Juneau

In a Friday hearing, members of the Alaska Senate spoke critically about a proposed new ferry terminal in Juneau, questioning why the project would be worth its multimillion-dollar cost.

Earlier this year, state legislators planned to divert $62 million from a variety of transportation projects in order to pay for the state share of federal transportation grants worth between $500 million and $600 million.

Lawmakers included the diversion in their budget for the year, but Dunleavy vetoed the maneuver, saying that the “funding is either still obligated in the original project or has been fully expended and is unavailable for reappropriation.”

That left legislators’ spending plan partially unfunded.

One of lawmakers’ biggest targets this past spring was DOT’s plan to build a new ferry terminal in Juneau, roughly 30 miles north of the existing terminal in Auke Bay, at a place called Cascade Point, which would shorten ferry runs to Haines and Skagway.

Legislators sought to divert $37 million from an account intended to fund that new terminal, but Dunleavy vetoed the transfer and the Department of Transportation subsequently signed a $28.5 million contract for work on the terminal.

In October, the state’s ferry advisory board concluded that the project likely did not make economic sense.

“Do you agree with that study?” asked Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Nikiski, during Friday’s hearing of the Senate Transportation Committee.

“Can you please make the case to the Alaska people why you think investing this money … in the Cascade Point project makes fiscal sense for Alaskans?”

Ryan Anderson, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, responded that “as a public agency, we’re more than economics. In this case, there’s this idea of saving people time with a much shorter run, saving money, the cost of operating that ship, we’re saving fuel. It’s less carbon emissions. I mean, there’s a lot of good benefits to shorter ferry runs.”

Lawmakers didn’t have the votes to override the governor’s vetoes, which means that when they reconvene in January, they’ll have to come up with a new way to fund construction work this summer.

According to documents presented to the committee on Friday, the Alaska Department of Transportation has “deferred” about 25 projects 1-3 years “to remain within available match.”

Without new money, “fewer projects will move to contract award, limiting construction activity.”

Anderson told the transportation committee that his agency is prioritizing “shovel ready” projects, those that are about to go to construction.

“As we go and prioritize projects through this year, we’ll continue that action, and we’ll be ready. That’s really how we’re looking at this program,” he said.

Three months after a trial against a former Juneau chiropractor accused of sexual assault ended in mistrial, the new public defense team is asking for more time to review the case before a second trial.

Fourteen former patients accused Jeffrey Fultz of sexual assault under the guise of medical care. They say the incidents took place during medical appointments between 2014 and 2020 while he was employed at Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium in Juneau.

In September, his trial ended in a hung jury on 14 counts of felony sexual assault, and two not guilty counts. One of the 14 counts has since also been dismissed. The state is attempting to retry the remaining charges that are eligible to be considered again.

The court assigned Fultz a public defender in October, Juneau’s Nico Ambrose. Private attorney James Christie represented Fultz for the last two years, and through the trial this summer. Ambrose appeared in court Wednesday for the first time since taking over Fultz’s representation.

Ambrose requested the next hearing date to be in April, which will mark five years since Fultz’s initial arrest. 

“There are just so many things in this case that need to be dealt with before we’re ready for trial,” he said. 

Ambrose said he has to review trial proceedings, which lasted six weeks this summer, and hasn’t yet received transcripts from the trial. Ambrose is Fultz’s third defense attorney since his 2021 arrest. 

Earlier this year, the Alaska Supreme Court issued a ruling that would limit delays in old cases, and while this case falls into that window, Ambrose said he doesn’t think it was written with a case like this in mind. 

“This case has not sat around for 5 years waiting to go to trial,” he said. “It has gone to trial.”

State Prosecutor Krystyn Tendy disagrees with scheduling the next hearing so far out and said the case has taken years, regardless of the recent trial. Some of the alleged crimes happened more than a decade ago. 

“We have seen how this case has dragged out and can drag out,” she said. 

