Alaska News Saturday Night, October 10, 2026

Among the options on the table for community fishing quota is a minimum age to receive it. Eleven. From the Last Frontier, this is Alaska News Saturday Night. This was a week when the paperwork and the real thing kept drifting apart: cash in the wrong column, fish a town owns but can't see, grant rules still being written. It stayed mild most places, and Southeast stayed wet.

0:27Auditors link Anchorage's $25 million cash misstatement to how SAP closes the books

Anchorage's outside auditors went before the Municipal Audit Committee on Wednesday to explain how the city's 2024 cash and investments ended up misstated by about twenty-five million dollars. That's the number to hold onto. Twenty-five million. The auditors, a firm called BDO, say the cash footnote in the city's financial statements didn't match the city's own trial balance, and they tied that partly to how the city's SAP accounting system closes the books. Chief Fiscal Officer Lance Wilber told the committee the cash was accounted for, "just not represented appropriately." I'm going to try that one on my bank. A BDO auditor explained that because of how SAP closes the books, city staff have to run corrections from prior years through equity. In twenty twenty-four, one ran through cash instead, and nobody caught it. The auditor said, "This is not something we do on most of our clients." So Anchorage is special. Not the kind of special you put on a welcome sign. The fix, for now, comes from Controller Stefanie Ryan. She says she pulls the 2025 numbers out of SAP and corrects them outside the system, "even if it's in an Excel workbook." Her review of that arrangement: "Not my favorite, but we're working through some things." Assembly member Erin Baldwin Day, who chairs the committee, said the workaround didn't sound sustainable, and that the city is paying millions of dollars for software that isn't helping it put together an audit coherently. So the expensive system holds the numbers, and the numbers that are right live in a spreadsheet next to it. It's like owning a very nice filing cabinet and keeping the real folder... on top of the filing cabinet. The city converted to SAP S/4HANA about a month ago. Ryan says the ERP team estimates the fix, with testing, could take about six months. Wilber says the change can affect other departments, so the city wants to make it collaboratively. Which is sensible. It also means there is a workbook in City Hall that is about to have a long and important career. BDO found five material weaknesses in the city's 2024 controls, including that the city didn't close its books on time. Wilber says the 2025 report will be more timely, but still behind.

2:49Anchorage ordinance would have boards write their own pre-sunset reports

That is the most honest status update I've heard from a government all year. Also at the Assembly. Member Sydney Scout has an ordinance that would let city boards and commissions write their own reports before they sunset. Covered boards end every three years unless the Assembly keeps them going. Right now, the Office of Internal Audit writes those reviews. Under this ordinance, the boards would write them themselves. The ordinance argues that sunset reviews mostly confirm things boards already keep, members, vacancies, meeting dates, minutes, and that Internal Audit's time is better spent on its risk assessments. Anchorage, as we just heard, has things to audit. The report would be due ninety days before sunset, approved at a public meeting, and would end with the board saying whether it should continue. I would like to see one board answer no. Just one. Just to see what the room does. In fairness to the ordinance, it says the city's sunset steps from a 2011 ordinance never made it into city code, which left them, in its words, "not readily discoverable" by the public or the board members. So for years the instructions for how a board ends were hiding. Which is one way never to end. A missing report wouldn't extend a board's term, and Internal Audit could still audit anybody it likes. The new rule only covers boards whose sunset is more than 120 days after it takes effect, so three boards facing an October fourteenth sunset are out, including the Public Naming Commission. They get their own ordinance keeping them through twenty twenty-nine, with a hearing Tuesday. Assembly Member Felix Rivera, who raised this last year, said he's been "on a mission for the last few years to try to streamline and reduce the number of sunset audits." Mission nearly accomplished.

4:33Council advisers back changes to help small Alaska towns fish their halibut and sablefish quota

Public hearing November fourth. Out on the water, or rather not on it. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council's Advisory Panel voted Thursday, without objection, to move a package of changes meant to help small coastal towns fish the halibut and sablefish quota they already own. Since two thousand four, small communities in the Gulf of Alaska and the Aleutians have been able to form nonprofits, buy quota, and lease it to residents. Nine of forty-six eligible towns have done it. And council staff say more than seven hundred fifty thousand pounds of that quota went unfished in twenty twenty-five. Part of the problem, according to the motion's author, is the lease itself. Once the quota is leased, it moves into the fisherman's account, and the community's manager can't see whether it's being fished. So the town owns the fish. It just isn't allowed to look at them. The package would let communities name residents as hired skippers instead. It would also set a minimum age to receive quota, and one of the options on the table is eleven. Now, about that seven hundred fifty thousand pounds. Duncan Fields, who manages the Old Harbor and Ouzinkie quota groups, told the panel those two fished all of theirs, and that the number is substantially skewed by Adak. Adak's community group holds just under a million pounds of Aleutian sablefish. A rule says one boat can catch no more than fifty thousand pounds of community sablefish a year. Staff ran it out. To fish its 2026 quota, Adak would need fourteen boats. So Adak doesn't have a fish problem. Adak has the fish, it has the paperwork, it is short about... it is short a fleet. Adak's representative told the panel, "It's staying in the water right now." Good news for the sablefish, anyway. The motion left the boat cap alone. The member who made it said she wasn't comfortable addressing it at this time, and added, "I'm not completely against it."

6:36Alaska opens $75 million rural health grant round before scoring rules are final

The full council takes it up in Anchorage through October thirteenth. And the Alaska Department of Health opened about seventy-five million dollars in rural health grants on September thirtieth. Applications are due October twenty-eighth, at 11:59 at night. The rules that will score those applications are still drafts. The department says the final rules will be posted by October fourteenth. Two weeks before the deadline. So if you run a rural clinic, you can start writing now, to scoring rules that may change. You can comment on those draft rules until October ninth. And then on the fourteenth you find out what happened to your comment, and you have two weeks left. Nobody at the department is pretending this is ideal. Betsy Wood, who directs the Office of Health Savings, told the advisory council that in an ideal world they would have provided proposed changes weeks ago. Jared Kosin of the Alaska Hospital and Healthcare Association called it "an example of just how terrible these timelines are," and then said the department "cannot delay this anymore." Which is two true things, said one right after the other, by the same man. A department official said the schedule keeps a January first start and gives a four-week window without applicants or staff "having to work over the holidays." So nobody works over Christmas. Everybody works over Halloween instead. And under the new rules, each entity serving a distinct community can submit up to five applications. Five shots... at a target they're still painting. Maggie and Bill have more of it. Here's North of Normal.

8:15Fairbanks senior commission to consider asking mayor to speed up a Senior Center bus shelter

Thank you, Walter. The bus stop at the Fairbanks Senior Center is in line for a covered shelter, with potential completion as late as 2037. Until then, according to a draft letter from the borough's senior advisory commission, riders wait on a bench that recently replaced a folding chair under a tree. I have milk in the fridge with more urgency than that.

8:38Kodiak Island Borough Assembly to weigh renewing five boards, one idle since 2022

Kodiak has an Emergency Services Council with the power to proclaim a local disaster. According to the borough clerk, the council last met March eighteenth, twenty twenty-two, and the Assembly decides October fifteenth whether to keep it. Nothing says ready for disaster like a four-year gap in the minutes.

8:57North Pole council advances comp time for on-call utility workers

North Pole utility workers may get one hour of comp time for every day they spend on call. The ordinance is sponsored by council members David Brandt and Santa Claus, and the council voted six to one to introduce it. Mayor Larry Terch the Third cast the only no. Someone had to stay off the nice list on overtime policy.

9:19Loring board weighs dock grant options with $60,625 on hand and an $8.5 million cheapest fix

The Loring Service Area Board has sixty thousand, six hundred twenty-five dollars. The cheapest dock fix the engineers priced is eight and a half million. So on Friday the board meets to talk about grants. Their savings account and their dock estimate are not on speaking terms.

