Interior

The Alaska Legislature is supporting the lawsuit by university students against Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration to protect a fund that pays for scholarships.

A joint council of the House of Representatives and Senate on Monday approved filing a legal brief backing the lawsuit.

The Alaska Higher Education Investment Fund has held more than $400 million. Each year, money from the fund pays for Alaska Performance Scholarships, need-based Alaska Education Grants and the state program for medical students, known as WWAMI.

Dunleavy’s administration has said that the money in the fund must be swept into a state savings account if three-quarters of both legislative chambers don’t vote each year to maintain the funding. That vote failed last year.

Kodiak Republican Sen. Gary Stevens said emptying the fund would leave students uncertain about whether the scholarships would be available.

“The medical students are on a long-term program, and for them not to know from year to year to year how they’re going to be supported would be quite devastating,” he said.

Dunleavy has said that he supports funding the scholarships.

The Legislative Council’s vote to support the filing was 12 to 1.

Members of an ad-hoc group called Advocates for Safe Alaska Highways say a mining company’s trucking plan will endanger the lives of people who live along and drive the 240-mile route from the Manh Choh mine near Tetlin to Fort Knox.

Kinross Gold will hold two public meetings this week to talk about its plans to develop the mine near Tetlin and haul ore from there by truck to the mill at its Fort Knox mine north of Fairbanks. Opponents of the trucking plan say they’ll voice their concerns about the plans during those meetings.

“Our group is focused on two things,” said Gary Wilken, a Fairbanks resident and one of the organizers of group. “One is safety.”

The group hopes to convince company officials to reconsider their plan to run up to 192 trucks a day along the route, each of which will be up to 120 feet long pulling two trailers and weighing some 70 tons.

“Secondly,” Wilken said, “and most importantly, we want to try to (convey) the sense that there must be alternative to this extraordinary 500-mile round trip hauling rock from Tetlin to Fort Knox.”

Members of the group propose three alternatives in a document they’ve produced and begun to circulate. They include Kinross building a mill at the mine, developing a rail link or building an industrial road to keep the trucks off the highways.

Wilken says the group looks forward to talking to Kinross officials about their proposals

“We haven’t really been able to sit down and have a critical analysis of what their plan may or may not be,” he said.

Wilken says the group wants to know more about the company’s plan for the last segment of the route, from Fairbanks to Fort Knox. They say the state transportation department restricts trucks pulling double trailers on the Steese Highway. And that means Kinross will have to decouple the trailers and haul them one at a time to the mill, which they say will require up to 384 single-trailer truck trips daily on that segment.

A Kinross Gold spokesperson said in an email Monday that company officials haven’t made final decisions on the trucking plan. And that they strongly prefer to run the double trailers along the whole route.

Wilken says members of the group also believe the trucking plan will require more and ongoing maintenance to repair damage to the roads inflicted by trucks. And they’re concerned about the impacts on Alaska Highway bridges that were built in the 1940s. They say the highways are already heavily trafficked by trucks hauling fuel and supplies, as well as slow-moving Army convoys and recreational vehicles.

The Kinross spokesperson said in a followup email Thursday that the document compiled by Advocates for Safe Alaska Highways has “scenarios that are intended to generate fear.”

The spokesperson added that during Tuesday’s meeting in Fairbanks, company officials “will be sharing more details about our plan and correcting and clarifying much of the misinformation included in the document.”

Tuesday’s meeting is scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. at the Pioneer Park Civic Center in Fairbanks. Wednesday’s meeting, in Tok, will begin at 5 p.m. at Fast Eddy’s Restaurant.

Kinross officials announced Monday that the public also can attend the meetings by phone or online. The company posted that information to its Facebook page, along with the telephone number to call and a link to connect to the meeting online via Zoom.

Twenty-five million dollars have been set aside for repair work to address landslide issues with the Park Road in Denali National Park and Preserve.

An area known as Pretty Rocks, about forty-five miles in on the Park Road, has seen an accelerating landslide in recent years. By last summer, shifting earth was causing the road to move more than half an inch per day.

Park officials have tried to keep up with maintaining the road. In 2019, there were a few short-term closures for maintenance. In 2020, the road was able to stay open all season. But in 2020, the deteriorating situation led the National Park Service to close the road in late August for the remainder of the season.

Last fall, the Park Service set up a page detailing the issues at Pretty Rocks. That page says climate change is a likely contributor to the current problems, and continued use of the Park Road west of Pretty Rocks would require new, more expensive methods.

Now the National Park Service is looking at building a bridge over the landslide.

On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced that $25 million from the recently passed bipartisan infrastructure bill will be used to make the needed changes. All three members of Alaska’s congressional delegation applauded the funds being dedicated to Denali National Park.

