KCAW

Thank you so much for joining us to celebrate and support Raven Radio’s news team on Southeast Celebrates News Day this year! Listen below to conversations with one very familiar voice and two newer ones. News Director Katherine Rose interviewed former News Director Rob Woolsey, Reporter Hope McKenney interviewed KUCB News Director Maggie Nelson, and Sarah Evangeline Hughes News Resident Ryan Cotter interviewed KYUK Reporter Samantha Watson.

Hear them below, and join in on our end-of-year news drive here.

The owner of Sitka’s cruise dock wants to relocate his downtown bus stop and build a pedestrian pathway with commercial spaces, food vendors, and housing nearby. But the city’s planning commission has signaled it intends to deny the request.

Sitka’s cruise dock is about six miles away from the center of town. That means, on any given summer day, hundreds to thousands of cruise passengers hop on a tour bus for a round trip to the city’s convention center and visitor hub, Harrigan Centennial Hall. But Sitka Dock Company owner Chris McGraw wants to move the shuttle’s drop off point to private property on Oja Way, with plans to develop the area into a bus depot. 

At the Sitka Planning Commission meeting on December 17, McGraw requested a conditional use permit for the plan, which would give him the greenlight to develop two lots on Oja Way. Reading from a prepared statement, McGraw said the plan would mean fewer buses on the road each day, and less congestion and pollution downtown. 

“It would honestly be much easier for me to keep things exactly the way they are. I currently pay about $25,000 a year to use Centennial Hall for my shuttle operations, and I could simply continue operating here without investing anything for anything further,” McGraw said. “Instead, I’m investing a significant amount of money in this proposed new shuttle drop off location, because I believe we can do better than the status quo.”

McGraw said moving the bus stop would also reduce jaywalking across the downtown thoroughfare, Harbor Drive, a concern that led the city to hire a crew of traffic safety coordinators this past summer.

McGraw’s plan also includes developing a pedestrian pathway from the back of the bus stop through Etolin Way, funneling passengers to downtown Sitka’s main intersection. On one side of the pathway, they would pass an area designated for food trucks and tour vendors. On the other, an existing 12-plex on Etolin Way would be demolished to make way for a three-story building with retail spaces on the first floor and ten apartments on the upper floors.

He said the plan wasn’t about growth, but about management and improving safety.

“I’m trying to be part of the solution, and asking you to work with me to help improve conditions,” he said. “To allow me to improve the interaction between the cruise ship passengers that visit every summer and the community.”

The two lots on Oja Way are abutted by residential properties, though there are a couple of businesses on the same block, down the street. The state building, which houses Sitka’s courthouse and police station, is across the street on one side, and Xoots Elementary School is on the other. McGraw said he plans to work with the elementary school’s principal to avoid pickup and drop off times for students when school is in session, and his plan also includes installation of noise barriers and a “no idling” policy for buses, to limit emissions. 

More than 20 people voiced opposition to the project at the meeting. Tommy Joseph’s home abuts the property, but he said he’d likely leave if the project was approved. He said his family had planted a garden with hundreds of potatoes.

“If this goes through, we won’t be to do that again, because this is going to poison our land,” Joseph said. “I’m not going to be able to live there anymore. I’m going to have to leave this place. For one business, my business has to go.”

Joseph was one of several who voiced concerns about the air quality from the bus traffic and particulates in the air impacting food sources, like the nearby Pacific High School garden. Many worried about the depot’s proximity to schools, and the increase in traffic and noise. Auriella Hughes, who lives nearby, said it would change the fabric of the neighborhood.

“That is not what the downtown of Sitka is about. It’s not about housing, busses. We already have so many tourists. Great. Good for the economy. Excellent,” she said and then listed off several of individuals who live near the proposed bus depot property and had spoken in opposition. “These are real people living right there, and they will be driven out. You know they will,” she said. “Would you want to live next to that? I wouldn’t. No way. Nobody in their right mind would want to live next to that.” 

After a very detailed presentation on the application, Planning and Community Development Director Amy Ainslie clarified what the planning commission could consider when making their decision to approve or deny it. Ainslie said either way, they’d want to gather more information to bolster their call before the decision is finalized.

“This is a complex proposal and complex permit, and I want to make sure that we take the time to really make sure that both the conditions and the findings are accurate and forcible, robust, clear from the record,” Ainslie said. “I do not feel comfortable doing that tonight in, sort of in, one setting.” 

