State Government

It’s Sunday in Kipnuk.

And like a lot of folks on Sundays, Tony Paul is headed to the hardware store.

“We’re making progress every day, seems like,” he said.

Unlike a lot of folks, he needs a boat to get there.

“It floated away,” he said, gesturing upriver. “There’s a couple stores down past that way, a bunch of houses.”

A week earlier, on Sunday, Oct. 12, Kipnuk endured the worst storm anyone can remember. It’s one of dozens of communities in Western Alaska working to restore essential infrastructure and repair damaged homes after the remnants of Typhoon Halong devastated coastal communities.

According to preliminary damage assessments, Kipnuk fared the worst.

The few residents who remain are determined to rebuild — but the task ahead is immense, and the future is unclear.

In this village, four miles from the Bering Sea on the east bank of the Kugkaktlik River, Halong’s high winds and storm surge left a catastrophe. Halong’s hurricane-force winds pushed seawater more than six and a half feet above the normal high tide line.

Water poured into houses. It lifted homes off their foundations and deposited some of them miles away. It toppled four-wheelers and snowmachines, and left freezers full of food for the winter without power.

The state Department of Transportation estimates that 90% of the structures in the community were destroyed. Most of Kipnuk’s residents evacuated on military helicopters in the days after the storm.

Now, Kipnuk is in ruins. Piles of debris are everywhere.

Anna Kashatok was with her boyfriend, his family and her two kids when the storm hit.

“We floated away pretty far,” she said. “A mile or two.”

They escaped from a window and trudged to the community’s school. She recalled seeing the destruction for the first time.

“So heartbreaking, devastating,” she said. “Kipnuk’s not Kipnuk anymore.”

Kashatok was only back in town for a couple days, retrieving some belongings and important documents from her parents’ house. It also floated away with them inside. She evacuated to the hub community of Bethel with her boyfriend, parents, and two children.

Only a handful of people remain in this village that just a week ago was home to 700.

In spite of the widespread destruction, the school remains a place of refuge. It escaped major flood damage. It’s elevated on pilings with a dedicated backup generator.

 

James Paul III sat at a table in the cafeteria, speaking with a local Yup’ik teacher.

“It happened so fast. Everything changed, like in a day,” he said. “The rest of their lives are changed in one day.”

The school remains, but the kids are gone. Many evacuated to Anchorage. Others are with friends and family in Bethel, surrounding villages or other communities around the state.

So for now, the Chief Paul Memorial School is a hub for the recovery effort. Packaged food lines the walls. Cafeteria workers prepare hot meals — chili was on the menu for dinner.

The state Department of Transportation told Paul some heavy equipment was on the way, he said, things like small excavators, skid-steers and all-terrain vehicles. That would help crews working to connect the school and a water treatment plant to power, he said.

“That’s our main objective right now,” he said.

But time is running short. Winter is well on its way. Bits of frost lined ponds on the tundra. That, and an oily sheen.

State emergency officials say they believe the fresh water supply is contaminated. A stiff breeze brought some relief Sunday from what residents said had been a lingering stench of fuel and sewage.

A big question looms ahead: Can evacuees return before winter — or at all?

“The way that their houses are right now, I don’t think they want to come back, especially people whose houses were pulled off their foundation,” Paul said.

There are a few dozen homes built on pilings that survived the storm and are still livable. They number 40 or 50, Paul estimated.

Paul wants to stay in Kipnuk if he can, he said. He’s spent most of his life here.

“Kipnuk means family, (it) means values, traditions. It’s my culture. I grew up here, and my dad taught me to hunt and live off the land here,” he said. “I do know some about city life, but I’d rather be here.”

Outside the school, standing with a group of young men working to restore basic services to the community, Benjamin Kugtsun was unequivocal.

“We’re going to stay here in the winter,” he said. “We can survive. How did our ancestors survive? Without nothing. But they did.”

But when — or whether — large numbers can return is unclear. Gov. Mike Dunleavy, in a request to the federal government, said some evacuees from villages across the vast, low-lying Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta might not be able to return for 18 months.

For now, Kugtsun and his crew are taking it one day at a time. One task at a time. One boat ride to the hardware store at a time.

But he’d like to see more residents return to help out.

“With teamwork, it can happen,” he said. “We got hope.”

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The Alaska Office of Children’s Services has struggled with staffing for years, from high vacancies and turnover to high caseloads. And data shows caseworker demographics also don’t line up with the state’s, or the system’s children.

