Last month, Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott rejected a potential ballot measure that would strengthen state law protecting salmon habitat. The state’s position is that if voters approved the measure, the legislature would be forced to protect salmon over other resource development, like mining or oil infrastructure.

Listen now

The people behind the ballot measure — the nonprofit Stand for Salmon — appealed. Now, a Superior Court judge has to decide whether Mallott was right.

At a hearing Tuesday in Anchorage, the key question was this: does the ballot initiative give the state enough wiggle room to consider projects like the proposed Pebble Mine or Susitna Dam even if they impact salmon streams?

The state argues it doesn’t. Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Bakalar said the initiative would violate the state constitution by forcing the legislature to prioritize salmon habitat over other natural resource development.

Bakalar said megaprojects like the Pebble Mine proposal could be at stake.

Asked after the hearing if the Pebble Mine or Susitna Dam could be permitted if the ballot measure was approved, Backalar replied, “No, we don’t think so. That’s basically the crux of our case.”

But the attorney for the nonprofit Stand for Salmon, the group behind the initiative, argued the opposite. Valerie Brown with Trustees for Alaska said the language in the initiative does toughen regulations, but it doesn’t force the state to shut projects down.

“This sets up a system where really big projects that will cause a lot of harm to salmon habitat get increased scrutiny,” Brown said after the hearing.

Many Alaska industry groups came out in force against the ballot initiative, including the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, the Alaska Miners Association and the Resource Development Council.

Marleanna Hall, executive director of the Resource Development Council, said current law does enough to protect salmon habitat.

“We truly believe that [the ballot initiative] is a disproportionate response to a problem that doesn’t exist,” Hall said.

Hall said new language in the initiative could effectively halt a wide range of projects, from oil fields to roads.

Two of the initiative’s organizers, Gayla Hoseth and Brian Kraft, are outspoken opponents of the proposed Pebble Mine. A third, Mike Wood, has led efforts fighting the Susitna Dam.

But Wood, a commercial fisherman, said the ballot initiative is not intended to halt projects. Instead, he argued that Alaska’s laws protecting fish habitat are too weak.

“Let’s give this permit system some teeth again, so that we can be ensured that when these projects are built, that they won’t be impacting our fish resources,” Wood said.

Under current law, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is charged with approving projects unless they are deemed “insufficient for the proper protection of fish and game.”

The ballot measure would add some specifics on what “proper protection” looks like. It aims to add language about water quality, temperature and flow. It would also set up a new permitting process for companies, one that’s based on the level of impact a project might have on fish habitat.

The initiative is similar to a bill that Anchorage Democrats Andy Josephson and Les Gara introduced in the House Fisheries Committee this spring. Wood said his group supports the bill, too, but is taking a “belt and suspenders” approach by also pushing for the ballot initiative.

Judge Mark Rindner is expected to make a decision this week on whether voters should decide this issue at the ballot box. But that may not be the final word. The case will likely be appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court.

Stand for Salmon aims to get the initiative on the ballot in 2018.

Fish from across Alaska and the Lower 48 is going toward recovery from hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

Listen now

Washington-based nonprofit SeaShare, which works with seafood companies to donate fish to those in need, is partnering with food bank network Feeding America on the disaster relief.

That’s according to a press release, where the nonprofit writes that 2 million servings of seafood are headed to food banks in Miami, Houston and 10 other states.

SeaShare executive director Jim Harmon said the last time the organization rallied donations like this was in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Harmon said the majority of the fish still comes from Alaska, but the recent need has caught the attention of the seafood industry nationwide.

“We’ve been able to show the other seafood companies around the country how Alaska processors and the Seattle processors have stepped up, so we’ve got some great donations from New Hampshire, from Chicago, some other people who don’t normally participate in this kind of thing,” Harmon said.

Harmon said among the donations are 30,000 pounds of salmon steak that came out of the Bering Sea and two truck-loads of Alaska-fished Pollock.

According to the press release, SeaShare is also seeking shelf‐stable donations to aid Puerto Rico’s recovery from Hurricane Maria. Companies can reach out to info@seashare.org if they have cans or pouches of seafood to send.

Cleveland Volcano in the Aleutians near Unalaska is restless. Scientists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory observed that a new lava dome formed in the summit crater over the weekend, and lava is trickling out. The dome is about 4200 square meters, a little smaller than 10 NBA basketball courts.

Listen now

“This happens relatively routinely at Cleveland that we grow small little lava domes,” Dave Schneider, a geophysicist with the AVO, said. “They’re kind of shaped like a pancake in the summit crater. Those typically exist for weeks to months before they’re blown up and we start the process all over again.”

It has been about a decade by Schneider’s estimate since Cleveland has exploded with a significant amount of lava. This pattern of building pressure and spewing small amounts of lava is one it goes through frequently.

“We grow somewhere between one to two to three domes per year it seems. Sometimes there’s more, then less. In 2017, we’ve had at least three periods of dome growth, the last of which was in August. That was destroyed by an explosion,” Schneider said.

Even though Cleveland’s explosions are frequent, its pattern does not give scientists much clue as to when this new dome will explode. It could be a matter of days or months.

The AVO can detect explosions with the limited monitoring equipment they have on the island. When Cleveland does explode they work with the Federal Aviation Administration and National Weather Service to get word out about ash clouds and other potential aviation dangers.

The Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority has hired a new CEO almost a year after the ousting of its long-time leader.

Listen now

Mike Abbott will take over the Trust on November 1. He currently serves as the Municipal Manager of Anchorage and previously worked as the chief operating officer for the Anchorage School District. He will oversee both the mental health programming side of the Trust as well as the Trust Land Office, which manages the organization’s properties and land.

