Anchorage Press

The candidates - A pre-election look at the races for five Anchorage Assembly seats

Just a few weeks remain until the municipal election on April 6, when most Anchorage voters will get to choose lawmakers who will represent them on the Anchorage Assembly for the next three years.

‘The merits of the debate’

On Monday, Rachel Humphreys, Alec Rothman and Samantha Corbin stepped inside the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., and released a handful of balloons.

Manor versus campus - RurAL CAP and Copper River Seafoods are both vying to purchase the Red Roof Inn

After the Anchorage Assembly approved the alcohol dependant housing ordinance last week, proponents of so called “wet housing,” or “Housing First,” as the program is known in its incarnations across the country, cheered the passage as the first step towards seeing such a program here in Anchorage.

The insurance anomaly, redux

The saga of the life insurance payout from the city to the trust of late former Mayor George Sullivan continues…

Invaders

At a glance, and from a distance, a casual observer might mistake a patch of purple loosetrife for fireweed.

The Commission

On Friday, March 5, the Alaska Public Offices Commission, which monitors and enforces statutes related to the finances of public officials, lobbyists, and candidates for public office, had a special teleconferenced meeting, giving the public a glimpse into the inner workings of the commission.

Letters from the issue of 3.11.10

Snark all you want, but the Constitution says…

Renaissance

On the highest shelves of the garage at Perry Eaton’s house are rows of wooden blocks, some up to three feet across, each one with its vintage indicated by a number written on the block with a black felt tip pen.

A wilderness of sea

On Monday, both of Alaska’s U.S. Senators were together in a room in New York City for a little-heralded and less-covered event.

The invisible exposed - Independent activist Mark Horvath comes to Anchorage to meet our homeless

“I’m still financially challenged; I’m still close to homelessness myself,” Mark Horvath says, just a couple of hours after he’s met with Mayor Dan Sullivan and broadcast his interview live on the internet. Horvath works at a nonprofit in Los Angeles as a case manager, but, he says, he still has to choose between paying the bills and buying food, so he eats at the shelter.

An insurance anomaly

In January of 1982, when outgoing mayor George M. Sullivan had just ceded the reins of power to Tony Knowles, the Anchorage Assembly had a novel proposal. Assemblyman Gerry O’Connor presented a resolution recommending the municipality continue life insurance benefits for the former mayor, citing Sullivan’s recent triple bypass surgery which had the potential to render him unable to pass a physical to qualify for private coverage. From the minutes of the meeting, the proposal doesn’t seem to have been controversial; only one assembly member voted against it.

The assembly gets wet

Tuesday night’s Anchorage Assembly meeting was largely concerned with problem drinkers, with two ordinances considered to tackle the problem.

In brief

The Alaska Support Industry Alliance—the trade group representing oil and gas industry companies, which is responsible for the bell-tolling “Faces of ACES” ad campaign, had its members in the capitol a few weeks ago, rallying for support to scale back the oil and gas tax known as Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share. The tax was passed under former Governor Sarah Palin, but has since proven unpopular with Republican lawmakers, including Governor Sean Parnell, as well as the industry.

On the streets of Fairview with the Community Action Policing team

It’s a slow afternoon on the streets of Fairview for Sergeant Denny Allen, supervisor of the Anchorage Police Department’s Community Action Policing team. The sun is bright and it’s rather warm for a February afternoon, but the inebriates and drug dealers who Allen spends his time rounding up, tracking, and generally making life uncomfortable for just aren’t out in force yet.

Wild and risky

One brown moose, munching on a lily. Two black ravens looking pretty silly. Thus begins the book that’s topped my reading list recently.

Everybody knows this is somewhere

The latest sign of development at Point MacKenzie is not the hiring of former Anchorage Mayor Rick Mystrom as economic advisor (read: industrial development cheerleader) for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, boosting the borough’s deep-water port and its plans for a rail link to Point Mac. No, the big change at Point Mac—and likely a semaphore of future changes—is actually quite humble and more immediately useful.

Hotel hostility

On February 2, Gina Tubman and Lucy Dudek, both servers at the Sheraton Hotel downtown and members of the local hotel workers union, Unite Here Local 878, were outside the Fifth Avenue entrance of the hotel handing out fliers to people entering and leaving the hotel, notifying them that the union had put the hotel under boycott. The boycott is in place at the Hilton hotel as well, where workers haven’t been able to reach agreement with the hotel’s management on an acceptable contract. At the Sheraton, the boycott is in place because the operator, Dallas-based Remington Hotels, stripped the workers of their union health care plan and offered them a higher priced plan with a higher deductible.

Getting there from here

Depending on who is telling their story, the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association is a nonprofit that’s either “chronically underfunded” or “in need of sustainable funding” or “not sustainable.”

