KUAC - Fairbanks

Congress approved an $886 billion defense bill Thursday and sent it to President Biden for his signature. The measure calls for more than $200 million in funding for construction projects at Alaska military installations, and a pay raise for service members.

The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act calls for planning and design work on future construction projects at Alaska military installations that Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s office says will provide military personnel serving in Alaska with “state-of-the-art facilities.”

The legislation authorizes funding for military construction projects already under way in the state or about to begin. Murkowski’s office said the biggest of those line items include $107.5 million for extending a runway at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, $34 million for completing a Fort Wainwright housing project, $9.5 million for a new dormitory at Eielson Air Force Base, and $6.1 million for a precision guided-missile complex at JBER.

The NDAA also calls for nearly $30 billion in missile defense funding in fiscal year 2024, including about $11 billion for the Missile Defense Agency, which operates a base at Fort Greely. The funding will enable the agency to complete work needed to field 64 Ground-Based Interceptor missiles, most of which will be at Greely.

A Defense Department document says the agency expects to complete testing of an advanced missile defense radar facility at Clear Space Force Station in the coming year. The document says the Long-Range Discrimination Radar will then be handed over to the Space Force.

The NDAA also includes funding for a 5.2% pay raise for service members and other quality-of-life measures — like improvements to the allowance that helps offset the cost of food and other necessities for military families.

According to Murkowski’s office, the legislation also calls for improving relationships with local Alaska Native and American Indian organizations by appointing tribal liaisons to consult and coordinate with those groups.

Alaska State Troopers say the driver of a snowmachine that hit a dog team on the Denali Highway Monday, killing three dogs, is a test rider for a major manufacturer.

Troopers said Wednesday that the Minnesota man was in the area doing testing for Polaris when he hit the dog team east of Cantwell. No humans were hurt, but in addition to the dead dogs a fourth dog suffered serious injuries.

The dogs were in a team owned by longtime Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race veteran Jim Lanier of Chugiak and being driven by Mike Parker, who works at Lanier’s Northern Whites Kennel.

In an emailed statement, Polaris spokesperson Jess Rogers says the company wants to “express our deep sympathies to the family that lost three of their beloved sled dogs.”

Rogers added that safe riding is “central to how we operate, and we are fully cooperating with local law enforcement, as well as conducting our own internal investigation.”

Alaska State Troopers are still investigating the crash.

Alaska Airlines is buying Hawaiian Airlines for $1.9 billion. The companies announced the proposed merger Sunday at a press conference in Honolulu.

The combined organization will be based in Seattle under the leadership of Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci.

“As the two airlines rooted in the 49th and 50th state, both of which are uniquely reliant upon air travel, Alaskan and Hawaiians share a great deal in common,” Minicucci said.

At the press conference, he called out the friendship between late Hawaii and Alaska senators Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens, and the political bonds shared by the native Hawaiian and Alaska Native groups. He said the airlines share a common corporate culture.

“We are aligned in the way we do business, the way in which we treat our employees, our engagement and support to the communities we serve,” he said.

Hawaiian Airlines serves about half the inter-island traffic in the state. Peter Ingram, Hawaiian Airlines’ president and CEO, says Honolulu will soon be an Alaska Airlines hub.

“This is the biggest announcement in Hawaiian’s history, and that’s saying a lot for a 94-year-old company,” Ingram said. “Our shared similarities, our people, and our values run deep, and that is what will ensure a prosperous future for both brands.”

The CEOs of each company say it will be 12 to 18 months before customers notice any changes, with schedules, frequent flyer programs and airline names staying the same. Minicucci promises the Hawaiian name will stay even after the merger is complete.

“The Hawaiian Airlines brand will remain, not only in name, but also in the distinctive branding that appears on the Hawaiian airplanes, at airports and other locations, and in the experience enjoyed by Hawaiian Airlines passengers, partners, employees, and the communities it serves,” he said.

It is very unusual in the industry for a purchased airline to keep its name and branding, according to Hawaii News Now business reporter Howard Dicus.

“It’s virtually unheard of,” Dicus said.

Dicus compared the promise to a combined tail design when United Airlines merged with Continental in 2010.

“This is more than a compromise. This is a recognition that the Hawaiian brand name has value,” he said.

With the deal, Alaska is picking up $1 billion in equity and $900 million in debt with Hawaiian Airlines. Minicucci said conversations on a price began early this year. The price translates to $18 per share, which is more than four times what Hawaiian Airlines had been trading at, which was only $4 per share.

“Today we have a deal because we agreed on a price that was fair, that valued the company at the right place,” Minicucci said. “And airline shares have been very volatile and so we took that aside to say. ‘What is the company actually valued at?’ The price that we offered was fair.”

Alaska has a larger workforce, with about 23,000 employees compared to Hawaiian’s 7,000.  Ingram said job protection was part of the deal.

“It was important to us at Hawaiian to ensure that Alaska will maintain and grow union jobs in Hawaii, retain flight crew bases and operations in Hawaii, with Honolulu becoming a strategic hub for the combined company,” Ingram said.

Alaska has 300 planes now, primarily Boeing 737s. The airline will get 60 more aircraft from Hawaiian, many of which are wide-body jets for international flights.

The University of Alaska’s graduate students have organized into a union, after votes counted on Friday overwhelmingly approved the formation of a local unit. Graduate students across the state – mostly at UAF in Fairbanks – are joining Alaska Graduate Workers Association-United Auto Workers.

