Alaska

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. 

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s fiscal plan is taking a beating as lawmakers and the public take a closer look at the proposal. Last week, dozens of Alaskans called into a hearing to voice their particular displeasure with the governor’s proposal to institute a statewide sales tax.

Now, the governor is changing course a bit. In an interview with Alaska Public Media on Friday, Dunleavy offered to put the tax plan on ice for now.

“Let’s all agree. Take more time on the taxes. I’m all in on that,” Dunleavy said. “Let’s get the first several components in law and a constitutional amendment sent out to the people of Alaska.”

In the interview, Dunleavy defended his tax plan, which would hike some oil and gas taxes, modernize corporate income taxes, and, most prominently, create a statewide sales tax of 4% in the summer and 2% in the winter. All of the changes would be temporary, set to automatically repeal in the 2030s, and corporate income taxes would vanish entirely in 2031.

The sales tax would be by far the largest revenue-raiser, bringing in $700 to $800 million annually.

Dunleavy pitched it as an effort to extract more revenue from people who live outside of Alaska. When a panel of economists from the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute for Social and Economic Research looked at the options the state has, they found a sales tax, especially one with a higher rate in the summer, would bring in a greater share of its revenue from nonresidents than other options, like an income tax.

The governor also argued that a sales tax would be countercyclical. When gas prices are low, and state oil income is correspondingly low, people might be more willing to travel and spend money in Alaska, he said, pointing to Texas and Saudi Arabia as examples.

“It stabilizes the ups and downs of oil, and so it stabilizes your fiscals,” Dunleavy said. “That’s what this is about.”

But House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, an independent from Dillingham, said it was clear from public testimony that Alaskans were not prepared to pay a sales tax.

“You cannot do broad-based taxes or any significant measures without, No. 1, having the general public somewhat in alignment,” he said at a news conference on Friday.

Without Dunleavy’s tax bill, what’s left in the governor’s fiscal plan?

Whether a willingness to delay tax changes will make the rest of the plan more palatable, however, is uncertain.

The tax bill, filed as House Bill 284 and Senate Bill 227, is by far the most controversial part of Dunleavy’s fiscal plan, but even without it, the remaining elements still face skepticism from leading lawmakers in the state House and Senate.

Those include:

• Capping the growth of state spending at 1% each year, not adjusted for inflation (House Bill 275 and Senate Bill 223)
• Tasking a legislative committee with performing “sunset reviews,” evaluating government agencies every six years and requiring a vote on whether to continue or end the agency’s work (House Bill 274 and Senate Bill 222)
• A multipronged constitutional amendment related to the Permanent Fund, which would combine its two accounts into one, cap the annual draw at 5% and set aside half of that 5% draw for dividends (House Joint Resolution 30 and Senate Joint Resolution 23)

Dunleavy argued that passing those measures would build trust with voters — and potential taxpayers — that tax money would be spent responsibly.

“Once you put in rules to control the spending,” he said, “the spending, if you need it, will then make sense to Alaskans, and it can be controlled.”

He cast the final year of his term as the last chance to get those sorts of measures into state law and the Constitution, even challenging this reporter to a $500 bet that the measures would not pass once Dunleavy left office. (This reporter is not allowed to bet on the news and declined the bet.)

Does any of it stand a chance of passing?

House Speaker Bryce Edgmon said in an interview that he was willing to negotiate with the governor’s team but expressed skepticism about the remaining elements of the plan, including the limit on government spending. Inflation in recent years has run above 2%, and costs in rural communities disconnected from the road system have risen even faster, Edgmon said.

“We have so many needs on the operating side of the budget, the capital side of the budget, that to limit to a 1% increase going forward into time, assuming we continue to grow as a state, bring more residents in that make everything more expensive, that seems unrealistic,” Edgmon said.

Some minority Republicans are also skeptical — House Minority Leader DeLena Johnson, a Palmer Republican, told the Alaska Beacon the measure didn’t go far enough, calling it a “spending beanie” that could easily be overcome with a majority vote and the consent of a future governor.

Another minority Republican, Fairbanks Rep. Will Stapp, said the constitutional amendment setting aside half of the state’s investment income for dividends would be unsustainable, even if the tax plan passed. Dunleavy’s proposal, if it were in effect next fiscal year, would dedicate $2 billion in otherwise unrestricted state funds to dividends.

“I fail to see how enshrining a liability that outstrips the amount of revenue I’m raising in taxation creates anything but more instability and a need for more taxes,” Stapp said at a House Finance Committee meeting on Thursday.

Key senators have also balked at the idea of placing the dividend in the state Constitution, including Sitka Republican Sen. Bert Stedman, who co-chairs the Senate Finance Committee, though Senate President Gary Stevens, Republican of Kodiak, said he believed there was room to negotiate with Dunleavy on the amendment.

In response, Dunleavy fired back at Stapp.

“Representative Stapp is the liability,” Dunleavy said, “because he wants to spend the people’s PFD.”

Dunleavy said the amendment was an effort to prevent lawmakers from balancing the budget by reducing dividends, as lawmakers have for approximately the past decade. That’s akin to a regressive tax, hitting low-income earners the hardest, according to the economists’ presentation.

