Get Alaska statewide news from the stations of the Alaska Public Radio Network (APRN). With a central news room in Anchorage and contributing reporters spread across the state, we capture news in the Voices of Alaska and share it with the world. Tune in to your local APRN station in Alaska, visit us online at APRN.ORG or subscribe to the Alaska News podcast right here. These are individual news stories, most of which appear in Alaska News Nightly (available as a separate podcast).
Updated: 26 min 35 sec ago
Charges Against Former BBNC Board Member Dropped
The State of Alaska’s sexual assault case against former-Bristol Bay Native Corporation Board Member Sergie Chukwak has been dismissed.
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Categories: Alaska News
APOC Approves Consent Agreement With Dan Coffey
The Alaska Public Offices Commission has approved a consent agreement worked out by its staff and former Anchorage Assembly member Dan Coffey. APOC staff say he failed to register as a lobbyist for the Municipality of Anchorage and then made illegal campaign contributions to legislative candidates outside his own district. Under the agreement, Coffey admits he violated the law and the staff recommends a reduction of the maximum possible fine from 46 and a half thousand dollars to thirteen thousand. Coffey says he thought he didn’t have to be registered if he limited his hours of lobbying activities. Coffey’s job was to try to get the Legislature to pay for the cost over-runs at the Port of Anchorage.
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Categories: Alaska News
Tsunami Debris Problem Gets Worse in Alaska, with Little Clean Up Funding In Sight
The beach on the southeast side of Montague Island stretches for nearly 80 miles of pristine wilderness. At least it looks pristine from a few thousand feet up. As our helicopter descends towards the shore, big chunks of white polystyrene foam, similar to Styrofoam, come into view.
Photo by Annie Feidt, APRN – Anchorage
“See how you can see all the white Styrofoam floats on this point out here? Big globs of Styrofoam? That’s all tsunami debris… And there’s more Styrofoam out here. There’s no question,” Chris Pallister, president of the nonprofit Gulf of Alaska Keeper, said.
The group has been cleaning up marine debris that washes onto Alaska’s shores for 11 years. And when the tsunami debris began arriving last spring, their job got a whole lot harder. Pallister has visited Montague Island nearly a dozen times since then. And by the time we land and step onto the pebble beach, he’s shaking his head in disgust.
“You’re basically standing in a land fill out here,” Pallister said.
Pallister points to an area scattered with foam bits smaller than packing peanuts:
“See what’s happening here? with all the crushed up Styrofoam? This is what we’re worried about, this Styrofoam is just going to get all ground up and you can see there would just be billions and trillions of little bits of Styrofoam scattered all over everything. And extrapolate that all up and down this coastline. It’s kind of an impossible job,” he said.
Photo by Annie Feidt, APRN – Anchorage
The trash is not just an eyesore. Pallister says voles, birds and even bears are eating the foam. He’s also worried about chemicals. Among the debris he finds containers that held kerosene, gas and other petroleum products. Even the little containers worry him. Sifting through the trash he picks up a small blue bottle and unscrews the cap to inspect its contents:
“I have no idea what this was. It looks like dish soap, maybe laundry detergent, but it’s empty, which is maybe not a good sign. There’s thousands of bottles like this up and down the coast, from small household chemical items to drum’s full of chemicals. Big industrial size drums,” Pallister said.
Marine debris is not a new problem in Alaska. But the Japanese tsunami magnified the problem. Pallister says the tsunami debris doesn’t have the visceral impact of the Exxon Valdez spill, with oiled animals and blackened coastlines. But he thinks in the long run, it could be a bigger environmental disaster:
“In a lot of ways its a lot worse than the oil spill. Both in the geographic scope of it and the chemicals that are coming with it. And who knows what the impacts are going to be?,” Pallister said.
Photo by Annie Feidt, APRN – Anchorage
Officially, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recorded just five tsunami debris items in Alaska. But the agency will only confirm an object if it has a unique identifier that can be traced back to Japan. The state of Alaska does not use the same strict standard. Last summer the state paid for an aerial survey to inspect 2,500 miles of Alaska’s coastline. Elaine Busse Floyd is acting director of the division of environmental health. She says the survey identified tsunami debris all along the flight path from southern Southeast, up to Prince William Sound and out the Alaska Peninsula:
“There was tsunami debris literally on every beach that was photographed. They took over 8,000 pictures and it was more widespread and in greater quantities than we even expected,” she said.