The Trust funds programs for people with mental illnesses, substance use disorders and other cognitive disabilities. It has been roiled by major leadership changes in the past year and is currently undergoing a special legislative audit.

For the second year in a row, crab fisheries in southwest Alaska are facing steep cuts. This year’s Bristol Bay red king crab fishery is 22 percent smaller than last year.

Listen now

The season opens October 15.

There will be no fishery for St. Matthew’s blue king crab because of low abundance.

The Pribilof District red and blue king crab fisheries will also remain closed due to continued low abundance and uncertainty from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game on the accuracy of red king crab estimates.

Tomorrow, Pebble Limited Partnership CEO Tom Collier is expected to publicly outline a plan for the proposed Pebble Mine project for the first time.

Listen now

But in an interview today, Governor Bill Walker said he’s against the controversial mine.

“I am not supportive of the Pebble Mine,” Walker said.

Walker said the mine’s developers have not yet proven to him that the project can be done without harming the Bristol Bay region’s salmon fishery.

“I do not have information sufficient for me to be comfortable or supportive of the Pebble Mine. The burden is on them to prove that it can be done without a risk to the fish in that area. It’s a high burden – it’s the highest burden, and to me, they have not met that yet,” Walker said.

Walker said he will consider what Pebble’s developers have to say, but he’s also listening closely to concerns from people who could be affected by the mine.

The governor did not say he’s planning to take any specific actions to halt the project.

“I don’t know that there’s a lever for me to pull that’s going to absolutely stop it,” Walker said, adding, “I think that there are a lot of protections that are already in place.”

It’s not the first time the Governor has said he’s not in favor of the mine — he came out against the project while campaigning for office in 2014. But the state will likely take on a bigger role in the Pebble Mine controversy soon.

Under the Obama administration, U.S. EPA proposed restrictions on the mine before the standard permitting process began.

Walker said he did have concerns about EPA’s previous action.

“Alaska’s a resource state…and my concern with that is that they sort of overstepped and didn’t let a process play out. If [EPA] could do that on that issue, then there are other issues they could do that as well,” Walker said. “It’s a delicate issue, but I certainly would not want to have that happen on a development that was not anywhere near a risk to a fishing area.”

However, Scott Pruitt, the EPA Administrator under President Donald Trump, reached a settlement with Pebble this spring, opening the door for the project to begin the permitting process. If that happens, the state also will begin its review of the mine.

Mike Heatwole, a spokesman for Pebble Ltd. Partnership, responded to Walker’s remarks in an emailed statement.

“The governor is correct that the burden is on us to demonstrate we will not impact the fish resource in the region,” Heatwole said. “While we believe our plan meets this hurdle, the next step is to have our plan thoroughly and objectively evaluated via the permitting process to determine if we meet the high standards Alaskans expect for development.”

The effort to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling made a baby step forward in the Senate today, with the debut of a Republican budget plan in a committee. The plan is a non-binding resolution but it contains the seeds of what could become a law that allows oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Listen now

You know how members of Congress sometimes try to pass legislation by attaching it to a fast-moving bill everyone loves? That’s not the case here. ANWR is controversial, and the budget plan it’s hitching a ride on isn’t entirely popular, either.

“The budget we’re dealing with today is in my view the most unfair and destructive budget in the modern history of our country,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt, said.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wa., said the plan would “blast a hole in our budget, increase the deficit, blow up the debt and put Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid and education, investments in health care and a lot of other priorities at risk.”

They were extrapolating. The budget plan isn’t that specific in what it would cut. The real point of using this process is to pass the proposed Republican tax cuts with just 50 votes. But even a few Republicans sound unsure they can support the tax plan.

“Unless it reduces deficits … and does not add to deficits, with reasonable and responsible growth models, and unless we can make it permanent,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said, “I don’t have any interest in it.”

Opening ANWR was hardly discussed at the Budget Committee hearing, although Sen. Murray referred to it as a “bizarre” thing to include in the budget. (Actually, the budget plan doesn’t mention the refuge by name, but it opens the door to including ANWR legislation later, in the process known as “budget reconciliation.”)

The House is likely to pass its version of the budget plan Thursday, and it includes a similar ANWR measure.

“It is necessary for this nation,” Alaska Congressman Don Young said in debate on the House floor Wednesday. “It’s necessary, very frankly, for the good of this Congress. With $20 trillion in debt, I’ve yet to hear anything that’s going to create new wealth.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski bucked her party on health care last month, in part because Republicans tried to fast-track that as part of a budget reconciliation bill. But she’s been trying to open ANWR her whole Senate career. If ANWR is married to the tax cuts, she’d have a massive reason to vote for them.

At the same time, Arctic Refuge drilling could repel other moderate Republican senators. Three Republican “no” votes would kill the bill. That is, unless the sponsors can win over some Senate Democrats, and most of them oppose drilling in the refuge.

The school in Nikolai, until recently, had a problem. There was nowhere for the high school teacher to live.

“And the last two years our high school teacher actually had to live in the school in a teeny-tiny little room that contains a bunk bed and a dresser and a desk,” said Principal Tara Wiggins. “There’s nothing else.”

She said the problem made it really hard to recruit a teacher. “I’ve been told that several teachers were interested and then didn’t come because they had families and didn’t want to stay in the school.”

Housing in Nikolai, a village of about 100 people on the south fork of the Kuskokwim River, is scarce. It’s expensive and difficult to get building supplies there.

But the school district had another problem, too: they needed more classes to help their students develop real-world skills for getting jobs later in life.

The solution? Have the kids build the house with professional supervision during a special summer program.