9:37State proposes 50-year Anchorage airport lease to Northstar Holdings

The state transportation department has issued two public notices for the same fifty-year lease at the Anchorage airport. The posted notice lists rent of about forty-four thousand dollars a year. The emailed notice lists about thirty-one thousand, with different allowed uses and a different comment deadline. Same fifty years. Somewhere Save As became public process.

10:03Feds propose second Cook Inlet oil lease sale on the same terms after first drew no bids

The federal government's first Cook Inlet oil lease sale this year drew zero bids. So in March it is offering the same million acres on the same terms, because Congress wrote the terms into the law. The sale is called Big Beautiful Cook Inlet 2. If at first you do not succeed, Congress requires you to fail identically.

10:26Cordova council waives protest of Moose Caboose liquor license despite doubts about its hours

The Cordova City Council voted not to protest the liquor license renewal for the Moose Caboose, after members said they doubt it is open much. The city clerk said the only way to know would be for somebody to sit there around the clock for a few months. The bar may be closed. The burden of proof is wide open.

10:46Juneau airport's low-visibility approaches stay down as FAA cites trees

Two bad-weather approaches into Juneau's airport have been out for well over a year. Trees, the airport manager says the FAA told him, are scattering the signal, and the FAA is weighing cutting them or raising the equipment. Other airports fight weather. Juneau, by the FAA's account, is in arbitration with the landscaping.

11:07Failing controls keep shutting down JBER's F-22 paint booths, Air Force says

The Air Force says the four booths where F-22s are painted at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson keep shutting down, because the control software is out of date and the manufacturer no longer supports it. The Air Force plans to pay the company that designed the original system about eighty thousand dollars to replace it, without competing bids. Stealth coating, legacy software. One of those is harder to patch, and it is not the jet.

11:35Unofficial Kodiak Island Borough election results posted, canvass set for Oct. 14

Six votes separate third and fourth place in Kodiak's Assembly race. Seven hundred forty-two ballots have not been counted yet, and the canvass is October fourteenth. Until then, that six-vote gap is not a result. It is fan fiction.

11:52Ship Creek moose permits available online only starting Tuesday

Fish and Game opens 100 permits for the Ship Creek bull moose hunt online at 8 a.m. Tuesday. The department calls the terrain extremely demanding and will close the hunt once the quota is reached, which last year took twelve days. In twenty fifteen the hunt closed in four days. Your coffee will still be brewing.

12:13Houston passes two-year pause on data centers as state weighs AIDEA land transfer

The Houston City Council voted unanimously to pause data center permits for two years. Meanwhile the state Department of Natural Resources proposes giving nearly 20,000 acres about two miles north of Houston to AIDEA, the state development authority, at no cost. Free. AIDEA does not need a prospectus. It needs a gift bag.

12:35Yakutat set gillnetters must donate any Situk king that dies in the net

Yakutat set gillnetters on the Situk-Ahrnklin Inlet may not keep a single king salmon through Wednesday, after the Situk weir counted 219 kings against a goal of at least 450. Any king that comes up dead in the net has its dorsal fin cut off and is donated to people in need, recorded on the fish ticket as code 86, Donated. The kings that hit the net still get a destination. The run did not.

13:03Anchorage Assembly takes up Chugiak senior housing lease extension to 2094

This is a good one. A Chugiak senior nonprofit plans about sixty affordable apartments on city land next to the senior center, and the Anchorage Assembly is taking up an extension that would run the lease to 2094. Without a change, the lease ends this month. So it is this month, or 2094. That is the widest definition of month-to-month I have ever heard. That's the desk. Here's what's coming. Tuesday, public comments are due to the Alaska Board of Fisheries ahead of its work session on escapement goals and agenda changes. That's where the rules start for anyone who fishes commercially, for sport, or for subsistence. Thursday, the RM038 moose registration hunt closes in Units 3, 1B and 1C south of Point Hobart, and permit holders have reporting to do. So Tuesday you tell the state how many fish should get away, and Thursday you tell it how many moose didn't. Adak is still short a fleet. This was Alaska News Saturday Night, so come back next weekend: Alaska News dot com.