Juneau

More than 800 people have signed a petition created Tuesday to put the Mississippi flag back up in downtown Juneau, just days after it was removed over its Confederate imagery.

The new, unpunctuated, seven-word petition on change.org says, “Put back up the Mississippi state flag.”

It’s addressed to the City and Borough of Juneau, which doesn’t control the all-flags display on Egan Drive and hasn’t officially weighed in on the controversy.

“The city employees don’t put those flags up, there are no city vehicles, they’re not city poles, it’s not even a city right of way,” Juneau Assemblyman Jesse Kiehl said. “So the Friends of the Flags group has not gotten any instructions, directions or push from the Assembly that I’m aware of,” Kiehl said.

Community member Gary Durling started the petition after about 200 people last week successfully petitioned to replace Mississippi’s official state flag with its first official flag, the Magnolia flag.

Durling doesn’t think that group should make the decision for all of Juneau.

“I feel that a lot of groups in this town try to push their ideas on others in this town, and it divides us,” he said.

Durling acknowledges the different sides of the issue, but says Mississippi’s official flag should fly downtown.

“All of a sudden it becomes an issue, and if you like the flag you’re racist or promoting slavery,” Durling said.

For Durling, who grew up in Juneau, the flag controversy is a part of a city that’s changing. He says it worries him a little. Now that his petition has garnered so much attention, Durling is unsure what he will do moving forward.

Juneau college student Amos Kissel is a supporter. While he acknowledges the flag’s association with racism, he says it’s also a part of people’s heritage.

“I understand people are offended by the Confederate flag, and I respect that and value their opinion. But I know there’s also people that are good and value the Confederate flag as a part of their history and it’s not just about racism and slavery,” Kissel said.

Assemblyman Kiehl says he recently spot-checked the supporters of the new petition and says the majority of them are locals.

“Eighty or 90 percent of the folks live in Juneau, and probably 90 percent of those are registered voters. So it’s clearly something folks in Juneau are starting to think about,” Kiehl said.

The June 17 racially motivated massacre of church parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked a national conversation about the Confederate and Mississippi flags — and in the Magnolia state itself.

So far, five Mississippi cities have removed the flag from their municipal properties. Clarksdale is one of them.

Clarksdale Mayor Bill Luckett says he wishes he removed the state flag sooner. For him, the Charleston massacre was the tipping point.

“They call it heritage, I call it history. It’s not most peoples’ history, at least not around Clarksdale, Mississippi,” Luckett said.

He says the flag is a reminder of a darker time in America.

“That is a reminder to many people of oppression, suppression, slavery, divisiveness, it just carries a lot of negative connotations with it,” Luckett said.

Luckett hopes that the increased attention to the issue will encourage the Mississippi lawmakers to change the flag.

“Sometimes you need to stand out from the crowd and be different if it’s for the right reason, but we stand out and we’re different from most states for the wrong reason,” he said.

The Columbus city council recently voted unanimously to remove the flag, becoming the fifth city in Mississippi to do so. Councilman Charlie Box voted on the issue.

“I just felt like anything that divisive—it’s a piece of cloth—and to some it means so much, but I  just feel like it’s really time to move forward,” Box said.

Box says his constituents are split down the middle.

If the change.org petition succeeds at reversing the Friends of the Flags decision, supporters in Juneau will need to pay for a replacement flag, installation equipment and a permit from the Department of Transportation.

The original Mississippi flag was donated to the Juneau-Douglas City Museum. Once collections are logged, the museum usually doesn’t give them back.

Friends of the Flag organizer Judy Ripley, who allowed the original flag replacement, did so because of the hateful associations with the flag. Although she would not comment on the new petition, she said she was not surprised.

Juneau Rep. Cathy Muñoz says to expect a special legislative session sometime in the fall, this time in the capital city. The Republican lawmaker spoke at Thursday’s Juneau Chamber of Commerce lunch.