Tendy said the court needs to set a new trial date, and should schedule a hearing in February. 

Ambrose said having hearings sooner than April — six months after he was assigned to the case — would be a waste of the court’s time.

Judge Larry Woolford scheduled the next hearing for this case on Feb. 11 at 11:30 a.m.

When someone experiences sudden cardiac arrest in Juneau, the average response time for Capital City Fire/Rescue is 9 minutes. 

CCFR’s EMS Program Manager Andrew Pantiskas is leading an initiative – involving the help of Juneau community members and an app called PulsePoint – to make the response time faster.

KTOO’s Mike Lane spoke with Pantiskis about this life-saving effort.

Listen:

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mike Lane: There’s an effort that you’ve been helping to lead to collect the contact information from people trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, and to provide training opportunities. Tell me about that. 

Andrew Pantiskas: Yeah, so we’re trying to get our cardiac arrest response to more of a community response. And what I mean by that is our average response time to a cardiac arrest when someone’s heart stops is 9 minutes across the board, and has been for the past over five to 10 years since we’ve been tracking our data. And what we’ve realized, and what most major cities down south have realized, is we need to get the community to the point that they can respond faster, start early compressions. Law enforcement agencies, military organizations, schools – the sooner we can have other trained responders start CPR, the better outcome we’re going to have for that person. Every 1 minute without good quality chest compressions is a 10% decrease in survival. And so you can kind of assume, if no one does chest compressions for about nine to 10 minutes, we’re not going to have a great outcome for that person. Now, that’s not a hard and fast definitive that it will be 100% mortality rate. It just means that the sooner we get compressions on board, the better chances we’re going to have of returning someone home to the community neurologically intact. 

Mike Lane: There’s a particular tool out there called Pulse Point, and that’s an app for your phone. Correct?

Andrew Pantiskas:  It is, yep. 

Mike Lane: So can you tell me about this and why it would be helpful for folks who live here in Juneau?

Andrew Pantiskas:  When we identify that someone might be in cardiac arrest, and our dispatchers start telling someone on the phone to start compressions, it basically pings everyone within a certain distance, whatever we set it to, and says, ‘Hey, this person here is in cardiac arrest. We need trained responders to respond. And here is your closest AED so that you can grab it on the way.’

Mike Lane: And that’s going to reduce the response time overall.

Andrew Pantiskas: Exactly.

Mike Lane:  Now, PulsePoint is not an active app in Juneau yet, but is going to be in the near future. 

Andrew Pantiskas: Yep, I don’t have an exact date. Our hope is that mid- to late-2026, we can do it. So there’s some things administratively we need to do. It’s got to be integrated into our dispatch system. What I can tell you is that CCFR is already adding in AEDs into our registry. If you do have an AED in a public location, your workplace, your religious gathering, your school, wherever it may be, and you don’t know if it’s entered, I would love it if you would send me an email. My email is andrew.pantiskas@juneau.gov. I would love to come out, photograph it and add it to our registry. That way, the day that PulsePoint is ready to go, we’ve already got them all in, and it will speed up the implementation of it. 

Mike Lane: Excellent. And now what is the reaction from Juneau residents been towards CCFR’s efforts for this? 

Andrew Pantiskas: So far, what I’ve heard is an overwhelming amount of support. This is going to drastically change how we manage our cardiac arrest. And I think that people realize that this is for their family, it’s for our community, it’s for the people who suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, it’s for our friends and family.  

Mike Lane: Now, do you have a goal for how many contacts you need or want in order for the app to be effective? 

Andrew Pantiskas: To me, as long as we have one person who’s willing that could be their sooner, I see that as a win. 

Mike Lane: Tell me about any of the training opportunities in Juneau for CPR.