“It should always be more difficult,” Dunleavy said. “If not, you’re going to end up with what we’ve had here over the decades, spending every single penny we can find.”

Despite their opposition to Dunleavy’s plan, lawmakers do not appear ready to counter the governor’s proposal with one of their own.

For now, Edgmon said he hoped this year’s debates would at least help Alaskans understand that, with dwindling savings and uncertain revenue, why taxes might be necessary to balance the state’s budget in the long term.

“The one message that we hope will emerge from all this is that, look, Alaska, we have a structural deficit,” Edgmon said. “We need new revenues. And so that conversation, I think, is going to be really valuable.”

Rayna Paul sat in an Anchorage office on Monday, scrolling through a spreadsheet filled with hundreds of names and phone numbers of Kipnuk tribal members.

“We are just on As,” she said with a chuckle.

Paul is Kipnuk’s environmental director who is in charge of the village’s voting process. Over the next several days, she and her team plan to call every single adult tribal member – that’s about 900 people – and ask them a pressing question: Do they want to rebuild the village in its current location or move to higher ground?

“It’s very important for us to find out what the tribal members from Kipnuk want to do, so we can continue trying to move forward in applying for funding,” she said. “We’re always on a timeline.”

Kipnuk sits about 4 miles inland from the Bering Sea, in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Last fall’s disastrous winds and flooding destroyed homes and infrastructure there and contaminated land and water. Today, most residents remain evacuated in Bethel or Anchorage, including Paul. She said she wants the future Kipnuk to be safe.

“We love our community. We miss our community,” Paul said. “We’re doing it for our future generations to come, because they might not know what to do when this happens again. I think we’re just going to be hit with many, many storm events.”

The first community meeting about whether to relocate happened about a week ago. The decision to start voting followed swiftly.

Sheryl Musgrove, who directs the climate justice program under the Alaska Institute for Justice, is assisting the village in the process. She said residents need to act quickly to make the most of both the short construction season and the available funding for disaster recovery.

“It seems fast, but we’re four months out from the disaster,” Musgrove said. “The tribe just needs to know which direction they’re going, so that they can put their efforts into following the path forward that they determine is the best path for them.”

The relocation process can be costly, but Musgrove pointed out that so is repairing and rebuilding homes and infrastructure.

The fall storm also destroyed much of Kwigillingok and residents have already voted to relocate. Musgrove said that while the relocation of another village in the region, Newtok, took decades, she hopes that Kipnuk and Kwigillingok can be examples of how to move through this process faster.

“They don’t have decades. They need to do it immediately,” Musgrove said. “My hope is, they can show other communities that are going to be faced with this in the future, that you can rebuild someplace else – if that’s what they decide – on a short timeline as the disaster recovery process.”

Right now, Kipnuk leadership is looking at two sites for relocation. They are both between the village and Chefornak, in the area of a historical settlement called Cheeching. Both spots are located on higher ground, one close to the ocean and the second one further inland. The village would have to work with either the Chefarnrmute Corporation or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to obtain ownership of the sites.

During the voting process, Paul said she and her team of four will also ask residents if they want to suggest any other sites for relocation.

They still have a lot of phone calls to make. While Kipnuk was home to about 700 people, Paul said the Native Village of Kipnuk has closer to 1,240 tribal members, and about 900 of them are ages 18 or older. She said they hope to reach all the adults within a week.

“It’s hard, but it’s doable,” Paul said.

Paul said she’s unsure how long the process will actually take and when the results will be announced. She said that if Kipnuk residents don’t receive a call by Friday, they should reach out to her and provide their phone number.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski said in Greenland Monday that she feels terrible for the anxiety her country inflicted on the Danish territory.

“In just a few sentences and words, trust that has been built since World War II has been eroded and degraded,” she told reporters in Nuuk. “We need to work to rebuild that trust.”

Murkowski was the sole Republican among four senators who took the trip to try to repair the relationship with Greenland after President Trump’s repeated threats to acquire the island.

The trip was part of her initiative to bolster what she calls a trans-Arctic alliance. She was part of another congressional trip to Denmark a few weeks ago.

The Greenland crisis seemed to abate last month, when Trump backed off threats to take the Danish territory by military force. But the visiting senators were asked if they could guarantee the president wouldn’t change his mind.

“The answer is no,” said Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who led the delegation. “We can only exert our role as a separate and co-equal branch of government. But we can’t guarantee what the president may or may not do tomorrow, let alone two months from now.”

Murkowski said Congress will stand up for Greenland, if necessary.

“But I will also speak to the fact that there are some members of my party who don’t want to be seen as engaging in anything that might be viewed as contrary to President Trump’s initiative or desire, and so who may not be speaking out publicly,” she said.

In private conversations, she said, Republican colleagues have assured her they won’t allow Trump to seize or control Greenland.

“I’m going to encourage them that they need to be more vocal in reinforcing that, because this should not be a partisan issue,” she said. “Respect for the sovereignty of another nation, respect for our NATO allies — that should not be Democrat (or) Republican. It should be just pro-democracy”

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.