Community

Rachael Juzeler’s show, “Favorite Things,” opens this Friday, March 7th at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center. KTOO’s Scott Burton sat down with her early in the week to talk about her process and what to expect on Friday.

Brian Bezenek of the National Weather Service office in Juneau provides some details about their forecast of snow and the winter weather advisory that has been posted for Juneau and vicinity starting on Friday evening, while Barbara Lindh of Eaglecrest Ski Area says all that fresh snow will come in handy for a variety of events this weekend.

City officials want to build a new fire station in the Lemon Creek area.

It’s now the busiest area for medical and fire calls with 550 mobile homes located there and several multi-family units planned for the area.

“We want to do everything we can to make sure that if someone is having a really bad day, that we’re there to make it a little bit better as quick as possible,” said Fire Chief Rich Etheridge of Capital City Fire and Rescue.

While CCF&R already serves Lemon Creek with crews dispatched from either the downtown or airport stations, Etheridge said it really takes too long for them to get to the scene.

“People in Lemon Creek are kind of in the middle. They’re at the far end of both districts,” Etheridge said.

For instance, to go from the downtown fire station into the Churchill Trailer Court area, it takes about eight minutes of driving time. In an emergency, that’s a huge amount of time. Some of the rules of thumb are (that) a fire doubles in size every minute. So, if you figure if there’s eight minutes of just driving to the scene, the fire could be very well entrenched by the time we get there. And if somebody is not breathing, you start having brain damage occurring in four to six minutes and no oxygen.”

Etheridge said the industry standard calls for getting emergency medical technicians or firefighters out of a station within a minute. Drive time to the scene should take no more than four minutes.

Juneau has got a lot of challenges because we’re very long and linear. Most communities are more square-shaped so it’s easier to distribute stations. To get that drive-time down, we would need to have some stations in between, where some communities wouldn’t.”

Etheridge said a Lemon Creek fire station would have an ambulance with EMTs and a truck company with an aerial ladder truck to allow firefighters to get onto the roof of multi-story structures. Such an apparatus also would carry more rescue tools and equipment than other engines.

The new fire station has been identified as a department priority for fiscal year 2015 in the CBJ capital improvement plan. Total cost is estimated at $10.5 million. City officials have already asked Juneau’s legislative delegation for $900,000 state funding for station planning and design.

Etheridge said a shovel-ready design would allow the fire department to qualify for federal grants to offset construction costs.

He said the city owns several parcels of land in the area that could be used for a station. His preference is a facility on Glacier Highway near the new Public Works vehicle shops, the Juneau Police Department, or a similar location that would provide safe and quick access to a main thoroughfare.

The program Pick. Click. Give. announced today that 10 donors’ names will be drawn for a dividend doubling sweepstakes.

The Alaska Community Foundation is sponsoring the sweepstakes. The foundation is one of the four nonprofits that run the Pick. Click. Give. program. Foundation president and CEO Candace Winkler says the contest was partially motivated by lower participation rates in January.

“Which is our heaviest period for people to file for their Permanent Fund (dividend),” Winkler says. “We were hearing from several people that they were actually kicked off the website before they could pick, click, give.”

The Permanent Fund Dividend Division’s website had some technical problems that month.  The problems were fixed, but Winkler says it’s a challenge to get people to revisit the dividend website.

“We wanted to do something to incentivize them to go back in,” Winkler says. “We know that it’s much easier for people to use it while they’re filing. To actually motivate people to go back in and add a gift if they weren’t able to is a little bit harder. And so, you know, the sweepstakes is certainly a way to do that.”

The Pick. Click. Give. program has grown since it began in 2009. Last year, about one in 20 dividend recipients donated nearly $2.5 million.

Last week, the Permanent Fund hit a record high value of more than $50 billion. Winkler estimates dividends will be worth between $1,400 and $1,800 this year. The foundation is covering the prize payout through a grant from the Rasmuson Foundation. Winkler says it’s unclear at this point if the sweepstakes will be a recurring or one-off promotion. The foundation will track a variety of data points to gauge the sweepstakes’ success.

