Western

An enormous share of Alaska’s food, fuel, and supplies come into the state through just a single access point: the Port of Anchorage. Even small communities in distant parts of the state rely on the steady flow of goods over the port’s docks. It’s a critical supply-chain that connects hundreds of communities, and is under threat from deteriorating infrastructure.

On a recent crystal clear morning, semi-trucks barreled up and down long drawbridges connecting the asphalt docks of the port to the belly of a massive container ship. Tractor-trailers hauled full 40-foot metal containers out from within.

Twice a week, two cargo ships travel 66 hours from Tacoma, Washington, to dock at the port. This one is run by Tote Maritime, and for hours a frenzy of heavy equipment moves 485 containers onto shore. According to officials with the the city, the port, and the shipping companies, the unloading process here is fundamental for Alaska’s main supply chain.

“Everything you see in the store comes up either on this ship, or the ship next door over there at Matson,” said Billy Godwin, operations supervisor for Tote. “Small amounts of stuff come up over the road, but pretty much everything that comes to Alaska comes in one of these two ships.”

For the Railbelt and Western Alaska, it’s these ships that haul up a vast spectrum of goods. As Godwin is talking we see trucks leaving the ship carrying pipes, heavy equipment, and a 20-foot v-hulled boat. In the parking-lot are about a dozen single-story modular houses.

“I believe we only had four today,” Godwin said, referring to the number off-loaded by longshoremen starting at 7 a.m.

Godwin drove up onto one of the ship’s five decks, filled with a chaotic ballet of trucks negotiating tight bends and somehow avoiding collisions. Containers were squeezed like Pez candies into every available corner of the vessel.

“It’s just a big parking garage in here for trailers,” he said calmly.

After parking, we walk up a few spiraling staircases to the bridge of the ship, which looks out over the port’s enormous staging area, packed with elaborate grids of containers arranged according to what has to be moved where at what time.

“No one ever sees what happens here,” Godwin said. He pointed out a row of refrigerated trailers beyond a knot of freshly disembarked new cars. The cooled containers are packed with perishables, and get priority heading to nearby stores, where they might be stocked by day’s end. Godwin ticks off other freight classes spread across the main cargo lot.

On average, a full-length Conex container loaded up with what’s called FAK: Freight of All Kinds, weighs 30,000 pounds. The volume of goods pouring off this one ship on a single morning is staggering.

“If you eat it, wear it, use it, or drive it, it’s on the ship,” said Grace Greene, vice president and general manager for Tote in Alaska, sitting in her office overlooking the company’s ship as it unloads.

Tote rents one of the three terminals that stands to be improved if funding moves forward for the port’s modernization project. Greene thinks Alaskans don’t always understand the Port’s role as a critical piece of infrastructure not just for Anchorage or Southcentral, but the whole state.

“85 to 90 percent of the freight that comes to the state comes here through the Port of Anchorage, comes on one of these ships, and then it gets distributed out either on trucks, on rail, or via air to nearly every single community in the state,” Greene said.

That 85 percent figure doesn’t include certain construction materials, or account for goods barged directly to communities off the road system. Southeast Alaska, for example, received 90 to 95 percent of its freight by barge directly from the Lower 48, according to 2012 figures from the Southeast Conference.

When you look at the total amount of cargo coming into the state by air, road and over water, the port handles half of everything coming in, according to a 2016 analysis from the McDowell Group.

And while 32 percent of all the refined fuel consumed in Alaska moves through the facility, the McDowell report notes, “All aviation gas consumed within Southcentral and the Railbelt first enters the state through POA docks.” Though a small fraction of aviation fuel heads directly to communities beyond Anchorage, the port handles a “substantial majority” of it.

As if to stress that particular point, Greene is interrupted midsentence by a fighter plane flying overhead on a training run out of Joint-Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

“That’s fuel,” said Michael Thrasher, Greene’s senior operations manager.

What he means is that fuel for the jet planes out of Alaska’s two main military bases came through the port. That’s also true of the commercial jet fuel that supplies large airports like nearby Ted Stevens International, as well as the armada of small planes knitting together communities off the road system.

A few miles down the road is a breakdown center, which is something like a big sorting room filled with forklifts. The cross-dock facility is managed by Carlile, a trucking company owned by Saltchuk Resources Inc., the same parent corporation that oversees Tote. As trailers are backed up to the cargo bays, Operations Manager Tom Hubbard opens one of the containers from that day’s ship, and points out labels for where the products are bound.