Andrew Pantiskas:  Absolutely. So there’s several agencies, and I apologize, I’m probably not going to list them all, but Tlingit and Haida does CPR classes. Bartlett Regional Hospital does CPR classes. We do CPR classes. While ours are mostly right now, tailored for individuals within or around CCFR, we do them. Southeast Extinguisher does them. And I know that there’s a couple others and I apologize I can’t name them off the top of my head that do them. The first thing I would do is, if anybody has any questions, email me. I can absolutely send you a list. 

Mike Lane: Who can be a user of Pulse Point? 

Andrew Pantiskas: Yeah, anybody can be a user. There’s differences in the types of responders, and we’ve not internally worked out who’s going to be a verified or unverified responder, and so on and so forth. But anyone can download the application. And so if anybody has questions on that, I would just go download it and start looking into what it does and how it does it. If you are like me or my family and travel down to Seattle or travel down somewhere else, and if you’re walking through Seattle–Tacoma International Airport airport, you might get a ping and say, ‘Oh, there’s someone in C gates who’s in cardiac arrest,’ and you could be the first person there. So if you have questions, just download it and start looking at it. 

Artists have an opportunity to have their bear-themed art work depicted on trash cans in Juneau built to keep the animals out — and win a $10,000 award.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings is partnering with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to host an art contest. Selected artists will have their art turned into miniature murals that will be printed on bear-resistant trash infrastructure in downtown Juneau. 

Fish and Game’s Abby McAllister said this is a way to raise awareness about the risks unsecured trash creates for bears and encourage people to throw away their trash properly. 

“How do we get people to use our very resistant cans downtown?” she said. “Well, let’s draw their attention to these cans with art.”

When bears get into trash, they learn to turn to garbage and people for food, which can make them dangerous. The state has to euthanize bears that have become aggressive while looking for food in city streets and neighborhoods.

A press release from Norwegian Cruise Lines said panel will narrow down the entries to three finalists, and then the public will vote on the best via social media. Norwegian will award $10,000 to the person whose entry is chosen, a portion of which will go towards a local charity the artist chooses. 

That design will go on an enclosure of bear-resistant cans near the cruise ship docks. Additional designs will be on new trashcans around downtown in bear hot spots. The City and Borough of Juneau is funding and installing the new canisters using cruise passenger fees allocated in fiscal year 2025. 

McAllister said the current bear-resistant cans in Juneau aren’t user-friendly.

“Not everybody knows how to work it,” she said. “So I see people struggle with it for just a half second, and even that is long enough sometimes to deter folks.”

The new cans have more of a “mailbox” design, she said, where people pull open the canister, drop their trash in, and close it. She hopes that the new infrastructure will prevent more bears from getting into trash and save bear lives. 

Submissions are open today, Dec. 9, through Feb. 13.

Listen here:

This week, Thunder Mountain Middle School joined the growing number of schools composting food waste. Before rolling out the program, students in an environmental club led their peers through sorting out their trash and seeing how much of it can avoid the landfill.

Seventh grader Thalea Headings stuck her arm deep into a trash can, and seemed pretty grossed out by what she found. Dressed in aprons and blue plastic gloves, her science class sorts through the remains of lunch at Thunder Mountain Middle School.

They dug through trash cans filled with yogurt, half eaten sandwiches, loose vegetables and seemingly endless cartons of chocolate milk. They sort the trash into two separate buckets: one for food waste and one for everything else. At the end of the class, they weighed and kept a record of the different types of waste.

Thalea found some interesting items, to the disgust of her classmates. And sometimes it was hard to tell what’s what. She said sorting through trash hasn’t been as gross as she thought it would be.

“There’s more plastic than actual food,” Thalea said. “I was thinking there’s gonna be more food because when I’ve seen the trash cans before, there’s a lot of ranch and gross stuff in it.”

What these students are doing is called a waste audit. All the food waste they sorted out will be composted. This effort is being led by a newly formed club at the middle school called Ocean Guardians. It’s part of a program from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that encourages schools to protect the ocean.

