Borough Transit has a call out to artists to paint one of the new borough buses.  Leslie Jackson and Kyan Reeve give more details and also talk about the transit program.  Bus032113

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Fishermen encouraged to get free USGC safety exams prior to Saturday’s opener. Oil tax legislation slows down as minority senators ask questions. Gold Medal Basketball brings SE communities together. Ethical wills leave values instead of property.

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(Photo by Anne Brice/KCAW)

The U.S. Coast Guard is offering free safety exams to all commercial fishing vessels. The program is so fishermen can ensure their boats meet the current fishing regulations before the halibut and sablefish fisheries open in Alaska on Sat., Mar. 23, 2013.

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Although the safety exam is not mandatory, Sitka examiner Steve Ramp says it’s in the best interest of the fishermen to have a safety check done.

“It’s a good program,” said Ramp. “It doesn’t cost fishermen anything. There are no ramifications if they’re short on equipment. We give them 30 days to get their equipment and then we give them their decal after we verify that. There’s no fines involved, no costs involved, and it’s a good way to make sure these fishermen get home to their families after a trip.”

The safety requirements and the length of an exam vary depending on the type of vessel. A large processor has more regulations to meet and might take two hours, while a state-numbered vessel fishing within three miles of shore usually takes about 30 minutes to check.

“The general safety factors are their life raft, their epirb, their immersion suits, fire extinguishers, life rings,” said Ramp. “For the bigger boats that fish offshore, they have to bilge alarms to know if they’re taking on water, they have to have general alarms so if something goes wrong, they can notify the crew. We also require they have their navigational publications, charts, sufficient radios and communication equipment…”

If boats do not meet current regulations, fishermen are subject to fines. And, for extreme violations, the Coast Guard will escort them back to the dock and not let them back out until the problems are fixed.

The safety exam is mandatory for fishermen whose insurance companies require it or if a NOAA fish observer is scheduled to go on a boat because the agency requires a boat to have a current dockside exam.

To know what to expect during the an exam for your vessel, you can call examiner Steve Ramp at 966-5620 to set up a free pre-exam meeting. You can also go to the Coast Guard’s website to generate a custom checklist.

File For Your PFD On-line Here
Thank you to the 23 people that contributed a total of $925 to KFSK in 2012 using Pick. Click. Give. You can join them this year by making an additional gift to KFSK when filing your PFD online this year.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its emergency management partners plan to conduct a test of Alaska’s tsunami warning communications system next Wednesday at 9:45 a.m., the agency announced Wednesday morning.

According to NOAA, the emergency test will be broadcast on local television and radio stations, as well as on NOAA Weather Radio. Residents in some communities may hear warning sirens.

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JUNEAU— Five small Alaska municipal school districts are trapped between funding mechanisms for school construction, but one lawmaker proposed a bill he hopes will remedy the problem.

HB133, by Rep. Bryce Edgmon, D-Dillingham, would add Saint Mary’s, Tanana, Kake, Klawock, and Hydaburg to those districts eligible to receive funding for construction using the Regional Educational Attendance Area School Construction Fund. REAAs are small, rural school districts.

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ANCHORAGE — A Manokotak official who was fatally shot Tuesday is the second Alaska village safety patrol officer killed in the line of duty and the first since 1986.

Authorities have identified the victim as Thomas O. Madola, 54. He became a village safety patrol officer in 2011 and was formerly an Assembly of God pastor in Bethel, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

Madola’s body was found outside the home of Leroy B. Dick Jr., 42.

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JUNEAU — Alaska’s latest “stand your ground” bill has passed the House of Representatives.

HB24, by Rep. Mark Neuman, would remove certain criteria that people must meet before they have a right to use deadly force as a means of self-defense.

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ANCHORAGE — Changes are planned for Alaska’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race following the asphyxiation death of a dog that was buried in snow by extreme winds, organizers of the 1,000-mile race said Wednesday.

Race officials said they also plan to meet with the owners of 5-year-old Dorado. The dog was found dead at a checkpoint Friday, four days after he was removed from the race because he was moving stiffly. He was kept in Unalakleet to await transportation home.

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FAIRBANKS – The Alaska Department of Natural Resources announced an interactive web map application Wednesday that displays faults and folds throughout Alaska believed capable of producing damaging earthquakes.

