KUAC - Fairbanks

Fairbanks residents gathered Thursday to remember John Hartman. The 15-year-old was beaten to death in downtown Fairbanks 19 years ago this week, a murder that resulted in the long questioned convictions of four local men, who were freed last year under a deal with the state.

Shirley Lee, an Episcopal Priest and chair of Tanana Chiefs Conference Justice Task Force, led the group in a prayer and vigil for the unsolved murder of John Hartman.

“19 years ago around here a young boy was murdered and the lives of four young men were robbed,” Lee said.

She also spoke of the four men, Marvin Roberts, Eugene Vent, George Frese, and Kevin Pease, also known as the “Fairbanks Four” who were arrested in 1997 for the murder and incarcerated until last December when they were released under conditions that they cannot sue the state or the city of Fairbanks. Lee said the state attempted to settle and quiet the case through what she believed to be an immoral agreement.

“It’s (inconceivable) to me that a confession has been made and no work has been done with it, not at the federal level, not at the state level, and not at the city level,” Lee said.

Lee said she hopes that those who gather this coming week for the Alaska Federation of Native Conference remember the case which is still unsolved.

“The boys may not be legally allowed to question or challenge it but those of us who are not involved can do so,” said Lee.

Activist and blogger behind the blog thefairbanksfour.com, April Monroe, reflected on the case saying that we are now at the 19-year mark without resolution for the murder of Hartman.

“What originally inspired so much passion and divisiveness of this case was a brutal and horrific murder of a child,” said Monroe.

Monroe hopes to see some movement in this case and feels that part of the inactivity is partly related to egos of those involved in the case initially and that going forward would take action in acknowledging the mistakes made during the wrongful conviction.

“John Hartman still needs justice and deserves it,” said Monroe.

One of numerous cost saving realignments within the University of Alaska system, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Journalism and Communications departments have merged.

Professor Charles Mason said the merger should save money, and shore up the journalism department, which has seen a declining number of majors in recent years.

”The point of this merger is to have, probably, a smaller core faculty over the long run, but increase the number of majors in the two programs together so that it’s a single department with a reasonable number of majors and a pretty large number of students,” Mason said. “And the savings will come in through that.”

Mason says the combined journalism-communications program has more than 60 majors, and a dozen graduate students.

He said the merger, which includes plans for co-location at a single facility, has resulted in the elimination of an administrative job, but that no other cuts are currently planned.

He noted that the department hopes to hire for an open journalism professor position.

Donors gave nearly $50,000 to an online fundraiser last month to help pay for a project to prevent the Tanana River from washing away the bank that runs along Big Delta State Historical Park near Delta Junction.

Alaska State Parks will use the donations as a match for further fundraising to pay for a bank-stabilization project riverbank to prevent further erosion.

Alaska State Parks Superintendent Brooks Ludwig said Monday the online crowdfunding drive that ended late last month went well, but fell just a bit short its $50,000 goal.

“We’re at about $48,200, I think, at the last count,” he said. “And actually, the donations are continuing to come in.”

Ludwig says State Parks will continue to accept donations through February while the agency applies for grants and other funding to pay for work to stop the Tanana River from washing away more of the south bank that runs along the Big Delta State Historical Park.

The Tanana cut deeply into the bank last summer after rains raised the level of the river to near flood-stage, and the high water undercut a bluff on which an historic cabin was located. The bluff collapsed to within 13 feet of the structure before State Parks jacked it up in August and moved it away from the river.

“We’re working to see what we can do with the state funding and the private donations,” he said. “Maybe we can leverage that for some federal funding for bank stabilization and some habitat work.”

Ludwig says 87 people donated to the cause, along with several private- and public-sector donors that kicked in big bucks and in-kind donations of materials such as boulders and “root wads,” or the big, gnarly bundles of tree roots that’re yanked out when land is cleared and that are useful in building aquatic habitat.

“If we can find some root wads, that’d be very beneficial because it’d be really nice to incorporate that in the bank restoration to preserve the salmon habitat there,” Ludwig said in an interview Monday.

He says engineers are surveying the bank now to develop a design for the project, which he says will get under way in the spring.

“We’re going to get at it in April, while the water is still very low,” he said, “and get in there and harden the bank before the water starts coming back up again.”

The company that sent the first big luxury cruise ship through U.S. and Canadian Arctic waters is preparing the Crystal Serenity for a repeat performance in 2017, but one expert believes this year’s historic transit doesn’t mean the Arctic is likely to become a hotspot for global shipping anytime soon.

The hoopla over the luxury cruise ship Crystal Serenity’s arrival in New York on Sept. 16 after a 32-day voyage from Alaska through the Arctic has died down a bit.

