KCAW

Candidates running for mayor or a seat on the Sitka Assembly joined Raven Radio and the Daily Sitka Sentinel Tuesday night (9-15-26) to answer community members’ questions ahead of the municipal election this October. 

In back-to-back, hour-long forums, assembly and mayoral candidates laid out their stances on everything from diversifying Sitka’s economy to cell towers and tourism growth.

Outmigration in the region is a rising concern. Sitka has lost nearly a thousand people in the past decade — mostly children and working age residents.

Thor Christianson, a long-time assembly member making his second bid for the mayor’s chair, said to address the demographic shift, the city needs to work to develop land for affordable housing, continue to look for ways to fund childcare facilities, and support economic development. He said there are also some “big ticket items” he’s been looking into recently.

“The [U.S.] Coast Guard’s going to have to put those 11 new icebreakers they just are getting someplace, and they’re going to need to be on the West Coast up north,” Christianson said. “So there’s a decent chance if we work at it, we might be able to get one of them. Also, the [U.S.] Navy is looking at a large repair facility they want to have in Alaska at a deep water port. That’s something that maybe we could work on here. I don’t know if that would come to fruition, but we’ve got to work on everything and anything.” 

Lisa Lane, a first-time candidate for public office, said she’d bring a “new and different voice” to the table. When asked what she would do as Sitka’s mayor to streamline government processes to make decisions faster, she said sometimes decisions take time. 

“Sometimes you can’t make fast decisions,” she said. “You have to look at the long game. It’s like playing chess. If [you’re] rash or make a decision too quickly, you might be making something that’s gonna make a ripple that turns into a tsunami. I think everything needs to be researched and planned, even though sometimes that’s painful. Most people aren’t very patient. But a long, deep breath through your nose and a glass of water helps.” 

Mayoral candidates were also asked what role the city government should play in preparing for upcoming changes to the federal food assistance program (SNAP), access to health insurance and Medicaid, and rising heating fuel costs that could impact Sitkans. Longtime assembly member and mayoral candidate Kevin Mosher said that he’s no stranger to financial struggles, and while the city can’t directly influence many of those state and federal programs, it can point people towards resources. 

“We can make sure our utility subsidization fund is fully funded, and people know about it. We can direct people to outside help,” he said. “And I know it seems counterintuitive to work on childcare with the tax, but the housing and childcare go hand-in-hand, and it’s a long-term solution that can, in the end, help with the cost of living. And those are the kind of things we need to work on. So we need to really dig our heads in and really work hard on these things to try to help people.” 

Local business owner Sherri Blankenship narrowly lost her bid for a seat on the assembly last year, and has thrown her hat in the ring a second time. When asked whether she supports a seasonal sales tax increase to fund childcare solutions, she said as a parent to four children, the issue is dear to her heart. She said while she doesn’t yet know where she stands on a tax increase, the issue is “multi-faceted” and the business community should be part of the solution. 

“Childcare is workforce development, and it is essential to retaining employees and in retaining our population,” Blankenship said. “I think that we should aggressively pursue a private funding model, and also take our largest employers in town, such as SEARHC, bring them to the table and ask them to participate in these talks, and help the community out, and then aggressively go after federal and state funding as well, and see where our shortfall falls.” 

Candidates were also asked if a Memorandum of Understanding between the city and cruise dock company that establishes guidelines for cruise ships is working. Incumbent assembly candidate JJ Carlson said the agreement should be reviewed and more stakeholders need to be brought into the fold.  

“The MOU is an MOU. It’s a Memorandum of Understanding. It’s not binding. It’s not a contract. It’s a handshake,” she said. “But to really have it be more impactful, we need to get more people at the table. Currently, the MOU is between the City and Borough of Sitka and the Sitka Dock Company. Adding in the schedulers and the larger international organization for the cruise industry will make it even stronger. We’ve learned from it, and we’re seeing that it’s a bigger picture that we need to move towards.”

Darrell Windsor has served on Sitka’s Planning Commission for 15 years and this is his first bid for an assembly seat. He said 100% of any future housing developed on city land should be affordable. 

“Affordable for me is not affordable for you, or affordable for the CEO of SEARHC,” he said. “We were looking at these properties [at] our last Planning Commission meeting, and the big question was high density or low density? I mean, can we cram as many houses in these places as we can, or spread it out? I think in the [area behind the] high school, it should be about a 50-50 on that. Affordable housing? Yeah, [it] should all be affordable.”

The fourth candidate running for a seat on the assembly, Mary Ann Hall, did not attend the forum.