The new application, “Alaska’s Quaternary Faults and Folds,” focuses on “geologically recent activity,” and is part of the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys’ efforts to better characterize earthquake hazards.

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Test part of Tsunami Preparedness Week

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its emergency management partners plan to conduct a test of Alaska’s tsunami warning communications system next Wednesday at 9:45 a.m., the agency announced Wednesday morning.

According to NOAA, the emergency test will be broadcast on local television and radio stations, as well as on NOAA Weather Radio. Residents in some communities may hear warning sirens.

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Crew members aboard the Hydaburg-based F/V Pacific Fisher tend to the net on Wednesday afternoon. The commercial herring fleet is in Sitka waiting for the opening of the 2013 sac roe herring fishery. State managers reported predators were visible during an aerial survey conducted Wednesday morning, but that the herring were not visible from the air. The state research vessel Kestrel to Sitka when the fishery is placed on two-hour notice. (KCAW photo by Ed Ronco)

A Ketchikan Girl Scout has earned the highest honor awarded by that organization, and will head to Anchorage next week for the formal ceremony honoring her achievement.

For her Gold Award, Mary Baker taught other girls a skill that’s not nearly as common as it used to be.

“Sewing isn’t really being taught anymore in schools or in homes by parents and all,” she said. “So, I taught girls how to sew and I had a sew-in, and I had two Rainy Day Quilt Guild members come and volunteer to help the girls sew.”

Baker said the girls learned how to use sewing machines, and completed nine squares for what will eventually become a quilt. She said the girls in the sewing class have said they want to continue learning how to sew.

The Gold Award is similar to the Boy Scout’s Eagle Scout Award. To earn the Gold Award, a Girl Scout must have reached a certain level in scouting, and then come up with a special project.

“We have to do all this paperwork to get the project approved, and we have to talk to the board,” she explained.

To qualify, a Gold Award project must focus on organizational, leadership, and networking skills; fulfill a need within the community and

create potentially ongoing change.

 

Baker said she’s been a Girl Scout consistently for the last five years.

“I enjoy Girl Scouts because I’m meeting people all the time, and I get to interact with girls of all ages, and it’s just a good environment,” she said.

A different Girl Scout sewing program years ago led Baker to ask Scout volunteer Gail Alguire for more sewing tips. Baker has since participated in group quilt projects, and says she enjoys the camaraderie, as well as the creative process.

Baker will fly to Anchorage for the Alaska Girl Scout award ceremony on March 27th.

Five other Alaska Girl Scouts earned their Gold Awards this year and will be honored at the Anchorage ceremony. They are Leila Pyle of Kodiak, Addoris Davis of Homer, Bonnie Billingsley of Anchorage, Anna Grant of Anchorage and Cassandra Alexander of Wasilla.

More information about the Gold Award is available online at http://www.girlscoutsalaska.org/for-teens/leadership-awards

A five-percent water rate hike is on the Ketchikan City Council agenda  Thursday.

The increase had been part of the 2013 budget that the Council approved in December, but fee changes must go through an additional approval process. The Council in January deferred the water rate increase in hopes that the city could come up with a different plan that would raise the same level of revenue, but without affecting homeowners.

Industrial customers, fish processing plants in particular, use significantly more water than any other customers, but pay a lower rate. Some Council members charged that homeowners were subsidizing those industrial users unfairly.

In a recent memo to the Council, City Manager Karl Amylon says that city officials met with some fish processing company representatives. They objected to any rate increase that would single out their industry, but agreed to continue working with the city to close the gap between what they pay for water and the cost of providing that service.

Processors now pay about 20 percent of the actual cost to the city.

The Council also has four executive sessions scheduled. The closed-door meetings are for private discussion of a lawsuit filed against the city over a street repair project; a potential lawsuit against Southeast Engineering over the water treatment plant project; and two issues related to KPU Telecommunications Division’s plans to offer local wireless telephone service.

The meeting starts at 7 p.m. in City Council chambers. Public comment will be heard at the start of the meeting.

Governor Sean Parnell has ordered state flags to be lowered Thursday in honor of Village Public Safety Officer Thomas Madole, who was killed in the line of duty Tuesday in Manokotak.

Parnell says that Madole will be remembered for his dedication, and devotion to public service and the protection of others.

He adds that public safety officer are a vital part of protecting and providing safety to Alaska’s rural communities.

Madole is survived by his wife and two adult children. State flags will be lowered on Thursday, and raised the following day.

