Author: Robert Woolsey, KCAW

The Sitka Summer Music Festival is a lot less hairy than it used to be. One of the state’s premiere art events, the festival was founded in 1972 by Paul Rosenthal and fellow students from the University of Southern California – all of whom had taken master classes from violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.

The legislature’s failure to reauthorize the Alaska Coastal Management Program means big changes for local governments once the program ends on June 30. But exactly what those changes will be is still unclear.

Hundreds of Sitkans gathered along the beach at Sitka National Historical Park on Sunday to help raise a totem pole commemorating the park’s 100th anniversary.

The Sitka Historical Society and Museum will likely be able to keep its full-time curator after the Sitka Assembly approved funding at a budget meeting Thursday night. But the $25,000 boost comes at a price for some community nonprofits, which also seek funding from the city.

The 2012 budget calls for about $835,000 to be spent on technology such as computers and phones, as well as the networks and people that connect them throughout city government.

An orphaned brown bear cub was being nursed back to health in Sitka on Friday after being discovered in Angoon earlier in the week.

A totem pole raising delayed because of the federal government’s potential shutdown last month is set to go forward this weekend.

The U.S. Coast Guard visited the cruise ship Westerdam during its stop in Sitka on Wednesday to investigate a reported collision between the 936-foot vessel and some ice on Tuesday evening near Hubbard Glacier.