Author: Ed Ronco

Sitka’s Historic Preservation Commission needs assistance, according to some members of the Assembly. But that assistance didn’t come on Tuesday, when Assembly members voted down a proposal that would have created a "paid agent" to help streamline the review process for historic properties.

A fire swept through Elfin Cove’s waterfront early Saturday morning (6-19-10), destroying a lodge and a restaurant. No one was injured in the blaze. Fire officials credit a hastily-organized bucket brigade and a swift response from neighboring communities with saving the town from a total disaster.

David Dobler has been removed as president of Sheldon Jackson College. That decision comes about a week after the University of Dubuque backed out of a deal to manage the campus. He'll be replaced by John Holst, who will act as "manager," says the board's chairwoman.

On June 13th scientists from up and down the West Coast flooded Sitka’s tidal zones looking for species from a foreign land. Volunteers toting buckets and laminated pictures followed close behind, keeping a keen eye for Japanese kelp, Green crab and two species of invasive tunicates.The search was part of a larger effort, called a Bio Blitz to document the presence of foreign species along Sitka’s coastline and moorages. Scientists involved in the Blitz say it will act as a baseline to see just how many invasives make their home in Sitka’s waters.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council wrapped up its June meeting in Sitka on Tuesday (6-15-10). During the meeting, which began June 7, the council advanced a measure to restructure a program that puts human observers on fishing vessels.

The new principal of Sitka High School brings with her decades of experience as a teacher and administrator across the country and around the world, including in Alaska. But she tells KCAW that her career in education was touched off after an event during her senior year of high school.

Pt. 2 of 2. Although forest restoration is officially the priority of the Forest Service, transforming policy goals into action can be hard. The Tongass in the summer of 2010 looks much like the Tongass in the summer of 2009, when US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a bold new strategy for protecting the nation’s forests, preserving clean air and watersheds, exploring biomass and carbon markets, and all the while maintaining elements of a traditional forest products industry. Senators from predominantly western states, including Alaska, have opposed increasing funding for forest restoration, saying the recommended changes “go too far, too fast.” They’ve urged the Obama administration to maintain or increase funding for timber output in 2011. It’s a formula for political stalemate. But on the Tongass, salmon have changed the way people – including senators -- talk about forest restoration. In the final part of our series on forest restoration policy, KCAW’s Robert Woolsey examines the role fish have started to play in the rhetoric of restoration.

Pt. 1 of 2. A river near Sitka is scheduled for restoration work next year. The Sitkoh River valley was logged in the 1970s, when harvesters clear-cut trees right up to river banks, and sometimes used stream beds as roads. The Sitkoh has retained a limited fish run while the valley has regrown, but the salmon are now in danger: Recently, the river meandered onto an adjacent logging road, leaving many fish stranded when water levels drop. Restoration is an old practice on the Tongass that has a new priority in the Obama administration’s Dept. of Agriculture. In the first of a two-part series, KCAW’s Robert Woolsey looks at how work on the Sitkoh River may signal an important and growing role for watershed restoration in forest policy.

P.J. Ford Slack will take over as principal of Sitka High School next year. Outgoing principal Howard Wayne is moving back into the classroom. Ford Slack’s addition to the staff is one of a number of changes within the district’s leadership.