Southcentral

The family of a man fatally shot by Anchorage police last week is calling on the city to release body-worn camera footage of the incident.

Anchorage Police Chief Bianca Cross initially said the man, 34-year-old Kristopher Handy, pointed a gun at officers before they shot and killed him. But a neighbor later released security footage that she says shows Handy did not raise his gun.

His brother, Travis Handy, said his family is demanding that the police chief or the mayor’s office release the police footage of the shooting to the public — immediately.

“They don’t believe that the video tells the entire story,” he said. “But you know, they have six other videos for body cameras and two dash cameras with different angles of what transpired that night.”

Cross released a statement Thursday saying the security footage, “appears to many to differ from the initial statement we provided regarding the event.” But she also cautioned that video does not capture many details including what happened outside the camera’s view and “the human element of those involved.”

The Handy family said that Cross called them Monday afternoon, and expressed her condolences over the death of Kristopher Handy. She also reiterated that the police body camera footage would only be released once an internal and state investigation on the shooting is completed.

APD spokeswoman Renee Oistad said Cross was following the department’s standard process for notifying the community of an officer-involved shooting when she held a press conference last Monday, before reviewing the body camera footage.

“We will review that process,” Oistad added.

Organizers are planning a rally for Kristopher Handy on Saturday at 2 p.m. to call on the police department to release the body camera footage of his shooting.

A Homer man died Sunday morning after being attacked by a moose.

According to an online dispatch posted by Alaska State Troopers, a cow moose charged at 70-year-old Dale Chorman and another person.

Journalist and writer Tom Kizzia was asked by Chorman’s family to speak on their behalf. He said Chorman and his friend were looking at newborn moose calves on Chorman’s property located east of Homer near Fernwood Drive when the moose charged at them.

“They were going down to see how close they could get to see if they could get any pictures of these newborn twins, but it was really thick, real dense part of the woods,” Kizzia said, “it was thick alder and elderberry, like we know around here, and suddenly out of nowhere, that moose was coming at them. They hadn’t seen it.”

Medics declared Chorman dead after arriving at the scene. Troopers say the moose has left the area. As of Sunday, troopers are still investigating the incident and the exact cause of death.

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, cow moose with calves tend to be aggressive in late spring and summer. The department recommends running behind a solid object like a tree if a moose charges at you.

Suzanne LaFrance is poised to unseat incumbent Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson and become the city’s first elected female mayor.

Partial, unofficial election night results Tuesday show the former Anchorage Assembly chair leading Bronson by 9.8%.

There are still thousands of ballots left to count, but the lead will be difficult for Bronson to overcome. If voter turnout patterns continue from recent mayoral elections, Bronson would need the outstanding ballots to favor him nearly 2-to-1 to overcome the deficit.

LaFrance supporters erupted in cheers as she talked to a television crew at her campaign party downtown Tuesday night, and again as she took the stage.

“I feel really optimistic and grateful to everyone for all their work and support, and bringing us to this moment,” LaFrance said in an interview.

Kelly Luczak was at the campaign party, and said she teared up when she saw LaFrance’s big lead.

“I think it’s historical and very exciting,” she said. “It really means a lot.”

If LaFrance’s lead holds, she will officially take office on July 1.

“This administration, this mayor has had so many problems,” LaFrance said. “And people have seen how services have suffered. And you know, the scandals and lawsuits. So definitely yes, there was a path and we put everything we had into it, and had a strategy and executed.”

Bronson went into his reelection bid as an unusual incumbent underdog, trailing LaFrance in the regular election results, a post-election poll and campaign fundraising. He’s set to be only the second incumbent mayor to fail to win a second term since 1975, when the city and borough unified.

So far there are 51,019 ballots tallied. LaFrance has 54.9% to Bronson’s 45.1%.

At his campaign headquarters Tuesday night, Bronson thanked his supporters and said there are still votes to be tallied.

“We’re not going to commit to anything tonight because, all the votes – I mean, there’s folks that just voted 30 minutes ago,” he said. “So we don’t want to say anything until their votes are counted.”

In an interview, Bronson said he’s anticipating far higher turnout than in recent history.

“So this is well within the realm of changing,” he said. “This is where we were three years ago, and we wound up pulling that out. But it was close three years ago.”