Crystal Cruises’ CEO and President Edie Rodriguez still was enthusiastic last week as she described what she said was a smashingly successful cruise.

“By every standard,” Rodriguez said, “a monumental success!”

Coast Guard passenger-vessel safety specialist Cecil McNutt agreed – at least, to the extent that nothing bad happened.

“It pretty much went without a hitch,” McNutt said.

Rodriguez said it all went off so well the company is well under way in preparing the 1,000-passenger Crystal Serenity’s second cruise next year on the same route.

“It was so popular that we are doing it again,” Rodriguez said.

It would’ve been unthinkable until now for a big luxury cruise ship like the Crystal Serenity to transit formerly ice-choked Arctic waters, especially the Northwest Passage.

A steady decline in Arctic sea ice due to the warming climate has made it possible.

Still, sea-ice conditions in the Arctic have always been unpredictable, which is why the company went to such lengths to prepare for the cruise, including lengthy consultations with U.S. and Canadian coast guards.

But McNutt said ice wasn’t a problem this year.

“I got some reports from the ship itself that showed that the vessel was sailing basically in pretty much ice-free conditions,” McNutt said.

In fact, one of the ship’s passengers told a reporter they spent much of their voyage looking for sea ice, instead looking out for it.

One of the predictable things about the Arctic is that conditions there are unpredictable.

McNutt said that’s why rough weather that set in late last month forced the Coast Guard relocate an evacuation site that was to be used in a big field-training exercise held to practice rescuing passengers from a cruise ship that runs into trouble in waters off Alaska.

“I guess the one lesson learned is that Mother Nature always rules,” McNutt said.

And that, said Arctic maritime expert Lawson Brigham, is why the Crystal Serenity’s voyage does not necessarily signal the beginning of boom in cruise tourism or other kinds of shipping in this part of the circumpolar north.

Arctic sea ice has receded enough in late summer for cruise ships and other vessels to take advantage of the open water, Brigham said. But for the rest of the year, it’s as difficult and expensive to operate in the region as it’s always been.

“The challenge for using the Arctic Ocean for navigation is that it is, in fact, ice-covered,” Lawson said. “It’s ice-covered partially or fully likely nine months out of the year, through (the end of) the century.”

Brigham is a distinguished professor of geography and Arctic policy at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, and a retired Coast Guard officer with years of experience serving in the Arctic.

He thinks despite all the talk of a shipping boom in the Arctic Ocean brought on by receding sea ice opening up more shipping lanes, the law of economics make that unlikely.

“It is all about economics,” he said.

Brigham said the only type of shipping that’s likely increase in the near future is the kind that brings raw materials out of the region that have become more accessible by receding sea ice.

“The biggest increase in traffic will be the movement of natural resources out of the Arctic to global market,” Brigham said.

Brigham thinks that kind of shipping isn’t likely to increase much on this side of the Arctic until global prices rebound for such commodities as iron ore, nickel, copper and hydrocarbons.

And even then, he expects the shipping lanes on the Eurasian side of the Arctic Ocean will be busier because there’s generally less sea ice along that coastline and because nations there have for decades been building up their shipping and industrial infrastructure.

“Where is offshore development? Where is hydrocarbon development? In the Norwegian Arctic right now and in the Russian Arctic – not in our Arctic and not in the Canadian Arctic,” Brigham said.

Brigham said receding sea ice may open shorter Arctic routes that may enable ships to get their goods to market more quickly. But that’s not guaranteed, due to weather and other uncertainties that come with operating in the region. Those include a lack of up-to-date maps and hydrography of the continental shelves and Arctic Ocean floor.

Brigham he said recent expansions of the Panama and Suez canals and other facilities in the lower latitudes suggest investors aren’t likely to gamble big sums on the still-risky venture of Arctic shipping. At least, not yet.

Areas of Fairbanks continue to struggle with wintertime smoke pollution.

Many residents of the interior community rely on wood heat, and a North Star Borough sponsored conference is exploring ways to reduce emissions tied to serious health problems.

Fairbanks has been a federal non-attainment area for the tiny airborne pollutants in smoke known as PM 2.5 since 2009.

The community is embroiled in a maze of state and federal air quality regulations, that are about to get more complicated. In town for a North Star Borough air quality conference, Environmental Protection Agency PM 2.5 team leader Justin Spenillo said the community’s failure to sufficiently lower pollution levels is triggering its reclassification as a serious nonattainment area.

“They’ll need to meet the serious area requirements, which include some more stringent requirements most notably the best available control measures and best available control technologies,” Spenillo said.