The legislature met in Anchorage for the last special session. Muñoz says it would’ve been difficult to have held it in Juneau due to seismic retrofitting work being done on the Capitol building.

“It was very noisy and there was a lot of construction work, but now that that’s done we are ready, and I have confidence that the special session will be held in Juneau,” Muñoz says.

By early fall, Muñoz says the governor plans to hold a series of public meetings across the state, including in Juneau. She says community members will be asked to weigh in on new revenue ideas for the state, like the possibility of managing the Permanent Fund as an endowment. She says the fund generates $3-4 billion a year and the dividend equals $1.3 billion.

“So it’s possible if we were to manage the earnings of the fund where a portion of the earnings could go toward public education or transportation, and maintain the dividend at a level that Alaskans have come to be accustomed to. We can do both and it would significantly help address our revenue problems,” Muñoz says.

One thing Muñoz doesn’t want to talk about during the special session is the next phase of the gasline project.

“I don’t believe we’re ready yet. I think there’s been a lot of going back and forth and potential changes (in) direction with the new administration,” she says.

Muñoz says gasline issues that still need to be resolved include size of the pipeline, route and ownership.

Muñoz thanked Chamber members for weighing in during the last session on issues like eliminating daylight saving time and the Juneau Access project. She says the daylight saving bill may come up again in the next session.

On the road, Muñoz says the state is close to having enough matching funds to secure federal money for moving forward.

The city’s timeline for razing the derelict Gastineau Apartments by November is “very aggressive” and cannot be guaranteed.

That’s according to architects planning the demolition of the downtown eyesore. The cautionary comments were made in NorthWind Architects’ proposal for a city contract. The three-building apartment complex has been uninhabitable since a 2012 fire.

NorthWind says rainy weather in a typical Juneau fall will make demolition more difficult, especially with respect to erosion of the hillside behind the apartments and managing stormwater pollution. NorthWind suggests a plan for completing demolition in April when it’s drier, but before tourist season.

The city wants a demolition plan at the end of August, which it then intends to use to solicit bids in September for the actual demolition. It’s budgeted $1.8 million for the entire project, which it hopes to recoup through a lien against the property owners.

The city has not signed a contract yet, but NorthWind’s proposal was the highest-rated of the two submitted.

Yesterday evening, Juneau resident Gary Durling started a petition to put the recently removed Mississippi flag back up. The petition, addressed to the City and Borough of Juneau, has more than 500 supporters, most of who are largely from Juneau and the Southeast region.

The flag, which features a full image of the Confederate flag in its upper left corner, was removed Saturday morning after a monthlong debate. It was replaced with the Magnolia flag, the state’s first official flag.

Criticism of the Confederate flag has grown after the racially charged mass murder of church parishioners at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last month.

After taking down the Mississippi flag, volunteers donated it to the Juneau-Douglas City Museum.

“Teacher training” usually means spending time in a library with textbooks and PowerPoints. But for 13 Alaska educators last week, it meant hopping on a helicopter, donning crampons and toting an ice ax on top of the Mendenhall Glacier as part of Discovery Southeast’s Teacher Expedition. I was invited to tag along.

From the Juneau airport, less than 10 minutes fly by before the helicopter lands on the ice of the Mendenhall Glacier.

Bev Levene, who works at the glacier’s visitor center, says she look at this glacier every day, “But now I’m actually seeing it, touching it, being on it, and it’s really cool and kind of surreal in a way.”

The glacier expedition is just one of several teacher trips that Discovery Southeast offers in the summer. Teachers pay tuition to learn in an outdoor classroom for a week and can get continuing education credits from the University of Alaska Southeast.

Richard Carstensen is one of the founders of the outdoor education nonprofit and an instructor.

“This is our backyard in Juneau,” Carstensen says. “And they’re going to bring this back to their classes, even if they can’t actually the walk the kids around on the ice. It’s going to just give them a much more full body understanding of what this glacier is doing.”

Cathy Connor is a retired geology professor at University of Alaska Southeast and another expedition instructor.

