In Cranford’s appeal, he says the city refused to search for, or respond to, his request for a “legal framework” for the additions, but did not confirm that the records don’t exist, so he’s fighting the decision. A brief from Municipal Attorney Rachel Jones says this portion of Cranford’s request did not ask for a public record– it was asking for legal analysis. A “legal framework” Jones says, is beyond the scope of a public records request. 

Tonight, the assembly will hear arguments from both Cranford and city staff. Acting as a quasi-judicial body, the group may grant or deny the appeal.

Cranford is a former Sitka Assembly candidate, and this the latest of several records appeals he has made before the assembly since 2024. He also sued the city in 2025, alleging censorship on the Sitka Police Department’s Facebook page. He’s the son of former police sergeant Gary Cranford, who sued the city several years ago, alleging he was unfairly demoted from sergeant to officer in breach of his union contract. The case was settled out of court for over $300,000. 

In other business, at tonight’s meeting the assembly will review an updated sub lease with Alaska Airlines. And it will consider the municipal administrator’s recommendation to hire the city’s interim fire chief, Brian McLaughlin, into the full-time, permanent position.

The Sitka Assembly meets at 6 p.m. tonight. Raven News will broadcast the meeting live, following Alaska News Nightly.

The Sitka Assembly has offered a second interview to a candidate for the city’s top job.

In a special meeting on Friday (8-21-26) the assembly interviewed Gerrie Cotter for the municipal administrator post. Cotter has a law degree from Loyola University Law School in New Orleans, and a bachelor’s degree in international studies from West Virginia University. She currently works as the administrator of Perry Township in Stark County Ohio, a community of just under thirty thousand people.

“We have police, fire, zoning, parks, and roads departments,” she told the assembly during a video call. “I’ve been township administrator there for the past year, and I’ve done quite a bit to help them modernize their processes.”

Before moving into the township administration job last year, Cotter spent nearly 14 years working for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, where she led a statewide workforce development program for young adults, and did policy work. She has also served as a trustee for a township in Ohio, and on a local school board. 

“So I’ve got a wide range of experience, much of it with local government. I really enjoy being able to see the improvements that you’re making at the local level. It’s much easier to see those improvements when you’re working in a particular community. So I do like that aspect of it,” she said.

“I’m also a licensed attorney in the state of New York,” she continued. “So I’m certainly capable of interpreting, drafting, recommending policy.”

The assembly prompted Cotter to share her experience in a variety of areas, from negotiating contracts with unions and doing public outreach, to building a budget and building a team.

“I think just being open-minded and listening to staff to hear what their concerns might be or what they’d like to see changed, and being flexible enough to consider those things is really important, especially when you’re dealing with diverse folks,” Cotter said. “I also think there’s ways that you can, you know, maybe create some more camaraderie and find commonalities and things that folks enjoy doing together to try and create that team environment too.” 

After interviewing Cotter for around an hour, the assembly went behind closed doors in an executive session. When the group returned, Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz announced that they would advance Cotter to a second interview.

Right now, Cotter is the only candidate in the running for the municipal administrator job. The assembly began its search for a new administrator when John Leach, signaled plans to resign last fall. Leach originally planned to step down in May, but extended his work with the city through December.

Cotter’s next interview date has not yet been announced. You can listen back to the full interview here.

“So we went around the other side of the house where the front door was, and began attacking the fire,” he said. “We found the fire to be in one of the first floor bedrooms, which was very, very much engulfed in fire at that point, and the house had filled pretty significantly with smoke throughout.”  

McLaughlin said the crew knocked down the initial blaze, and then began working to vent smoke out of the house. After about two hours, first responders were able to secure the scene and return to the fire hall.

He said the home was vacant at the time of the fire, and the cause is currently under investigation. While the source of ignition is still unclear, he believes the fire started in the first floor bedroom which suffered significant damage. 

“Throughout the rest of the house, there was smoke damage as well. So it’ll be a lot of cleaning and some significant repairs in that bedroom for sure,” he said.

“The person walking by, who saw the smoke and took the the minute to call us, saved that house,” he said. “If they if they just kept walking and forgotten about it, the house probably would have burned down. It would have gotten out of control.”

McLaughlin said don’t be afraid to call 911. He also asked that folks in the vicinity of a fire response keep a safe distance, and follow the instructions of emergency responders at the scene for their safety. 

District 13’s previous single-day harvest record was set in 2017 when roughly 950,000 pink salmon were caught. Aaron Dupuis is the Sitka area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He says while pink salmon harvests are down in other parts of the state, they’re surging in Sitka.

“We’ve just been seeing really strong harvests of pink salmon and really strong escapements, which was kind of unusual for an even year, and fairly unusual, given what’s been going on with pink salmon in the rest of the Gulf of Alaska,” Dupuis said. “So it’s pretty special to have a good pink run in the Sitka area this year.” 