According to the 2023 progress report on the state’s child welfare system, 8.7% of caseworkers are Alaska Native or American Indian, and more than 71.9% are white. As for supervisors, all but 2 of the agency’s 13 supervisors are white. The agency is turning to training and partnering with tribes to address the gap.

Indigenous children have been overrepresented in Alaska’s child welfare system for years. State population estimates from last year show that 23.8% people under the age of 18 are Alaska Native or American Indian. But data from the Office of Children’s Services shows they consistently make up around two-thirds of the children who are in out-of-home care such as a foster home. It’s been as high as 69% in the past.

Mary Johnson is the senior director of family services at the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, and worked as a caseworker for a tribal organization earlier in her career. She said the racial disparity concerns her.

“How do we connect with this, these 69% of our families?” she said. “If they are from one population, it would make sense that we would want to identify people to work with the population who are like them.”

Kate Paskievitch is a public information officer with the Alaska Department of Family and Community Services, which runs OCS. In an email, she wrote that “OCS does not view this as a ‘concern’ in the sense of a problem to be fixed, but it does guide our efforts to provide culturally responsive care.”

She wrote that care includes partnering with local tribes in the state on cases, prioritizing hiring local staff in the communities they serve, and providing ongoing training on cultural responsiveness.

Tlingit and Haida is one of the tribes that partners with the state on cases that apply to the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. That federal law lays out minimum requirements when taking on a case involving Indigenous children. The state must try to place children with their family members or in their local communities first.

Johnson herself is Yup’ik. She said it’s important to have tribal representation when working on these child welfare cases.

“It makes sense that if you’re not able to recruit and hire Alaska Native people, at least partner with tribes, at least have tribal partners be a part of the decision making process when making decisions about how our children and families are being cared for and treated,” she said.

Johnson said the tribe largely employs Alaska Native people in its family services office. She said it’s important to have Alaska Native people working on cases, either as a caseworker or as a tribal partner.

“I do think in the field of child welfare, when it’s something so serious and so personal, that the people making the decisions for the group of people that are involved really should have knowledge on how this other group exists in this world, right, and how we parent,” she said.

Trevor Storrs is the president of Alaska Children’s Trust, a nonprofit that advocates and works toward ending child abuse and neglect in the state. He said hiring people whose racial demographics line up with the people they serve is important, but it’s hard to focus on that when the entire system is strained.

“They’re doing really important work, and their hearts are out to protect kids, but they’re also challenged,” he said. “There have been audits. They have high caseloads. They can’t keep staff. There’s just all these challenges.”

Storrs said training on cultural responsiveness is part of social work programs, which is why he said it’s important for the state to hire credentialed workers. That also isn’t always happening.

An audit performed this year on OCS shows many people hired do not have a degree in social work. The state even hired case workers with only a high school diploma.

Storrs said the state should be looking for ways to improve the system as a whole. He said he wants to see a focus on supporting children and families and preventing the problems that lead to OCS intervening.

“It’s less kids that are not going to school, less kids and families addicted to substances, and for us and for OCS, it would be less cases of child abuse and neglect,” he said.

Research from Casey Family Programs shows some children benefit from the system, but they often leave state custody with lasting negative effects on their education, mental health and employment.

A change to the system might be on the horizon. A federal class action lawsuit against the state aiming to reform the system is awaiting a judge’s decision.

If the federal government shutdown continues, more than 66,000 Alaskans will lose federal food aid within weeks, the state of Alaska is warning.

On Monday, the Division of Public Assistance within the Alaska Department of Health said that the federal government “has directed states to stop the issuance of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for the month of November due to insufficient federal funds. This means that Alaskans may not receive SNAP benefits for November, even if they are authorized to receive them.”

The division estimates that 66,471 Alaskans would be eligible for benefits under the program.

In its written statement, the division said that it tried to pay for the program with state money “and determined that a state subsidy was not mechanically possible under the federal payment system.”

Similar warning messages went out from other states across the country starting Friday. In Kentucky, where one in eight residents receives food aid, Gov. Andy Beshear said the pending cut makes this “a scary and stressful time.”

In Oklahoma, more than half a million residents receive food stamps and are expected to lose that help.

Altogether across the country, more than 42 million Americans rely on the food stamp program, which the federal government funds and individual states administer.

On Tuesday, the 21st day of the federal government shutdown, there appeared to be no progress toward resolution.

Sixty votes in the U.S. Senate are needed to advance a House-passed stopgap funding bill. That would require the support of some Senate Democrats, but they oppose its passage unless lawmakers also agree to extend subsidies for health insurance purchased through the federal marketplace.

Existing subsidies are scheduled to expire at the end of the year, sending prices soaring.