But so far there has been minimal funding for cleaning up the debris. Governor Sean Parnell didn’t included any tsunami debris funding in his budget. NOAA is figuring out how to distribute a $5 million gift from Japan for cleaning up the debris. And Alaska’s Congressional delegation is working to get federal funds. But tsunami debris clean up money was stripped from a bill for Hurricane Sandy relief that passed this week.
Back on the beach, as the waves crash in, Chris Pallister says the debris could have serious impacts on fisheries and subsistence resources.
“I don’t know if it’s being taken seriously enough. I don’t think a lot of people who are going to be impacted by it know how bad it is right now. And until that gets out, maybe not much is going to happen,” he said.
Pallister guesses it will take tens, or even hundreds of millions of dollars to remove the tsunami debris in Alaska. On this day though, he has to leave all the trash on Montague Island behind. We take off in the helicopter and head north along the beach. Pallister looks out the window at all the debris below and says, “it just goes on and on and on.”
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Categories: Alaska News
Bill Pushes For Increased School Funding
In the legislature, a bill that would increase funding for schools has been introduced.
A team of nine Democrats want to peg what’s called the “Base Student Allocation” to inflation. That allocation gives school $5,680 for every student they have enrolled, and it’s remained at the same level for the past three years.
The funding bill would increase that amount to nearly $6,000 to account for inflation over the past two years, and it would permanently tie the allocation to the consumer price index going forward.
Rep. Harriet Drummond served on the Anchorage School Board before being elected to the legislature, and she describes the bill as a way of responding to recent staffing cuts in the district.
“The school districts have been cutting for years,” says Drummond. “They’ve long since cut any fat if there ever was any. They’re now cutting certified staff.”
House Majority Leader Lance Pruitt doesn’t know how the bill will fly with his caucus. The Anchorage Republican is concerned the bill could give future legislators less flexibility with the budget in times when less revenue is coming in, and he says that changes to the education funding formula would probably have more success if the Democratic Minority took a bipartisan approach.
“The bill that’s out there is more of a political statement than truly addressing the issue,” says Pruitt. “If there was really a desire to see this move forward and not just be an opportunity to talk to you guys, then you would probably see some Majority members’ names on there.”
Pruitt says that it’s too early to tell whether there will be any increases to education funding, but thinks the governor’s plan to keep the base student allocation at the same level is a good starting point.
A similar bill to tie the base student allocation to inflation was introduced in the last legislature, but stalled in committee.
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Categories: Alaska News
Public Comments On Gov. Parnell’s Oil Tax Cut Proposal
The public got its first chance to comment on Gov. Sean Parnell’s proposal to cut taxes on oil companies on Tuesday, and most of the testimony broke along familiar lines.
Representatives from mining, timber, and trucking groups showed up at the Capitol in person, and they spoke before the Senate’s pipeline throughput committee first. They offered support for the governor’s bill, saying that it would discourage oil companies from leaving Alaska for states with lower tax rates.
Aves Thompson represents the Alaska Trucking Association.
”We’re not the tax experts. We don’t know how to do. But we do know that something is wrong. There is something out of balance that needs to be fixed. And it is our firm belief that it needs to be fixed now,” Thompson said.
Once the committee started taking testimony over the phone from legislative information offices across the state, opinion diversified. About half of those callers criticized the governor’s plan to do away with a windfall profits tax and overhaul the way credits are awarded.
One of those comments came from a voice that was very involved in last year’s oil tax debate. For two-and-a-half minutes, former legislator Joe Paskvan testified that oil companies could take advantage of the tax cut to ramp up production without reinvesting in new infrastructure and exploration – something he described as “super harvest mode.” He also suggested that the argument that the current tax structure is behind the drop in oil production is a red herring.
”The throughput decline started in 1989 and has nothing to do with tax policy,” Paskvan said.
Paskvan was one the senators who opposed Parnell’s previous attempts to lower taxes on oil companies, and he lost his seat in November.
The TAPS Throughput Committee is scheduled to hear more public testimony on Thursday.
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Categories: Alaska News
ASD Students, Staff Worried About Counseling Cuts
Service High School senior Johnny Meszaros meets with Graduation Coach Carly Tibbets. Photo by Daysha Eaton, KSKA – Anchorage
The Anchorage School District Superintendent has recommended a budget which eliminates more than 200 jobs. Counseling services could be hit especially hard. KSKA’s Daysha Eaton visited Service High School in Anchorage where staff and students are worried about the impact of the cuts.
Johnny Meszaros loves baseball.
