Southeast

Alaska’s state ferry system is at risk of a partial or total shutdown this summer due to the failure of the federal government to issue a key annual grant.

“Currently right now, we have a shortfall in our budget,” said Dom Pannone, director of program administration and management for the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, to members of the Senate Finance Committee during a Monday morning hearing.

Money from the Federal Transit Administration’s rural ferry program pays for almost half of the Alaska Marine Highway System’s operating expenses, but the administration failed to open its annual grant process in fiscal year 2025, which ended Sept. 30.

The ferry system’s budget runs according to the calendar year. Last spring, the Alaska Legislature and Gov. Mike Dunleavy budgeted $171 million for the 2026 ferry budget. Of that, almost $78 million was supposed to come from the rural ferry program.

Without that money, the system could be forced to tie up its ships in midsummer, at the peak of the state’s annual tourist season.

“Right now, we have a federal chaos problem,” said Sen. Jesse Kiehl, D-Juneau and a member of the Senate Finance Committee.

Ryan Anderson, commissioner of the state DOT, said his agency is “looking at several options” to prevent a shutdown of the ferry system.

If a federal grant isn’t delivered, DOT would make significant changes to the summer ferry schedule, which is slated to begin in May.

Anderson said the state could “dispose of the Matanuska,” the state’s oldest active ferry, which has been tied up dockside as a “hotel ship” because of maintenance costs.

The ferry Kennicott, coming out of drydock, or the Columbia, another old mainline ferry, could be tied up as a hotel ship instead of the Matanuska, he said.

On Monday, neither DOT officials nor state legislators could say why the Federal Transit Administration has failed to make grants available.

“What is going on in Washington, D.C.? That’s always a tough thing to work with,” Anderson said.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, secured almost $1 billion in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act bill for the rural ferry program, which was written in a way to steer much of the money to Alaska.

By text after Monday’s hearing, Murkowski spokesman Joe Plesha said the Federal Transit Administration told her office it will release the FY26 ferry grants this spring but did not give a timeline.

“We are directly engaged with the FTA and working to advance the release of this grant funding as soon as possible,” Plesha said.

When Murkowski got the ferry language signed into law, it was the first time the federal government had significantly funded operational expenses for Alaska’s ferry system.

“In this particular case, it can actually pay for the operations of those (ferry) vessels,” Anderson said, noting that includes operating costs like crew and fuel. That billion dollars was to be spread across five years, and the program disbursed more than $252 million nationwide in FY22, $170 million in FY23 and $194 million in FY24.

Alaska received more than five-sixths of the total distribution in that time, something that allowed Gov. Mike Dunleavy to divert state dollars to other parts of Alaska’s annual budget.

Alaska DOT estimates that about $410 million remains available for the federal government to disburse.

In each of the three prior grant years, it took between 152 and 199 days from the time the grant application period opened to the time the grant was awarded.

That timeline means that even if federal transit officials were to open the grant process tomorrow, a decision might not be made before the start of the summer ferry schedule in May.

Dunleavy and the Legislature could extend the timeline by changing the ferry system’s budget calendar so that it starts July 1 along with all other state agencies, but if there’s still no federal money, that would just extend operations until January 2027, and then the system would face a $150 million cliff instead of a $78 million one.

Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, said that finding “backfill” money will be difficult in either case.

“Our budgets are getting tighter and taking away the flexibility the (finance) committee has to backfill some of these holes, and this particular hole could be significant, pushing $80 million,” he said.

The ferry funding issue could persist even if the federal transit authority resumes paying grants, because its ferry operations program is set to expire this year.

“What happens when that grant money is gone?” asked Sen. Mike Cronk, R-Tok.

“This year, the surface transportation reauthorization is up for renewal,” Anderson said. “This, we understand, is part of that discussion: Will the rural ferry program continue over the next subsequent four years?”

Anderson said that even if Congress renews the program, the current Alaska-favorable rules might be rewritten.

“Other states are very interested in this program as well because they have a lot of similar challenges,” he said. “Nationwide, there’s support for a program such as this. The questions that are out: How will the rules be rewritten, and how competitive will the program be? That will be the challenge.”

The U.S. Forest Service is moving forward with a plan to harvest over 5,000 acres of trees in the Tongass National Forest, just east of Ketchikan. A majority of that will be old-growth trees, which some people worry will be devastating to the forest.

The Forest Service released the final environmental impact statement for the South Revilla project earlier this month. It would allow for the harvest of over 4,000 acres of old-growth timber, and over 1,000 acres of young growth timber. The project site, which surrounds Carroll Inlet on both sides, is around 41,000 acres in total.

Cathy Tighe, a district ranger with the Forest Service, says the cut will allow for more than logging — it will also create new recreation opportunities.

