Interior

University of Alaska Fairbanks administrators say rising costs and cuts in state dollars have produced a $42 million gap. Officials rolled out statistics Friday outlining expected funding shortfalls.

Interim UAF Chancellor Mike Powers and other administrators project a troubled fiscal landscape for the school in 2017.

Forty percent of the university’s budget is tied to state dollars, which are growing scarcer as lawmakers grapple with low oil prices and deficits.

Vice Chancellor Kari Burrell outlined the history of UAF funding and the situation on Monday.

“The pull backs we’ve had centrally was for $29 million over the last three years, but we’ve also asked units to absorb $13 million,” Burrell said. “So, the total gap that we have filled over the last three years has been $42 million.”

Burrell talked about vertical and horizontal cuts. Horizontal cuts distribute pain across most programs and has been the prevailing strategy for meeting deficits. Now, however, UA President Jim Johnsen has asked chancellors to look at vertical cuts, a strategy that could lead to programs with low student numbers to be eliminated or combined with another disciplines.

Chancellor Powers said most likely both strategies will be employed.

“Emphasize the vertical as opposed to the horizontal, but it will be a part of both,” he said. “Everybody will be touched in some way, there’s no question.”

Powers underscored the projections for the future were preliminary.

He says university officials will wait to see what Gov. Bill Walker proposes in his budget due out this month, then see what lawmakers come up with when they meet next year.

The Environmental Protection Agency has fined the Army nearly $60,000 for failing to notify the agency of a munitions dump on Fort Wainwright.

The base near Fairbanks has been an EPA Superfund site since 1990. According to an EPA statement Tuesday, the Army discovered an old munitions and explosives dump at the fort’s small arms firing range in June 2013, with lead and other heavy metals eroding into the Tanana River.

The Army was supposed to notify the EPA within 15 days. But the EPA says it only learned of the dump more than a year later, in a memo from an Army contractor. A partial cleanup this year produced more than 160 tons of material, including explosives and unfired rounds.

The annual run of lamprey is headed up the Yukon River. Diverse commercial markets for the snake-like creature have opened up over the past few years but catching them can be tricky.

To catch a Yukon River lamprey, you need good, solid river ice, and perfect timing.

For almost 15 years, Kwik’pak Fisheries has tried to operate a commercial lamprey fishery on lower Yukon sometime around Thanksgiving, but general manager Jack Schultheis says more than other fisheries, this one is hit or miss.

“It’s not a run like salmon that goes on for days or weeks. The lamprey run goes on for hours, and then that’s it,” he said.

Lamprey swim upriver to spawn.  But unlike salmon, lamprey bunch together in one big horde as they move upriver, and run under the cover of ice.

Fishermen at Mountain Village started the commercial lamprey harvest on Nov. 17, when a few thousand pounds of lamprey were taken.  That harvest was curtailed by a lack of adequate river ice to give fishermen access to the main channel, according to Schultheis.

Kwik’pak is expecting a stronger harvest of lamprey from the village of Grayling sometime in the next few days.

The unpredictable nature of the lamprey harvest makes it hard to commercialize, according to Schultheis, because buyers want a steady supply year after year.  Nevertheless, Yukon River lamprey gets shipped far and wide for a variety of purposes.

“Some of them go to Europe, some of them go to Asia, and some of them go into the bait market in the lower 48,” Schultheis said. “And that all hinges on how much volume we get.  When we get a lot of lamprey, then it is feasible to ship overseas – that’s in 20,000 pound increments.  It’s gotta be a really good year to get that kind of volume.”

By those standards, 2014 was a very good year, with just over 40,000 pounds of lamprey sold commercially.

The parasitic creatures are typically caught with long handled dip nets, or impaled on long poles fixed with spikes.

Lamprey also have a long history of subsistence use in certain villages, where they are commonly referred to as eels. Nearly half of their body mass is fat, making them a good high-energy food for sled dogs. As human food, they are often smoked and jarred. And their skins can be used to make bags or even parkas.

New rules could make it possible to develop more renewable energy in Alaska, by making it easier for independent projects to sell their power to the grid.

Mike Craft has been trying to expand his wind farm near Delta Junction since 2010. In his view, the project is a win-win.

“(I want to) create some jobs for my kids and friends and family and neighbors,” Craft said. “I want to bring down the cost of power, and I want to do something about this air in Fairbanks.”

But the local utility, the Golden Valley Electric Association, wouldn’t buy his power. They said it was too expensive — even though it was potentially cheaper than some of their existing sources.

“I can compete with diesel,” Craft said. “I can compete with natural gas. I can compete with — coal’s pretty tough. Coal’s a bargain, no doubt about it. If you don’t mind the consequences of burning it, it’s a bargain.”

But, Craft argued, he shouldn’t have to compete with the cheapest part of a utility’s portfolio. He should only have to beat the price of whatever power his project would displace. In 2013, he filed a petition with the Regulatory Commission of Alaska (RCA), which oversees electric utilities.

This month, after two years of hearings, the commission issued new rules — and Craft got his way. Under the old system, a wind farm or hydro project had to beat the “average” cost of a utility’s power — that included everything, from cheap coal to relatively expensive diesel.