“My passion for baseball is very, very strong. I’m working out at lunchtime. I’m weight training I probably put in as much as a full-time job playing baseball,” Meszaros said.
The Cougars pitcher is set to graduate from Service High School this spring and has a full ride to play college baseball at Central Arizona University. But things weren’t always on track for him. In 10th grade he was dabbling in drugs and lost focus.
Service High School Graduation Coach Carly Tibbets holds a motivational chart her students use to track their credit completion. Photo by Daysha Eaton, KSKA – Anchorage.
“I wasn’t passing any classes and I was getting in trouble. I was getting suspended. And then I got in trouble for good, I got expelled,” Meszaros said.
He was expelled but allowed to come back after a semester.
The 17-year-old lost valuable time is making up more than a semester’s worth of credits in order to graduate.
For Christian Alvarado, it was moving that pushed him off track. His parents are from Guatemala. He relocated to Anchorage from Oklahoma when he was in first grade. He hasn’t stopped jumping around since.
“Since I moved to Anchorage, I’ve probably moved a dozen times. Having to move because of either just wanting a different place or better opportunity or just cause I have to because maybe you know, something went wrong with the lease,” Alvarado said.
Sometimes Alvarado says he ended up living across town and because his single mom worked full-time, she usually wasn’t around to help him get to and from school.
“There’s times when I would really want to go to school and like you know I would wake up and honestly, I wouldn’t have a ride,” Alvarado said.
As a result, he fell behind. Eventually, he moved in with a classmate’s family near Service. The 18-year-old works part-time to contribute to the rent. If he makes it, he’ll be the first in his family to graduate from high school. He says he wants to major in Business at UAA, then open his own construction company. But he has a lot of catching up to do first – he has to make up most of his sophomore and junior year by May to graduate.
Both Alvarado and Meszaros get help from the help from Carly Tibbetts.
“You know, love, sex, drugs, alcohol, suicide. I have those conversations on a daily basis with my kids,” Tibbetts said.
Motivational posters decorate the wall in Graduation Coach Carly Tibbets’ office in Service High School. Photo by Daysha Eaton, KSKA – Anchorage
Tibbetts, who has a Master’s degree in social work, says she can relate to the students because she also struggled with school. Besides day-to-day counseling, she also manages a ‘credit recovery’ program to help kids who fall behind. About 1,800 students attend Service High School. Tibbetts says the 75 or so students she works with face serious challenges.
“We have kids that are homeless. We have kids that bounce from parent to parent. We have kids that are into drugs. I become their cheerleader but I’m also the person who calls them when they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing,” Tibbetts said.
Anchorage School District Superintendent, Jim Browder, has recommended a budget that eliminates more than 200 jobs, including Tibbetts’. He says the cuts are needed to address a $25 million budget shortfall caused by flat funding from the legislature that is not keeping up with inflation and cost of living increases for employees. Jodette Knock teaches math at Service. Her job is not in jeopardy, but she thinks one of the district’s primary goals is.
“If we cut these counselors, our graduation rates that we want to go up are gonna go down. Kids get frustrated, they have nowhere to turn and they’ll be done,” Knock said.
The district’s comprehensive plan calls for a graduation rate of 90 percent by 2020. The rate has been stuck in the 60 to 75 percent range for nearly a decade. Knock also worries that fewer counselors will put more pressure on teachers.
“I have 34 kids in a classroom. How much more do you want me to do? I’ve got six languages spoken. And if I’m the lone support person, it’s gonna be really hard for these kids. And I’m pretty sure it’s not to cut the counseling support staff,” Knock said.
Browder’s budget recommends eliminating 28 full-time positions in counseling services out of 132, reducing the number to 104 district-wide. That includes doing away with all eight graduation coaches and all eight High School Career Resource Advisors. Superintendent Browder says compared to other school districts, Anchorage has more counselors. And many of the programs that employ them were initially paid for by grants, which have run out. What Browder says he envisions is fewer counselors per school who are generalists — sort of super counselors that can handle anything.
“Anybody inside of the suite should be able to handle any issue. And I think we’re realigning in a way that will provide better service for parents, students and the school as we move forward,” Browder said.
Back at Service High School the kids who benefit from the graduation coach say they don’t know what they’d do without her. Johnny Meszaros says he would not be back in school.
“I was planning on dropping out my sophomore year. I actually got kicked out of school for drugs and stuff and she put me on the right track. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if she wasn’t here,” Meszaros said.