Fanning the flames

Once again, employees at the Anchorage Fire Department are outraged at cuts to the department being made by the Sullivan administration. Last week the city revealed that, in order to save the city $150,000, the Backcountry Rescue Team would be eliminated, and other special teams would be downsized; the Swift Water Rescue Team, for example, will operate only seasonally.

Sweet Homestead Alabama - Alaska ex-pat Jackie Carr traded life at Rancho Spenardo for 29 acres and a goat at Spenardo del Sur.

There are many places in the American Deep South that defy stereotypes. Randolph County, Alabama, is not one of them.

The Facebook Olympics

It’s jarring, at first, to read the Anchorage place names transposed into French:

What’s in a name? Critics say a ballot initiative in August’s election is misleading at best, and onerous at worst.

In late 2007 and early 2008, two petitions were circulating to get initiatives on the ballot, both with pretty sexy names, considering the Bill Allen/VECO corruption indictments were still coming down with regularity. One was known as “The Clean Elections Act,” the other “The Anti-Corruption Act.” Who wouldn’t want those? At the time, this paper and other media outlets noted that many potential signatories didn’t realize the two initiatives were different—starkly so.

He’s “here” every morning

Flashlight got wind of a nasty rumor this month—that conservative chatterbox and oil patch apologist Rick Rydell runs his morning radio show from Outside, specifically on a cushy ranch property in Montana. The rumor turned out to be almost completely false, which naturally makes it more interesting.

The landlords that roared

A group of commercial property owners is up in arms over the city land-use and zoning code rewrite. One group spokesman calls the proposed codes “fatally flawed” and is asking the Anchorage Assembly and Mayor Dan Sullivan to scrap a process they’ve worked on for almost a decade by refusing to let the new rules become law.

Blame bikes? Bad move

Guest opinion by Thomas Pease

In brief

As of Tuesday, the fundraising numbers are in for candidates for state office. What’s important at this point isn’t necessarily how much the candidates brought in altogether, but how much dough they’ve got on hand right now (after all, to Briefs’ knowledge, only Republican Ralph Samuels has started blowing money on TV commercials). Here’s the breakdown: On the Republican side, Governor Sean Parnell is sitting on just over $125,000, while Samuels has just under $130,000, and Bill Walker, who dropped more than a hundred grand of his own money into his war chest, has about just that much remaining after spending a roughly equivalent amount. For the Ds, former legislator Ethan Berkowitz has been frugal, and has almost $110,000 in the bank, while state Senator Hollis French has almost $66,000 on hand, and Bob Poe, who raised just under $80,000 altogether, has just $11,000 remaining.

Letters from the issue of 2.18.10

Lawmakers:

Blotter: Less-than-responsible edition

Heroin. In Wasilla. In the parking lot by Wonderland, the kiddy park on one end of Iditapark. Alaska Sate Troopers say a trooper approached a man who appeared to be slumped over the steering wheel of a Dodge pickup. Turns out a 23-year-old Wasilla man was in the truck. It’s a conspicuous spot to package-up hard drugs for sale, but troopers say that’s what he was doing. The bust was February 7, and troopers posted info online Monday, March 1.

Blotter: Fallen Assistant DA edition

"Football is life,” a coach once told Blotter. Sure, but life ain’t football. A good Samaritan learned that Sunday, February 22, when he tried to tackle a bad guy who was leaving a south Anchorage supermarket in a hurry—running holding someone else’s purse “like a football” under his arm, according to an Anchorage Police Department press release. The two men crashed into a door, breaking it, and in the process the bad guy broke the tackle. The good guy (take him off his feet next time) injured his arm, but APD did not report how badly. Then the bad guy, a 19-year-old Anchorage man, also learned that life ain’t football when a bunch of people left the sidelines to pursue. Two of them, an APD officer and his 18-year-old son, got credit from APD for the tackle. The police forwarded a raft of charges to prosecutors: second degree robbery (the purse); third-degree criminal mischief; resisting arrest; and lastly, seven counts of second-degree theft of an access device (credit cards in the purse.)

Blotter - The interlock waiver edition

Maybe it’s nitpicking, but Blotter always wonders how cops writing in cop-speak came up with the description “suspicious vehicle.” What could possibly be suspicious about a vehicle? Were its headlights shifty and avoiding eye-contact? Did it have a suspicious, handgun-shape bulge in its vinyl grill cover? We’ll probably never know. But one “occupied suspicious vehicle” caught the attention of a University police officer at UAA Tuesday, February 9 and became the subject of a 3:45 a.m. investigation. The cop confiscated weed and alcohol, likely confirming their suspicions about that vehicle.

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