“So it’s actually it’s not just focused on timber,” she said. “It actually clears a lot of activities that help us meet our multiple-use mandate as an agency.”

The project includes construction of new trails, a cabin, boat launches and outhouses. It also includes the construction of parking spaces and 14 miles of new road.

Environmental groups have been pushing back on large-scale, old-growth logging for decades. For years, up until Trump was reelected, the Forest Service was steering away from large-scale, old-growth logging. The focus was instead on young-growth sales, which has less cultural and environmental impact.

The Ketchikan-area plans were originally introduced in 2016, under the first Trump administration, but were shelved in 2020 with the change in administrations. But with the latest administration change came a new executive order, and a new directive from the Department of Agriculture to restart and increase timber production.

“Since this project was so close to being completed previously, we had all of our resource specialists review those changes and sort of pick up where we left off.”

Part of developing the plan involves an interdisciplinary review, where resource specialists with the federal agency study the site and evaluate risks.

“It’s a long process, partly because we have all of these different resources working together,” Tighe said. “And then, in addition, there’s a lot of what we call best management practices that go into, you know, how far away from a stream you have to, like, fuel equipment to protect resources.”

But critics say that old-growth logging projects of this scale will be devastating.

Betsey Burdett is the owner of Southeast Exposure Outdoor Adventure Center, a kayaking and ziplining tour company. She says she’s seen logging projects of this size before. And she doesn’t see it as responsible development.

“It’s just a question of how many people can this land support,” she said. “What’s the breaking point, and how can we do it responsibly?”

She says she’s seen people leave the island because they didn’t like what was happening to the forests at the height of the timber industry.

Nathan Newcomer from the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council says there are better ways to go about logging.

“Our organization works with small mill operators that are just like mom-and-pop shops really, like two people that work there, and they might go grab one or two old growth trees every once in a while,” Newcomer said. “Or a tribe, for example, they might want to go chop down one old growth tree to build a canoe or carve a totem pole. There’s appropriate ways to do this.”

He says the project will harm animal populations, like those native to the Tongass, and the region’s world-class salmon runs. Old-growth projects also affect carbon sequestration and long-standing ecosystems.

Newcomer says the South Revilla project will affect Southeast Alaskans who live a subsistence lifestyle and will come at a cost to taxpayers, who will likely have to pay for a lot of the project.

“The average person in Alaska understands that that’s not our economy,” he said. “It’s not based on large scale timber production. It might have been at one point decades ago, but we’ve moved on. And so again, I ask the question, who’s asking for this? Who’s getting the benefit out of this? It certainly isn’t the majority of Alaskans in Southeast.”

Newcomer suspects this project might be a bellwether for other large scale old growth projects to come in Southeast, particularly if important conservation laws get repealed.

There is a 45-day objection period that follows the release of the final environmental impact statement. That ends on March 8. The final environmental impact statement can be found on the Forest Service website.

The state of Alaska’s case against a Haines man charged with animal cruelty is stuck in a holding pattern, seven months after officials first removed dozens of animals from his wildlife facility.

In September, the Office of Special Prosecutions filed three felony and two misdemeanor charges against Chilkat Valley resident Steve Kroschel, the longtime owner of the Kroschel Films Wildlife Center.

After a years-long back and forth over conditions at the center, the office alleged that Kroschel had failed to provide adequate care for his animals, in some cases causing prolonged pain, suffering and death.

The state issued a warrant for Kroschel’s arrest in late December. But there’s a catch — Kroschel says he has been in Russia since last summer, around the time when the state seized his animals. And during a recent phone interview, Kroschel said he’s staying put for now as he works to obtain Russian citizenship.

“I’m not going anywhere now for a year,” he told KHNS.

Kroschel has virtually attended a number of hearings in recent months. But there will be no trial as long as he remains overseas, Juneau Superior Court Judge Amy Mead said during last week’s hearing.

“Obviously, I would not hold a trial,” Mead said. “If you were to enter into an agreement that included a felony conviction, you would need to be here in person because that involves fingerprinting.”

Kroschel said he understood.

The hearing, which focused on how Kroschel’s defense would be handled rather than on the case itself, was scheduled in response to Kroschel’s request that he be allowed to represent himself due to his dissatisfaction with his public defender.

“I know enough about this case, right and wrong, and the protocols to do this on my own. My life is on the line here, my family, everything,” Kroschel said. “I know what I’m doing. I wish to proceed representing myself.”

Mead, the judge, walked Kroschel through the potential risks and warned him that most people who defend themselves are not successful. Then she asked if he still wished to proceed.

Kroschel replied: “Yes, your honor.”

Mead granted the request.

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Landslides have killed at least a dozen people in Southeast in recent years. 

