Lowering the winter sales tax rate, and upping the summer one. That was a popular proposal discussed at a Sitka Assembly work session on Tuesday (7-21-26) aimed at addressing the island’s childcare shortage.

Finding available and affordable childcare in Sitka is tough. Organizations trying to solve the problem have named it a top concern for young families in the community. 

“I’m very lucky to be in the situation I am to have daycare lined up, but it took until my child was five months old to know that I had a space available for her, and I signed her up the month I found out I was pregnant,” Skyleen Bottani told the Sitka Assembly on Tuesday.

She’s a parent to a seven-month-old and works as a mortgage lender at a local bank. 

“I do mortgages, and I’m seeing more parents stay home so they can help raise their grandchildren, or take equity out of their home to help kids buy homes to stay in Sitka,” she added. 

Bottani, along with several other community members, testified to the assembly on the importance of finding an affordable solution that includes career development.

Annette Evans heads up the Betty Eliason Child Care Center, which has operated in Sitka for nearly five decades. She said after setting up their second infant room, it took three months to get the staffing lined up so parents could finally enroll their kids. 

“It really comes down to the staffing,” Evans said. “We could add more children to our facility if we had the staff. We could keep children in our facility if we [could] keep our staff.”

And assembly members agree. They hope to incorporate a career pathway into a $1 million a year plan to address the childcare issue. But how the city is going to pay for the plan is still a question. Assembly members have discussed a winter sales tax increase, an alcohol tax, and removal of the sales tax cap, but finding a stable, dependable funding source has proved difficult for a city with already narrow budget margins.  

“We have spent the last year trying to figure out something besides the sales [tax],” Assembly Member Thor Christianson said. “Everybody’s been throwing out everything, and I haven’t heard anything that works, and if somebody has an epiphany, great. But it has to be stable, and it has to be something that we can know how much to put into the fund. And ultimately, Sitka is going to have to decide how important this is to them.”

But on Tuesday, at the suggestion of Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz, the assembly asked staff to look into how much a summer sales tax increase and winter decrease would bring in — that would put the summer sales tax at 7% and winter tax at 4%. Sitkans already pay a seasonal sales tax. Voters approved a permanent 6% summer tax rate in 2023 to establish a fund for school infrastructure projects.

“If we do a 1% sales tax up in the summer, and then 1% down in the winter, it’s kind of a give and take there,” Eisenbeisz said. “We’re easing the burden on those who stay here throughout the winter, while taking advantage of revenue streams that come through town in the summer.”

Eisenbeisz also suggested the city look at where it can tighten its belt and find money in its existing revenue streams to put towards a solution.

The assembly plans to discuss the issue again at its regular meeting on September 8. A sales tax change would ultimately have to go before the voters for approval.

Current Sitka Assembly Member Kevin Mosher has filed to run for mayor. Mosher, who is two years into serving his third term on the assembly, has served as an assembly member since 2018. He also threw his hat in the ring for the mayor’s seat in 2022, but lost to incumbent Steven Eisenbeisz. 

Mosher has lived in Sitka for more than three decades and has worked as a staff accountant at Sitka’s urban Native corporation, Shee Atiká, for 15 years. 

KCAW’s Hope McKenney sat down with Mosher on Tuesday (7-21-26) to talk about why he’s making another run for elected office. 

TRANSCRIPT:

MOSHER: I ran for mayor one time, and I did not win, and that’s okay. And I’m kind of glad I didn’t win at that time. I don’t think I was ready for it. But the reason why I’ve decided to run for mayor this time is because, well, one, I think I’m qualified now. I think I have the experience, the wisdom, the city leadership skills, and I feel like there’s a lot of change happening. You know, our current municipal administrator won’t be there for much longer, and that’s a huge change. And I feel like I have good working relationships with the assembly members, with the staff. Over all these years, I built trust, because that’s a part of effective governance as well as building trust within the community and with the staff. And I’ve done that, and I understand how the structure goes. You know, I usually communicate with [Municipal Administrator] John [Leach], and then we get another sponsor on something. We have a meeting, we collaborate together, and then the staff gets involved. So I’m very proud of the work I’ve done. I think the biggest compliment I’ve gotten so far for all these years is that I come in with an open mind, and I do my homework, I do my research, meet with people, listen — a lot of listening, and when I come into an assembly meeting, if I’m presented with different information or a different point of view, and I’m willing to change my mind, and I have several times, I think it’s really important to have an open mind. So that kind of leadership, I think, is necessary, and I am looking forward to this opportunity to serve the community.