Before bridge construction can begin, the project must go through an environmental assessment process. That assessment allows for a public comment period, which is open until Feb. 13.

The vast majority of cases of COVID-19 in Alaska this week are from the rapidly spreading omicron strain, state health leaders said on Thursday.

They said that over the past five days, between 80% and 95% of cases screened by the state public health lab have had a marker associated with omicron.

State Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink said there has been a significant increase in cases over the past 24 hours. 

“It’s pretty clear that omicron is here and spreading quickly across the state of Alaska,” she said.

State leaders expect to report a large increase in the total number of COVID-19 cases statewide on Friday. 

Despite the increase in cases, hospitalizations have not gone up. Zink said hospitals’ biggest problem is staff members becoming sick with the virus.

“We’ve been seeing nationally, as well as internationally, not the same rate of hospitalization and severe illness with omicron as we did with delta, but still in many states an increase as cases so quickly increase, so we’ll continue to follow and watch this closely moving forward,” she said.

Zink said that at the same time cases are increasing, the amount of monoclonal antibodies allocated by the federal government to Alaska has dropped.

“We are very limited in our supplies at this time, with significant demand,” she said.

The state is changing how it’s reporting COVID-19 data.  It will be emphasizing weekly changes, rather than daily numbers. In addition, state officials said that hospitalization and death statistics are more accurate than case counts. 

Zink said public health officials around the world are discussing what information is most useful, especially as more people have had the disease and have been vaccinated against it. 

“We will see more people who have mild or asymptomatic disease who are not ending up at the hospital and are not ending up overwhelming our health care systems,” she said. “And that is kind of the natural progression through a pandemic, as this has less and less impact on the population as a whole.” 

State Epidemiologist Dr. Joe McLaughlin is tracking how omicron has spread in other parts of the world. In the first place where there’s data — South Africa — cases peaked less than three weeks after they first started to spread rapidly, then fell quickly. McLaughlin expressed hope that the omicron wave of infections will be shorter than previous waves of the disease. 

Four University of Alaska students are suing the state government in an attempt to maintain a fund that pays for scholarships. 

The Alaska Higher Education Investment Fund has been under threat of being emptied of more than $400 million as a result of legislative budget fights. It pays for Alaska Performance Scholarships, need-based Alaska Education Grants and the state program for medical students, WWAMI.

Riley von Borstel of Seward is one of the students who sued. She’s the student body president at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She said the scholarships are essential for her and other students. 

“If this funding weren’t available to students anymore, I think the University of Alaska System would see a significant decline in enrollment amongst Alaskan students,” she said. “I think many of them would decide not to attend school in Alaska if this funding weren’t available.”

Students Madilyn Short, Jay-Mark Pascua, Kjrsten Schindler and von Borstel filed the lawsuit on Tuesday against Gov. Mike Dunleavy, the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Administration.

According to the Dunleavy administration, the money in the fund must be swept into state savings account if three-quarters of each legislative chamber doesn’t vote each year to maintain the funding. And this vote failed last year. 

Another lawsuit, filed by the Alaska Federation of Natives and 17 other plaintiffs, successfully protected the Power Cost Equalization Endowment Fund, which also has been threatened by the legislative disputes. That fund pays to lower the cost of electricity in high-cost rural areas. 

In the new lawsuit, lawyers for both sides jointly asked that a judge hear arguments in the case quickly and issue a ruling by Feb. 22, leaving time for an appeal and for the Legislature to take the ruling into account in the budget. 

Dunleavy said in a statement that he supports funding the scholarships. 

University of Alaska Interim President Pat Pitney wrote in a letter to students that the university supports the lawsuit. 

 

Update — Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2:48 p.m.

Alaska State Troopers say investigators located the mother of the newborn who was found New Year’s Eve in a cardboard box at a Fairbanks intersection.

Troopers say the mother, who is a minor, was brought to a hospital in the Fairbanks area for an evaluation and medical care.

“The investigation into the circumstances surrounding the baby being abandoned is ongoing, and no criminal charges have been filed at this time,” troopers wrote in an online dispatch.

Original story – Wednesday, Jan. 5, 12:43 p.m.

Efforts to find the parents of a baby left in a cardboard box on a west Fairbanks street corner on New Year’s Eve continue.

Alaska State Troopers say they are pursuing all avenues, including DNA analysis, to find the family of the newborn — whose name is Teshawn, according to a letter left with the child.

The baby was found near a bank of mailboxes at the intersection of Dolphin Way and Chena Point Avenue. The note refers to parents who lived nearby on Cormorant Street, but troopers say the newborn may have come from a different location in town.

The note said the family could not care for the baby, who was wrapped in a blanket inside the box. Troopers say the child appears to have been found shortly after being left.

The child remains in good health and is being cared for by the state Office of Children’s Services.