“If you teach teachers, you teach the world. If you just teach kids, that’s just a flash in the pan. They’re the parade moving, but teachers are your pivot point. They’re the railway station that all the trains come through,” Connor says.

During the expedition, teachers were supposed to spend three days on the Juneau Icefield. Due to weather, ice time was limited to the day on the Mendenhall Glacier. Matt Potter says the days spent off the ice were just as rewarding. Potter is in the process of moving from Anchorage to Circle, where he’ll be the lead teacher.

“We hiked up somewhere and there was this gravel pile and we had a bunch of 5-gallon buckets and we dumped water down it just to look at what the effect of concentrated run off is, how it sorts out the rocks from the gravel from the silt,” Potter says. “It was a really good hands-on activity to show in real time the processes of erosion. That’s something that no matter how old you are, you’re going to have fun dumping water down a hill, right?”

But it’s the glacier that draws the most awe.

“There’s just nowhere else on Earth like this,” says Allie Smith, a teacher at Juneau’s Auke Bay Elementary School.

“And the one thing that I’m so amazed with today is watching all the melt streams on the surface of the glacier. I always knew there was melting but there’s just a lot more channels and dynamics to see up here than I realized,” she says.

Throughout the day, the instructors pose this question to the group of teachers:

“Do you guys have any ideas on what you might take to your classrooms about the process that’s happening out here?”

The teachers have some ideas, like using algebra to predict snow accumulation and ablation cycles, nature walks in areas where the glacier once was, experiments that model how ice carves away at cliff sides. But they have weeks before school starts, so while they’re on the glacier, they might as well goof off for a few minutes.

Palmer teacher Nicolas Owens stands over a small glacial river.

“It’s a very technical thing we’re doing here. We’re going to drop the orange in. We should probably measure something off or eyeball a measurement and then we’re going to calculate how fast the water’s flowing,” Owens says.

“On your mark, get set, go.” The orange is dropped into the flowing glacial water.

“Oh no,” Owens says, as someone laughs. “It’s in the eddy,” he says. “The orange is stuck in the eddy.”

Much of the conversation at Monday’s Juneau Assembly meeting centered on housing and how Juneau could grow as a city.

The Assembly approved $72,000 for a grant incentive program which gives homeowners cash to construct accessory apartments. Assemblyman Jesse Kiehl called the plan a “premature” use of limited funds.

“We haven’t heard from the public about what the recommendations are. We haven’t heard from the consultants about what the recommendations might even be and we’re using money quite frankly probably to incentivize things that are already, probably going to happen,” he said.

Kiehl said a housing action plan is already in process, further input is needed to make sure the funds are used wisely.

“An old saying is keep your powder dry. In this case, I think we need to keep the taxpayers’ cash dry,” he said.

In 2012, the Juneau Economic Development Council found the city needed hundreds of new units to improve the tight market for renters.

Assemblywoman Kate Troll said there is nothing in the housing action plan that suggests this is not a good move.

“The affordable housing commission is very engaged in this issue,   and they still feel very strongly in terms of trying to make a difference, a big difference on the ground for the smallest amount of money, this is a very worthwhile program,” she said.

Kiehl was the only Assembly member to vote no.

Later, zoning changes near mile 7 of Glacier Highway were discussed–a move some said could help with Juneau’s housing problem. The area is zoned for single-family homes. The ordinance would more than triple the density.

Dave Hanna testified it would “unfairly change the character of the neighborhood.”  Not fix Juneau’s housing problem.

“Now we’ve heard density is the answer to our housing problem here in Juneau but we also hear Juneau is sorely underserved in the single-family market. We really need more single-family homes here,” he said.

At an April meeting, the planning commission recommended denying the proposed rezone. The Assembly approved the ordinance with Assemblywoman Kate Troll and Assemblyman Jerry Nankervis voting no.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of the story attributed a quote to Assemblywoman Karen Crane but it was Assemblywoman Kate Troll who said it. We regret the error.