KCAW: And so, like you said, you’ve served on the assembly for nearly a decade now. What are some of the biggest issues facing Sitkins right now? And if elected as mayor, how do you propose to address those?

MOSHER: Well, the mayor is one vote of seven, so that’s something to keep in mind. There’s lots of issues. The cost of living is looming large over people. Housing is huge. Childcare is huge. We’re working on that right now. There’s lots of other things like that. Some big things. You know, people want to live here, and sometimes they can’t afford to live here. Whether they’re born here or get a job here to come here, they can’t find a place to live, and they can’t find childcare. I mean, I talked to my wife about this. We could probably sell our house for a pretty penny, but then we’re going to turn around and we won’t have a place to live. So there’s no real mobility there. So you know, basically the cost of living and the quality of life. And we have a very beautiful town, and we do have overall a very nice quality of life, but it takes a lot of hard work to maintain that. A lot of our infrastructure in town is aging, and so that has to be paid for. A lot of this infrastructure was built with state or federal money, so the current tax base doesn’t have the funds to pay for those repairs and maintenance. And so we’re trying to get federal and state grants. We’re trying to be business friendly to have responsible business growth, so we can have the tax revenue to help pay for these things [like] basic services like police, fire, roads, things like that, as well as supporting the schools, which is a basic requirement in my mind. I think the entire assembly agrees with that. So, in my mind, being mayor will be listening and guiding gently the assembly and the public to maintain the good things that are happening. There are a lot of good things. We’ve gotten some grants, we’ve got lots of infrastructure projects planned and also ongoing, and also we’re growing in other ways. We’re trying to make better communication within the city. There’s a communication plan. So there’s always room for improvement and grow. So in my mind, there’s two things. One is to help maintain the things that are good that are going on, especially in a time of big change, and then also at the same time to help facilitate pathways forward to help see if we can address things like childcare or housing affordability and things like that. And those are big things. And so they are things that community is going to have to decide if they want to work on together and tackle together. And I’m willing to work on that with other assembly members, and there’s a lot of excitement on the assembly to move forward with things like that, and I believe I have the skills now, at this point in my life, to be able to lead in this way.

Firefighters tamped out a fire at the Sitka Hotel on Friday night.

Around 10 p.m. on Friday, the fire hall received reports of smoke in the building of the Sitka Hotel alongside an alert from the hotel’s fire alarm company. In an interview with KCAW, Acting Fire Chief Rob Janik said 18 fire hall personnel, including nine staff and nine volunteers, responded.

When they arrived on the scene, they found light smoke throughout the building, but could not identify where the smoke was coming from. They explored each floor of the building from top to bottom, using thermal imaging detectors to search for hotspots in the walls. 

Shortly before 11:30 p.m., they located the smoke’s source inside the wall between the hotel restaurant’s kitchen and bar area on the first floor. Janik said the fire hadn’t burned through the wall yet, but the paint in the area was beginning to bubble. The team used tools to tear the wall apart and started applying water to the blaze. Janik said it took around five minutes to get the fire under control, but they had to remove more of the wall afterwards to ensure they extinguished the entire source of the burn. 

No injuries were reported. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

Janik said Friday’s response was a team effort, and was grateful for support from police, city administration, the city’s electric department, and volunteers who helped ensure the problem was safely solved.

Janik asks that Sitkans pay attention when they hear a fire alarm, take appropriate action like calling the fire department, and evacuate the area. 

The city has been advertising for the role since current administrator John Leach submitted his resignation last October. Leach will step down from the position in December.

The Sitka Assembly publicly interviewed two candidates multiple times earlier this year, including Alber, who currently works as the deputy director of the City of New Orleans’ Department of Safety and Permits. Alber has a law degree from Charlotte School of Law in North Carolina, as well as a masters in public administration from Auburn University in Alabama. She also earned an associate’s degree from Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka in the early 1990s, according to her application. 

The city had been planning two public meet-and-greets with Alber later this month to allow Sitkans to ask questions and learn more about her. But in Monday’s announcement, staff said the community receptions would no longer be held. 

Seven Sitkans are taking turns chucking wood scraps into a round metal pit. They’re hauling them from Darren McAvoy’s truck bed where twigs, branches, and logs tower high over the cabin of his pickup truck.  

“We don’t need million-dollar high-tech machines to do this really important process of carbon storage,” McAvoy says. “It’s available to anybody in the home, farm, ranch, backyard.”