Thus far, Republicans have been unwilling to agree to the Democratic demand, and Senate Republicans also have been unwilling to change the Senate’s filibuster rule. Doing so would allow them to advance the stopgap funding bill with 50 votes instead of 60.

Large-scale evacuation efforts are winding down in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta after the remnants of Typhoon Halong washed away homes and infrastructure.

In the days since Halong brought record floods and high winds to the coast, more than 600 people have boarded military helicopters and planes bringing them to Bethel and on to Anchorage. The Alaska National Guard called it the largest airlift operation in the state’s history.

Now, the focus is shifting.

“We’re in the relief process,” Gov. Mike Dunleavy said at an Alaska Army National Guard hangar in Bethel on Friday after visiting Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, two villages hit hardest by the storm.

Teams are continuing to assess damage in villages throughout the region and restore basic services, like power, water and communications. Some 90% of the structures in Kipnuk were destroyed by the storm, along with 35% of buildings in Kwigillingok, according to the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities. A quarter of households in Napakiak have been displaced by flooding.

Further east, in Quinhagak, the storm eroded 60 feet of shoreline separating the community’s sewage lagoon from Kuskokwim Bay, and left raw wastewater perilously close to entering a vital salmon stream. Artifacts dating back to the 16th century at the Nunalleq archeological site, key to understanding pre-contact Yup’ik history, were left scattered on the sand.

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Meanwhile, hundreds of people are in shelters at the Alaska Airlines Center at the University of Alaska Anchorage and the Egan Civic and Convention Center.

State officials say the next step for evacuees is moving them into temporary, so-called “non-congregate” housing, like apartments or hotel rooms. The Municipality of Anchorage reported Saturday it had identified 1,000 hotel rooms and 100 apartments that could be used by evacuees.

But the long-term future for evacuees — whether they’ll be able to return to their home communities, and when — remains uncertain with winter fast approaching.

“Hopefully over the next few weeks, we’ll have a much better understanding about how many people can go back to the villages, and then long term discussions as to, what is this going to look like over the long term?” Dunleavy said.

Kipnuk, he said, was in “bad shape.” But Dunleavy said he was optimistic about Kwigillingok’s future.

“We believe we can get that place up and running, probably on a much larger scale, where we think a lot of folks can actually come back,” he said.

Though military flights are tapering off, State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management spokesperson Jeremy Zidek said evacuations would continue with smaller aircraft. He said the Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corporation, the regional tribal health consortium, is working with state officials to coordinate ongoing flights.

“If people still want to evacuate, now is really the time to let YKHC health care providers in the communities know, so we can start that process to get them out of the community,” he said.

Dunleavy sent a request to President Trump on Thursday asking him to declare a major disaster, which would unlock additional federal resources. He asked the federal government to cover 100% of the costs for the first 90 days. Local officials and the state’s congressional delegation are pressing Trump to approve the declaration.

On Saturday, a spokesperson with the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the disaster declaration was “under review.” An earlier email from FEMA warned of delayed responses to questions because of the ongoing federal government shutdown.

State officials are encouraging anyone who suffered damage in the storm to apply for the state’s individual assistance program, which helps people find housing, make repairs and more. It also helps tell state officials where help is needed and marshal resources from charitable groups, Zidek said.

Survivors can apply for assistance online at ready.alaska.gov/ia or by calling (844) 445-7131.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy requested Thursday that President Donald Trump declare a federal disaster after remnants of Typhoon Halong brought high winds and record-breaking floods to coastal villages in Western Alaska.

“This incident is of such magnitude and severity that an effective response exceeds state and local capabilities, necessitating supplementary federal assistance to save lives, to protect property, public health, and safety, and mitigate the threat of further disaster,” Dunleavy wrote in a letter to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Dunleavy and members of his cabinet were scheduled to visit Kipnuk and Kwigillingok on Friday.

The disaster declaration would unlock federal resources to respond to the Lower Kuskokwim and Lower Yukon regions in Western Alaska, in addition to the Northwest Arctic Borough. The Association of Village Council Presidents, a consortium of tribal governments in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, urged a federal disaster declaration in a letter to the White House on Tuesday.

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Previously, officials coordinating the state’s response in the immediate aftermath of the storm said federal resources were not necessary. But with damage widespread, leaving evacuees unsure when they’ll be able to return home, Dunleavy said the state’s resources may not suffice.

“Due to the time, space, distance, geography, and weather in the affected areas, it is likely that many survivors will be unable to return to their communities this winter,” Dunleavy wrote. “Agencies are prioritizing rapid repairs to all lifelines where possible, but it is likely that some damaged communities will not be viable to support winter occupancy, in America’s harshest climate in the U.S. Arctic.”