While LaFrance would be Anchorage’s first elected female mayor, another woman has held the city government’s top executive position in an acting capacity. That was Austin Quinn-Davidson, who served as acting mayor for about eight months beginning in October 2020.

The Anchorage Assembly had picked Quinn-Davidson from within its membership to finish out Mayor Ethan Berkowitz’s second term after he resigned amid a sexting scandal with a local news anchor.

The runoff election follows a crowded mayoral race.

LaFrance and Bronson emerged as the top two candidates in a 10-person competition for mayor. LaFrance led in the regular April election by under 500 votes.

The election caps a yearslong divide between LaFrance and Bronson, beginning when Bronson was elected mayor in 2021. For two years of Bronson’s term, LaFrance served as Assembly chair.

As chair and during her campaign, the registered nonpartisan tended to avoid divisive rhetoric and politicizing administrative failures, but often sided with the left-of-center majority of Assembly members in discussions over COVID-19 health mandates, homelessness and general budgeting.

Bronson, a registered Republican, has campaigned on being a conservative counter to what he’s described as a “woke leftist” Assembly, with many campaign signs sporting the message “Bronson = balance.”

Bronson and his campaign leaned into their political differences. “I’m normal. She’s woke,” he said at a candidate debate in April. He later explained that to him, wokeness is an unhealthy political ideology of the far left.

LaFrance’s campaign emphasized that most local issues are apolitical.

Snow removal, potholes, housing costs and homelessness were among the most common local issues that residents across the city raised leading into the runoff.

Alaska Public Media’s Matt Faubion contributed to this report.

A new University of Alaska research project will look at how human-caused climate change affects fishing, farming and harvesting in the Gulf of Alaska to build resilience for communities that rely on the ocean.

$20 million dollars of funding from the National Science Foundation will support the work of 23 researchers at all three University of Alaska campuses in Fairbanks, Juneau and Anchorage.

Jason Fellman of the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center is one of the principal investigators on the Interface of Change project. He says warming from the burning of fossil fuels is changing the weather across Southeast Alaska, bringing more extreme rainfall and less winter snow.

It’s also rapidly accelerating glacial melt, which creates a steady trickle of freshwater, sediment and nutrients. 

“What’s running off the landscape potentially ends up in the nearshore marine,” Fellman said. “So these connections — land ocean connections — could be changing quite rapidly.”

Understanding those changing connections is important because the Gulf of Alaska supports vital commercial and subsistence harvests. 

The five-year project will examine important marine foods like red seaweeds, kelp, oysters, clams, mussels and salmon to see how they might be responding to the changing environment.

It will also focus on questions about mariculture. The industry is booming in Alaska, but it’s still young. 

“There’s still a lot to learn about this type of farming in the Gulf of Alaska,” Fellman said. “Maybe glacial runoff is driving places that are more suitable, or less, to growing seaweeds or kelps or something like that. Those are the types of questions we don’t know.”

Davin Holen, a coastal community resilience specialist with Alaska Sea Grant and one of the project’s five principal investigators, says the research will support the harvesting of traditional foods, too.

The goal is to create tools that people can use to adapt the timing and location of their subsistence harvests to keep up with a changing climate. There will also be projects focused on diversifying which species are gathered, and reconnecting younger generations to traditional foods.

“You can kind of build resilience, so that when the environment impacts one species, you still have lots of other species and the knowledge of how to harvest all those other species as part of your toolkit,” Holen said.

The researchers will work closely with industry partners, local science centers, and tribes in Juneau, Haines, Klukwan, Seldovia, Halibut Cove, Homer, Cordova and Valdez. 

Research efforts will kick off this summer.

An independent investigator has concluded several allegations of illegal, unethical and unprofessional behavior among high-level officials in Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration are valid.

Anchorage Ombudsman Darrel Hess released a 20-page report Wednesday describing his investigation into complaints filed in December 2022. Hess doesn’t name the complainant, but an attorney for Amy Demboski, Bronson’s first municipal manager who he abruptly fired at the end of 2022, confirms Demboski is the complainant.

Demboski has publicly said the work environment was toxic, accused the mayor and other high-level officials of a wide range of inappropriate behavior, and sued the mayor for wrongful termination.

