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Ketchikan: House Bill 155 Supports Alternative to Logging Ketchikan's Iconic Deer Mountain - Monday, Representative Dan Ortiz (I-Ketchikan) introduced House Bill 155, which details the process for swap lands between the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority and the U.S. Forest Service.

The Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority uses revenue from Trust-owned property and lands to provide funding for programs and services that benefit people with mental illnesses, developmental disabilities, Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injuries, and substance abuse disorders.

One piece of Trust-owned land is Ketchikan’s iconic Deer Mountain, which has been considered for logging.

“The vast majority of people of Ketchikan, including myself, are opposed to logging Deer Mountain,” said Rep. Ortiz. “This bill would allow for the preservation of Deer Mountain lands while making other lands of comparable value available to the timber industry.”

By exchanging Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority lands for lands of equal value from the U.S. Forest Service, the Trust Land Office will gain land that can be logged and bring in revenue directed to programs that serve Alaska’s most vulnerable populations. House Bill 155 includes a transaction of approximately 20,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land for 18,000 acres of Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority land. Lands affected by the legislation are in Ketchikan, Petersburg, Wrangell, Sitka, Juneau, and Meyers Chuck.

“Logging Alaska Mental Health Trust land not only funds important programs for Alaskans, it also sustains the timber industry. Current and upcoming logging projects act as a bridge to the timber industry until young growth timber is ready to be logged. Maintaining the timber industry is particularly beneficial to Southeast Alaska, and this bill would bring new logging jobs to Southeast,” said Rep. Ortiz. “I am excited about the potential of this bill to increase revenue for mental health programs and the timber industry while protecting iconic lands, such as Ketchikan’s Deer Mountain.”

HB 155 was formally introduced on Monday and was referred to the Alaska House Resources and Finance Committees.

House Bill 155 is the state's match for federal legislation sponsored by Senators Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan, and Representative Don Young.

In January 2017, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, and U.S. Rep. Don Young, all R-Alaska, introduced companion bills to accelerate an equal value land exchange between the Alaska Mental Health Trust (Trust) and the U.S. Forest Service. The legislation, which nearly passed last Congress, protects important community viewsheds, local trails, and other conservation values while expediting much-needed timber for local operators and generating new revenues for mental health services across the state.

“Our bill protects lands that are worth protecting, provides critical timber to keep our sawmills running, and raises money for mental health programs in the midst of our state’s ongoing fiscal crisis,” Murkowski said in a prepared statement in January. “This is a widely supported, common sense solution that will deliver real economic and environmental benefits for Southeast communities. It is one of my top legislative priorities, and my goal is to have it signed into law as quickly as possible.” - More...
Wednesday PM - March 08, 2017

Ketchikan: Tug towed to Ketchikan after grounding near Sumner Strait - Commercial tugs towed the tug Ocean Eagle to Ketchikan for repairs, Sunday, following its grounding at Mariposa Reef in Sumner Strait, Thursday.

The Ocean Eagle's barge was towed to Sitka where a Marine Inspector is conducting additional damage assessments before the barge continues its planned voyage.

Brusco Tug & Barge, the owner of Ocean Eagle, contracted Alaska Commercial Divers to conduct underwater hull surveys of both the tug and barge in Alvin Cove after the grounding. Temporary repairs were made by the divers to cracks in the tug's hull. Minor damage was noted on the barge. Transit plans for both vessels were submitted and approved by the federal on scene coordinator from Coast Guard Sector Juneau and the state on-scene coordinator from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. - More...
Wednesday PM - March 08, 2017

Alaska Science: Are we living in a warm peak between ice ages? By NED ROZELL - As another major rainstorm hit California in February, downtown San Francisco surpassed its normal rain total for an entire year. Reservoirs in the high country were spilling over. So ended a five-year drought in the state that some people attributed to human-caused climate change.

Syun-Ichi Akasofu works in his office in the International Arctic Research Center.
Photo by Ned Rozell

Those pictures of dried-up California lakes bothered Syun-Ichi Akasofu, who recently gave a talk, “The Forthcoming Ice Age,” at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He thinks we humans are perhaps living in a period of warmth between cold periods, and we consider it normal. Mankind’s effects on climate, he said, are a minor act in a much grander play.

Akasofu, who an Anchorage Daily News reporter a decade ago called “Alaska’s best known climate-change skeptic,” is now 86. Every weekday, he walks into the rear entrance of a building with his name on it (home to the International Arctic Research Center) and works in his modest partitioned space until early afternoon.

He came to Alaska from Japan in 1958 to study the aurora. He became a worldwide expert, and transitioned to people-and-budget management as director of the Geophysical Institute and later the International Arctic Research Center. He was essential in the birth of the latter, now a major UAF institution, by bringing in funding from Japan in the late 1990s.

Since he was a boy, Akasofu has been a contrarian, finding himself looking for an alternative explanation when many people agree on an unproven notion. He has spent many hours of his retirement looking for cracks in the argument of the importance of humanity’s role in global warming, one of the noisiest debates of his time.

Upon reading of the drought-ending rains in California, Akasofu said that state is experiencing natural changes that come and go in cycles. His pet peeve is “instant climatology,” in which he says people base an argument on just a few decades of data.

The time period one chooses, he said, support or refute a favorite argument. From 1940 to 1975, he pointed out, the average temperature on Earth decreased 0.2 degrees F, making some believe a new ice age was coming.

Global warming from 1975 on is real, he said, and he agrees that carbon dioxide levels are increasing dramatically. But he thinks warming world temperatures could be mainly Earth’s natural rebound from the Little Ice Age, a period from A.D. 1200 to 1850 when during some winters the Thames River froze in London and so did New York Harbor. - More...

COLUMNS - COMMENTARY

Dear Working: Yours is becoming a much more common question as more and more people are choosing to work even after they are entitled to receive Social Security benefits. Social Security's rules say that if you work and are receiving benefits but have not yet reached your full retirement age (which for you is 66) and you earn more than their annual earnings limit, they will "take back" half of everything you earn over the earnings limit (which for 2017 is $16,920). The way they do this is by withholding what you owe from future benefit payments, which could cause you to not receive benefits for a number of months until they recover what you owe. This would happen every year up to the year you turn 66, which would mean that during that working timeframe you would have gone some number of months without receiving Social Security. In the year you turn 66, the amount you can earn is much more generous and the amount they withhold is much less. After you turn age 66 you can earn as much as you like without penalty. - More...
Wednesday PM - March 08, 2017

DANNY TYREE: Let's Applaud History's Greatest Teenagers - Help! There's suddenly a teenager in the Tyree house!

Yes, my son Gideon just turned 13. He's a good kid with a bright future, but sometimes the inevitable "attitude" shows up.

I know that many teenagers are creative, hardworking and respectful of their elders; but I still have worries about the coming years. Teens have always faced a mountain of changes, responsibilities and temptations ---- and the pace is only accelerating.

I must admit I led a rather sheltered teen life, but you still couldn't pay me enough to go through all the frustrations and emotional rollercoasters again. And I certainly saw enough classmates who drove too fast, broke curfew, obtained fake IDs, became addicted to nicotine and alcohol and suffered the consequences of unplanned pregnancies.

The sordid events on "Riverdale" (the CW's soap opera reimagining of the Archie Comics universe) do little to ease my concerns about Gideon's challenges.

Besides prayer, the one thing that keeps me going is knowing that others have passed this way before. Some of history's most influential people survived their own stereotypical teenage behavior. For example: - More...
Wednesday PM - March 08, 2017