That prompted Aaron Jacobs, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau, and his colleague to answer a major question people in the region have been asking: “Are we seeing more landslides across Southeast Alaska?”

A couple of years ago, scientists weren’t sure. Now, Jacobs says the answer is yes.

According to the study, published in the journal Landslides in November, news outlets reported 281 destructive landslides between 1883 and 2025 in Alaska. Jacobs said they decided to use news reports as the data source because if a landslide affected people or infrastructure, it probably made the news.

They found the number of reported landslides started to increase in the 1980s and has skyrocketed in recent decades. 

Fewer than 10 damaging landslides were reported per decade before 1980. From the 1980s to the 2010s, they found a 295% increase in impactful landslides across the state. In the 2010s, 84 damaging landslides were reported. In just the first half of the 2020s, 76 landslides have made the news.

“A big thing that stuck out was the precipitation-driven or triggering events that were increasing within the last 20 years,” Jacobs said. 

The four fatal landslides that hit Southeast in recent years — Sitka in 2015, Haines in 2020, Wrangell in 2023 and Ketchikan in 2024 — were all triggered by heavy rain or rapid snowmelt.

In the paper, the scientists drew a connection between rising average annual air temperatures — between 1.2 and 3.4 degrees Celsius — and a 3% to 27% increase in precipitation across Alaska over the past half-century. 

“It’s all connected,” Jacobs said. 

It’s a result of climate change. As the globe heats up, more intense atmospheric rivers are slamming Southeast because warmer air can hold more moisture. These downpours cause steep slopes to crumble. 

Climate change is also expected to raise the frequency and intensity of storms that dump rain on top of snow. When the rain melts the snow, it rapidly saturates hillsides and can make landslides more likely. Additional research published Wednesday by Jacobs and others found that this phenomenon triggered the 2023 Wrangell landslide.

Earlier this month, Jacobs and his colleagues posted a manuscript of a scientific paper addressing these rain-on-snow events that hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. They used a high-precision weather forecasting model to assess atmospheric rivers in Southeast within the last handful of decades and project how they could change in the near future.

The researchers found that rain-on-snow events coincided with 8% of landslides assessed between 1981 and 2019, including some that were large and widespread. They predict that rain-on-snow events will happen more often and involve an increase in extreme rainfall and snowmelt between 2031 and 2060 as the atmosphere continues to heat up.

How people use the land also plays a role in where landslides occur and how they affect people. On Prince of Wales Island, scientists have mapped nearly 800 landslides. The island is crisscrossed by hundreds of miles of logging roads. 

“The writing is on the mountain,” said Quinn Aboudara, natural resources manager for the Shaan Seet tribal corporation in Craig. 

He said he’s noticed that landslides are more prevalent in logged patches and where roads cut across steep slopes. When he was growing up in Port St. Nicholas Bay, he said landslides weren’t as frequent and more snow fell in the winter. In recent years, it mostly rains. 

“Now we treat the rainy seasons as landslide season,” he said. 

Shaan Seet is piecing together a road and culvert inventory to identify problematic areas. During a deluge, Aboudara said some old culverts meant to funnel water under roads clog or just aren’t big enough to handle the runoff. He said that causes water pressure to build up in the hillside and can lead to landslides. 

“We’re looking to replace those with actual bridge works instead of culverts,” he said. 

At the Sitka Sound Science Center, Luka Silva is working on other measures to reduce risk. He manages the Ḵutí Geohazards Project, which works with Southeast communities to address gaps in landslide science and public safety. 

“Because no one wants to lose their neighbor or their home or their friends or loved ones in a landslide, and we have steps that we can take to make that less of a possibility,” Silva said. 

The center developed an early warning system for Sitka that Silva said other communities are using as a model. Scientists are studying soil thresholds to someday forecast landslides. Many communities are working on or already have landslide hazard maps. 

But some municipalities have struggled to take action. After residents in Juneau pushed back against updated landslide hazard maps, the Juneau Assembly declined to adopt them and rolled back development restrictions in landslide paths. Nearly identical stories played out in Sitka and Haines. It’s because homeowners don’t want to see their property values tank and insurance premiums rise. 

Silva urges people to keep the bigger picture in sight.

“We know what we know about how our landscape is going to change even further, and how our landslides are going to be more and more impactful and frequent,” he said. “What are we going to do about that? And what are we going to do to make people safer?”

This story has been updated with information about an additional study published Wednesday. 

The federal government says 98% of rural Alaskans catch, hunt or gather at least some of their food. And much of that happens during the school year.

Now, students in Skagway are calling on their school district to adopt a policy that would let them take part in those activities — without it potentially counting against them.