Alaska’s Board of Game Sunday approved state-sponsored trapping programs to kill wolves in two areas of Southeast. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game proposed the plan as an experiment to boost deer numbers around Ketchikan and Petersburg.

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The state calls the programs “intensive management” and they come in response to poor deer hunting in key areas near the two communities. Over the past decade, hunters have fallen short of harvest target numbers the board set back in 2000. Under the state’s intensive management law, those shortfalls force the board to consider steps that could help increase deer numbers. Board actions can include predator control, if other measures like habitat improvement or hunting opportunity reductions are not successful. The proposed measures came before the Board of Game during a meeting this month in Kenai.

Sitka resident Larry Edwards of Greenpeace testified that deer harvest and population targets were too high and maintained that intensive management for wolves was not warranted. “My view is that it hasn’t been legitimately triggered because the life span of those objectives has been far exceeded,” Edwards said. “The board who accepted those was under the understanding that those would be reviewed and looked at again in one to two board cycles which would have been by 2004. In fact my understanding of what was said at that meeting is they would be looked at every one or two cycles. So it should actually have been looked at maybe two or three times by now.”

Photo courtesy of ADF&G

Greenpeace and the Center for Biological Diversity have petitioned for the protection of Southeast wolves under the Endangered Species Act, arguing the region’s wolves are at risk of extinction. State biologists say there are no conservation concerns with Southeast wolves, although Fish and Game does not have precise estimates of how many wolves are in the two areas. Based on research done elsewhere on the Tongass, biologists think there may be 60 wolves around Petersburg and six to 12 wolves on Gravina Island near Ketchikan.

The department’s plan is to hire experienced trappers to eliminate all of the Gravina wolves and 80 percent of the wolves near Petersburg on Mitkof and Woewodski islands as well as the Lindenberg Peninsula of Kupreanof . The proposals generated written comments from around the globe opposing the trapping programs and urging the state not to kill the wolves.

Fish and Game Wildlife biologist Rich Lowell has noted that the state is running out of other options for boosting deer numbers in the Petersburg area. The board has shortened local bucks-only hunting seasons, lengthened trapping seasons for wolves and has little control over habitat conditions on the Tongass National Forest.

“Suffice it to say that we’ve received numerous complaints about when you gonna do something about the situation with deer around here,” Lowell said. “And as you know we just took action to shorten the season on the Lindenberg Peninsula due to concerns about low numbers there. The community is obviously very concerned about the situation and there were calls to close the deer season completely and we tried to take some action short of that.”

Deer harvests on the islands around Petersburg have declined since peak levels in the mid to late ’90s. Those peak years were the basis for the board’s harvest targets set in 2000. The department blames the declines on several factors, including several snowy winters, the loss of habitat through logging, competition from an increasing moose population and predation by wolves as well as black bears. For the most part, the number of people living in the two communities and estimated numbers of hunters have also dropped since those peak years.

The department’s feasibility studies for wolf trapping anticipate paying one or two trappers over a period of four or five years, at a cost of over $300,000 dollars for each program. And those studies note there’s no guarantee the trapping will reduce wolf numbers or help deer. Fish and Game plans to compare deer abundance in the areas proposed for trapping with those in nearby areas and evaluate the wolf trapping programs.

Board member Nick Yurko of Juneau thought the proximity of the mainland to the islands around Petersburg would make it difficult to keep wolf numbers down. “They don’t mind moving,” he said. “They don’t mind swimming. The snow conditions on that mainland get a little bit more severe, they’re gonna go to the islands to do their shopping for their groceries. So I think you’re gonna have a real challenge down there of trying to keep that, get the wolf population down.”

The state’s biologist, Rich Lowell, agreed long distance travel and migration of other wolf packs would be a challenge. He cited one animal radio collared on western Kupreanof Island in the 1990s that made its way to the Ketchikan area before it was shot.

Board member Robert Mumford of Anchorage said he was not against intensive management programs but did not support this one and suggested a different approach. “Move towards getting some of the local trappers more involved and let them be heroes of their own community and say you know hey we got these wolves and they’re coming up as a direct result of that or they’re not coming up as a direct result of that but I feel that trapping along the beach trying to pick off these wolves and we have such a large area that fresh wolves can move in you know I just feel like we’re gonna be you know like picking salmon out of a stream one at at time in front and they’re just still gonna keep coming,” Mumford said.