Or in the outfield of Mt. Edgecumbe High School’s old ballpark. McAvoy, a professor at Utah State University, is in Sitka with the local branch of the University of Alaska Fairbank’s Cooperative Extension Service leading a workshop on how to make biochar. That’s charcoal that stores carbon and improves soil quality.

“If worldwide in the next 30 years all agriculture adopted this approach, we’d have more carbon in our soil than we ever put in our air for the entire Industrial Revolution,” he says.

Waste wood is often openly burned or left to rot. Both of these scenarios emit 100% of the wood’s carbon. If turned into biochar, McAvoy says only a third goes back into the atmosphere. The rest is stored as a solid of almost pure carbon. 

To make biochar, you need large pieces of waste wood and a kiln. McAvoy’s kiln is a simple machine: just two rings of metal kept together by thumb screws. It comes up to his ribs and is about the size of a hot tub.

The bottom is packed with sand to keep air from seeping in. Using a lighter, he ignites small bundles of kindling on top of the spruce and birch branches. Both of these steps are crucial to deprive the kiln of oxygen.

“Pretty soon a flame cap forms over the top of it, and it consumes all the smoke, all the combustibles coming up,” McAvoy says. “So it’s very clean burning.”

Thick smoke and ash billow from the damp wood now roaring with flames. 

“It’s more productive and easier and less smoky if the wood is a little bit dry, which is not so easy in Sitka.”

The wood needs to burn for about an hour. That means there’s time for lunch. 

“I have hand sanitizer. I have foil. I have bean and cheese and beef and bean burritos. I recommend you grab one and some foil and wrap it up and put it on the top edge of the kiln,” McAvoy says. “Hope your expectations for a good lunch weren’t too high.”

The pile that once poked out above the kiln’s walls has shrunk. Small pieces of dark, black charcoal litter the bottom. The next step requires perfect timing. 

“Like when you’re sitting around a campfire late at night, you’re kind of falling asleep, and it poofs out, and it’s just coals,” he says.

That’s when it’s time to quench the burning wood. McAvoy douses the kiln with a garden hose. This stops the biochar from turning to ash. He knows it’s cool enough when he can run his bare hands through the char.

McAvoy says biochar is like a sponge that soaks up compost’s nutrients when mixed together. And there’s another upside according to Andrea Fraga, a gardening teacher at Pacific High School.

“As I get older, my back gets sore. I think about not turning compost piles,” Fraga says. “So if you don’t have to turn them as much, if they’re full of biochar, that’s great.”

For drier climates, the char holds onto water to keep soils moist. Biochar also has its benefits for wetter regions like Southeast Alaska. 

“It’s known to hold the nutrients on site and help to prevent the leaching that the heavy rainfall here creates,” he says.

Though it’s not widely used, McAvoy hopes his demonstrations across the country will educate and inspire more people to try it out.

He scrapes up a few handfuls of char and plops it into garbage bags to send home with gardeners. McAvoy hopes his workshop plants a seed for what will grow into a more common practice.  

When the Gary Paxton Industrial Park board met on Thursday (7-16-26), it approved an agreement and waiver for owners of uninsured boats. The document would allow owners to haul their uninsured vessels, as long as they agree to assume financial responsibility if the boat is damaged or spills fuel during the lifting process.

The owner must also pony up a substantial deposit. Board Member Casey Campbell said that was the only part giving him pause. 

“That $5,000 is going to be hard for people to deal with, and I almost feel like we just take it out. I don’t know what it’s gonna get us,” Campbell said. “We all know it’s not gonna solve an environmental spill or anything like that. So it’s kind of like we’re doing it because it feels good, but then it’s not gonna help the people who are trying to get hauled out.”

Park Director Garry White said while the money wouldn’t cover much more than a small spill, it was important to include it. 

“If there’s a big event, it’s not going to cover that, obviously. And then, this document has recourse to go after…whether the recourse is achievable or not,” White said. “But it also shows that some of these boat owners will have skin in the game, and understand that there is some issue going forward to the citizens in town if there is a spill.”

At the previous meeting, the board asked White to investigate whether any insurance companies could help cover the upfront cost for vessel owners through a loan, or bond. White said he’d had little luck courting insurance companies, but a private individual had expressed interest in providing bonds.

The board made one change to the document, adding that the $5000 spill fee could be covered with cash or bond, then approved the waiver unanimously. White said now city staff will work with Highmark Marine, the haulout operator, to negotiate adding the waiver to their operating agreement. Ultimately the Sitka Assembly must approve any changes to the haulout contract. 

Former Assembly Member Chris Ystad will serve on the Sitka Assembly until the next municipal election. This comes after former Assembly Member Tim Pike stepped down last month. 

Ystad, a local fisherman, served on the assembly from 2022 to 2025. He said while he’s enjoyed his time off the assembly, there are still things he wants to see through, like finding a solution for hauling uninsured boats at the new, city-owned, contractor-operated shipyard.  

“I still want to serve the community,” Ystad told the Sitka Assembly on Tuesday. “It’s a community I care for very much, and I do have some unfinished items that I would like to see across the finish line, [and] at least help get there if it doesn’t happen within these three months. [During] my time away, I’ve also thought of a few other things that I’d like to try to address. Three months is a tight timeline, but maybe I can at least get the ball rolling and the discussions started.”

The assembly unanimously voted to appoint Ystad over Jeremy Plank, a local accountant and business owner who currently serves as the chair of the city’s tourism commission.

Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz said he voted for Ystad because of his previous experience on the assembly, and said he supports keeping Plank in his seat on the tourism commission. 

“I find his operation and running of the tourism commission to be extremely valuable, and I think that we would be benefited the most by keeping him in that role, and then having Chris serve out the remainder of the term,” Eisenbeisz said.

Ystad was sworn in at the assembly meeting on Tuesday, where he was also appointed as vice deputy mayor. He said he does not plan to run for re-election in the upcoming municipal election.

The Sitka Assembly is moving forward with a discussion over whether or not to put $20,000 towards a Parks and Recreation Master Plan. At its regular meeting on Tuesday (7-14-26), the majority of assembly members rejected the funding, but the issue still advanced because of a rule in the city charter. 

Leaders and supporters of the Sitka’s Parks and Recreation program are developing a plan for its future. The Sitka Recreation Foundation, an outside organization that advocates for parks and green spaces, is leading the charge.

They hired a contractor, Corvus Design, to complete the multi-phase plan. The project launched in June. Parks and Recreation Manager Kevin Knox said it’s far overdue. 

“I do want to note that the last time we had a comprehensive recreation plan for the city was 1991,” he said.

Knox said the plan, which they hope to have finalized by January, is expected to cost at least $61,000. 

The city entered into an agreement with the recreation foundation earlier this year to help raise money for the project, and contributed about $15,000 as seed funding. Knox said while the foundation has already raised 20K with plans to raise more, they need more support from the city to complete the “visioning, community engagement, and conceptual design phases.” 

“Active community discussions have highlighted pressing infrastructure deficiencies lately that we plan to address, specifically regarding athletic fields, dark park accessibility, and modernizing our other outdoor recreational facilities,” he said.

Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz said the agreement indicates the recreation foundation will do the heavy funding lift, and its request for additional funding doesn’t necessarily align with that. 

“Do we want to do it? That is the question to me. Do we want to do this? Originally, we were talking about ownership of the project, right? And we were going to have a little seed money in this, and it was going to be SRF’s thing. At this point, this has become our project,” he said. “Does the municipality want to own the project at this point? Because I don’t think any of us are debating the worthiness of it. It’s the ownership of it.”

Assembly Member JJ Carlson said she was on board with the city’s initial contribution, but now it seems like they were “sold something that hasn’t been delivered.”

“This is becoming different than I thought we were getting into six months ago,” she said.

Assembly Member Thor Christianson said there’s a lot of public interest in the plan, and for him, it isn’t so much about the dollar amount. It’s more a question of if this plan is actually a priority for the city. 

“It’s no surprise to me that they are having to struggle to raise money from donations,” he said. “And it’s no surprise that it’s costing more than they really thought it was. I mean, almost everything we do these days is that way. The real question is, do we want to do this? Do we want this plan to happen, and are we willing to spend some money to do it?”

Ultimately, assembly members Christianson and Kevin Mosher voted in favor of the appropriation, with Carlson, Scott Saline, and Eisenbeisz opposed. While this would normally kill the item, the city’s charter requires a majority of seven for an ordinance to fail, even if there aren’t seven assembly members present. 

The assembly will discuss the item again at its meeting on July 28.

Nicholas Galanin carved away at a 25-foot totem pole in his Sitka studio, his dog sunning himself in the open warehouse doorway. 

“It’s a Kiks.ádi totem that’ll be raised in Juneau, I believe next year,” Galanin said, the sound of his chisel hitting wood resonating through the room. “I’ve had two apprentices, and we’ve been working on it for about a year. So [we’re here] trying to finish it.”

Galanin is a Lingít/Unangax̂ artist and musician whose work has been featured all over the country. In 2025, ArtReview listed him in the top 100 most influential people in the contemporary art world. His work is part of an exhibit referenced in a new 162-page White House report that alleges “anti-white” bias at the Smithsonian Institution. The report, titled “Saving America’s Story,” was released on the Fourth of July. 

“I come from a history of artists,” he said. “My great-grandfather designed the kootéeyaa totem right in front of the radio station. My father was a mentor, an artist. My uncle is a mentor, an artist. My children are artists.”

The White House referenced the Smithsonian exhibit “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” which wrapped up in Washington, D.C. last September. Galanin’s included piece is titled “The Imaginary Indian.” He describes it as a curio totem that you could find in a tourist shop that’s covered in a floral wallpaper design. 

“The work speaks towards [the] erasure of our people,” he said. “And it speaks towards the quote unquote consumption of our culture, without wanting the communities that create that work or that culture, which is a very typical colonial form of consuming and targeting and taking from Indigenous communities.”

In addition to Galanin’s piece, the exhibit included 81 other artworks created between 1792 and 2023, and examined the role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race in the United States. 

Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” targeting the exhibition and calling it “divisive” and “race-centered.” The order was followed by the new report from the White House Domestic Policy Council, which was released as Americans marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It accuses the Smithsonian of promoting what it calls a politically biased interpretation of the nation’s past.

Specifically, the White House takes issue with how the exhibit frames race as a social construct and highlights how societal systems have historically maintained privilege and disenfranchisement. 

Galanin said he’s received varying reactions from people after being targeted by the Trump Administration. He said one artist told him, “Congratulations!”

“If anything, it is a testament to the fact that our voices have power and our work is important, and it’s making an impact one way or another,” Galanin said. 

This isn’t the first time Galanin said he’s felt pushback around this specific exhibit. In September, he announced on social media that he would no longer participate in a Smithsonian symposium because of government censorship. 

“I feel like they were pressured to not promote our work and conversation publicly with the program and surrounding the exhibition,” he said. 

At the time, Galanin said he understood that the organizers were put in a challenging position due to the government review of the Smithsonian and its programming.

“I come from a lineage that has endured attempted erasure through cultural, linguistic and spiritual silencing,” his post read. “My people, and all Indigenous peoples of this hemisphere, have endured attempted erasure through legislative and physical violence. My work is only possible because of the ancestors who persisted and refused to be silenced; who continued to carry our culture and pass on that responsibility to me, to speak to a larger audience than was able to see or hear them.”

Galanin said the administration’s targeting of cultural institutions is part of a greater push to erase perspectives, experiences, and history. For example, a display at Sitka’s Russian Bishop’s House that references mistreatment of Alaska Natives by missionaries was flagged last year as part of Trump’s demand that national park facilities remove “improper ideology.” 

“The signage in that instance was targeted [and] deemed ‘anti-American,’” Galanin said. “But the sign spoke to the systematic violence that the government perpetuated and targeting Indigenous people — so the genocide of our people and our experience.”

But Galanin said this isn’t surprising. He said voices like his have been purposefully ignored and erased from institutions, from government, and from history for centuries.  

“To see this active push, obviously, it’s nothing new to our communities, where we’ve had to fight for a voice and a place to tell our stories,” he said. “But it’s like right there, front and center.” 

Galanin said the White House report could impact funding in the future, and further the censorship of Native and other marginalized voices. He said, “everyone should be concerned by that.” 

KCAW reached out to the Smithsonian for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication. 

Sitka Tribe of Alaska has a new general manager. In a press release on Tuesday (7-14-26), the Tribe announced Bert Adams will step into the role later this summer. Adams previously served as the executive director of Kenaitze Indian Tribe and the Native Village of Eyak.

Interim General Manager Rob Allen said the Sitka Tribe of Alaska Tribal Council kicked off its hiring process in April. After a couple of interviews, Adams traveled in from the Wasilla area for the final round with the Council. He also met with staff and community members. But it wasn’t his first time in town.

“He grew up in Yakutat and has played a lot of basketball in his time,” Allen said, “so he’s been to Sitka as a basketball player.”

Allen said the Tribe plans to build a maintenance facility for its buses and revamp a few of its buildings. He said Adams led similar projects during his previous positions in Tribal governance.

“We’re hoping that that experience and knowledge will help with the Sitka Tribal enterprises, and some of our thoughts and ideas on how to expand the scope and impact on the enterprise side,” Allen said.

Council Chairwoman Yeidikook’áa Brady-Howard said in the press release that Adams “will bring a fresh perspective and innovative new ideas” to Sitka Tribe of Alaska. 

Adams will step into his new role on August 17.