Juneau

As breweries in Alaska adjust to a legal ruling that could allow them to have unlimited live shows, a different sort of industry is also celebrating: musicians. 

Until last month, breweries were limited to hosting four live shows a year. Before 2024, they were banned from having them completely. Now, breweries can host unlimited live music performances. 

The ruling comes right on time for musicians and businesses to start planning for the Alaska Folk Festival in April. 

Marian Call is a Juneau musician and, as executive director of MusicAlaska, she’s also spent the last few years organizing other musicians across the state to advocate for the industry. She said the recent Alaska Superior Court ruling opens doors for musicians and performers. 

“This regulation was ultimately a regulation about when and where musicians can work,” Call said. “It was essentially putting a limit on how often and in what locations we can do our job.”

The ruling argued that the regulations that limited live shows at breweries suppressed free speech. The lawsuit didn’t specifically include distilleries, but at a recent Alaska Alcoholic Beverage Control Board meeting, board members said they believe those businesses will fall under the same ruling, and be able to have unlimited live music as well. 

“It makes sense for the government to regulate various industries. But the thing that was so difficult about this particular regulation was that they were not intending to regulate the music industry,” Call said. “They were intending to regulate the alcohol industry.”

She said musicians are a force in Juneau. More performances in town don’t create a zero-sum game, economically. Call said MusicAlaska researches the economic impacts of music in communities.

 “Generally, what we see is that more music breeds more economic growth without necessarily undermining other sectors,” she said. “We come into a space where there was no economic activity and create it kind of out of thin air.” 

If the ruling holds, this could open doors – financially and creatively – for musicians during the city’s biggest music event of the year, Call said.

“I think Folk Fest excites me the most because it’s really an invitation, not just for everyone to come out and listen and enjoy, but also for everyone to play,” she said. “And I can’t wait to see people feeling free to play anywhere without worrying about it.”

Avery Stewart is a guitarist, vocalist, and writer with local band the Rain Dogs. He said he thinks former limitations have dampened Juneau’s creative spirit during Folk Fest.

“I was just recalling past Folk Fest, seeing signs on the walls of distilleries because they had to put up these signs, like, ‘do not play music here,’ which I thought was so silly,” Stewart said.

He said that impromptu jam sessions are an inherent part of the festival, and now, there’s no risk of businesses or musicians facing fines for them.

“It’s like a communal experience, rather than a performance,” he said. “Just a sharing of music, in its purest forms.”

The Rain Dogs Frontwoman Anna Mahanor said she’s excited to have more places to play in Juneau, and different venues to suit different kinds of shows. She said she wants to be able to play for broader audiences. 

“I think that our sound is evolving in a lot of different ways, and we’re experimenting with playing in different places,” Mahanor said “There’s a certain energy that you bring to when you’re playing at, like a bar or a dive bar.”

And a lot of the Rain Dogs shows meet that energy — loud and rowdy. But Mahanor wants to play in quieter venues, too. 

“With the idea of there being kind of more listening-room-style, it’s like a little bit more intimate,” she said. “And you can be a little bit more personable with the crowd, you know, and interact and have just a more intimate, vulnerable experience”

The Alaska Alcohol and Marijuana Control Office has until Feb. 14th to appeal the decision. 

Support for grant-funded positions and teacher contracts became the main issue during the Juneau School Board’s budget public forum on Thursday. 

Most of the 28 parents, elders, teachers, students and community members at the forum testified in support of funding positions in the Tlingit Culture, Language and Literacy program, as well as reaching a new union contract for teachers.

Jodie Gatti is the parent of a kindergartener at TCLL and said the program has allowed her son to bring the Lingít language home with him.

“I never imagined I would witness a child, let alone my own child, teaching my mother the language that was once denied to her,” she said. “That moment is deeply emotional for our family and shows how powerful this work truly is.”

Three positions at TCLL are funded through a federal grant, and that funding will end in September. The school district’s preliminary budget doesn’t include these three positions. But the school board last month directed administrators to include one of the three grant-funded positions in its budget. That leaves the program’s principal and biliteracy specialist positions without funding.

Jamie Shanley is the director of Sealaska Heritage Institute’s language and education departments. She oversees the grant for the district’s positions and testified in support of the district funding the positions while the nonprofit works on securing long-term funding.

She said the district’s Lingít culture and language program is growing.

“They are teaching their language, they’re writing curriculum, they’re creating resources,” Shanley said. “They’re writing Lingít language proficiency assessment. That’s a standardized assessment tool that people use in their classrooms. And they’re doing it all, really at little cost to the school district.”

Shanley said the program has doubled in size since the grant began in 2023, with 121 students currently enrolled.