Student Thomas Owrey showed off the classes work on the two-bedroom home. “So we layered plastic down here,” he said, pointing to the crawl space. “We’ve got foam boards on the floor.”

By late June the exterior walls were up and the roof was on, and the house was connected to the septic system.

Owrey said the project wasn’t as straightforward as he hoped, even though they are building it from a kit that theoretically comes with everything they need.

“You get the blueprints and all the supplies [with a kit],” he said. “But they sent us one house and they sent us another thing of blueprints.”

And it wasn’t like the students and their instructors could just walk to the store and get the correct plans – everything was shipped in from hundreds of miles away in Anchorage. They didn’t have all of the supplies yet either. The windows had to be brought up river from six hours away because they wouldn’t fit on the small airplane. That delay meant they couldn’t finish the siding or other parts of the house.

The students were running out of options for things to do, and the kids couldn’t just go home and come back later. They came from schools across the region and two different school districts and were living near the job site in the main school building.

But learning problem-solving and improvising is part of the job, said student Harlan Standish.

“You’re constantly using your reasoning skills,” he said. “You’re not just learning how to put a building together. You’re learning how to think ahead or think about different ways of doing things. Like if you make a mistake on a wall or something, you gotta fix it. You gotta kind of think about how to fix it without taking it all apart.”

Though Standish said he was enjoying learning new skills, the whole process wasn’t exactly fun when it involved precarious balancing acts.

“I hate putting up the blocking between the rafters,” he said, pointing at boards in the roof above the window. “Because you have to stand up on this little ledge right here and try to use a nail gun to put them in without falling over the sides.”

Standish was afraid of heights and the drop below the window was pretty long before backfill was added.

But he felt he had to do it, “because it’s on a job site so you just gotta buckle up and do the job.”

“They’ve matured in a lot of ways,” teacher Troy Tubbs said of his five students.

“For most of them, I think they’ve never been away from home, especially not for this long of a period,” Tubbs explained. “And so there was a little bit of an adjustment there where they had to get used to living with roommates. Finding out how to manage their own time. Being responsible for getting up on time, getting their meals squared away, and getting out to the job site when they’re supposed to be.”

They’re also getting high school and college credit for the class and getting paid.

Iditarod Area School District Superintendent Connie Newman said the district didn’t save any money by building the new teacher housing with students, though the project allowed them to use funds for career and technical classes for two purposes. Because of delays with supplies, the house eventually had to be finished by professionals at the beginning of the school year, more than a month behind schedule.

But the project was successful enough that they plan on holding a similar class to build school housing in Grayling next summer. The district may also partner with the tribe in Nikolai to build housing for elders.

Want to hear more Solutions Desk stories? Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or NPR.

Have ideas for future Solutions Desk stories? Join the conversation by texting “solutions” to 907-885-6055.

The Pacific walrus won’t be protected under the Endangered Species Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Wednesday that the “species has demonstrated an ability to adapt to changing conditions.” The announcement angered the environmental group that petitioned the agency to protect the walrus, but a number of Alaska groups were pleased with the decision.

Listen now

Shaye Wolf from the Center for Biological Diversity said she’s been glued to her computer this week, waiting to hear about the protection status for the Pacific walrus.

Her organization, which is an environmental nonprofit, petitioned for more federal protections for walrus back in 2008 — the same year the polar bear was added as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Wolf said hearing the news that the marine mammal wouldn’t receive the same protections was alarming.

“This read exactly like a political decision,” Wolf said. “If the Fish & Wildlife Service had protected the Pacific walrus from threats of climate change, the Trump administration would have to admit that climate change is real and it’s causing real world harms.”

Wolf said there’s evidence from government scientists to suggest the walrus population will decline.

As Arctic sea ice has diminished, more female walrus have been forced to come onshore in the summer. It’s become a yearly occurrence in late summer to see tens of thousands crowding on the beach at Point Lay — a village along the coast of the Chukchi sea. This year was the earliest haulout on record since the walrus first started appearing in 2007.

Still, Patrick Lemons, a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, said the decision not to the list the Pacific walrus isn’t political. He says the federal agency acknowledges “environmental change” is happening.

“The decision was based on the best available science and that was the recommendation that came out of the region,” Lemons said. “I don’t think it would have changed under either administration.”

Walrus use sea ice as a kind of floating platform. It gets them out to rich foraging spots and provides an important place to nurse their young or rest.

Lemons said scientists started to see a rapid population decline in 1980s, as sea ice disappeared.

But, recently, Pacific walrus have been observed making long trips offshore for food.

“That suggests that some of our assumptions before, where we didn’t have any certainty about how walruses would react, now we actually have some certainty about how walruses would react,” Lemons said. “Now, we actually have some information that walruses can change their behaviors as sea ice declines.”

Lemons said stampedes, which were thought to be a big threat onshore, aren’t killing as many of the animals as expected. Overall, he said the population appears stable.

That was good news for Vera Metcalf, the director of the Eskimo Walrus Commission, who lives in Nome. An Endangered Species listing wouldn’t have impacted subsistence harvest of walrus. But Metcalf said it confirms what the community already knows.

“I think we’re all relieved, and we’re going to work on a common vision to move forward,” Metcalf said.

Several state agencies in Alaska, including the governor, have also released statements applauding the decision not to list the Pacific walrus. Congressman Don Young said he was glad the federal agency ignored “the extreme political pressures” to add a new listing.

The Center for Biological Diversity says it plans to appeal the decision.

For the second year in a row, crab fisheries in southwest Alaska are facing steep cuts. This year’s Bristol Bay red king crab fishery is 22 percent smaller than last year.

Listen now

The season opens October 15.

There will be no fishery for St. Matthew’s blue king crab because of low abundance.