 Sophia Sytniak, a graduate teaching assistant in clinical-community psychology at the University of Alaska Anchorage, said the union will represent about 450 fellows and graduate, research, student and teaching assistants. The next step is to survey members on what they want their union leadership to address with UA leaders.

“Some of the things that we’ve heard are things like health care, wages, those are some of the primary concerns,” Sytniak said. “Also, a lot of our contracts prohibit external positions. That’s a concern because with our wages, us not being able to make like living wages that we’re able to live off of, we’re also not able to seek other employment positions. And so that’s something that can be challenging.”

The union vote took place online from Oct. 13-26, with ballots counted last week by the Alaska Labor Relations Agency. Votes in favor of unionization prevailed 314-11.

Memry Dahl, the university system’s chief human resources officer, sent a system-wide e-mail message on Friday saying the outcome will be certified Thursday.

“After certification, university leadership looks forward to bargaining with the new unit in the future,” Dahl wrote.

Sytniak said the union will soon elect a bargaining team.

The UA students first started their organizing movement last winter, and are following a nationwide trend of student workers organizing with the United Auto Workers. Roughly 100,000 of the union’s 383,000 members work in higher education – although not all of those are student workers.

At its peak from the late 1960s through the 1970s, the United Auto Workers union was 1.5 million members strong. Today it’s barely a quarter that, and only about half of its members work in the auto industry.

The new unit of graduate students is the first UAW presence in Alaska.

University of Alaska Fairbanks associate professor of fisheries Peter Westley is clear that there’s nothing new about salmon straying into Arctic Ocean waters. Westley says the fish have long been occasionally observed and caught, but their numbers appear to be increasing.

“And we were interested in whether the change in the sort of frequency of salmon being encountered…is that a perhaps indicator that the salmon are not only showing up in the ocean but are showing up in rivers and are potentially working to establish populations in a new region.”

Last month, Westley lead a team that aerially surveyed two Colville River tributaries, the Anaktuvuk and the Itkillik, and counted about a one hundred chum salmon equally split between the two Arctic rivers. He says movement of a species farther north is a clear signal of climate change.

“So in the past where those fish might have been sort of hopeful colonists showing up and kind of giving it a go, the conditions are just changing enough that we might be on the cusp of having it be a viable success story for the salmon.”

Elizabeth Lindley, a PhD student working on the project, says that while the development is positive for the salmon, it’s not necessarily good for the region’s people.

“Being Yupik and from Bethel, I was really interested in this question about salmon, which are really important to me, maybe impacting other Indigenous ways of life and ecosystems,” she said.

Lindley helped organize and lead an Arctic salmon workshop last December where she says people shared difference perspectives on the movement of the fish.

“Some community members that were present expressed concern over increasing salmon and not wanting to catch more salmon because it interferes with cultural harvesting practices, but I think it really varies by the person and the community,” she said.

Lindley says the impact of salmon sharing spawning grounds with Arctic char and Dolly Varden is among the unanswered questions.

The UAF team deployed temperature sensors in gravel where the chum salmon were observed spawning to track whether the water remains warm enough for the eggs to survive. The origin of the Arctic chums is unknown, but Westley says analysis of samples gathered from the fish this fall will provide clues.

“Extract DNA and sort of compare that to the genetic structures of known populations,” he said. “You can also use the water signatures, the chemistry of the waters themselves that gets archived in the ear bones, the otoliths.”

Lindley and Westley both emphasize the value of Indigenous knowledge in understanding the history and future of salmon in the Arctic Ocean and North Slope rivers. The UAF lead research group plans to head back to the Anaktuvuk and Itkillik rivers next fall to look for smolt as well as more spawning adults.

An article by Fairbanks writer Amy Loeffler will appear in the prestigious national anthology “Best American Food Writing,” which will be released next week by Harper Collins.

“Human beings have really evolved to have this mineral be a very fundamental part of our body chemistry,” Loeffler said. “We literally would die without salt.”

Loeffler is a science writer. Her story chosen for the 2023 edition of Best American Food Writing is about the science of salt in relation to sex and love throughout human history.

“We typically do associate love and sex and everything that has to do with romance as being sweet. And doing research, I found some scholarship — you’re really talking about the nitty gritty of sex and lovemaking, you’re talking about a lot of things that are made with salt and are salt-inspired,” she said.

To explain a little of the effects of salt on the human brain, she spread out a sampler of foods and salts for a tasting.

“So, what happens when you put salt on fruit? In tropical countries, where there’s a lot of fruit, people tend to salt their fruit because sodium ions interact with your tongue to tamp down bitterness. They neutralize the taste buds that receive bitterness, and the fruit actually tastes sweeter when you salt it,” Loeffler said.

She says that, when she met a chef who was drying out water from the Atlantic Ocean to make her own sea salt, it inspired Loeffler to research the different types and tastes of salt.

Soon she was writing about salt and attracting the attention of chefs and foodies like former New York Times food editor Mark Bittman, who edited the articles in this year’s edition of Best American Food Writing. She says salt is a mundane mineral, but we can’t live without it. It is also a cosmic element ound in space and star matter.

“I went down this huge rabbit hole learning about salt,” she said. “How has salt figured into human history? And it really has been a prime ingredient in human culture and existence, including sex.”

The book comes out on Oct. 17, but Loeffler’s article was first published last year, in Whetstone magazine.