Aaron Jacobs, a senior hydrologist and meteorologist, joins KCAW for the Morning Interview. Jacobs examines the water cycle to help with weather and flood forecasting for the National Weather Service. He’s in Sitka working with the U.S. Geological Survey Land Hazards Group to research the connection between atmospheric conditions and landslide risks in Southeast Alaska. Listen to the conversation here:

The Roadless Rule is a 2001 environmental conservation law that protects 45 million acres of national forests across the country from logging, including over nine million acres of the Tongass. Last month, the United States Department of Agriculture filed a plan to repeal it. The deadline to submit public comment on a proposed plan to repeal the Roadless Rule has now been extended to October 6. Sitka Conservation Society Executive Director Andrew Thoms joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss the Roadless Rule and local opportunities for public participation. Listen here:

Nearly 630,000 cruise passengers are set to visit Sitka in 2027, making next summer the biggest in the community’s history. The record-breaking season will be the latest of several in recent years, and follows ongoing community debate on the level of cruise traffic Sitkans want.

Voters rejected an initiative to cap cruise traffic in 2025, shortly after the Sitka Assembly narrowly approved a “Memorandum of Understanding” between the city and the cruise dock to set some parameters. In contrast to the cap initiative, the MOU was presented as a way for the city and the industry to agree on guidelines to follow, without hard, legally binding limits.

At a Sitka Tourism Commission meeting on September 10, some community members said the news of next year’s numbers means it’s time to revisit the document.

Klaudia Leccese is with Small Town SOUL, the advocacy group that filed the cruise cap initiative and continues to push for a regulatory approach. She said Sitka needs to “get a grip” on the situation, and it’s critical to start now since the industry schedules ships years in advance. 

“Increases, like what is scheduled for now for 2027, tell us that the MOU doesn’t have any teeth and isn’t working. So we’re really concerned about the MOU. It doesn’t seem like it’s a strong enough thing to make sure that we don’t have increases, or you know a creep upward,” Leccese said. “We really need to kind of come together and have something that we can all count on as being solid information, so we can really know what the community does want.”

There are roughly 22 days with more than 7000 passengers in next year’s cruise calendar. SOUL organizers pointed to data from previous community survey from 2023– in that survey a majority of respondents preferred 6000 passengers a day or less. Leccese said 630,000 visitors is too many for the small town to accommodate. But Sitka Dock Company owner Chris McGraw pushed back. 

“The numbers are not out of control. They’re not continuing to go up exponentially. We have a bump in 2027 of the days over 7000, and that 7000 number was not a cap. It was never intended to be a cap in the MOU,” McGraw said.

McGraw noted that the schedule is set to drop back down in 2028 with just over 600,000 visitors. But he said next year Sitka is ready to accommodate the increase with more infrastructure and new tour businesses to disperse passengers and ease congestion downtown. He used his own tour company, Adventure Sitka, as an example. 

“And on a busy 7,000 passenger day, we’ll have over 500 people on tour in Adventure Sitka, and that’s either on boats or kayaks, and we’ll put over 800 people through our theater. So that’s 1,300 people that in 2023 and 2024 would have just been dropped off downtown,” McGraw said. “And we’re not the only company that has added that. You see more vans, you see more boats, and the people have been dispersed. So it’s difficult to compare apples to apples from 2023 to 2026.”

Following presentations from McGraw and SOUL, the commission opened the floor up to a handful of Sitkans in attendance. Teal West is a downtown business owner and member of Safeguard Sitka’s Future, an advocacy group that campaigned against cruise limits. She said the MOU is working.

“I think it matters that we continue to talk about the data, and not the emotions. The data is that it’s working, so let’s keep doing what we’re doing,” West said. “We can’t continue to move this goalpost every time we see numbers come up. We have to listen, and we have to see, and we have to listen to the experiences that everybody is having in the community, not just a certain group of people.” 

But Phyllis Hackett, a former tourism task force member, said the commission should acknowledge the continuing effects of the industry’s rapid growth.

“The effect is positive for some and negative for some, but overall, it is dramatic. It is very dramatic, and growing pains, yes, but it’s a dramatic effect, and it does deserve some attention,” Hackett said. “And I think that you need to make a recommendation to the assembly to acknowledge that, and to work towards finding something with with the stakeholders, finding something that is going to be able to spread the effect out, so that people can see all sides of it.” 

The commission’s vice chair, Bethany Lowrance, is a local tour operator. Lowrance said while new businesses may have helped disperse high traffic away from downtown, they’ve also begun to create congestion in other areas, like Sitka’s trail system.

“I’m excited that we have so many new businesses that are getting out and getting to show off our beautiful hometown, but at the same time, at what cost? Not only to us, but to our visitors as well, giving them the experience that we want to give them,” Lowrance said. “So I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. I love what we’re doing, but I feel like we’re at a point where we we need to look, because we’re in the biggest city in the world, or in the United States, but we’re very little as to where we can take [people].” 