In his report, the ombudsman concludes that three of the Demboski’s six allegations filed in his office were justified:

• City workers knowingly violated city code when they raised the capacity of the city-run, mass homeless shelter at the Sullivan Arena.
• Sole-source contracts awarded to Larry Baker to serve as a senior policy advisor did not follow the city’s purchasing code.
• The city Purchasing Director Rachelle Alger distributed penis-shaped cookies to workers at City Hall, though the city’s Human Resources Department did follow up with disciplinary action.

In a letter to the ombudsman ahead of the report’s publication, Alger objected to references to private material that hurt her reputation, the ombudsman’s conclusion on the Baker contracts, the rehashing of a settled disciplinary matter, and a legal issue that did delay the report’s publication.

A fourth allegation that Baker pressured city prosecutors to drop domestic violence charges against a business partner was referred to another agency.

The ombudsman’s report also concluded two of Demboski’s complaints were not valid.

Lawyer Scott Kendall is representing Demboski in her wrongful termination lawsuit. In a statement, he said she is pleased with the ombudsman’s investigation.

“Ms. Demboski believes, and has always believed, that the public is entitled to public officials who will uphold the law and the highest of ethical standards,” Kendall said.

The heart of Demboski’s wrongful termination claim is that her firing was illegal retaliation for, in Kendall’s words, her “attempts to rein in the Bronson administration’s unethical and illegal activities.”

Veronica Hoxie, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, called attention to the timing of the release of the ombudsman’s report. Voting is underway in the city’s election, which ends April 2, and Bronson is running for reelection.

“The allegations of this report are nearly two years old, if not older,” Hoxie said. “They’ve been handled, they’ve been addressed. But there is some concern around the timing of the release of this report, especially, you know, being two weeks away from a municipal election. And you have the Ombudsman’s Office that is hired by, paid for and funded via the Anchorage Assembly, the same body of government that oversees municipal elections.”

Hoxie said it was just an observation, and did not explicitly allege ulterior motives.

In the report, Hess did address some timing issues. He said he intended to release the report on Feb. 9, but it got delayed by competing legal interpretations over when the office must drop investigations. A code change, which the mayor vetoed and the Assembly overrode Tuesday night, resolved the legal ambiguity.

A panel of federal appeals court judges heard oral arguments Thursday in a case with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line for Anchorage. The dispute stems from botched construction work on the city’s port that began in the early 2000s.

The particulars of the case deal with the intricacies of contract law and how damages are calculated. A federal trial court judge decided in 2022 that the federal Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration breached its contracts with the city by failing to fulfill its project oversight duties. The trial court judge said the Maritime Administration owes the city a whopping $367 million. 

The Maritime Administration appealed. A panel of judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., finally heard arguments in the case on Thursday.

“We feel the oral arguments went great,” said Luke Patrick, a spokesperson for Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s office. “And we feel that the MOA has positioned itself well and we’re optimistic that the outcome will be in our favor.”

The Maritime Administration basically argued that it wasn’t obligated by a 2003 agreement with the city to deliver a defect-free port structure. And, in a subsequent 2011 agreement having to do with how to manage claims against the contractors on the project, Maritime Administration argued it wasn’t obligated to pursue litigation on the city’s behalf.

Department of Justice attorney Evan Wisser argued the case for the Maritime Administration. Here’s a sample of how that went.

“So our argument there is that the trial court simply misinterpreted the plain language of that clause, which says — ”

Appeals court judge Richard Taranto interrupted: “Assume I disagree with you.”

“If you disagree with that,” Wisser continued, “then we have no other argument about the breach on that point.”

The judges seemed a lot less skeptical as they listened to the attorney representing the city, Jason Smith.

Referring to trial court Judge Edward Damich’s opinion, Smith said, “There is not one single witness of the 24 who testified over the course of this trial who disagreed that MARAD had an obligation to design and deliver a port for the Municipality of Anchorage. Those are the witnesses offered by the municipality, and those are the witnesses that were offered by the government. They all said the exact same thing.”

The underlying work led to unstable and hazardous sheet-piling and land at the port, and years of setbacks.

There is no set timeline for when a decision is due from the appeals court, but many local officials are closely following the case. Some state lawmakers may be, too, as they consider two bills that propose the state take over the Don Young Port of Alaska, including whatever cash award the city may be due from this litigation.