In addition to grappling with grant-funded positions, the school board is working through contract negotiations with the district’s teaching and support staff unions. Both unions have not yet reached a new contract.

Deborah Rakos has taught for the district for more than 25 years. She testified before the board last year and testified again last week about contract negotiations. She said what teachers are asking for is not beyond contracts other districts have with teachers.

“Look at the salary schedules in the state – please look at Ketchikan, look at Fairbanks, look at Anchorage,” she said. “I urge you to do that, because we’re not out of our tree in what we’re asking. We’re not.”

The board will also consider an over $5.3 million dollar deficit in next year’s budget. That can either be filled through dipping into the district’s savings or by making cuts to services.

The district plans to release a budgeting tool this week that will allow community members to build their own school budget and provide feedback. There are also several meetings over the next month where the public can testify about the budget. The next opportunity is during Tuesday’s school board meeting. The board expects to approve a final budget by March 12.

The Juneau Assembly will vote Monday night on whether to approve $2.3 million worth of city funding to support five proposed affordable housing projects. 

The money comes from the city’s Affordable Housing Fund. The city created the fund five years ago to address its housing shortage — specifically, the lack of low- and middle-income rentals. Since then, the city has awarded nearly $13 million in grants or loans from the fund. This round, $2.5 million is available.

The city uses criteria like proximity to public transportation and long-term affordability to decide which projects get funding and how much. The projects proposed this year would help create more than 40 units of housing, comprising both single-family homes and apartment complexes, all across the borough.

The city uses a formula based on Juneau’s income data to determine eligibility for affordable housing programs. People qualify as “low-income” if their household or individual income is at or below 80% of the Area Median Income. In Juneau in 2025, 80% AMI for a single person is $72,080 and $102,960 for a four-person household.

The Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority is up for two grants. One is for $800,000 to help fund the construction of 16 single-family homes in the Pederson Hill subdivision. The other grant is for $250,000 to help pay for building five single-family homes on North Douglas.

Another applicant, Dave D’Amato with Brave Enterprises, LLC, is up for a $900,000 loan to help fund the renovation of the shuttered Bergmann Hotel in downtown Juneau. The project would turn the historic 46-room hotel into an 18-unit apartment complex.

Shawn Kantola with Southeast Endeavors, LLC, is asking for a $200,000 loan to construct a fourplex on Lee Street in Auke Bay. And the Society of St. Vincent de Paul requested a $150,00 grant to help pay for long-term maintenance of its Teal Street facilities. 

Juneau residents have the chance to testify on ordinances on Monday’s agenda – as well as on non-agenda items – in person or online before the Assembly votes. People who want to testify online must notify the city clerk by 4 p.m. before the meeting. The meeting begins at 6 p.m. at City Hall. 

After proposing to build a new cabin near Juneau’s Herbert Glacier, the U.S. Forest Service released a draft decision last month abandoning it. 

The cabin site was initially selected due to public interest. It would have been built within a mining claim block across the river from the proposed New Amalga gold mine owned by Grande Portage Resources, Ltd. The Forest Service approved exploratory drilling at New Amalga in April. 

But Paul Robbins, a public affairs officer for Tongass National Forest, said the agency’s decision to cancel the cabin is unrelated to mining interests and is instead due to the challenging location and limited staff capacity. This comes after the agency lost a third of its staff in Alaska last year. 

“The proposed cabin site’s elevation, distance from the trail, design requirements and the need to move materials through difficult terrain all add to the complexity of that cabin project,” Robbins said.

He said the agency’s landscape architects and engineers could be overwhelmed with work if they moved forward with building the cabin.  

But some residents in Juneau submitted public comments saying they don’t believe those reasons are genuine. 

“Cancelling the project seems to be influenced by mining interest across the river which would inherently be hard to make compatible,” wrote Riley Moser, a Juneau resident. “It appears that the Forest Service is bending to corporate interests instead of listening to the needs and concerns of the public.”

Staff from the Alaska Miners Association and Grande Portage submitted comments to the agency before the draft decision, saying that building a cabin near the proposed mine could lead to disputes over how the land is used.

“Selection of a site to be used for recreational lodging, which can be easily placed anywhere, within an area of active mineral exploration could unnecessarily invite land use conflicts that do not and should not exist, and could incite litigation and appeals for years,” wrote Deantha Skibinksi, executive director of the Alaska Miners Association.

Kyle Mehalek, a technical specialist at Grande Portage, wrote that “it would be incredibly challenging, likely impossible, to protect the proposed cabin from potential visual and noise impacts with the same effectiveness as the existing trail.”

