and strong winds.

Greeley lives in one of those houses, and he can see the orange tape marking the clearcut boundary from his kitchen window.

“Will I be able to walk my dog again?” Greeley asked. “I don’t know.”

The state’s Division of Forestry is conducting the sale. Southeast Area Forester Greg Staunton said he expects the hillside to recover quickly.

“It’s been quite a while since they’d seen a cleared hillside in their viewshed, but it was — it will be similar to what they’re already looking at, probably five to 10 years’ time,” he said.

Staunton said his division listened to the outpouring of opposition for the sale — specifically, how close the boundary comes to some homes — but he explained it just wasn’t feasible to push it back.

“We approached the design of the sale with a perspective that we wanted to maximize that footprint for the intended purpose of the land base, which is for forest management,” he said.

But Staunton said the plan does incorporate wildlife corridors to minimize the impact on deer and fish.

Katie Rooks is a policy analyst for the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. She thinks the most surprising thing about the sale is that, despite how much criticism it received, it’s still moving forward. The Division of Forestry published its land use plan last week.

“After the, you know, moving appeals by the people of the town, I think we were just shocked at the lack of empathy,” she said. “This is public land, and the public overwhelmingly responded in opposition to this sale.”

Rep. Dan Ortiz, I-Ketchikan, and former Rep. Jonathan Kriess-Tomkins, D-Sitka, both opposed the sale.

The recent forest land use plan included comments from both representatives.

“I respectfully request that you modify the Draft Forest Land Use Plan for the Whale Pass timber sale and return to the drawing board with the City of Whale Pass to reach a reasonable compromise that will benefit both the State of Alaska and residents of Whale Pass,” Kriess-Tomkins wrote.

“Whale Pass is Alaska’s newest established city as of 2017 and does not yet have the infrastructure needed to provide utilities such as water and sewer,” Ortiz wrote. “Residents rely on naturally occurring resources. However, clearcutting the land above their homes would negatively impact the watersheds those households primarily rely on.”

Greeley heads the group Friends of Whale Pass, which has led local opposition to the sale. He submitted several written comments and proposals to the division, and participated in the hearing process.

“It’s just very frustrating, very disappointing,” he said.

Greeley feels like the state ignored Whale Pass.

“From my first comment was basically just saying, shut up and take it,” Greeley said. “So I guess that’s what we have to do. So that’s great to know.”

If a request for reconsideration is not filed, the sale will be made final on April 26.

Two conservation groups are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its alleged failure to finalize standards to protect U.S. waterways from harmful vessel discharges, including those from cruise ships.

In a complaint filed in February, Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity say that the 2018 Vessel Incidental Discharge Act required the EPA to develop standards for discharges from ships.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction that would require the EPA to issue those rules.

Much of the lawsuit focuses on the ballast water that ships take on to provide stability. Friends of the Earth Oceans and Vessels Program Director Marcie Keever says that when ships take on water in one place and discharge it in another, that can help spread invasive species and diseases.

“Unless you have treatment to a level which gets rid of these invasive species, when your ship exchanges ballast water, … it’s an incredible risk just from invasive species alone, let alone the pathogens you might encounter from ships coming from all over the world into our waters,” Keever said.

An EPA spokesperson declined to comment on the pending litigation.

In their lawsuit, the conservation groups say invasive species alone cause more than $9 billion in damage each year to infrastructure for public water supplies, industry and power plants.

But ballast water is only one focus of the lawsuit. Keever says the groups are also concerned about discharges from scrubbers that reduce ships’ air pollution.

“The biggest rise in wastewater pollution that we’ve seen over the last several years is exhaust gas scrubber wastewater, which is, basically, the wastewater generated when you use a wet scrubber to scrub your smokestack to comply with international rules for cleaner fuel,” Keever said.

A CoastAlaska investigation published last year uncovered dozens of reports from independent cruise ship monitors alerting state authorities to foamy discharges from ships operated by Carnival Corp. and subsidiaries like Holland America and Princess. Keever says those discharges can harm marine life and those that depend on it for sustenance.

“Essentially, what they’ve done is converted air pollution into water pollution,” Keever said.

Lawyers for the conservation groups and the EPA are due to appear before U.S. District Judge William Orrick in the Northern District of California in mid-May.