Western

Nome could soon be home to an intensive treatment facility for those struggling with addiction and substance abuse. The Liitfik Wellness and Treatment Center has been five years in the making, according to Norton Sound Regional Hospital CEO Angie Gorn.

The proposed wellness center would provide intensive outpatient therapy, she says, as well as support and training to healthcare providers throughout the Bering Strait.

The plan has been championed as a much-needed alternative to far-away treatment options in cities like Kodiak and Anchorage. Members of the Liitfik cultural committee spoke in support of a local facility at Kawerak’s Rural Providers Conference in Nome on Monday.

Committee elders, including Emma Olanna, emphasized a need for regional support when it comes to substance abuse — and shared her own story, and struggle with addiction, as a message of hope.

“We want to leave everyone with hope. And these stories of recovery and success that we’ve heard brings hope to the hopeless. We need to stay strong and build hope with one another,” Olanna said.

By bringing the treatment options closer to home, she believes providers can better adapt therapy to fit the needs of those who live in Bering Strait communities. Even the word liitfik — which literally means “a place to get well, a place to come to your senses” in St. Lawrence Island Yu’pik, draws from an ancient place of healing.

“A long time ago, in the 19th century, people from the region would go by sailboat to St. Lawrence Island. To get well,” said Olanna.

Cultural committee member Edna Apatiki believes that a solution to the problem of substance abuse must also build upon the past. She says the way forward requires not only recognizing past hurts and traumas, but honoring past strengths.

“Our people are a resilient people. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t resilient people. We’re survivors,” said Apatiki. She said the Liitfik center is a logical step forward — providing support for those who are already strong, but may need “a little hope.”

Plans for the facility are currently in the preliminary design stage, but could be finalized as early as next year, with construction slated for summer 2018.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is forecasting strong sockeye salmon returns to Bristol Bay this summer. Copper River Seafoods is getting ready to open a processing plant in Naknek and buy fish from the Naknek-Kvichak District, where 18 million sockeye are expected to be available for harvest.

Fish and Game is forecasting a return of 28.8 million sockeye to the district, with 18 million available for harvest. Copper River Seafoods will be on hand to help purchase and process those fish.

Copper River bought the old extreme seafoods plant in Naknek. Vojta Novak, the company’s Bristol Bay manager, says they have been getting ready to open for the past two months.

Although the plant is new to Naknek, Novak said the company is familiar with the region from its operations in Togiak. He said that entering Naknek is challenging, because it’s competitive, and one of the biggest sockeye salmon fisheries in Alaska. But in some ways, it’s easier to operate there than in Togiak.

“You have everything pretty much here, if you need any help, if you need any welders, if you need any materials, you can buy here. When I was in Togiak, I cannot buy anything,” he said.

Novak said about 15-20 people are working at the plant now to get it ready, mostly construction guys. When the plant is operational, it’ll have about 70 employees, he said.

Novak said the company is shooting for a June 15 opening this summer. All of the fish purchased and processed in Naknek will be sold under the Copper River Seafoods brand.

 

More than 80 firefighters are battling a 2,500 acre blaze near Whitefish Lake. The fire south of Kalskag and the Kuskokwim River is one of about a dozen that were started by lightning on Sunday. Tim Mowry, public information officer for the Alaska Division of Forestry, says smokejumpers and four crews were dispatched to the fire.

“For air resources we have a CL-215: a big water scooping aircraft working it, and also three water scooping airplanes called ‘Fire Bosses,’” Mowry says.

Managers don’t believe there are any structures at risk, but they want to prevent it from reaching village corporation lands. The fire is currently burning a mix of black spruce and tundra grasses on Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge lands.

“Most of the fire is in light fuels, tundra and open country; it’s susceptible to rain if it falls. The forecast is calling for wetter weather moving into the area,” Mowry says.

Other fires with a staffed response include the 40-acre Getmuna fire northwest of Crooked Creek, which is now mostly contained. A 17-acre fire at nearby Little Creek was declared contained on Monday. Crews are keeping an eye on a small fire in the Lime Village area, which they believe could turn into a larger fire if conditions are favorable.