“Fish House in Seward,” he said of a box sitting atop several piles of paper headed to an Office Max.

Of all the material shipped on a delivery like this one, 45 to 50 percent of it moves on to communities beyond Anchorage. Exact data on where freight moves is treated by companies as a trade secret. But estimates from the McDowell report suggest 15 percent of the cargo moving beyond Anchorage goes to the Interior, 10 percent goes to the Kenai Peninsula, 20 percent goes to the Mat-Su Valley, with the remaining quantities bound for Kodiak, the Aleutians and Western Alaska.

Regardless of whether shipments are headed next, Hubbard and his crew unpack the containers and re-organize them for delivery.

“We’ll do the same thing and then backfill these trailers to send them on to where they’re going next,” Hubbard said.

The whole operation hinges on ships being able to dock and unload at the port. And in part two of this series, we’ll look at why that key step is threatened as the port’s basic infrastructure erodes into the sea.

The family of a sexual assault survivor brings allegations of racial preference by the justice system to a sentencing hearing in Bethel.

At the sentencing hearing of former Bethel police officer Aaron Fedolfi on Tuesday, a debate about race and how it may have influenced his case broke out between the survivor’s family and the defense.

The State of Alaska has charged Fedolfi with one count of third-degree attempted sexual assault and one count of official misconduct after he attempted to force a Bethel woman to perform a sexual act on him while on duty.

Tuesday the state sentenced him to one year in prison— a sentence which his survivor’s family says is not harsh enough.

“The seriousness was not taken into account because of the misdemeanor charges instead of felony charges,” the survivor’s father, who will remain unnamed for his protection, said.

The family requested the court charge Fedolfi with a felony. But the court ruled to charge the defendant with a misdemeanor.

The survivor’s father says Fedolfi got a light sentence because he’s not from Bethel, he’s rich, but most of all because he’s white. The survivor’s mother says she agrees with her husband.

“We’re all human beings, we deserve to be treated just like everybody else,” she said.

Bethel lawyer Heather Sia consulted the survivor’s family throughout the trail. Her remarks before the sentencing hit on similar racial themes.

“We’re sick of it. You have white teachers;. You have white cops. You have white priests that are coming into this area. And they get away with it,” Sia said.

Though Fedolfi did not respond to these comments, his attorney, James Christie, said in his opening remarks that Sia’s words were some of the most offensive he’d heard in a courtroom.

“We’re not punishing Mr. Fedolfi for being white, and we’re not here to set an example for all white people by punishing Mr. Fedolfi. That’s not what this system of justice is about,” Christie said.

Fedolfi’s sentence comes on the heels of a national spotlight on race and police misconduct. Prosecutor in the case, Assistant Attorney General of The State of Alaska Adam Alexander, says these events shake the trust survivors and communities holds in the police force.

“The punishment, from my personal perspective, is not always proportionate to the degree of harm that’s inflicted upon a victim,” Alexander said.

Fedolfi will be remanded in Anchorage at the end of the week where he will begin his sentence. Fedolfi’s attorney says his defendant will leave Alaska after completing his sentence and finish his parole in Florida.

Calista Corporation is campaigning to reduce quorum requirements at its annual shareholder meetings to prevent invalidating future meeting votes and wasting corporation money when a quorum isn’t met.

Current quorum stands at an over 50 percent majority. Calista wants to reduce that to a one-third or about 33 percent requirement, and the corporation wants it to happen before descendants enroll as shareholders next year.

The corporation has one shot to make the change before the pending influx— the annual shareholders’ meeting in July. To rally support, a Calista committee is visiting communities across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta to outline their campaign before the gathering.

Thom Leonard, Calista Communications Manager, says quorum for annual shareholder meetings average 50.07 percent, barely over the needed 50 percent majority. Leonard says the corporation fears that average could plummet with descendants enrolling next year, a change passed at the 2015 meeting and a move expected to triple shareholder numbers from about 13,000 to around 40,000.

The corporation expects this surge of younger voters will reduce the likelihood of reaching quorum in the future based on voting trends among young Alaskan voters. According to the Division of Elections, in 2014 less than 41 percent of 18 to 34-year-old registered voters cast ballots in the Alaska general election.