The Pribilof District red and blue king crab fisheries will also remain closed due to continued low abundance and uncertainty from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game on the accuracy of red king crab estimates.

Tomorrow, Pebble Limited Partnership CEO Tom Collier is expected to publicly outline a plan for the proposed Pebble Mine project for the first time.

Listen now

But in an interview today, Governor Bill Walker said he’s against the controversial mine.

“I am not supportive of the Pebble Mine,” Walker said.

Walker said the mine’s developers have not yet proven to him that the project can be done without harming the Bristol Bay region’s salmon fishery.

“I do not have information sufficient for me to be comfortable or supportive of the Pebble Mine. The burden is on them to prove that it can be done without a risk to the fish in that area. It’s a high burden – it’s the highest burden, and to me, they have not met that yet,” Walker said.

Walker said he will consider what Pebble’s developers have to say, but he’s also listening closely to concerns from people who could be affected by the mine.

The governor did not say he’s planning to take any specific actions to halt the project.

“I don’t know that there’s a lever for me to pull that’s going to absolutely stop it,” Walker said, adding, “I think that there are a lot of protections that are already in place.”

It’s not the first time the Governor has said he’s not in favor of the mine — he came out against the project while campaigning for office in 2014. But the state will likely take on a bigger role in the Pebble Mine controversy soon.

Under the Obama administration, U.S. EPA proposed restrictions on the mine before the standard permitting process began.

Walker said he did have concerns about EPA’s previous action.

“Alaska’s a resource state…and my concern with that is that they sort of overstepped and didn’t let a process play out. If [EPA] could do that on that issue, then there are other issues they could do that as well,” Walker said. “It’s a delicate issue, but I certainly would not want to have that happen on a development that was not anywhere near a risk to a fishing area.”

However, Scott Pruitt, the EPA Administrator under President Donald Trump, reached a settlement with Pebble this spring, opening the door for the project to begin the permitting process. If that happens, the state also will begin its review of the mine.

Mike Heatwole, a spokesman for Pebble Ltd. Partnership, responded to Walker’s remarks in an emailed statement.

“The governor is correct that the burden is on us to demonstrate we will not impact the fish resource in the region,” Heatwole said. “While we believe our plan meets this hurdle, the next step is to have our plan thoroughly and objectively evaluated via the permitting process to determine if we meet the high standards Alaskans expect for development.”

The effort to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling made a baby step forward in the Senate today, with the debut of a Republican budget plan in a committee. The plan is a non-binding resolution but it contains the seeds of what could become a law that allows oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Listen now

You know how members of Congress sometimes try to pass legislation by attaching it to a fast-moving bill everyone loves? That’s not the case here. ANWR is controversial, and the budget plan it’s hitching a ride on isn’t entirely popular, either.

“The budget we’re dealing with today is in my view the most unfair and destructive budget in the modern history of our country,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt, said.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wa., said the plan would “blast a hole in our budget, increase the deficit, blow up the debt and put Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid and education, investments in health care and a lot of other priorities at risk.”

They were extrapolating. The budget plan isn’t that specific in what it would cut. The real point of using this process is to pass the proposed Republican tax cuts with just 50 votes. But even a few Republicans sound unsure they can support the tax plan.

“Unless it reduces deficits … and does not add to deficits, with reasonable and responsible growth models, and unless we can make it permanent,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said, “I don’t have any interest in it.”

Opening ANWR was hardly discussed at the Budget Committee hearing, although Sen. Murray referred to it as a “bizarre” thing to include in the budget. (Actually, the budget plan doesn’t mention the refuge by name, but it opens the door to including ANWR legislation later, in the process known as “budget reconciliation.”)

The House is likely to pass its version of the budget plan Thursday, and it includes a similar ANWR measure.

“It is necessary for this nation,” Alaska Congressman Don Young said in debate on the House floor Wednesday. “It’s necessary, very frankly, for the good of this Congress. With $20 trillion in debt, I’ve yet to hear anything that’s going to create new wealth.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski bucked her party on health care last month, in part because Republicans tried to fast-track that as part of a budget reconciliation bill. But she’s been trying to open ANWR her whole Senate career. If ANWR is married to the tax cuts, she’d have a massive reason to vote for them.

At the same time, Arctic Refuge drilling could repel other moderate Republican senators. Three Republican “no” votes would kill the bill. That is, unless the sponsors can win over some Senate Democrats, and most of them oppose drilling in the refuge.

The school in Nikolai, until recently, had a problem. There was nowhere for the high school teacher to live.

“And the last two years our high school teacher actually had to live in the school in a teeny-tiny little room that contains a bunk bed and a dresser and a desk,” said Principal Tara Wiggins. “There’s nothing else.”

She said the problem made it really hard to recruit a teacher. “I’ve been told that several teachers were interested and then didn’t come because they had families and didn’t want to stay in the school.”

Housing in Nikolai, a village of about 100 people on the south fork of the Kuskokwim River, is scarce. It’s expensive and difficult to get building supplies there.

But the school district had another problem, too: they needed more classes to help their students develop real-world skills for getting jobs later in life.

The solution? Have the kids build the house with professional supervision during a special summer program.

Student Thomas Owrey showed off the classes work on the two-bedroom home. “So we layered plastic down here,” he said, pointing to the crawl space. “We’ve got foam boards on the floor.”

By late June the exterior walls were up and the roof was on, and the house was connected to the septic system.

Owrey said the project wasn’t as straightforward as he hoped, even though they are building it from a kit that theoretically comes with everything they need.

“You get the blueprints and all the supplies [with a kit],” he said. “But they sent us one house and they sent us another thing of blueprints.”