Nearly 11,000 acres statewide have burned so far this year.

 

Nome Superior Court Judge Timothy Dooley is facing a host of allegations from a judicial oversight commission. The charges say that alleged violations of professional conduct, as well as violating sections of state law call his integrity into question.

In all, the Alaska Commission on Judicial Conduct cites six incidents — brought to their attention through anonymous complaints — beginning the first month Dooley was on the job in May 2013 and running through September of last year.

Courtroom recordings, made available through the commission, highlight a series of statements by Dooley the commission says violates state law and the state’s code of conduct for judges, by showing “insensitivity” to victims, witnesses and others in both criminal and civil cases.

In a May 2013 hearing, Dooley asked a man facing a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest: “You don’t have to answer this question, but has anything good ever come out of drinking other than sex with a pretty girl?”

In a November 2013 sentencing hearing — after a guilty conviction for sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl — Dooley said to the man being sentenced: “From what I’ve read this was not someone who was, I hate to use the phrase ‘asking for it’, there are girls out there who seem to be temptresses, and this does not appear to be anything like that.”

In August 2014 Dooley said during a domestic violence case, when a juror could not hear the victim on the stand: “I’m not allowed to slap her around, I can just say something.”

A civil trial that same month showcased Dooley’s self-described “medieval Christianity;” statements the commission said are “inappropriate to the dignity of judicial office.”

“I’m going to enforce those oaths, and they’re enforceable with a two year sentence for perjury. And I’d be the sentencing judge,” Dooley began. “I also have a medieval Christianity that says if you violate an oath, you’re going to hell. You all may not share that, but I’m planning to populate hell.”

A final violation alleges Dooley essentially bargained a specific sentence in exchange for a defendant’s “no contest” plea. In addition, the commission states the defendant didn’t have a lawyer, all of which the commission claims is conduct that harms “the administration of justice” and brings the judicial office “into disrepute.”

Marla Greenstein is the executive director of the commission. She said the complaint was built on review of court transcripts and interviews with people working in the Nome legal system. (The names of those interviewed, Greenstein added, remains confidential at this time.) She said the case has been building for months.

“The commission evaluates the conduct in the investigation at various stages and gave notice to [Dooley] several times in the process,” Greenstein said. “The point where they made the determination [that it was serious enough to warrant public charges] was at a meeting on May 12.”

Dooley has 20 days to respond to the complaint. He said Wednesday he has no comment on the alleged violations.

Greenstein said Dooley could face a hearing before the nine members of the commission, which she estimates could take place as early as November. He could also reach a settlement before a hearing. Either outcome will ultimately go before the state Supreme Court, which will rule on one of three possible outcomes.

“A public censure, basically a public statement that the conduct was wrong and violated the Code of Judicial Conduct,” Greenstein said. Dooley could also face “suspension from office for a certain period of time; and then, the most severe, is a removal from office.”

Only one judge has faced that “most severe” punishment, former Bethel Judge Dennis Cummings who was removed from his position as judge in January 2013.

An Alaska resident for nearly 40 years, Dooley has lived all over the state, from urban hubs like Anchorage and Fairbanks to rural communities like Bethel and the North Slope. He opened an Anchorage-based private law practice in 1993. He assumed his current position in Nome in March 2013 by appointment from former governor Sean Parnell.

 

Of the 30 million pounds of halibut caught last year in commercial fisheries statewide, nearly a third was thrown back into the ocean, dead.  The fish were netted accidentally by boats targeting other fish.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which oversees the federal waters off Alaska, is considering major new limits on wasted halibut — or bycatch — at its meeting in Sitka this week. The decision will have impacts from Southeast to the Bering Sea.

Critics argue that too many fish are dying in the nets of big Bering Sea trawlers, and that means less halibut for everyone else.

Linda Behnken is the executive director of ALFA, the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, which represents mostly small-boat, hook-and-line commercial fishermen.

“Halibut’s one of the two most important species, along with salmon, to the coastal communities of Alaska,” she said. “The bycatch threatens all of that.”

Behnken calls the Bering Sea Alaska’s halibut “nursery ground.” Studies have found that young fish migrate from there into the Gulf of Alaska and Southeast.