He says local seiners beat the record on August 6 this year, catching 1.23 million pink salmon in one day. And it didn’t take long for them to beat it again, harvesting 1.28 million pink salmon on August 10. 

Dupuis said fishing effort was up this year, in part, because pinks arrived late for some of the fisheries that typically see higher participation. 

“So a lot of that purse seine effort moved from the Ketchikan area, Juneau, Petersburg over to Sitka,” Dupuis said. “So right now we have about 20 or 30 more boats on average, and then combine that with pretty good run.”

Dupuis said ocean conditions may have played a part in the “good run.” And the weather played a part in salmon escapement, too – that’s the number of fish that make it past the fishery, into streams to spawn. With the dry August weather, water levels were low when fish showed up. 

“In a lot of these other systems, the fish aren’t up the creek. We have the whole escapement sitting there. Kind of the worst case scenario is the fish go up the creek, and then the water drops. Then you can have pretty big mortality events, which isn’t great,” Dupuis said. “But we haven’t had that because the water levels were low prior to the fish showing up.” 

As of Monday (8-17-26), Dupuis said the fishery was ranked the seventh largest in the state’s history, with more openings to come. That’s a big contrast from what state fishery managers were anticipating earlier in the summer.

“It started out the season looking pretty grim,” Dupuis said. “Historic low harvest levels and escapement observations going into the last week in July, it was kind of looking like it might be a disaster, and then all of a sudden all these fish started showing up.” 

The record pink harvest will sell for a high price. Dupuis said purse seined pink salmon are going for $0.60 per pound, as much as double some recent years.

The Southeast Alaska commercial troll fishery will close briefly next week.

In a release on Wednesday (8-5-26), the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced that on August 9, the fishery will close for four days. During that time, trollers are prohibited from harvesting Chinook and coho salmon.

The commercial king salmon fishery opened on July 1. Trollers typically catch their target number of kings within a handful of days. This year, lower fleet participation and slower fishing conditions extended the opener beyond five weeks. 

State biologists expect trollers will reach their target of 82,000 kings soon, leaving roughly 36,000 to harvest in the second summer opener. That will kick off on August 13, with areas of high king salmon abundance open until further notice. State biologists strongly encourage trollers to contact fishery managers during the retention period to report harvest effort.

During the four-day closure, trollers can target chum salmon in Neets Bay, West Crawfish Inlet, Crawfish Inlet and Sitka Sound, and pink and sockeye salmon can still be retained. 

Recently appointed Sitka School Board member Kat Richards has filed to run for a full term. Richards works for the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium as a nurse educator, and is a former Sitka School District employee. KCAW sat down with Richards to learn about her experience and interest in serving on the board. Listen here:

Transcript forthcoming

“Some of these exclusions make intuitive sense. You know, wear and tear, pest infestation. Those are maintenance issues, not, you know, accidents,” Bruneau said. “Insurance was never designed to cover those type of things. But flood, earthquake, and landslide are different. These are catastrophic risks that tend to hit an entire region at once, and insurers manage that kind of correlated risk very differently from, say, an isolated house fire.”

When it came to the slides in Sitka, Haines, Wrangell and Ketchikan, Bruneau said  homeowners’ insurance exclusions forced many affected families to rely on the federal government after they were displaced.

“Every one of those families may have had a standard homeowner’s policy, but all of those policies excluded landslide damage. Recovery instead depended on a federal disaster declaration, and you know after Wrangell, that declaration took months to arrive,” Bruneau said. “Even the main federal program that funds landslide hazard monitoring has lapsed with reauthorization still pending, so that safety net isn’t guaranteed to be there either.”

Bruneau said the exclusions are not an unsolvable problem, though. “Parametric insurance” may be one of the answers. Unlike traditional insurance, where you file a claim for damages after-the-fact, with parametric insurance, the payout is agreed upon ahead of time.

“Everyone agrees up front on a measurable trigger, something like a certain amount of rainfall in a certain amount of time,” Bruneau said. “Once that trigger is crossed or met, payment goes out automatically, often within days or even hours.”

Parametric insurance doesn’t exist for slides in Southeast…yet. But Bruneau thinks it could. It works in three steps- first a parameter is set- like a certain magnitude of earthquake or a level of rainfall, or a temperature. That parameter is monitored continuously. Once it crosses the agreed upon threshold, the payment is triggered. In Cancun, the government used parametric insurance to protect its tourism economy and reef from high winds. And, Bruneau said, in the first pilot season of a program in India, 21,000 women’s wages were quickly covered by parametric insurance when high heat exceeded a pre-agreed-upon temperature threshold, making it unsafe for the women to work. 

“That’s kind of the brilliance of it,” Bruneau said. “There is so much flexibility within the structure of parametric itself that, you know, it can be built to look like what you want it to look like, or cover what you want it to cover.”

She said it does not replace traditional coverage or close all the gaps, but it can offer some protection where other insurance can’t, and with less red tape. 