Lowrance said she doesn’t know what the commission’s next steps should be without more community input, but she said there should be next steps.

Member Devon Calvin said the group should move toward revisiting the MOU and replacing it with a new agreement. But Chair Jeremy Plank and member Sherri Blankenship said they felt the collaboration between the city and the industry had improved the situation year-over-year, and takes time to work. Still, they felt one missing piece in the MOU needed to be addressed. That’s the addition of cruise line associations, Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) and Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska (CLAA). Without them at the table, Plank said the scheduling process stays outside of the city’s purview.

“If you look at the MOU over in Juneau, they are part of that. I think that they should be at the table during this discussion, and if there’s a mechanism that we can kind of tighten to try to bring them into that conversation earlier, it’s maybe bringing them [in]” Plank said. “It’s really hard to have a discussion about what’s going on with the schedule if we have one party that’s clearly missing at the table.”

The commission recommended the city’s tourism manager investigate bringing CLIA and CLAA to the table on a 5-1 vote with Calvin opposed. 

Jean Larson-Rein and her golden retriever, Minto, circle around small boxes in the parking lot of the Sitka Fire Department. 

“We’re looking for bones,” Larson-Rein says. “Minto, bones.”

It’s a training exercise to see if Minto can pick out the package with human remains. He parades around for a bit before diving at one of the boxes with his nose. 

“Yes! Good job! Good job!” Larson-Rein says.

Larson-Rein and Minto traveled from Juneau for Paws Across Alaska, a weekend-long K-9 search and rescue conference. The gathering was put together Karen Royce from Sitka Search and Rescue’s K-9 team.

“We’ve done this before with just Southeast dogs, but this time we wanted to do dogs all over the state of Alaska,” Royce says. “Dog teams are here from Fairbanks and Kodiak and Wrangell, Anchorage, Juneau, and Sitka.”

Search and rescue teams will sniff out buildings and work along docks and shorelines. They’ll also go over how to decontaminate their dogs and get into baskets the U.S. Coast Guard hoists during their rescues.

The weekend’s main focus is learning by doing. And this afternoon, the four-legged friends will be put to the test. 

“They are not back yet,” Royce says, laying out the details of a mock search and rescue, or SAR. “Family is very concerned and reporting them overdue.”

Two volunteers will be staged as lost berry pickers somewhere in the woods off of Katlian Bay Road. The teams go over descriptions of who they’re looking for. They gather their gear — neon vests, bear spray, and walkie talkies — and get into their cars. They head out the road and meet at a gravel parking lot.

“Who wants to run from the top coming down?,” asks Cathy Needham, the mock operation’s designated leader. She splits the group into six teams – each with one or two dogs —   to cover different areas. 

Teams set out in search of the lost berry pickers. Needham and a few others stay in the parking lot to run operations. They’ll communicate over radios with the crews on foot. 

Justin Jacques sits at a folding table behind an SUV working on his laptop. With satellite internet set up for the mock SAR, Jacques is able to track teams’ locations from their personal GPS devices. His map shows what ground has been covered.

“We can create maps that can figure a probability of location or figure out how far could they possibly hike to based on certain conditions,” Jacques says.

He has a TV-sized monitor in the trunk of the car to make the simulation run a little smoother.

“Say the person or instant commander is on the radio, and she just needs to turn her head and see where the team is, she can instantly look at that,” Jacques explains.

After about an hour of searching, Delilah, a German shepherd from Kodiak, finds one of the voluntarily-lost hikers sitting in the woods. 

“How are the berry pickers? Are they ambulatory and able to walk out with you?” a volunteer asks over the radio.

“He requests air lift but I think he’ll be fine,” another search team jokes.

Needham radios to the other groups that the operation is complete. 

With the lost hikers found, everyone heads back to the fire hall where they’ll discuss what went well and what could be improved. Their mock SAR ended successfully, but debriefing still provides important insight for operation planners and dog handlers in case the SAR had to continue. 

Luckily for the pretend berry pickers who sat silently in the woods all afternoon, today’s mission is complete.

Editor’s Note: KCAW has updated this story with the correct hometown of Delilah. The German shepherd is from Kodiak.

Sea chantey singer Jerry Bryant and Sitka Maritime Heritage Society’s Rebecca Poulson and Keith Nyitray join KCAW for the Morning Interview. Bryant will sing traditional maritime work songs this Friday (9-18-26) to honor Sitka’s fishing history through song. The concert will be at the Mean Queen Dungeon from 7 to 9 p.m. Listen to the conversation (and a snippet of a chantey) here:

Puzzling is usually a peaceful hobby stretched out over a couple of days. But some Sitkans looked to change the pace last week (9-3-26), piecing puzzles together in a race against the clock. Listen here:

Hailey Rinella, Charlie Bloede, Grace Billok, and Tess Wiegmann are going as fast as they can. But they’re not running a relay. They’re working on a jigsaw puzzle. 