Under the new rules if, say, a wind project can produce electricity more cheaply than diesel, the utility has to buy that less expensive power. That brings Alaska into line with rules in the rest of the U.S. And Craft calls it a game changer.

“Basically, the door’s open,” he said. “And independent power producers, entrepreneurs, developers, or just a guy that has a house, when he wants to put a wind turbine on his house — Alaska’s open for business now.”

Ethan Schutt, of the Cook Inlet Region Inc., or CIRI, has a more measured response.

“It definitely could help a little,” Schutt said. “And sometimes just a little is all it takes to get something from concept to construction.”

CIRI developed the Fire Island Wind Project in Cook Inlet. With 11 turbines, it can produce up to 17 megawatts for Chugach Electric, one of the main utilities in South Central.

But CIRI scrapped a project to double the number of turbines when they couldn’t find a buyer for the new power. Schutt said one big issue is integration. Sources like wind and solar are variable — when the wind isn’t blowing, no electricity is produced.

That means it’s more complicated to integrate them into the grid than a traditional natural gas or coal plant.

Utilities charge fees to cover that — and in the past, Schutt said, it wasn’t clear how they came up with those costs.

“In the absence of regulatory guidance, each utility was able to address those issues in its own, self-serving way,” he said.

The new rules include a set of criteria that utilities must use in making those decisions.

That doesn’t mean the Fire Island expansion is coming back. For CIRI, there’s still another major hurdle: transmission costs. If they want to sell to, for instance, Golden Valley in Fairbanks, right now they have to pay every other utility along the way.

That can double the price of their electricity. The new rules don’t solve that problem.

But for Mike Craft, in Delta Junction — he says it’s full steam ahead.

“I’m excited. I feel like I have my life back in a sense, and I have my state back,” Craft said. “I’m going to finish building this wind farm.”

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation is requesting the Environmental Protection Agency to no longer consider Fairbanks and North Pole together when it comes to air quality regulation. If the request is approved, the change could free Fairbanks from more stringent emissions regulations.

Fairbanks and North Pole are currently regulated as a single entity by the Environmental Protection Agency. An EPA designated fine particulate pollution non-attainment area for wintertime emissions, primarily wood and coal smoke covers Fairbanks to the west, and North Pole to the east, but the communities air quality is no longer on par.

“On the western side the air quality appears to be improving,” says Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation program manager Cindy Heil.

Heil says Fairbanks and North Pole have diverged relative to a federal 35 microgram per cubic meter pollution standard.

Several factors play into the growing disparity, including the concentrations of wood and coal burners, and localized atmospheric conditions that trap smoke in neighborhoods. Heil says DEC’s requested division of the non-attainment area would keep Fairbanks from being covered under an impending EPA “serious” air quality designation.

North Pole Mayor Bryce Ward opposes the dividing the area, fearing it will make it more difficult for his small city to reduce pollution.

Ward says that could include the inability to leverage grants and other resources to combat pollution. The EPA is expected to take over a year to rule on the request. Meanwhile, Ward is looking toward the state supported Interior Energy Project to help solve the air quality issue.

The state is currently reviewing five finalist company proposals for getting clean-burning natural gas to Fairbanks, North Pole area. Selection of a project partner is expected in December.

The Alaska Railroad has a lot riding on a highway bill pending in Congress. The railroad CEO says he hopes it will fix a technical mistake in a 2012 law that has shortchanged the railroad $3 million a year.

When you’re up against a deadline and all bleary-eyed from working way too long, you’re prone to make mistakes. It’s the same with Congress, only on a larger scale. Three years ago, when Congress passed a highway bill, the House and Senate lawmakers negotiating the final version agreed the Alaska Railroad should get $31 million a year in formula funds. It was a cut from years past, but that was the deal. And then somebody made a mistake in calculating the formula.

“Due to the math error, by the time it was all said and done — one of these 11^th-and-a-half-hour deals — we only received $28 million annually,”  says Alaska Railroad CEO Bill O’Leary.

The railroad attributes the mistake to the Federal Transit Administration, which provided technical assistance to the congressional conference committee. O’Leary says it appears to be just an honest mistake, a late night math goof that has cost the railroad $3 million for each of the past three years.

Alaska Congressman Don Young convinced his colleagues on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to fix that math mistake this year. The House passed a new highway bill this month that would bring the formula funding for the Alaska Railroad back to the intended amount.

The Alaska Railroad gets about half its revenue from hauling freight, and about 25 percent from government sources.

Young’s spokesman, Matt Shuckerow, also attributes the math mistake to agency personnel and said he doesn’t know if it affected any other railroads. In 2012, some lawmakers wanted to drastically cut the Alaska Railroad’s funds. Young was one of the conference committee members then, and Shuckerow said he got his fellow negotiators to agree the Alaska Railroad should get $31 million, only to see $3 million lost to technical error.

“That’s part of the reason why it was such a top priority for him to rework this issue,” Shuckerow said.

The Senate version of the bill does not include the Alaska Railroad fix, but Sen. Lisa Murkowski was appointed to the conference committee this time and it’s a priority for her.