Seventh grader Maebell Bos helped bring the club to Thunder Mountain. She was part of the Ocean Guardian club at her former elementary school, Sayéik: Gastineau Community School, and didn’t want to give it up.

“When we went to middle school, we kind of thought to just bring it over, and we are excited that we can do that,” she said.

Maebell worked with her friends in the club to create presentations to all of the middle school science classes about what a waste audit is and what things are compostable before actually doing the audits.

Cheyenne Cuellar teaches science and math at the middle school and supervises the club. She worked with Monica Haygood, the Ocean Guardians teacher at Sayéik, to learn what the process was and applied for grant funding to bring composting to the middle school.

Though she’s in charge, she said it’s the club members that have done the bulk of the work for the waste audits. 

“It’s not like I’m there helping to make sure this happened,” she said. “The Ocean Guardian kids are really just taking the lead of teaching these, for each science class, two to three class periods, of being the leaders within that class.”

The students are auditing their trash while Juneau is having its own reckoning with waste.  Juneau’s landfill will likely fill up in the next decade. Composting is a way to keep food waste out of there. Maebell, the club member, said it was challenging to get some students to get on board with the waste audit and composting.

“Some people are either unaware of, like, the problems that are going on, like, on how fast our landfill is filling up and they aren’t aware. And then other people, they just don’t care for it as much,” she said. “We’re trying to make it something positive and something that we can do to help our environment.”

Still, some students simply didn’t want to go through trash. But, Aria Gribbin, another club member, said once the audit happened, those students realized it’s not that bad. 

“It’s been a bit hectic trying to get all the classes to agree to it and not have a bunch of kids be like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be sick tomorrow,’ so they don’t have to do it,” Aria said. “It’s been hectic trying to get that, but once they did it, I think they realized it’s a bit gross, but it’s also kind of fun.”

By the end of all the audits, students sorted out 319.88 pounds of food waste. And instead of going to the landfill, it was composted. Thunder Mountain joins four other schools in the district all composting their food waste.

Juneau saw a snowfall record during a winter storm over the weekend, and now, freezing temperatures and clear skies are expected to stretch through most of this week. 

Juneau received 13.6 inches of snow this past weekend, measured at the Juneau International Airport. The majority, 9.6 inches, fell on Saturday, Dec. 6, breaking the record for that day in history, according to the National Weather Service. The previous record for Dec. 6 was 7.2 inches, set in 1975. 

“It was a fairly common setup for a heavy snow pattern in Juneau,” said Nathan Compton, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau. 

He said the winter storm was caused by cold, dry air flowing south from interior Canada and moving under warmer, moist air traveling north, turning what would have been rain into snow. 

“That cold air came down from Lynn Canal and just undercut everything,” he said. “Right when that happens, that’s when we get the maximum lift. And so on Saturday, that’s why we got those very, very, very heavy snow rates, right at the beginning of the event.”

Elsewhere in the region, the heavy snow and wind caused the Klondike Highway to close over the weekend, and the Alaska Marine Highway System ferry M/V LeConte scheduled to leave Skagway Sunday was cancelled. That stranded the Juneau-Douglas High School Yadaa.at Kalé Nordic Ski Team in Whitehorse after a ski trip. 

Abby McAllister is the lead ski coach for the team, but wasn’t on the trip. She said 16 students and their coaches stayed an extra night in their AirBnB. 

They’re driving to Haines, where they’ll stay overnight at the local high school and then board the ferry M/V Columbia early Tuesday morning.

Instead of coming home Sunday night, the team is expected back Tuesday. McAllister said the kids know how to go with the flow. 

“You know, it’s Alaska, and these are Alaska kids, and they’ve just been all positive with the twists and turns,” she said. 

Now that the dry, cold air from the north has mostly wrung out the moist clouds hanging over Juneau, sunshine and low temperatures — ranging from the single digits to the teens — are expected to take hold through Friday.