The School Board will be accepting public testimony on the proposed 2013-2014 budget on Monday, February 4th at the Anchorage Education Center beginning at 6:30pm.
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Categories: Alaska News
Unalaska Works To Ward Off Eagle, Human Encounters
Photo from KUCB – Unalaska.
Eagle-human relations in Unalaska are usually relatively peaceful. But for a few months each springtime they can turn violent as the eagles attempt to protect their nests. Last week, the city took preemptive action to ward off future attacks.
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Categories: Alaska News
Havermeister Dairy Fills Niche Dairy Market
Ty Havermeister in the new Havermeister bottling facilty with gallons of whole milk and 2% milk now being marketed in Anchorage and in the Valley. Photo by Ellen Lockyer, KSKA – Anchorage.
Matanuska Valley’s dairy industry has shrunk to two farms since the shutdown of the Matanuska Creamery in December. A new dairy enterprise may keep both of them afloat for the time being.
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Categories: Alaska News
Anchorage Police Search For Shooting Suspect
There was a shooting in a West Anchorage apartment Tuesday afternoon. Police say the victim was seriously injured and knew the suspect, who is still being sought. They say there were several other people in the apartment at the time – no identities released yet. Officers say the place was full of bear spray when they arrived, but were not yet ready to say why.
Categories: Alaska News
Head of BP’s Alaska Operation Gets Promotion
John Minge will leave his Alaska job and move up to become the Chairman and President of BP America in a couple of weeks. Minge has headed BP’s Alaska operations since 2009. He will replace Lamar McKay, who is moving up to head the oil giant’s Upstream operations worldwide.
Minge’s Alaska post will be taken by his Vice President, Janet Weiss.
Categories: Alaska News
Bill Allows Tribes To Directly Apply For Federal Disaster Aid
Alaska did not receive any money in the Sandy relief bill that cleared the Senate Monday night.
The bill did include a provision that will allow tribes to directly apply to the federal government for future disaster aid.
A governor needs to request a federal disaster declaration for any issues in a particular state. Senator Mark Begich says that’s changing for tribes.
“It basically gives the tribes, in this case the federal government who recognizes them as a government, a direct request,” Begich said.
The relief bill is designed to pay for Hurricane Sandy aid, not set policy. But tucked inside is a major change in protocol.
Tribal leaders can now appeal directly to the federal government for a disaster declaration – bypassing the state. Robert Holden is the deputy director of the National Congress on American Indians. He says there has been a history of governors ignoring disasters in Indian Country, so this is a welcome change.
He says not every tribe has the resources to do proper damage assessments and appeal directly to the federal government.
“That doesn’t preclude them from still working with the state and going through the state,” Holden said.
So the current method of having a governor declare an emergency on behalf of a tribe or region can still apply to those who need it.
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Categories: Alaska News
Board of Fisheries Adopts New Kuskokwim River Plan
The Board of Fisheries adopted a new management plan for the Kuksokwim River which includes stronger language supporting the King salmon subsistence fishery.
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Categories: Alaska News
Fish and Game Releases Chinook Research Plan
Meanwhile, the Department of Fish and Game has just released its long-term research plan to manage – and ideally prevent – future Chinook salmon disasters like the one Alaska experienced last year. The proposal calls for better estimates of young salmon populations on a number of major rivers, and it puts an emphasis on getting more local knowledge of fish stocks.
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Categories: Alaska News
Eastern Bering Sea Fish Survey Yields Surprising Results
About a thousand people gathered for the Alaska Marine Science Symposium last week. Dozens of scientists spoke on topics ranging from ocean acidification, and changes in the productivity of plants and animals in the marine environment to jobs in science. A survey of fish in the eastern Bering Sea had surprising results.
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Categories: Alaska News
Project Homeless Connect Offers Opportunities To Homeless Population
Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright (l) and Mat – Su Coalition on Housing and Homelessness Director Dave Rose (r) stand with bags of supplies for homeless at Wasilla’s Project Homeless Connect event on Jan. 30. Photo by Ellen Lockyer, KSKA – Anchorage.
Project Homeless Connect is a one-day, one-stop opportunity for homeless individuals to access state and city resources aimed at helping them find shelter and services. Anchorage’s outreach took place Tuesday, but homelessness is no longer a big city problem. Smaller communities are facing a need to serve a transient and needy population without the facilities or budget to do so.