The cabin would have been part of the Alaska Cabins Project, the Forest Service’s biggest public-use cabin expansion plan in 50 years, which plans to bring around 25 new cabins to the Chugach and Tongass National Forests, including four in Juneau at Mendenhall Campground, Montana Meadows, Treadwell Ditch Trail and Dupont Beach.

Robbins said cancelling this cabin won’t affect the other proposed cabins. He said the Forest Service plans to reroute part of Herbert Glacier Trail and build a scenic overlook there instead. 

Although there is a lot of public support for building a cabin near Herbert Glacier, Robbins said the agency is unlikely to change course.

“Only because our decision was based on the complexity and capacity, not on whether or not the site was popular,” he said. “We know the site is popular, that’s why we wanted to initially build a cabin there.”

A public comment period to object to the cancellation closes March 9.

Nineteen people have applied to be Juneau School District’s next superintendent, according to search firm McPherson & Jacobson.

The job posting to replace outgoing Superintendent Frank Hauser was open for more than three weeks before closing Thursday. The search firm will use data from surveys and stakeholder meetings to narrow down the candidates.

Meanwhile, the Juneau School Board is continuing to collect public feedback.

Consultants met with various groups inside and outside of the district. Board President Britteny Cioni-Haywood said the board is heavily relying on a community survey to understand what people want to see in a superintendent.

“We’re not going to catch everyone in one-on-one meetings, and so that default is back to that survey, that then anyone in the community can have their voice heard in the process by utilizing that tool,” she said.

As of Thursday afternoon, there had been more than 300 responses to the survey, said board member David Noon, who acts as a liaison between the consultants and the board.

Within the district, search firm consultants met with several stakeholder groups, including teachers, district staff, administrators, student governments, and site council parents. They also met with the University of Alaska Southeast, U.S. Coast Guard and Juneau’s delegation of state lawmakers.

The search firm plans to hold another meeting with the district’s site councils on Thursday, Feb. 12 at 6 p.m. Only a handful of parents attended the first one on Tuesday.

Noon said the board will conduct multiple interviews with finalists before selecting a new superintendent. He said there will be some type of public forum with finalists for the position, but the board hasn’t decided on a date or specific format yet.

“As a board, we haven’t talked about what that was going to look like,” he said. “It can take any shape that we want it to.”According to the timeline for the superintendent search on the district’s website, the board plans to select a new superintendent in the second week of March. The new superintendent is expected to begin on July 1.

Alaska’s largest professional theater indefinitely postponed a run of its show in Anchorage this spring due to financial concerns. 

Perseverance Theatre had originally planned to bring its newest production, opening in Juneau later this month, to Anchorage. For the past decade, the theater has regularly run productions in both the capital city and Anchorage. But staff say the decision to postpone the latter leg came after a period of financial pressure on the national and local level.

Artistic Director Leslie Ishii said Juneau has been feeling the impacts of federal job cuts and economic strains, so less people have money for entertainment.

“Many, many jobs are gone, besides just being laid off,” she said. “So we’re feeling the effects of that as we all look around and see some shops are no longer there, or restaurants are having to cut back hours.”

The nonprofit – which relies on a number of funding streams for its budget, including support from the city, state and federal governments – considered other factors as well. That includes an upcoming $10 to $12 million budget shortfall at the city level, plus ongoing instability with the Trump administration’s efforts to cut arts spending. All of this informed the decision to not take its upcoming show, “Pueblo Revolt,” to Anchorage. Ishii said it would have cost about $60,000. 

“The good news is we’ve been able to say we want to produce this show here,” Ishii said. “We were able to keep that funding in place. But just the added cost of transferring it to Anchorage is what made it difficult to say we can still do this.”

She said so far, the theater has only seen minimal reductions in their current grants. Moving forward she is expecting that funding from all government levels will be greatly diminished. 

On a positive note, she said the Mellon Foundation – a private funder of arts and humanities programs – just renewed a two-year $500,000 grant to Perseverance. And Ishii said theater leadership is working with a financial management company that specializes in helping arts organizations budget and plan for the future. 

The theater hopes to take “Pueblo Revolt” to Anchorage later this year instead. 

Kylie Ferguson manages community partnerships with Perseverance. She said postponing the show’s run in Anchorage was a decision to maintain the theater for the future. 

“Sometimes the play doesn’t have to go on,” Ferguson said. “Sometimes it gets delayed by a few months, but it’s in service of keeping this wonderful organization around for the next generation.”

Ferguson said the Juneau community — which values its performers and the work they do — will be here to appreciate it. In 2024, Juneau was ranked third of small cities nationwide for having a vibrant arts community by SMU DataArts.