Spenillo said reclassification also moves back a compliance deadline to 2019, or even as far as 2034 in the community applies for and receives extensions.

North Star Borough mayor Karl Kassel said the community should not rely on federal regulators to drive a solution.

“This is a local issue,” Kassel said. “We’re breathing the air. EPA isn’t breathing the air.”

The borough has reduced wood and other smoke pollution through education about clean burning, and subsidized replacement of older stoves and boilers, but Borough and State air quality consultant Bob Dulla said some neighborhoods continue to suffer serious violations.

“The very high concentrations that have been recorded, in North Pole in particular, demand very large reductions,” Dulla said. “And so that requires a real change in behavior. That’s not easy to accomplish, and it’s gonna take time.”

Tacoma, Washington, provides an example of a community that successfully reduced fine particulate pollution.

Puget Sound Clean Air Agency scientist Phil Schwartzendruber told Fairbanks conference attendees that it hinged on enforcement patrols carried out after hours by local government employees “who are accustomed to this sort of work. Some of them were inspectors. Some of them were housing inspectors. We’ve actually had some dog catchers.”

Schwartzendruber said identified violators were contacted and offered help.

“If you simply cooperate with us, go through the education materials, sign up for our alerts sign up for the text alerts, enroll in our change-up program, the fine would be waived,” Schwartzendruber said. “And so the vast majority of people actually had no fine at all because they agreed to work with us.”

Schwartzendruber said Tacoma lowered the local fine particulate pollution enough to meet EPA standards in 2015.

The Fairbanks Borough assembly is taking new steps to address the problem.

Last month, the assembly approved funding for more localized air quality monitoring, Mayor Kassel said should help identify polluters.

“We have staff that will be going out and taking a look at what’s going on and try to pinpoint sources that need to improve,” Kassel said. “And I think we can get there.”

The Fairbanks assembly appropriated nearly 3 hundred thousand dollars to purchase and operate 26 new air quality monitoring devices.

The borough’s air quality conference continues through Wednesday.

Alaska Wildlife Troopers are asking for the public’s help after more than a week after they began an investigation of the killing of four moose that were left unsalvaged in three areas along the Richardson Highway south of Fairbanks last week.

Wildlife Trooper Tim Abbott said it’s been a week and day since he checked out the bodies of four bull moose after receiving reports they’d been shot and left to rot in three areas: one near Eielson Air Force Base; another near Delta Junction; and a third about 160 miles south of Fairbanks near the Fielding Lake Road intersection.

Three of the four moose killed and left unsalvaged last week had “sub-legal” size racks, too small or otherwise illegal to harvest.

“We’re still looking for any leads that the public can provide,” Abbott said in an interview Thursday.

Abbott has never seen so many instances in a single day of what Alaska law refers to as “wanton waste” of a game animal.

“I dealt with four moose that were shot and left,” Abbott said. “And that is just totally unethical and it’s just very sad.”

It’s also punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $10,000 and possible jail time.

Abbott said he began that day, Sept. 15, with checking out a report of a dead moose just off Telegraph Road near Eielson.

“It was found floating in a lake,” Abbott said.

He said that bull had a big enough rack to make it legal to harvest, unlike the other three he checked out farther south along the Richardson, including one just north of Delta Junction just off the highway.

“That one was found right before dark,” Abbott said, “in a little gravel pit to the north side of the highway there, near Electric Avenue.”

Abbott found a couple of other bulls with racks that were too small to be harvested – so-called “sub-legal” – just off the highway near the Fielding Lakes Road intersection, about 25 miles south of Black Rapids.

“One was 43-and-a-half, I believe, inches wide,” Abbott said, “and the other one was 45-and-a-half-inches wide. They were just two sub-legals, and they were both just, again, left to lay.”

Abbott said bulls in that game unit, like the one in the Delta-area unit, had to have a rack that was least 50 inches wide with a certain minimum number of antler spikes or tines.

Abbott said he can’t talk about the details of his investigation. He thinks the two bulls on Fielding Lake Road may have been killed by one hunter or one group of hunters. But not all four.

He said if the shooters would come forward, it would be easier for all involved and may result in a more lenient sentence.

“Y’know, if somebody makes a bad call and unfortunately shoots a small animal, there’s a simple way that we can deal with it,” Abbott said. “It’s called a self turn-in. They can make a phone call, we can meet up with them, we can take their statement, we’ll talk to them…”

In lieu of that, Abbott encourages anyone who knows anything about the killing or who saw anything suspicious early last week in those areas to contact Troopers of call the Alaska Fish and Wildlife Safeguard office at 1-800-478-3377.