The push originated with Ryder Calver, who is the treasurer of the Skagway student council. Calver said he’s gone moose hunting almost every year since he was six years old. But in his experience, taking part in an annual moose hunt eats up most of his allotted absences in one go – leaving little room for other absences later on.

“I’m gone for around 10 days each time, and the school only allows you to miss 15 days total per semester, whether that is a trip, you’re sick, excused or unexcused,” Calver said. “I got the idea to add a buffer.”

So this fall, Calver teamed up with Student Council Senior Parliamentarian Sam Munson to write a resolution they hope will push the school board in that direction.

Right now, students can be penalized after their fifteenth excused absence – unless they get a waiver from the superintendent or school board. The resolution makes a case for allowing students to take up to 7 “subsistence days” per semester, which wouldn’t count toward the 15 day limit.

The board’s policy committee took up the issue during a recent meeting. Munson, Calver and Student Council President Lina Hischer spoke, saying the policy should specifically provide flexibility around subsistence activities.

The fact that the current policy doesn’t do that “negatively affects kids who do subsistence hunt or gather,” Hischer said. “We want to make it more even, or equal.”

During the meeting, Skagway School District Superintendent Josh Coughran said the policy could be updated to mention subsistence activities – and to allow students to proactively request days off for a moose hunt or other trip that wouldn’t count against their attendance record.

In that case, he said subsistence days could be treated like travel days for sports or debates – which don’t count as absences.

“We know they’re not in school, but it’s on a school-sanctioned event. And so this would be the school sanctioning subsistence activities and not counting it against families,” Coughran said.

The board is set to discuss the issue at a meeting this week.

Coughran said in an email on Monday afternoon that it’s still “early days” for the idea. If the board decides to move forward with the proposal, it would go back to the policy subcommittee and then return to the full board for consideration.

Disclosure: Sam Munson, the student council parliamentarian, is the son of KHNS News Director Melinda Munson.

More than eight years after 19-year-old Kake resident Jade Williams was killed at a party, a man has been sentenced for causing her death. 

On Wednesday, Superior Court Judge Marianna Carpeneti sentenced 33-year-old Isaac Friday to 20 years in prison for manslaughter. Friday has already spent several years in prison since his 2019 arrest. The judge suspended the remaining years of the sentence. 

Instead of serving more time in prison, Friday will be on probation for seven years, and if he violates his probation, he will face the remaining prison time.

Williams was found dead on August 15, 2017 at a party in her family’s house in Kake, according to court documents. Investigators from Juneau didn’t reach the scene until the next afternoon. Williams and Friday, who was 24 years old at the time, had been in a relationship, and the case was tried as a domestic violence case. 

Friday was first indicted in 2019 on four charges: two murder charges, a manslaughter charge, and a criminally negligent homicide charge. As part of a plea deal, Friday pleaded guilty to the manslaughter charge in February 2025. All other charges have since been dropped.

Jeremy Williams, Jade’s father, said at the sentencing hearing that his life hasn’t been the same since his daughter was killed. 

“I had one job — I failed — that was to protect her,” he said. “It eats at me every day.”

Williams said he believes the sentence is just a slap on the wrist, and that his family’s experience throughout the investigation and criminal proceedings has been traumatizing.

“I really don’t know what to make of this,” he said. “It’s been a nightmare”

He said Jade had plans to go to cosmetology school in Washington, and that seeing other kids graduate and go to college makes him feel her loss, even eight years later. 

But Williams said he hopes this sentencing means Jade’s family can begin to move forward. 

“I hope myself, my family, my friends, his family — we could start to heal,” Williams said.

Friday’s defense attorney Eric Hedland said at the hearing he believes it’s possible that his client didn’t kill Williams. He pointed to another man at the party, who Hedland said admitted that he had been in a fight with Jade that night and had injuries consistent with an altercation. Hedland said DNA evidence that came out years after Friday’s indictment pointed to that other man. The state never filed charges against that person in connection with Williams’ death.

“I don’t know what happened. I don’t think anybody does. I don’t think the state does,” he said. “And that troubles me.”

Friday himself took the chance to speak during the sentencing Wednesday, and said he wants to be able to serve his community again. 

“I’m ready to start giving back instead of taking,” he said. “I’m ready to help someone else rather than sitting in a room taking.”

Before delivering the sentence, Carpeneti said she also thinks the facts of the case remain muddled. 

“None of us will ever know with a lot of clarity every event that transpired that evening and all of the harm that was done to different people,” she said.

Carpeneti said she knows the legal system can’t fix the pain Williams’ death has caused.

“There is not a sentence in the world that will restore Mr. Williams, his family, Jade’s friends and the community of Kake,” she said.

But, she said, the court’s responsibility in a plea agreement is to find an outcome that both parties — the state and the defense — will accept. Friday’s sentence, which both parties agreed to, achieves that.