Leonard says lower voter turnout would mean wasted time and money for Calista and its shareholders. An unmet quorum invalidates votes and forces Calista to spend about $100,000 to reschedule its annual event. The corporation hopes reducing its quorum requirement will buffer these potential losses.

So far over 30 percent or 14 of the corporation’s 41 annual meetings have failed to meet quorum. Only one of those meeting, in 1998, did Calista reschedule.

Leonard says the one-third quorum requirement aligns with quorum standards in the majority of its tribes across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta where 33 of the 56 tribes have an average quorum requirement of 31 percent.

A Calista shareholder relations committee will meet with shareholders in Bethel on April 25 at 6 p.m. at the Cultural Center to discuss their quorum campaign and provide corporation updates.

The state House and Senate are trying to work out their differences over a bill that would draw money from the Power Cost Equalization Endowment Fund.

The $900 million fund subsidizes the high cost of electricity in rural areas. Because the state government has a $4 billion deficit, some lawmakers have suggested drawing money from the fund to pay for other state costs.

Bethel Democratic Sen. Lyman Hoffman crafted a bill that would limit the draw from the PCE fund to years when the fund earnings are more than what’s needed for the power cost equalization program. This program costs about $40 million per year.

The Senate unanimously passed the measure, Senate Bill 196.

But the House made changes to the bill. These changes made it less likely that excess fund earnings would be redirected back into the fund.

Those changes concern Hoffman. When it was time for the Senate to decide Wednesday whether it would agree with the House’s changes, Hoffman spoke up.

“They changed the formula on how the excessive earnings will be distributed,” Hoffman said. “And I believe that that formula will potentially put the fund in jeopardy and want to go back and revisit the differences between what the Senate has done, which is a more sound approach to the fund.”

As a result, there will be a conference committee to rewrite the bill so that both houses can agree to it.

Hoffman will be the Senate chairman of the committee, which will also have Eagle River Republican Sen. Anna MacKinnon and Fairbanks Republican Sen. Click Bishop. The House members will be chairman Dillingham Democrat Bryce Edgmon, Eagle River Republican Dan Saddler and Fairbanks Democrat Scott Kawasaki.

The Legislature formed the conference committee on what was an otherwise quiet day in the Capitol.

For decades, Diomede has scrambled to fund reliable air carrier service. On Tuesday, the small island community got one step closer to a long-term solution for passenger travel and mail delivery. The U.S. Senate voted to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration with a new amendment that would guarantee federal funding for the island of Diomede.

Diomede is smack dab in the middle of the Bering Strait, closer to Russia than it is to the continental US. The remote community relies on air carrier services for everything from milk to medication. That’s why an amendment to include Diomede in the FAA’s Reauthorization Bill is a big boost for the community.

“This is a huge, fundamentally important life, health and safety issue for them.” said John Bioff is an attorney for Kawerak, the Native nonprofit corporation for the Bering Strait Region.

Up until now, Bioff said he’s struggled to secure steady funding for air carrier services to the island.

“To have to go back to the state every year, not knowing whether or not this year we’re going to be able to keep the Diomede funding in the state budget, is horrible,” Bioff said.

In 1978, the FAA established the Essential Air Service, or EAS, program. It subsidizes air carrier service to small communities throughout the country, including 60 in Alaska. Diomede isn’t one of them. It’s had to rely on a mix of state and federal funding, which Kawerak reapplies for each year.

In 2015, Diomede received about $190,000 in federal funding and relied on state grants to double that.

Senator Dan Sullivan learned about Diomede’s dire situation a few months back. He’s on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

“I recognize how difficult any kind of economic issues are without essential air service, particularly in some of most remote locations, so we got to work,” said Sullivan.

The FAA Reauthorization Bill sailed through the U.S. Senate 95-3. The House is working on its own FAA bill, which does not include a special provision for Diomede, is bogged down over a section that would privatize air traffic control.

Middle Kuskokwim River villages reported that river ice is beginning to move out in what is expected to be the earliest river breakup on record for those villages.

Bethel Search and Rescue Chief Mike Riley posted on the BSAR Facebook page that the Kuskokwim River ice around Aniak, Napaimute, Chuathbaluk, and Kalskag was moving around 4 p.m. Sunday.

According to the National Weather Service breakup database, the earliest breakup for Kalskag was April 22, 1940. The records go back to 1938.

Riley says the ice should be completely out within a few days.