Alaska’s congressional delegation urged Trump to sign the disaster declaration.

“The people of Western Alaska are once again facing the onset of winter and the immense challenge of rebuilding in the aftermath of another coastal storm,” they wrote. “Quick federal action will help ensure that families remain safe, critical services are restored, and communities are stabilized before winter arrives.”

Trump was expected to sign the declaration Friday afternoon.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates. 

Alaska Public Media’s Liz Ruskin contributed reporting.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s decision to appoint a suspended attorney to a public seat on the state’s judge-nominating board does not violate the Alaska Constitution, an Anchorage Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday.

An appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court is expected, but for the moment, it clears the way for John Wood to serve on the Alaska Judicial Council, which nominates candidates to the governor for judicial vacancies.

“The Alaska Constitution gives the governor clear authority to appoint members to the Judicial Council — a power central to the executive’s role in our system of checks and balances. Yesterday’s decision reaffirms that authority,” said Attorney General-designee Stephen Cox in a written statement. “The court agreed with the State on every material issue, recognizing that the governor’s appointment of John Wood was both lawful and appropriate, and that Mr. Wood is fully qualified to serve. This is a complete victory for the governor’s constitutional authority — and an important win for the separation of powers and for all Alaskans who want fair, balanced representation on the Judicial Council. With his decades of public service and sound judgment, Mr. Wood will be an asset to the council’s work right away.”

Alaskans For Fair Courts and Juneau resident Eric Forrer had alleged in separate lawsuits that picking Wood violated the Alaska Constitution. In a pair of expedited complaints, they claimed Wood’s suspended bar license made him ineligible to serve on the Judicial Council because the writers of the Alaska Constitution intended laymen, not trained lawyers, to sit in public seats.

Judge Yvonne Lamoureux disagreed with that interpretation of the constitution, declaring that Wood is not an attorney.

His license was suspended in 2000 because of a dispute over bar dues and he has not practiced law since.

“Mr. Wood is not authorized to engage in the practice of law, and has no intention of practicing law again,” Lamoureux wrote. “While Mr. Wood was an attorney 25 years ago, he is not an attorney today.”

Based upon the plain meaning of the constitutional clause establishing three non-attorney seats on the Judicial Council, and the intent of the framers of the Alaska Constitution, Lamoureux wrote, “the court concludes that Mr. Wood is eligible to serve as a non-attorney member on the council.”

The two plaintiffs had also challenged Wood’s eligibility to serve because the Alaska Constitution forbids a member of the Judicial Council from holding a “position of profit under the state,” and Wood holds a consulting contract with the Dunleavy administration. Other members of the Judicial Council also have had contracts with the state.

In 1968, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that “position of profit” means acting as an employee in “salaried nontemporary employment” and does not cover consulting contracts.

Lamoureux, citing that case, ruled against the plaintiffs.

She also sided with the state and against the plaintiffs in one final argument that revolved around the timing of Wood’s appointment. His predecessor’s term on the Judicial Council had expired during the spring legislative session, but Dunleavy did not appoint Wood until after the session ended. The plaintiffs argued that because of that timing, Wood could not serve until confirmed by the Legislature.

Again, Lamoureux referred to the plain language of the constitution and rejected the argument.

“The text does not reflect that the governor can only fill a vacancy which arose or first happened during the recess (after the Legislature adjourns),” she wrote.

“There is no language in the constitution limiting the ability of an appointee to begin serving upon appointment, and the legislature has expressly allowed those appointed to ‘exercise the functions, have the powers, and be charged with the duties prescribed by law for the appointed positions or membership’ pending confirmation or rejection by the legislature,” Lamoureux said.

Neither Donna Goldsmith, co-chair of Alaskans for Fair Courts, nor Jim Reeves, the group’s attorney, could be reached for comment on Thursday.

Attorney Joe Geldhof, who represented Forrer, said by phone that he was “surprised, bordering on shocked” by Lamoureux’s decision because it was pretty clear to him that the context of the constitutional framers’ discussion around public members and attorney members went beyond its plain meaning.

Someone who has been trained in law cannot act as a layman, even when no longer an attorney, Geldhof said.

“The judge’s decision here, it creates a huge potential for political intrigue and mischief, and it’s just inconsistent with the ordinary language in the constitution and the common understanding of what a lawyer was when the citizens ratified the constitution,” he said.

While he expects to appeal, “it’ll be interesting in the meantime,” he said. “It’s going to cause chaos with the judicial council.”