“We will certainly be looking at whether we see an increase in the percentage of people who, both go back in and add a gift, and also to see if, you know, in the last month of filling, if we see a significant increase in the percentage of filers who are making gifts,”  Winkler says.

The dividend application and donation period closes March 31. To be entered, donations cannot be made anonymously.

(Full disclosure: KTOO is an eligible Pick. Click. Give. charity.)

Pete Boyd of the National Weather Service and Sarah Cannard of the Eaglecrest Ski Area provide a preview of weather and snowsports events in Juneau during KTOO’s Morning Edition on Friday.

The annual Town Downhill is Saturday at Eaglecrest. The race is for skiers and snowboarders ages 10 and up. It’s sponsored by the Juneau Ski Club, which runs youth race programs at the city-owned ski area.

Registration is in the morning. At noon there’s course inspection. Head coach Dan Ord says that’s important for a successful run.

You need to have an idea where you’re going when you’re running a downhill. And then 1 o’clock we’re going to start the race and we’re going to keep it open for two hours. And you get two runs. So when you get your bib in the morning, we won’t run you in bib order, it’s just first come first served for your two runs and then you go.”

The race is on Hilary’s trail. Last year 75 racers participated.

Every Saturday at Eaglecrest Ski Area young racers work on mastering slalom gates on a trail known as Sourdough.

They are the Mighty Mites.

Thirty skiers ages 7 to 12 are in the ten-week race program this season. It’s sponsored by the Juneau Ski Club, which coordinates youth ski race programs at Eaglecrest.

Even former downhill Olympian Hilary Lindh, whose daughter is a Mighty Mite, got her start in the program.

“Bib 188 is on the course. Bib 119, Mikayla Neal, is in the start,” Lindh says by two-way radio to the timers, gate judges and referees working the course.

A multitude of parents volunteer for each of the three Mighty Mite races of the season.

“Go Mikayla,” cheers Mike Goldstein, an Eaglecrest ski instructor and father of three racers. He says the youngsters develop good fundamentals for a lifelong sport.

“They become fantastic all-mountain skiers. But it’s really also about camaraderie and team work and it’s about the social interaction that they generate out here on the mountain. Lots of people can attest to it. It’s lifelong friends as well.”

For boys ages 10 to 12, Goldstein’s son Koby came in first. Twelve-year-old Kaelin Quigley was second. They’ve moved up this year from Mighty Mites to Devo, short for development team.  Nine Devos are still eligible by age to race with the Mighty Mites.

Kaelin says they spend every weekend during ski season in a race class.

“We do a lot of drills to get better, so we can get better times on our races,” he says.

In the giant slalom, each racer had two runs that were averaged for the total time.

“I think I went pretty fast,” Kaelin says.  “It felt pretty comfortable.” His total time was one-minute, five-tenths of a second.  Koby’s was 56.88.

Ski fast, have fun

Look all over Eaglecrest on weekends, and you’ll see a lot of seemingly fearless kids on skis and snowboards.

To join Mighty Mites, kids must be 7 years old, able to get on and off the lifts by themselves and ski independently, says coach Mike Satre. He and his wife Sarah grew up racing at Eaglecrest and have coached Mighty Mites for about six years.

Most importantly, Mike says, kids need to be comfortable skiing the whole mountain and “ready to have some fun.” After all, the Mighty Mite motto is “ski fast, have fun.”

“The more laps they get on the mountain, the better they are. We work on edging and balance skills, and we enforce that as we work in all terrain on the mountain, then we do some race specific drills,” Mike says. “And then we have a beautiful day like today and we get to show it off on the race course.”

Sarah Satre teaches second grade at Auke Bay Elementary School and knows the Mighty Mite age group pretty well.

“Going to have some fun today?” she asks 10-year-old Sadie Jenkins as she pushes into the start gate.  “Ready? Go.”

As each young racer slides into the start, Sarah delivers a very clear message:

“Smile and have a lot of fun.”