Bruneau spoke for about 30 minutes before she took a few questions from the audience. Mike Janes, an avalanche forecaster, asked if the weather stations used to confirm “triggers” in any of the pilot programs had to meet certain standards. 

“Not all weather stations are created equal in measuring precipitation,” he said. “I was curious if you could speak to what does it take to get these weather stations to be able to to make a trigger like this that’s reliable and useful?”

Bruneau said there aren’t any mandated requirements at this time, and the insurance carrier and the customers can work together to determine the best way to measure that data. It’s flexible because the parametric insurance market is an emerging space. 

“I know in one case, I forget which state, but it was a parametric flood product for homeowners, and they actually went and installed sensors in each of the homeowners’ yards,” she said. “So there are different ways, you know, to get at that. There’s no set standardization quite yet for that.”

Bruneau said she was not aware of any emerging pilot programs for parametric insurance in Alaska yet, but encouraged SLIPP to push and ask. In places where pilots have been successful, groups have worked with local governments, philanthropic organizations and NGOs to make the ‘parameters’ possible. 

Sitka School Board President Phil Burdick filed to run for a second term last week. Burdick worked as a teacher in the Sitka School District for 15 years and an administrator for a decade. He says consistency on the school board will ultimately lead to better outcomes for kids. Listen to our interview with Burdick here:

KCAW: If you’re reelected, this would be your second term on the school board. Why have you decided to throw your hat in the ring again, Phil?

Burdick: I think last time I threw my hat in the ring because there were some very specific tasks. We needed to hire a superintendent. We needed to get ahead of the budget. Those things have been taken care of. I’m throwing my hat in the ring for consistency. We all know that everything in education is about consistency, and so to have a consistent school board for a number of years is really beneficial to kids ultimately because we set policy, we set budget priorities, and if that continually turns over, you know, staff don’t really know what’s coming down the pike, and that causes stress, and then that rolls downhill to the kids. So I think a consistent school board ultimately leads to better outcomes for children.

KCAW: What experiences on the board shape your decision making the most, and and how do they shape it?

Burdick: I think for me, my experience as an educator, so 25 years, 15 as a teacher, 10 as an administrator, all in Sitka, and so I’m very committed to this community. I’m very committed to our schools and our children and our families, and I come to the school board table with that experience and that that relationship, the relationship that I built with families in my schools. So, so for me, being on the school board is just extending that relationship that I’ve been able to build for the last 30 years.

KCAW: Should you be reelected, you talk about consistency and and maintaining those relationships that you’ve already built. What other goals are are rising to the top for you, you know, for your for your next term?

Burdick: For the next three years, what I want to focus on is we had a board goal last year of improving external communication, and I want to continue that goal because I want to hear from the community what it is that they want our students to know and be able to do, and where those priorities are. Then the board should budget those priorities. And so I’m really hoping that we can create those priorities from community input, and be able to budget strategically instead of budgeting chaotically, which is what it is with educational funding and the way that the system is set up and the way the timelines are set up, and, you know, all of the stress that goes around budgeting for a school district. If we can be strategic about how we do that, I think we could take some of that stress, again, off of staff, off of teachers, off of kids.

KCAW: The last time you ran, you stepped in kind of in the 11th hour as a write-in candidate, and and the school board, oftentimes you have about the same number of candidates as there are seats, maybe one more in a really good year. What would you say to folks who are considering running for the for the board to to encourage them to to try their hand at it?

Burdick: It’s difficult to run for public office. It takes time. It takes energy, but I think what I would remind people is that we’re in it together and we’ll support you. I think that we can have differing opinions and viewpoints and still come at the work in a collaborative way. I think some people shy away from the fact that ‘I’m not this enough, I’m not that enough, I don’t have enough time.’ I would say you are enough, and you could do enough. I think anybody who’s got an interest in community and family and schools would be a perfect candidate, and that’s probably everybody who’s listening.

KCAW: Anything else that you think the voters should know about you or about the work that the school board’s been doing over the last three years?

Burdick: I think less about me and more about the school board because this group, Mr. Rioux has a bunch of experience, and…this is really only my third year of experience on a board, while I have educational experience. Ms. Amundson is new, Mr. Potter is new, Ms. Richards is new, and that seems to be the trend over the last five or 10 years, is that we keep struggling to to build when it’s always refreshed every year and sometimes mid-year. I think it’s important for people to know that there’s a learning curve when you get on that board. Even though I had 25 years of experience in education, when I got to the school board, I knew nothing, and so I’m learning as I go. If we can remember to come to that, you know, we’re learning and growing in our positions and our roles on the school board, then I believe that we can really do great things for kids, which is the ultimate goal.

Burdick is the first to file for one of three open school board seats. Two assembly seats and the mayor’s chair are also up for grabs this year. The deadline to file to run for local office is Friday, August 7.  KCAW will interview candidates as they file. Then, in September, we’ll host several candidate forums, and publish a local election guide which will include interviews and questionnaires, so voters can learn where candidates stand on local issues.