Commissioner Wendy Alderson said she didn’t feel the plan met the land use objectives in the city’s comprehensive plan. She said that while the application was for a “public transportation facility,” the bus service is actually private. 

“If you look at the application, that is a direct quote on the application,” Alderson said. “And not only is a private shuttle bus drop off not a permitted or conditional use in the public facilities use table, it is not a permitted or conditional use in any of the land use tables. That is what I’m basing my no on.”

Commissioner Robin Sherman said she appreciated some aspects of the proposal, like cutting back on congestion on Harbor Drive. But she didn’t know how they could prevent the development from evolving the neighborhood into a more commercial and seasonal area. 

“And I think that’s one of the things that Sitka really values, is that we, unlike some of the other communities that have heavy cruise ship tourism, our downtown is not a ghost town in you know, the off season when the cruise ships aren’t here,” Sherman said. “And I don’t know how, I find it hard to mitigate the impacts of what this use would do in the summer to the mix of property uses year round.”

The commission moved to deny the conditional use permit application, and pending staff findings, will finalize the decision at its meeting in January.

The Alaska Native Sisterhood Christmas Bazaar returns to ANB Founders Hall for all gift-shopping needs (or even just a nice cup of hot chocolate!) Debe Brincefield joins KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss what vendors attendees can expect at tomorrow’s event (12-20-25), as well as how any interested artists can sell their goods last minute as vendors.

The city may have finally secured an operator to run its visitor services program, Visit Sitka. But when the Sitka Assembly met on Tuesday (12-16-25), the group approved an initial round of funding to pay the contractor, but spent over two hours hashing out details over the contract. 

For years, the city has paid the Greater Sitka Chamber of Commerce to run Visit Sitka. But this past January, the Chamber announced it would not be pursuing a new contract because of “structural differences that were not aligned with the Chamber’s management of Visit Sitka.”

Their contract expired in June, but in light of the city’s unsuccessful efforts to secure another long-term contractor, the Chamber agreed to stay on through the end of the calendar year, and be available for a handoff in January, to give the city more time to find a permanent replacement.

After months of searching, the city got a bite this fall. At Tuesday’s Sitka Assembly meeting, Planning Director Amy Ainslie said the city received a joint submission from Element Agency and Agnew::Beck Consulting for the contract. 

“Element Agency has been a subcontractor to the Chamber for the Visit Sitka contract for several years,” Ainslie said. “They are very familiar with Sitka, and they do have some staff in Sitka, but they also have staff state-wide. Again, very familiar with Visit Sitka in providing primarily a lot of the promotional and marketing support, and they were very intimately involved in the development of the recently-adopted three-year strategic marketing plan.”

At the meeting, the assembly greenlit just over $300,000 in funding for the first six months of service. But when it came to approving the actual contract itself, there were reservations. City staff only had a partial draft contract ready for the meeting, and many assembly members weren’t comfortable giving Municipal Administrator John Leach authority to move forward without seeing the final document. 

“It’s not about trust, it’s about responsibility,” said Assembly Member Tim Pike. “It’s not that I don’t trust John if we voted to have him execute it that he’d bring back the contract we’re after. But that’s not my responsibility. My responsibility as an assembly member is to vote on contracts, and I’m not going to vote for one that I haven’t seen.”

Some assembly members worried that delaying a vote on the contract wouldn’t allow sufficient transition time to hand over the Visit Sitka service from the Chamber to the new operators. 

Assembly Member Kevin Mosher said getting visitors to Sitka takes a lot of work.

“And we have a really good thing going on,” he said. “I don’t want to interrupt the services. I want continuity of service, because I think it’s really really important. Tourism is basically our biggest industry now, and we have to continue doing that. And people are counting on the revenue from the tourism industry to help fund important things that they care about.”

But ultimately, after much deliberation, including multiple amendments to the original motion, assembly members voted unanimously to postpone a final vote on the contract until their Jan. 13 meeting. 

Several assembly members said they support the meat of the contract, and only want to see changes to the “legalese” — things like outlining duties upon termination or length of contract.

Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz said he intends to move forward with the contract once it’s updated. 

“I intend to go forward with this,” he said. “I intend to make this work. I’m excited to see a contractor who has already done this work for many many years step up to the plate.”

Under the proposed five-year contract, after the first six months, the city would pay the contractor $587,000 a year, with incremental increases over time.