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Categories: Alaska News
Quest Mushers WILL Think Of Massachusetts Man On The Trail
At least six Fairbanks-area Yukon Quest mushers will wear wristbands during this year’s Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race. The hand-made bracelets are part of a fundraiser to support a man in Massachusetts who is battling Cancer.
Will Huggins is a homebuilder and carpenter in Mattapoiset, Massachusetts 15 minutes from Cape Cod.
In 2008, the 41 year old was diagnosed with colon cancer. Doctors removed six inches of his colon. Afterwards, he had chemotherapy. Then, a year and a half ago, Doctors found spots on Huggins’ liver.
“Which caused me to have a pretty major surgery where they removed about 75 % of my liver,” explains Huggins, “and also my gall bladder with a half a dozen procedures that went along with it.” Today, he estimates he’s about 75 percent back to normal, despite a staggering financial burden brought on by the high cost of health care and a lack of insurance.
So, what does this all have to do with the Yukon Quest? Well, long time Quest volunteer, Ryan Hughes grew up with Huggins. “We were childhood friends I think as far back as maybe second grade or so.” Hughes smiles.
Hughes lives in Fairbanks. He spends lots of time with local mushers Brent Sass and Mike Ellis. When he heard Will Huggins was sick, he wanted to find out if they could help. “I was home this summer and was able to go to one of the fundraisers and just kind of jumped on board,” he says. “Friends are important to me.”
If you’ve been to a Quest-related event recently, it’s very likely Hughes has asked you to wear a handmade brown and white bracelet. That’s how Fairbanks musher Paige Drobny ended up with hers. “It’s on an elastic band with brown beads and there’s letters on them that say ‘I WILL,”” Drobny describes her bracelet. “The family that started this, the guy who started this, his name is Willy Huggins and so it’s kind of a play on his name but it’s sending a positive message out to you know positive thoughts. I will finish the Yukon Quest or I will do whatever I put my mind to.” Drobny will wear her bracelet in the Quest 300 and the Iditarod this year. Her husband, Cody Strathe will have one on as he runs his team in the 1000 mile Yukon Quest. The bracelets sell for ten dollars. Proceeds go to help Huggins and his family. Some of the money is also paid forward to others who’ve found themselves in similar situations.
A group of friends in Massachusetts get together to make the bracelets and fill orders at local businesses and online. “It’s been awesome. I’ve heard stories about like – well, you guys out in Alaska and other parts of the country. It’s really spread and it’s really an awesome thing, it makes me feel amazing,” says Huggins.
Word of the bracelets spread mainly through social media. Pictures on his facebook page show an always smiling Will Huggins. He has three children. “When I was a kid, my parents sort of left me,” says Huggins. “I was raised by my grandparents and I made a commitment to the universe that I would never ever leave my children and there I was faced with the universe taking that promise away from me and at first I could barely look at my children, I was so ashamed, but I’ve sort of gotten past all that now. The children in my family are the main thing that keeps me fighting and staying positive.”
Musher and fellow cancer survivor Lance Mackey will also wear an ‘I WILL” Bracelet during this year’s Yukon Quest. Via Text message, Mackey says he and Will Huggins have a lot in common.
Before Ryan Hughes got Interior Alaska’s mushers on board, Huggins didn’t know anything about sled dogs or the Yukon Quest. But the two friends say once Huggins’ health is 100 percent, he’ll come north, preferably to watch the start of the Yukon Quest. “I think someday in my near future, I’d love to get uot and see Ryan and give it a go,” Huggins says. “My ultimate goal,” explains Hughes, “is to get Will Huggins and get him on a sled you know!”
Will Huggins says he’ll follow along as 26 teams make their way down the Yukon Quest trail between Whitehorse and Fairbanks. The race starts Saturday.
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Categories: Alaska News
Princess Cruise Lines To Pay $20,000 In Fines
Princes Cruise Lines has agreed to pay $20,000 in fines for dumping water from on-board swimming pools into Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in 2011.
The fine was announced by the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday.
The EPA writes that Princess violated the Clean Water Act in May 2011 when more than 66, 000 gallons of pool water was discharged into the waters of Glacier Bay National Park.
EPA writes there was a software malfunction on the ship the Golden Princess, causing the pool dump valves to open. The malfunction allowed chlorinated water from six of the ship’s pools and spas to dump into Glacier Bay. Princess notified EPA of the discharges by phone the next day.
The EPA said the incident violated the wastewater discharge permit for large cruise ships, which prohibits the discharge of pool or spa water in national parks and refuges. The federal Clean Water Act allows the EPA to fine cruise companies for permit violations.