Other board members were supportive of predator control. Pete Probasco of Palmer thought the trapping program around Petersburg would provide important information. “So I think it’s important that they do develop some sound data that we may have a very important future tool here too,” Probasco said. “We’re gonna find out the impact of reducing wolf numbers. There’s some other things we cant control, weather and some of the habitat aspects but we can pick up one thing and get a dimension to find out how much it’s gonna change what’s going on.”

The vote was 6-1 to approve the program with only Robert Mumford opposed. A similar program for Gravina Island passed by a vote of 7-0. That program will seek to keep that island free of wolves for four or five years. Paid trappers under both programs will operate during normal trapping seasons, possibly as soon as next November.

The predator control programs will be the first for the region in decades. Southeast had state sponsored trapping and poisoning programs for killing wolves in the 50s and 60s and the state paid a bounty on wolves in its early years.

KFSK used an audio recording of the board meeting provided by Larry Edwards of Greenpeace as Board of Game staff could not provide a copy in time for this story.

Eight young women are in Ketchikan competing for the Distinguished Young Women scholarship program.  Kayhi Counselor Robert McClory and past scholarship recipient Devon Inch provide details.  DW032013

Gail Jones of PeaceHealth Ketchikan Medical Center speaks about new physicians and staff, and recent and upcoming changes.  PeaceHealth032013

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Sequestration forces SEARHC to make $3.5 million in cuts. ADF&G boosts sac roe herring harvest level by 500 tons. US Fish & Wildlife Service’s new rules about “substantially altered” sea otter pelts questioned by craftspeople. Army Nat’l Guard Honor Guard holds memorial service in Wrangell.

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Southeast crabbers had their biggest tanner harvest in more than a decade last month. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game just released a preliminary catch estimate of 1.2 million pounds for the fishery, which was open for a total of eleven days.

“This one-point-two million pound harvest exceded last seasons harvest by about 130,000 pounds and it’s the largest tanner harvest in the last 12 seasons. In fact you have to go back to the 2000-2001 to find a larger harvest,” says Joe Stratman, the department’s lead crab biologist for Southeast

Photo courtesy ADF&G

A total of 77 boats fished tanner last month. 55 of them were limited-entry vessels, which fish with large crab pots and land the lion’s share of the catch each year. Only about two percent of the harvest came from the 22 boats in the open-entry, ring-net fishery. That’s a pretty typical split. Overall participation was up by about seven boats from last year.

Stratman says the biggest catch came out of District Eleven, which includes Seymour Canal off Admiralty Island as well as Holkham Bay and Snettisham off the mainland south of Juneau.

“We saw the largest harvest in district 11 at 440,000 pounds. We had like 20 permits participating there. I guess the district with the second highest harvest would have been district 14 which includes Icy Strait and Excursion inlet. We had 330,000 pounds harvested there by…..21 permit holders. District ten was third. That includes places like Thomas Bay, Port Houghton, Pybus Bay, Gambier bay. In district ten we saw a harvest of 170,000 pounds by 17 permit holders.” :34

And according to Stratman, the department’s pre-season surveys have shown an increase in the amount of mature male crab in recent years. That could bode well for the future.

“Of that mature male biomass, roughly about half of it is legal. So, there are mature crab that are not legal that havn’t entered the fishery yet. It’s difficult to make predictions for crab fisheries, but we see pre-recruits in our most recent survey. So, That’s a good sign for future fisheries,” he says.

Pre-recruits are male crab that have not yet reached legal size to harvest.

While this year’s tanner catch was up overall, the dockside value was down this year. Buyers typically paid about $2.40 a pound which is around 34 cents less than last year’s typical price. This year’s entire harvest was worth a total of 2.8 million dollars which is a couple hundred thousand less than last year.

Meanwhile, Southeast golden king crab fishermen are still working the grounds. They have a total of 590,000 pounds to catch. Golden crab opened on February 17th, the same as tanner. As of early this week (3/18) all seven of the golden crab management areas were still open. Permit holders had landed an estimated 62 percent of the guideline harvest level in the largest management area which is called East Central. They had caught around 42 percent in the Northern area, around 11 percent in the Icy Straits area and 10 percent in the Mid-Chatham area. Instead of setting a season length like they do in tanner fishing, managers close golden crab areas one at a time, as their separate GHL’s are reached.