“You’re looking at a small, one bedroom efficiency apartment that lined up as bunk on bunk sitting area on one side and across from that, a full counter with a two burner induction hot plate on it, with the single tank sink with the fan over the top and some lockers.”

That is Forchunatus Wayne, a board member for Sitka Homeless Coalition.

“And then in the back, and go through the through the front room area you got on one side a closet, and in the back you have a bath, a shower and lavatory setup.”

Wayne is standing in one of the 12-new Hítx’i Sáani tiny homes that are dedicated to providing housing to unhoused Sitkans. Other visitors file in and out of the room, whether to express awe at the home’s modern interior, or to find relief from the snowy, 30-degree weather outside. 

As somebody who has experienced being unhoused himself, Wayne is no stranger to how dangerous it can be to go without access to warm and reliable housing, especially during Alaskan winters. He says the location of the Hítx’i Sáani Community, next to Sitka Mini Storage at the end of Jarvis St., is especially meaningful to him. As a teenager growing up in Sitka, he got to know some unhoused folks who hung out in that area. 

“And one in particular, he’d probably be going, ‘Yes, this is a good thing,'” said Wayne. “But this has been needed for at least 30 years.”

And Wayne is not the only person excited by the grand opening of Hítx’i Sáani, which has been in development for three years. Numerous speakers from all across Alaska addressed the crowd of over 60 to padded applause from attendees’ gloved hands, from Maria Uchytil, the regional director for the Juneau office of Senator Dan Sullivan, to Sitka Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz.

“There are people in this town who just need a little bit of help to get back on their feet, and this is exactly what this is going to do for us. It’s going to strengthen our town in many more ways than just providing a roof over your head,” said Eisenbeisz. “And what an example of a day of why we need this, right? Everybody’s out here bundled up in hats, gloves, coats, we’re all a little bit cold. Can you imagine if you didn’t have one of these to go to after this event?”

For speakers such as longtime Sitka Homeless Coalition volunteer Lenise Henderson, helping get Hítx’i Sáani off the ground was a deeply personal endeavor, as her brother passed away while unhoused in Seattle, Washington.

“And I want to thank everybody here who spent even a minute on this, because I have a feeling that if there would have been something for my brother Jack, maybe he might be here with me,” said Henderson. “I’m really personally thankful for the closure and how my heart feels right now. It’s huge for me, and so thanks for letting me help.”

After many speeches, and much anticipation, the attendees all gathered around as Sitka Homeless Coalition Executive Director Andrew Hinton and Rasmuson Foundation’s Strategy Program Officer Deborah Vo cut a bright red ribbon marking the official grand opening of the Hítx’i Sáani Community, with much fanfare from the crowd. 

Holding one end of the unfurled ribbon is Denise Shaffer, the Programs Director for the Homeless Coalition, who was praised alongside Hinton by numerous speakers for her work in connecting the organization’s clients with the paperwork they need to move into the new homes. For Shaffer, it is an incredibly touching moment to celebrate all the people who helped make Hítx’i Sáani a reality.

“It’s extremely emotional for me, because I look around and I see so many people who have been a part of this,” said Shaffer. “In that role as connector, I also got to be a supporter. And you can’t pour from an empty cup, and all these people poured into mine. So it’s good to see them and good to celebrate.”

As of December 15, five  of the 12 housing units in Hítx’i Sáani are occupied by new tenants. Going forward, the Sitka Homeless Coalition hopes to build a services building for Hítx’i Sáani residents to gather and access essential behavioral health and employment services.

As snowy weather takes hold of Sitka, there’s still a wide variety of ways for Sitkans to engage with local birds. Maite Lorente, Victoria Vosburg, and Jasmine Shaw join KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss a wide array of events informing Sitkans on how to track and protect our feathered friends, from a movie screening on how to prevent birds from colliding into glass windows, to the upcoming feeder count and winter bird count.

It’s a cold, snowy day down by Sitka’s marine haulout. Inside the giant unheated commercial workspace, I can still see my breath as men weld and work on boat parts around me. 

Off to one side is a giant engine — or should I say two, one white and one dark grey — stuck together in an intricate pattern of metal and tubing. This engine is hybrid electric and is about to be put in the 50-foot fishing vessel Mirage.