And it wasn’t like the students and their instructors could just walk to the store and get the correct plans – everything was shipped in from hundreds of miles away in Anchorage. They didn’t have all of the supplies yet either. The windows had to be brought up river from six hours away because they wouldn’t fit on the small airplane. That delay meant they couldn’t finish the siding or other parts of the house.

The students were running out of options for things to do, and the kids couldn’t just go home and come back later. They came from schools across the region and two different school districts and were living near the job site in the main school building.

But learning problem-solving and improvising is part of the job, said student Harlan Standish.

“You’re constantly using your reasoning skills,” he said. “You’re not just learning how to put a building together. You’re learning how to think ahead or think about different ways of doing things. Like if you make a mistake on a wall or something, you gotta fix it. You gotta kind of think about how to fix it without taking it all apart.”

Though Standish said he was enjoying learning new skills, the whole process wasn’t exactly fun when it involved precarious balancing acts.

“I hate putting up the blocking between the rafters,” he said, pointing at boards in the roof above the window. “Because you have to stand up on this little ledge right here and try to use a nail gun to put them in without falling over the sides.”

Standish was afraid of heights and the drop below the window was pretty long before backfill was added.

But he felt he had to do it, “because it’s on a job site so you just gotta buckle up and do the job.”

“They’ve matured in a lot of ways,” teacher Troy Tubbs said of his five students.

“For most of them, I think they’ve never been away from home, especially not for this long of a period,” Tubbs explained. “And so there was a little bit of an adjustment there where they had to get used to living with roommates. Finding out how to manage their own time. Being responsible for getting up on time, getting their meals squared away, and getting out to the job site when they’re supposed to be.”

They’re also getting high school and college credit for the class and getting paid.

Iditarod Area School District Superintendent Connie Newman said the district didn’t save any money by building the new teacher housing with students, though the project allowed them to use funds for career and technical classes for two purposes. Because of delays with supplies, the house eventually had to be finished by professionals at the beginning of the school year, more than a month behind schedule.

But the project was successful enough that they plan on holding a similar class to build school housing in Grayling next summer. The district may also partner with the tribe in Nikolai to build housing for elders.

Want to hear more Solutions Desk stories? Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or NPR.

Have ideas for future Solutions Desk stories? Join the conversation by texting “solutions” to 907-885-6055.

The Pacific walrus won’t be protected under the Endangered Species Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Wednesday that the “species has demonstrated an ability to adapt to changing conditions.” The announcement angered the environmental group that petitioned the agency to protect the walrus, but a number of Alaska groups were pleased with the decision.

Listen now

Shaye Wolf from the Center for Biological Diversity said she’s been glued to her computer this week, waiting to hear about the protection status for the Pacific walrus.

Her organization, which is an environmental nonprofit, petitioned for more federal protections for walrus back in 2008 — the same year the polar bear was added as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Wolf said hearing the news that the marine mammal wouldn’t receive the same protections was alarming.

“This read exactly like a political decision,” Wolf said. “If the Fish & Wildlife Service had protected the Pacific walrus from threats of climate change, the Trump administration would have to admit that climate change is real and it’s causing real world harms.”

Wolf said there’s evidence from government scientists to suggest the walrus population will decline.

As Arctic sea ice has diminished, more female walrus have been forced to come onshore in the summer. It’s become a yearly occurrence in late summer to see tens of thousands crowding on the beach at Point Lay — a village along the coast of the Chukchi sea. This year was the earliest haulout on record since the walrus first started appearing in 2007.

Still, Patrick Lemons, a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, said the decision not to the list the Pacific walrus isn’t political. He says the federal agency acknowledges “environmental change” is happening.

“The decision was based on the best available science and that was the recommendation that came out of the region,” Lemons said. “I don’t think it would have changed under either administration.”

Walrus use sea ice as a kind of floating platform. It gets them out to rich foraging spots and provides an important place to nurse their young or rest.

Lemons said scientists started to see a rapid population decline in 1980s, as sea ice disappeared.

But, recently, Pacific walrus have been observed making long trips offshore for food.

“That suggests that some of our assumptions before, where we didn’t have any certainty about how walruses would react, now we actually have some certainty about how walruses would react,” Lemons said. “Now, we actually have some information that walruses can change their behaviors as sea ice declines.”

Lemons said stampedes, which were thought to be a big threat onshore, aren’t killing as many of the animals as expected. Overall, he said the population appears stable.

That was good news for Vera Metcalf, the director of the Eskimo Walrus Commission, who lives in Nome. An Endangered Species listing wouldn’t have impacted subsistence harvest of walrus. But Metcalf said it confirms what the community already knows.

“I think we’re all relieved, and we’re going to work on a common vision to move forward,” Metcalf said.

Several state agencies in Alaska, including the governor, have also released statements applauding the decision not to list the Pacific walrus. Congressman Don Young said he was glad the federal agency ignored “the extreme political pressures” to add a new listing.

The Center for Biological Diversity says it plans to appeal the decision.

Spanish-immersion students in Anchorage are well on their way to a goal of raising $10,000 to benefit fellow students in Puerto Rico hit hard by Hurricane Maria.

Listen now

That includes Romig Middle School’s sister school in Puerto Rico, teacher Anaely Leon-Hernandez said.

Groups of Spanish immersion students from Anchorage have been visiting the island for about 10 years, visiting historic sites and parts of the jungle there, among other places, Leon-Hernandez said.

“The highlight of our trip is when we go and visit this small little school in Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, where there’s only about 400 students,” Leon-Hernandez said. “And it’s just a small little community that has opened their school, they open their homes, they open their hearts to us, so we’ve gotten to know them very well.”

It was that connection and all the friends they’ve made over the years that led the students to want to help in the wake of the hurricane, Leon-Hernandez said.