The Golden Princess can host more than 500 passenger and sails in Alaska during the summer season. It sails to Hawaii, the South Pacific and South America at other times of the year.
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Categories: Alaska News
Public, Scientists Disagree On Cruise Ship Wastewater
A bill that would relax the wastewater standards placed on cruise ships by Alaska voters is on the fast track in the Senate.
The Senate Resources committee took the first public testimony on Senate Bill 29 last Friday (1-25-13). Proponents of the bill advocated for the lower standards, saying that the current law unfairly puts ships under tighter rules than Alaskan communities. The leading opponent of the bill was a marine ecologist, who was dissenting from her colleagues on the science advisory panel that studies cruise ship wastewater.
Gov. Parnell is putting his weight behind SB29 to expedite permitting for cruise lines by this summer.
Karla Hart, with Alaska Community Action on Toxics, urged the Senate Resources committee to slow down.
“The risk of quick action on your part is that you’ll betray the voters of Alaska, who voted to have this higher standard of clean water.”
Hart reminded the committee that the amount of discharge was significant. More people visit Alaska on cruise ships each summer than live in the state. She did not think leveling cruise ship discharge with local communities made sense.
“If an Alaska community doesn’t meet discharge standards, it’s in our front yard. We know where it comes from. We know who’s responsible, and we have to clean it up. Ships discharge anywhere, so remote areas that you might go to for subsistence harvests or commercial fishing that you might go to because you think they are clean, because they are far away from any apparent discharge, could be getting a pretty substantial burden over time, because a lot of these things are heavy metals that bioaccumulate.”
Alaska voters in 2006 passed the statewide Cruise Ship Initiative, which set wastewater standards “at the point of discharge.” The Department of Environmental Conservation subsequently granted cruise lines temporary relief from these requirements, to allow them time to install the necessary treatment systems.
Putting ships on a different standard than Alaskan communities was a major argument against the initiative. John Kimmel, with Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska told the committee that Senate Bill 29 would correct a flaw in the law that voters adopted.
“The cruise ships really need to be held to the same standard as everyone else. The original initiative held them to a higher standard than everyone else. This fix is going to make it more fair for the cruise lines.”
A variation of this theme has made it to the table from a different direction: The Alaska Cruise Ship Wastewater Science Advisory Panel, in a preliminary report, says that many ships now meet or exceed Alaska water standards, except for a few key heavy metals, like copper. The report concludes that there would be little, if any, environmental benefit to requiring cruise ships to adopt additional treatment methods in the future.
The report gave advocates of the cruise industry an opening to talk about science. This is Andy Rodgers, the deputy director of the Alaska State Chamber of Commerce. He testified that his organization has now adopted a position “Advocating for legislation and regulations that are based on sound science, as opposed to a precautionary method.”
And this is Bob Janes, a tour operator from Juneau.
“I am not a scientist, but I think this subject is all about science.”
But at least one bona fide scientist who testified before the Senate Resources committee disagreed with the conclusions of the Science Advisory Panel – which she herself sits on. Michelle Ridgeway, a marine ecologist in Juneau, believes the other members of the panel underestimate the potential harm from the consistent discharge of heavy metals.
“Quite frankly, I think we’ll be appalled by the long-term degradation to the marine ecosystem if we allow this to go forward in this form.”
Ridgeway thinks applying rules for shore-base treatment plants – which allow for mixing zones – to cruise ships will ultimately create a kind of Sophie’s choice for the state.
“I believe it will be exceedingly excruciatingly difficult for Alaskans to concur on where it is between a 0 to 3 nautical mile area – our state waters – that we find it’s acceptable for vessels to discharge water that contains copper, zinc, nickel, and ammonia at levels that are known to be acutely and chronically toxic to marine life that we all depend on.”
Read an open letter from Michelle Ridgeway to DEC Commissioner Larry Hartig.
Chip Thoma, president of Responsible Cruising in Alaska, said it was his organization’s preference that ships discharge all waste in federal waters. He urged the committee to maintain the water quality standards set by voters, saying it was likely that much of the copper contamination would eventually be reduced as ships modernized with the use of flexible plastic plumbing.
Senate Resources chair Cathy Giessel scheduled another hearing on SB29 for Monday afternoon, January 28, at which she invited members to propose amendments. A companion bill in the House, HB 80, was heard in that body’s Resources Committee on Monday afternoon as well.
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Categories: Alaska News