The Mirage could be Alaska’s first official hybrid electric fishing boat, and it’s one step closer to hitting the water. The boat is part of a pilot program based in Sitka to address high fuel costs for the fishing fleet and maybe make fishing just a little bit greener.

“We hauled out at the end of October, early November, cracked a lot of eggs, making this big omelet,” said Ben Matthys, of Southeast Sparks, who’s been working to adapt and install the hybrid engine for the boat’s owner the past couple of months. He said they’re pioneering this technology to the fleet to prove that hybridization is viable. 

“Diesel is reliable,” he said, “but as we’re looking to save beyond those low hanging fruits, where do we go? And we decided that diesel electric is the way forward.”

The program is funded by a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, and includes converting two hybrid commercial fishing boats and one fully electric mariculture boat.

While the initial investment is high, Matthys said hopefully it’ll pay off for fishermen down the line. 

“The margins for fishing are getting tighter,” he said. “The price per pound of what people can market the fish for, or what’s purchased at the plant, is lower, and fuel and all operating costs are higher, so most are still tied to going to spaces A, B and C to go get the fish, and even sometimes having to work harder to find that same amount of fish to pay the bills. So as we move forward to the next options to save and become more profitable, this is it.”

Another benefit is helping to address the climate impacts of fossil fuels, and make it healthier for fishermen onboard who are often exposed to harmful fumes, according to Linda Behnken, a commercial fisherman and director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association (ALFA), which is pioneering the program. Fishermen might even be able to market their product as greener than the next guy and may be able to get a better price for their fish. 

“So we think there are health benefits for fishermen, as well as for the ocean, and for people’s bottom line,” Behnken said.

She said they’ve worked for years to find ways for the fleet to operate more efficiently, by changing certain boat operations, or making certain modifications to vessels. And after a lot of input from people at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, they identified hybrid technologies as the next best step for fishing boats operating out of small communities. 

“At a national level, there’s definitely a lot of interest across the country in hybrid or fully electric vessels,” Behnken said. “Folks in Maine at the Island Institute there have been working with their fleet to look at electric and hybrid. There’s some work being done in Norway on electric and hybrid, or alternative fuels. But up here, we’re really breaking new ground.”

Jeff Turner owns the Mirage. He fishes for spot prawns, salmon and halibut, to name a few, throughout the Gulf of Alaska. 

Turner said he used to longline out of Kodiak, which took about three days to travel to one way. At the end of the trip, he said, he’d rack up about $3,500 in fuel costs. If he could knock that down by a couple thousand dollars by longlining on a battery, he said that could be huge. 

“Hybridization, for me, started with, ‘Oh my god, I’m spending so much on fuel. There’s got to be a better way,'” Turner said. “This grant money came up and there was interest…I raised my hand and said, ‘I’ll try this.”

Throughout the process, Turner said, he’s been learning a lot, and there’s still a lot left to learn. But, he said, he’s ready to install the engine and hopefully hit the water in January.

“I’m really excited about the data they’re going to collect, [to see] how it changes the way I fish and what other people can do with it too,” he said. “So, I mean, it’s exciting [that] every day I go out, I’m going, ‘I’m fishing and researching.’ So it’s kind of nice that way too.”

Matthys, the marine electrician, said that collecting data is going to be important when proving to other fishermen that converting to hybrid energy will be worth the investment.  

“I’m excited to see the technology move forward, advance the fleet. We’re running mostly on 100 plus year old technology moving boats around. And I can understand, you know, grandpa did it, dad did it. It worked for them, and it’s working for me type deal. But as we advance to new technologies, I’m excited to see this stuff come forward,” Matthys said. “I look forward to serving the fleet, both in a traditional sense, and then in this new realm of technology.”

After the Mirage hits the water, Matthys will be working on installing an electric propulsion system on a gillnetter from Juneau and setting up a fully-electric mariculture vessel in Kodiak.

Elle Campbell and Ben Hughey joined KCAW on the Morning Interview to discuss Sitka Cirque’s upcoming Cirque Noir event on Dec. 20 at 8 p.m. at the Sitka Cirque studio. The immersive adult dance party includes aerial performances, visual art, live music, DJ sets, and roving characters. Listen to their conversation here:

Two different birds rarely seen in Sitka and much of Alaska showed up in Southeast last month. As KCAW’s Katherine Rose reports, it was exciting news for birders leading into a big month for our feathered friends–the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count.