And that means “what happens in the Bering Sea doesn’t stay in the Bering Sea,” Behnken said. “What happens in the Bering Sea happens to all of us.”

When trawlers target flatfish like yellowfin sole, they drag their nets through the same deepwater habitat where halibut live, and invariably catch some. The law requires trawlers to discard that halibut, but most fish don’t make it back into the water alive. Last year alone, trawlers scooped up — and discarded — about five million pounds of halibut in the Bering Sea.

This has been the case as long as there’s been trawling, but the issue has become more urgent in recent years as halibut abundance has dropped.

In the last 10 years, the exploitable biomass (the population of fish big enough to catch) has declined by half, and halibut fishermen have seen their catch limits drop with it. But the caps on bycatch have remained essentially the same.

In the Central Bering Sea, halibut fishermen initially faced a 60 percent cut in 2015. That cut was avoided, but only on the condition that bycatch in the region declines this year. The impacts would be huge, Behnken says.

“The Bering Sea communities, especially communities like St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands, they don’t have salmon,” she said. “They don’t have musk ox. They don’t have caribou. They don’t have moose. Halibut is the most important species for them for subsistence and for their commercial fisheries … They’re looking at something that, I think, threatens cultural extinction if they lose the halibut stock.”

ALFA has asked the Council to reduce the trawl bycatch cap by 50-percent.

Chris Woodley is head of the Groundfish Forum, which represents most of what’s called the “Amendment 80” fleet. That fleet is made up of six companies, most based in Seattle, with about 18 catcher-processors targeting flatfish in the Bering Sea.

“A 50 percent bycatch reduction would be absolutely devastating to the Amendment 80 sector,” he said. “Essentially our boats would be tying up five to six months early. And it would also have significant downstream impacts to the maritime economies of remote communities in Alaska, primarily Unalaska, Adak, Kodiak and Sand Point.”

Woodley said the fleet has already made voluntary efforts to reduce bycatch. And they’re asking the Council to let them adopt other measures, like deck sorting, which would allow them to return more halibut to the water alive.

“There may be some more things that we can do, but all of that comes at a cost,” he said. “And we’re concerned that people don’t appreciate that we’ve already made significant improvements, and it’s not so simple as just flipping a switch and everything gets better. Any additional improvements are going to have potentially huge costs to our fleet.”

For Behnken, the big issue is what kind of fisheries Alaska wants. The state’s commercial halibut fleet is made up of about a thousand small boats, most of them family-owned, in communities up and down the coast.

“I would say the way fisheries are changing, it’s the way our country’s changing. It’s what small farmers have faced. It’s the industrialization of the food system,” she said. “To me, this decision the council is facing, it’s really a landmark decision. They are deciding between a fishery that has a hundred-year tradition of being commercially exploited by small boats — community based, this is a really important fishery to Alaska — and this fish being taken as bycatch, wasted in the industrial, Seattle-based fleet.”

But whether the Council sees it that way is up in the air. The Council is expected to vote on bycatch caps this weekend.

 

The City of Bethel has settled with Wassillie Gregory, a man who was violently arrested by a Bethel Police Officer in 2014. Bill Ingaldson, an attorney hired by the city says the settlement was dispersed last week.

“The settlement amount was $175,000. That includes his medical expenses which he had a dislocated shoulder and ended up having surgery on his shoulder so those were pretty expensive around $80,000 dollars. The settlement was agreed to about three or four weeks ago and consummated last week,” Ingaldson said.

The arrest took place in the parking lot of the Bethel Alaska Commercial Store on July 12th, 2014. The officer, Andrew Reid, was fired from the Bethel Police Department in March.

Gregory was originally charged with harassing the officer and pleaded guilty without the assistance of an attorney in a deal to drop two other charges. His conviction was overturned by a Bethel judge in May after surveillance video of the incident surfaced showing the officer repeatedly slamming Gregory to the ground.

The Bethel District Attorney’s office has turned the case over to the FBI. The City of Bethel was contacted for this story but did not want to go on tape and said only their lawyer could comment on the matter.