Wednesday morning at Romig and West High, students held a one-minute fundraiser to gather money to donate to their sister school in Quebradillas. Some students came bearing checks for as much as $100, while others gave what they had on them: the change in their pockets.

Leon-Hernandez said that between the two schools they’ve raised about $7,500.

Her student, 8th grader Areli Olivares, said it was important for the students to help out after hearing about the hurricane.

“I was so sad, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, are my friends OK?’ Over here, we’re doing fine, everything, over there, they could use the help,” Olivares said.

For another Romig 8th grader in the Spanish-immersion program, the hurricane posed a threat to not just friends, but also family. It took about a week for Javier Bosques to learn that his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were OK.

His worries got Bosques thinking about other families struggling in Puerto Rico, just like his family.

“I love them all, they all mean so much to me,” Bosques said. “You see people struggling, and you would want to help them, and every little bit counts. It’ll make a big difference to families.”

To try to meet their goal of $10,000 for the school, Romig is hosting another fundraiser, and this one is open to the community. It’ll be a potluck at the school on October 13, from 5:30 to 8 p.m., complete with pictures and stories from the students’ trips to Puerto Rico.

Alaska lawmakers will face a challenge when they weigh what to do about the state’s criminal justice laws later this month: how to balance a body of research that supports changes they made last year, with the outrage about the current rise in crime.

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At a Sept. 25 town hall meeting in Anchorage called by Republican Rep. Charisse Millett, residents called for the death penalty; letting people die from overdoses; and turning an island into an Escape From New York-style prison. While the comments ranged far from the Legislature’s policy debate over crime, they show the level of passion in the city that lawmakers are hearing.

The focus of the policy debate is legislation passed year, Senate Bill 91.  It’s a law that allowed some low-risk offenders to avoid jail time. It also changed sentencing, bail and probation with the goal of reducing the number of repeat offenders. In addition, it funds drug treatment.

Most categories of serious crime have risen in Alaska over the past five years. University of Alaska Anchorage Associate Professor Brad Myrstol has looked at whether property crime is related to last year’s law. In a word, his answer is: no.

Myrstol noted there hasn’t been much time to study the law’s effects.

“I can’t say that (no) universally, in terms of both property and violent crimes, but I see no evidence in the trend data that I’ve looked at that would indicate the recent upticks in crime are attributable to the passage of SB91,” he said.

There are other potential factors, like the opioid addiction epidemic, rising unemployment and a shrinking police forces.

Millett described what she sees as one result of the law — police officers facing limits in making arrests.

“We’ve taken a tool away from them, so instead of now arresting someone and doing a physical arrest and taking them down to the jail and booking them, they’re arresting them by ticket, or by citation and giving them a summons to appear in court,” she said.

The law did downgrade drug possession from being a felony to a misdemeanor, so it no longer leads to arrests. But for 142 other types of class C felonies, the law left arrests to officers’ discretion.

Myrstol said the approach to sentencing under the new law can be difficult for police officers and residents who see jail time as the primary way to hold criminals accountable.

“We’re talking generations of police officers were trained – and their everyday practice is – putting people in handcuffs, taking them to the jail and booking them,” Myrstol said. “And now, for certain offenses, it’s not that. And that’s a dramatic change in practice.”

Myrstol said the criminal justice system has multiple goals, including reducing recidivism by shifting away from jail time and toward probation and treatment. That conflicts with another goal: giving people a sense of retribution.

“For the past generation, the imprisonment binge that we’ve been on hasn’t been particularly effective, and in many instances may even have been counterproductive to our objectives of fostering public safety and community well-being,” he said.

Shawn Williams owns an Anchorage DJ business, Five Star Entertainment. He’s helped organize other business owners to ask lawmakers to repeal Senate Bill 91.

“Between burglaries and theft being a daily occurrence, it got a little disheartening,” Williams said.

He expressed doubt over the social science used to write the law.

“Most people realize you can make data say what you want it to say,” he said.

Others in Anchorage want to see parts of the new law replaced, but not all of it.

City Assemblyman Eric Croft has worked as a municipal prosecutor. He said he supports the idea behind the criminal justice reform, but questioned its execution.

“This bill … took the savings upfront and back-loaded or didn’t fund at all the treatment and probation,” he said.

Susanne DiPietro worked with the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission as it made the recommendations that helped shape Senate Bill 91. Like Croft, DiPietro said it would have been better to increase drug treatment before the law. But she said the law creates a framework to fund treatment.

“Before SB 91, there was no promise or plan or schedule for investment in treatment,” she said. “And post-SB 91, we have … a framework of a commitment for six years out of reinvestment.”

She noted the law still isn’t fully implemented. Parts of Senate Bill 91 went into effect in July 2016, other parts went into effect in January and the rest won’t go into effect until this coming January.

“We really need to stop and take a small pause and analyze the situation and come up with approaches that will work for the problems that we have, and we just don’t have the resources to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,” she said.

Gov. Bill Walker has asked the Legislature to pass a bill that would partially reverse some of the changes made last year, Senate Bill 54. A large change would be to Class C felonies. Before last year, these crimes would lead to jail terms of up to two years, plus up to 10 years of probation. Senate Bill 91 changed that to up to five years of probation and up to 18 months of jail time if probation was violated.

The bill that Walker placed on the agenda for the Legislature’s special session would reintroduce jail sentences for C felonies, of up to one year. The Alaska Criminal Justice Commission recommended shorter jail terms of up to 90 days.

House finance subcommittees will hear testimony Thursday afternoon regarding the crime bill.

A downtown Anchorage conference room hosted an unusual meeting Wednesday, as Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott gathered a cross-section of Alaskans to brainstorm paths forward on climate change.

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Representatives from the oil and gas and mining industries joined environmentalists and local community leaders to spitball solutions. The Walker administration plans to use the ideas to inform a state climate policy currently in the works.

About 35 people sat around tables on the second floor of Anchorage’s Dena’ina Center. Giant notepads on easels sat ready for participants to jot down thoughts, each with a label: adaptation, mitigation, research and response.

“I don’t need to emphasize here that climate change is real,” Mallott told the gathering in his opening remarks, calling it a “generational” challenge.

“There is no stopping what is happening,” Mallott added.

But as participants gathered in groups to brainstorm, the state’s contradictions were on full display. Alaska is an oil state that sits on the front lines of global warming. The room included people who depend on oil for their livelihood, and those coping with the impacts of climate change on the ground – represented at the same table, sometimes by same person.

Joshua Kindred pointed out that paradox; he works for the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, the industry’s main advocate in the state. Kindred said the word that comes to mind when he thinks about trying to address climate change is “quixotic.”

“We’re a state that produces 500,000 barrels a day, on a planet that consumes almost a hundred million barrels a day,” Kindred said. “When we talk about things like reducing our carbon footprint, and what we can do at the local level, I think we have to acknowledge the fact that we have very limited control to change the long-term path of climate change. So, how do we advocate on a global level?”

Sitting across from him, Karen Pletnikoff said she sees plenty of opportunities for Alaskans, and the Alaska oil industry, to move the needle on climate change. Pletnikoff is with the Aleutian Pribiloff Islands Association, which is working with communities to plan for climate impacts.

“I think your specific industry has a wonderful opportunity to do a lot to protect the environment by preventing methane escapes in the North,” Pletnikoff told Kindred.

Across the room, former Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell argued that action on climate change doesn’t have to threaten oil production. He said he’s hopeful new technology might emerge to capture carbon emissions – and suggested Alaska should be at the forefront of carbon capture and sequestration.

“I think the joke’s going to be on those who think oil and gas is going to go away. I think we have to be part of trying to make sure oil and gas are clean,” Treadwell said. “We’ve done a pretty good job with oil and gas over the last 30 years. And if carbon’s a new problem, let’s figure out a way to get it out of there. That doesn’t mean kill it.”

Joel Neimeyer, with the federal Denali Commission, raised the issue of Alaska villages that may have to abandon their current sites because of climate change.

Neimeyer said the state needs to make up its mind and declare a position – whether Alaska favors relocating whole villages to new sites or just moving individual families into cities, which is much cheaper.

“If the State of Alaska is about relocating villages and not relocating families, I think that would be a good thing to know,” Neimeyer said.

In the end, he said, relocation is probably out of the state’s hands: it will come down to whether Congress is willing to loosen the federal purse strings.

“I think if the State of Alaska says, ‘This is our policy,’ that would be helpful to Congress,” Neimeyer said. “Now, will they consider it? Yeah. Will they actually adopt it in the end? We don’t know.”

“Will they pay for it?” Adm. Thomas Barrett interjected.

Barrett heads up the Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which operates the trans-Alaska pipeline.

“Yeah, will they pay for it. Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to,” Neimeyer agreed.

Mallott said exchanges like that, between people on all sides of the issue – including the oil industry and those working with communities in the path of climate change – were the whole purpose of the meeting.

The governor’s office plans to use ideas raised in the brainstorming session to develop its climate action plan, which it aims to release later this year.

Glaciologists have wrapped up two years of research on LeConte glacier near Petersburg. Their preliminary findings show that the glacier could reach a record retreat by the end of the year. And it could be an indicator for what’s going to happen in Greenland.

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Glaciers are like frozen rivers of ice, constantly moving. LeConte Glacier feeds into the ocean near Petersburg at a rate of 90 feet a day. LeConte is the southern-most tidewater glacier in the Northern Hemisphere. Its accessibility makes it a draw for nearby scientists. But that’s not the only reason they’re interested. The glacier is also a lot like hundreds of others that cover Greenland.

And Greenland has the attention of climate specialists all over the world. When it melts, which they say is inevitable, sea levels could rise quickly.

Christain Kienholz is a Glaciologist at the University of Alaska Southeast who is originally from Switzerland. He’s been studying LeConte for the past two years to find models to predict glacial melt in Greenland.

“If we want to better understand than we need to look at an example like LeConte, which is much better accessible than the glaciers in Greenland,” Kienholz said. “LeConte has other advantages because it’s a fairly narrow fjord, which allows us to do the measurements from the boat like transects fairly efficiently.”

Kienholz and a colleague have visited LeConte seven times staying at a base camp about 1,200 feet above the glacier overlooking the end or terminus.

The research required lots of equipment. They had six time-lapse cameras set up around the fjord taking snapshots every fifteen seconds. A radar measured the glacier’s speed and elevation every three minutes. A sonar measured the depth of the fjord. Seismometers helped detect calving events and runoff. And they tracked the weather–the temperature and precipitation.

Some of the research continued year round like the time lapse cameras. Kienholz collected over a half a million images through them. The winter snow would come and go but the cameras kept rolling.

“And that’s something that recently became possible,” Kienholz said. “We have now cards, memory chips that are large enough to actually store that number of pictures. Ten years ago that was not possible.”

Newer computers are helping translate the still images into surface speeds of the water.

Scientists like Kienholz call LeConte and other tidewater glaciers non-linear systems. The glaciers are traveling on top of water and become stable when they get to shallower spots known as sills. So, the terminus usually stays near a shallow spot for a long period of time where there is less calving. But when the glacier retreats beyond that point onto deeper water, there’s more calving and the terminus jumps back.

“That’s what we have seen with Leconte Glacier,” Kienholz said. “Typically it’s stable for a couple of years, a certain spot, typically on sill, and then it’s retreating pretty fast for a certain period of time and then stable again and then retreating.”

Students at Petersburg High School have recorded the terminus every year for decades and that’s initially what caught scientists attention. The new and old information has Kienholz believing that the glacier might reach a record retreat this year.

“We know from maps where the glacier was in 1950, for example, and we know from the high school record every year where the glacier terminus was, and at the end of this year, very likely the glacier will be as far back as never before,” Kienholz said.

Kienholz was interested in glaciers early in life growing up in Switzerland. He said he has seen major changes just in his lifetime.

“There are quite a few small glaciers. They were already small when I grew up and some of them have gone away,” Kienholz said. “That’s definitely what you’re going to see in the years to come. There are a lot of glaciers that are predicted to retreat almost completely.”

Kienholz hopes that his research can help predict just how fast those changes will happen and maybe help people plan for what they’re going to do about it.

The two-year research project not only included collecting data from the top of LeConte. An oceanography team from Oregon State University and University of Oregon has been studying the water near the glacier. The two teams are sharing data and plan to publish their results.

Kienholz hopes that the scientists can secure funding to collect more data from LeConte in the future.

The U.S. House on Thursday passed a budget plan that could open the door to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

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The vote was 219-206. Eighteen Republicans joined the Democrats in voting “no.”

This is an early stage in the process Republican are using to fast-track their proposed tax cuts. So far, ANWR is a lesser-noticed passenger. Alaska Congressman Don Young was one of the few who brought it up in Congressional debates this week. He spoke in favor of drilling in the refuge.

“It is necessary for this nation,” Young said from the House floor Wednesday. “It’s necessary, very frankly, for the good of this Congress. With $20 trillion in debt, I’ve yet to hear anything (else) that’s going to create new wealth.”

Young says development would have a small footprint and won’t disturb the migratory caribou herd.

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., argued the anti-drilling case. Beyer says the budget proposal offers a bad deal, especially for the subsistence hunters of ANWR.

“It essentially sacrifices wildlife and environmental protection,” Beyer said, “for tax cuts for the wealthiest.”

ANWR isn’t actually in the budget plan at this phase, but there’s a placeholder for its revenues. This sets the stage for lawmakers to include it in “budget reconciliation,” a type of bill that can’t be filibustered in the Senate.

The Senate version of the budget plan has a similar placeholder. It passed out of a committee Thursday, along party lines.

Taking a moose usually means carrying home 500 pounds of meat. Cutting and preparing that meat can take all day. But Bill Howell can do it in a few hours. Add another Bill and they can do it in half. Bethel has a small shop where customers come with legs and torsos, and leave with packages of steaks, ribs, roasts, and other tasty meats.

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Bill’s Meats is a small 16-by-16 foot building off the Bethel highway. If you’re not looking you’ll miss it, but once you arrive, you’ll know you’re in the right place. On a deck stands a pile of blood-stained white bags.

“That’s a hind quarter,” Bill Howell said. “That’s probably back straps.”

Howell is better known for being Bethel’s Fire Chief, but he’s taken three weeks off of fire duty this moose season to focus on cutting meat.

“The fall moose season is a very short and very intense time,” Howell said.

Bill and his team cut meat 10 hours a day, seven days a week, even after the hunt closes. Bill’s right hand man is his dad, also named Bill Howell.

“So I’m going to make a batch of burger,” Bill Sr. said. “For proper mixing, you leave your fingers open. Otherwise, you scrunch it together.”

Bill Howell Sr. is working beef fat into the lean moose meat. 80 percent meat to 20 percent fat makes a juicy burger. When it’s done, it all goes through the grinder again.

Bill’s Meats started in 2009 in Bill Howell Jr.’s yard. There weren’t any game butchers in town and the business took off. In the intervening years it has received two Best in the West small business grants and moved from its neighborhood location to the highway.

“We have a 7.5 horsepower Hobart size 52 meat grinder. It grinds 95 pounds of meat a minute,” Bill Jr. said. “We’ve got a 2 horsepower meat saw so we can cut through bones, and we’re trained meat cutters.”

Bill Jr. trained under his father when his dad managed the meat department for Bethel’s old ANICA Family Store. The building is now AC Quickstop.

His father trained decades before that, becoming a journeyman meat cutter in the early 1970s in Washington state.

“We were knife men. Knife men were the hardest working men,” Bill Sr. said. “They were production men. They produced with knives. They boned out whole carcass beef.”

“He’s a machine,” Bill Jr. said. “He just turns it out like you wouldn’t believe. Look at him.”

His dad takes only 40 minutes to cut 200 pounds of moose into roast and cubes of stew meat.

“I know it sounds crazy. I’m on Social Security. I’ll be 70 years old in five days, and I still love cutting meat,” Bill Sr. said.

This season is the older Bill’s first time cutting meat in 15 years. He had moved to Nome, worked different jobs, bought a restaurant, and went bankrupt.

“So my children invited me, Bill especially, ‘Come on dad, let’s cut meat,’” Bill Sr. said.

Though younger Bill is the son, he’s clearly in charge, and his dad, always cutting, keeps the product moving.

“I consider it an honor and a privilege to be able to still serve the community and have some usefulness,” Bill Sr. said.

The work looks backbreaking. The men are standing all day, slinging tubs holding hundreds of pounds of meat. It’s perpetual motion, efficiently performed in a tight space amidst flashing blades and giant tools designed to slice flesh and bone.

The communication and coordination seems to require a certain trust, like that which exists between a father and son.