In mid-November, the arrival of two rare birds in Sitka caught the attention of birders from around the state. Local naturalist Matt Goff said his son, a fellow naturalist, spotted them back-to-back.

“My son got ambitious about feeding birds this fall again, so [he’s] been putting out a lot of bird food, and he noticed a Harris’s sparrow in the yard, which is a bird that we’ve been looking for for a while,” Goff said.

The small brown sparrow breeds in the boreal forest of Northern Canada, but typically winters in the lower Midwest. Goff had never seen a Harris’s Sparrow in Sitka- the bird was last spotted here in the 1990s. 

Just minutes later, his son spotted a second bird.

“About a half hour later, he’s like, ‘There’s another unusual bird in the in the yard,'” Goff recalls. “And he says, ‘I think I remember what it is. I can’t remember its name, but it’s like, it begins with a D, and it’s rare,’ and I said, ‘Is it a Dickcissel? And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s what it was.'” 

The Dickcissel was even more unusual. Goff said the midwestern bird that winters in South America was last spotted in Juneau in 2004, and the Sitka sighting is the third on record for Alaska. Its arrival was so unexpected, it brought even more out-of-town visitors. Goff said after he posted about the sightings to the Alaska Rare Birds Facebook group, several birders from Anchorage flew down too…by plane, of course. 

“There’s folks that keep track of a list, their Alaska State list, how many birds they’ve seen in the state. Some of these folks have well over 300 species. One of the people that came had over 400 species,” Goff said. “And it’s pretty difficult for them to get new birds these days, because they’ve seen most of them.”

View the group’s eBird checklist to see the birds they spotted on their Sitka visit

For some it wasn’t their first stop- one drove over five hours from Anchorage to Valdez the day before to see a Broad-winged hawk, the first spotted in Alaska.

“Some of us are mad travelers when it comes to birds,” Goff said. “Especially unusual birds.”

While the Dickcissel hasn’t been seen since late November, Goff said it’s possible the Harris’s Sparrow will stick around for the winter. If it does, it could be counted as part of the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. Victoria Vosburg is a retired Alaska Raptor Center veterinarian, and she said it’s the country’s longest running citizen science initiative. 

“Way back in the beginning, people on Christmas Day used to get together and hunt. They called it a ‘side hunt,’ and it was a competition to see who could kill the most living things,” Vosburg said. “So it wasn’t just birds, it was killing everything. And then some people decided, ‘Let’s do something different. Let’s just count birds, instead of kill them.'”

For more than a century, the Christmas Bird Count has documented population declines and recoveries of all types of bird species, and the data collected during the count has influenced policy and conservation efforts. Sitkans began participating in the 1970s, and in just the past couple of decades, Vosburg said they’ve observed a lot. 

“I started running the bird count about 20 years ago, and just since I started doing that, we’ve seen swans come back to town. We’ve seen Anna’s hummingbird start spending the winter,” Vosburg said. “We’ve seen Eurasian collared doves come to town, population explosions, disappear, and now we’re watching them on the rise again.”

Sitka’s Christmas Bird Count is December 20, and there are a number of ways to get involved. But if you’re looking to see a Dickcissel or a Harris’s Sparrow, it’ll be a lucky break. Only one of each was spotted. Goff said that’s often the case with lost birds. 

“I think there’s some speculation that what might happen, in part, is their internal compass, so to speak, might be off 180 degrees or 90 degrees, or something like that, and they just go the wrong way because they orient differently,” Goff said. “Then they end up someplace that is not at all what their, sort of, biological systems are expecting.”

Goff said lost birds often look for the birds that are local and “in the know” to find food and sometimes they settle in for the winter. Sometimes not. But even if participants at the Christmas Bird Count don’t spot one of the rare birds, there are plenty of other bird species that are counting on being counted.

This Sunday, December 14, the Sitka National Historical Park will host a walk led by naturalist Connor Goff as a warm-up initiative for the annual bird count, which lasts nationally until January 5. A planning event is set for December 17, 6 p.m. at the Alaska Raptor Center, then the official count will happen in Sitka on December 20.

AFS-USA exchange students from Italy, Georgia and India joined the Morning Interview to talk about their exchange experience thus far, including the cultural differences, particularly the snow, and the excitement of experiencing new activities with their host families. They also discuss their upcoming presentation at Sitka Public Library on Tuesday, Dec. 16 at 6 p.m. Listen to their conversation here: