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Some shareholders with one of Alaska’s largest Native corporations are speaking out about the company’s involvement in immigration detention centers overseen by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, including at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba. NANA, the Alaska regional Native corporation for Northwest Alaska, gets most of its revenue from its Akima subsidiary. Akima owns dozens of companies which provide a variety of contracting services to the federal government. Some of the contracts include running migrant detention centers wher...
Alaska telecommunications company GCI no longer plans to end its longtime email service. The company had said last summer it would end the service and cancel gci.net and alaskan.com accounts sometime in mid-2024. It also launched a new fee for the old accounts, at $4.99 monthly. The company said it hosted about 40,000 email accounts last summer. The announcement upset many customers who had used GCI for their email for decades. But last month, the company said in an online statement that it is “no longer pursuing any options that would a...
Flight attendants with Alaska Airlines have voted to authorize a strike for the first time in more than 30 years. News of the vote emerged as more than 60 flight attendants protested for better pay outside the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on Feb. 13. The vote does not mean a strike will occur. But the decision raises the stakes in an effort by the attendants to negotiate what they say is their first new contract in a decade. They say Alaska Airlines has awarded large pay increases to pilots but does not provide a livable wage to...
Two Alaska seafood shipping companies agreed to pay a $9.5 million penalty to the federal government for violations related to their use of a tiny rail track in Canada that the federal government said was an illegal attempt to avoid requirements of the U.S. Jones Act. Kloosterboer International Forwarding and Alaska Reefer Management accepted the settlement in January, agreeing to what amounts to the second-largest settlement involving the act, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement Feb. 23. The companies provide transportation and...
Nearly 80 Alaska tribes are calling on the Biden administration to retain decades-old protections for 28 million acres of land scattered across large swaths of Alaska. The administration is conducting an environmental review to weigh the impacts of potentially opening some or all of the land to future uses that include mining. The protections were created in the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, putting the lands off-limits to uses such as mineral, oil and gas extraction. The lands include vast swaths overseen by the Bureau of Land...
More than 150 Alaska Airlines flight attendants demonstrated outside the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on Aug. 15, part of a broader protest nationally as the airline’s attendants demand what they’re calling their first meaningful pay raise in nearly a decade. “Record profits, corporate greed, Alaska pay us what we need,” they shouted. They hoisted yellow signs with messages such as “pay us or chaos.” First-year flight attendants at the airline make an average base pay of less than $24,000 annually, said LeiLauni Scheideman,...
A custom homebuilder in Anchorage said it can now take a full year to complete a house, twice as long as they once did, because workers are hard to find amid a labor shortage that’s predicted to get worse. There aren’t enough framers to erect walls, so concrete foundations can sit untouched for months on end in a “painful waiting game,” Bill Taylor said. Electricians, plumbers, sheetrockers, roofers and others are in high demand, too, so labor costs are higher. “It’s been going on aggressively since COVID,” said Taylor, who owns Colony Builde...
Telecommunications company GCI will end its longtime email service next year, a move that will force customers to transition to new email providers. Spokespeople with GCI, Alaska’s largest telecommunications company, said the service will end sometime in mid-2024. At that point, customers will no longer be able to access or use their gci.net account, according to a draft fact page posted online. “We will provide our customers formal notice at least six months in advance of email deactivation deadline,” GCI spokeswoman Heather Handyside said...
The nation’s surgeon general heard from Alaska mental health care advocates on June 26 about the need for more resources to address what they say is a crisis that is leading to more suicides, eating disorders and depression among young Alaskans. Dr. Vivek Murthy said he was in the state at the invitation of Sen. Dan Sullivan to learn how Alaska is dealing with the rising rates of isolation and depression that are affecting young people nationwide. He said that nationally, one in three adolescent girls in 2021 seriously considered suicide. M...
The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, based in Juneau and representing more than 35,000 tribal citizens, and the Tanana Chiefs Conference, based in Fairbanks and representing 42 villages, announced they are leaving the state’s largest Native organization. In earlier decisions, three of the state’s 12 regional Native corporations have also left the politically powerful Alaska Federation of Natives in recent years. AFN continues to represent more than 200 federally recognized tribes, 184 Native village cor...
A lawsuit over a driveway-sized parcel in Juneau and a sales tax disagreement involving a food truck in Craig both highlight the learning curve facing city, state and tribal officials in Alaska as the federal government slowly accepts tribal lands into trust. So far, only two tribes in Alaska have placed land into trust — in Craig in 2017 and in Juneau this year — after the federal government in 2014 began reversing a decades-old ban against the practice in the state. The Alaska Department of Law early this year filed a lawsuit to stop the pol...
Conservation groups have asked a federal judge for a preliminary decision to stop construction work this winter at the Willow oil field on Alaska’s North Slope, days after the Biden administration approved the $8 billion project. ConocoPhillips had begun building an ice road but agreed to delay activity associated with gravel mining and road building — putting dozens of jobs on hold — while the court considers the request, according to paperwork filed in the case. The Biden administration early last week approved the controversial proje...
The high wages that once coaxed people to Alaska have continued to shrink compared to the rest of the U.S., due partly to a statewide recession before the pandemic and a slow recovery after it, according to a new report from the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Alaska’s average wages still outperform the rest of the country, said economist Neal Fried, writing in the agency’s latest publication of Alaska Economic Trends. They placed eighth nationally last year at $30.52 an hour, about $2.50 above the national average. But...
For the past seven years, the Alaska economy has performed “at or near the bottom” nationally in four key measures of economic health, according to a report released Nov. 17 by the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development. Taken together, the state’s poor performance between 2015 and 2021 — in employment growth, unemployment, net migration and gross domestic product — place Alaska’s economic health at the bottom of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, said Nolan Klouda, the center’s executive director and lead author of the...
A top official with ConocoPhillips said the company expects to start working early next year on the $8 billion Willow oil prospect in Alaska, an effort that could lead to more than 2,000 construction jobs in the coming years. The project is located in the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska on the North Slope. The reserve is home to migratory birds, polar bears and calving grounds for the Teshekpuk Lake caribou herd. Willow could potentially produce 600 million barrels of oil over a 30-year life, according to estimates. Peak produ...
As they’ve done every 10 years since 1972, Alaska voters on Nov. 8 again overwhelmingly rejected the ballot measure to convene a convention to rewrite the state’s founding document. Advocates on both sides had expected the outcome to be closer this time because of the annual deadlock in the Legislature over the size of the Permanent Fund dividend, an issue that convention supporters said they wanted to resolve with changes to the Alaska Constitution. But as of the Nov. 9 count, 70% of voters had voted against the measure (146,092 to 63,...
The state’s largest Alaska Native organization declared its opposition to a constitutional convention on Saturday, saying rural Alaska could have the most to lose if a convention is called. The Alaska Federation of Natives also called for a potential reduction in the amount of fish caught in Area M, a state-managed fishery off the Alaska Peninsula, in order to protect salmon runs that have crashed on the state’s two largest rivers, the Yukon and Kuskokwim. And, after passing several other measures, the organization voted in executive ses...
Just as Alaska’s tourism season heats up, Princess Cruises said it will close one of its five lodges in the state this summer because of staffing shortages. The Copper River Princess Wilderness Lodge will close this Friday, according to a statement provided June 6 by Negin Kamali, a spokeswoman with Princess Cruises. The lodge had opened on May 19 for the first time in more than two years, after the COVID-19 pandemic halted major cruise sailings to Southcentral Alaska until this summer. Located a 3½-hour drive northeast of Anchorage in Co...