It’s Sitka Public Library’s first-ever speed puzzling contest. Nine teams are racing to complete a 500-piece picture of a seaside town. Under a pale yellow sun, boats sail around a striped lighthouse. There are shops selling ice cream and lobster. It’s an illustration of a quiet coastal town. But some competitors are far from calm.

A stop watch projects onto a screen in the front of the room. Big blue numbers loom over the puzzlers, counting every millisecond. 

Separating pieces by their colors, a couple of teams seem to have a strategy. Like Steffi Rusk’s crew, who sits calmly around their table, shuffling pieces around with confidence.

“He is building the edge after we find them while we’re flipping so that everything is right-side up,” Rusk explains. “And then on this side of the table, we’re sorting by color or distinctive characteristics like letters.”

Rusk says she’s wanted to do a speed puzzling competition for years. Her group trained a handful of times before the contest. Practicing as a pair, their fastest time was around an hour and a half. But today, they have an extra teammate.

“I’m interested to see how the time changes with the three of us now,” Rusk says.

As the timer creeps past the 15-minute mark, most teams have the puzzle’s border in place. Across the room, Rinella, Bloede, Billok, and Wiegmann slowly rotate around their table, like a game of musical chairs.

With half an hour on the clock, the intensity grows by the minute. Puzzlers scramble through the piles of pieces as they string the seascape together. 

“There it is. That’s the lighthouse,” Bloede says. “The piece that was stumping us all along was the lighthouse.”

With the lighthouse in place, the four women have their sights set on the finish line. In just 38 minutes and nine seconds, the team of four has emerged victorious. Their reward? A $20 gift card to Old Harbor Books and something from the library’s prize cart for each of them. 

“Hands off puzzle pieces,” Adult Services Librarian Margot O’Connell says. “We have second place winner.”

Just minutes later, Rusk’s team — the one that practiced — takes second. But practice can’t totally make up for an extra set of hands. 

“They had one more person that got them those extra 10 minutes right there,” Rusk says.

Maybe another teammate was their missing piece. Or maybe the winning team had a ringer in Rinella.

“I was a child puzzle speed making star back in 2007,” Rinella claims.

“She actually set the Guinness World Record for fastest child puzzler,” Bloede says.

“No, that’s a lie,” Rinella admits.

With the next speed puzzling competition set for December, the reigning champs say they’re already planning their return. They joke that’s only if they’re allowed back, and warn Sitkans to watch out.

But the secret to success still isn’t certain. Is it better to rely on thought-out tactics or tempo? Maybe it’s teamwork. And for the four friends, that answer seems to be a good fit.

The Brave Heart Buoy Gala and Auction is September 12 at Odess Theater. The annual banquet is Brave Heart Volunteers largest fundraiser, supporting the organization’s mission to provide free companionship, respite, and education to anyone in Sitka experiencing loneliness, grief, and end of life. Nicole Miller and Sandy Butler joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss the event. Listen here:

Last year, a small group gathered at Sitka Public Library for the Big Ideas Book Club. For a couple of months, they’d meet weekly to discuss short stories and novellas across eras and perspectives. Earlier this month (8-18-26), the book club returned for its second year— this time with a new, historical focus.

Garrett Faulkner sits at one of six tables circled up in the middle of Sitka’s public library. He teaches writing and literature at Outer Coast, an undergraduate liberal arts program in town, and he’s helping lead this year’s Big Ideas Book Club. 

“History of any type — especially American history — is so put together and kind of reconstituted every time we think about it, and so I thought it would be interesting to look at the way that different pieces of American art are thinking about American history and American culture,” Faulkner says.

This year marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Faulkner, alongside Adult Services Librarian Margot O’Connell, selected texts, visual art, and music that look back on the nation’s history from different perspectives.

“We like to celebrate big anniversaries, but also those are sort of moments of reflection and reckoning with our own memories, how things are collectively remembered, how things are memorialized,” O’Connell says.

To prepare for today’s conversation, Sitkans read three excerpts: the opening chapter of Benjamin Franklin’s memoir, a lesser known short story by 19th century writer Nathaniel Hawthorne called “My Kinsmen, Major Molineux,” and an article from The Atlantic reflecting on Hawthorne’s point of view in that piece. 

“We’re kind of looking at like founding myths of the republic, and how people — some of whom were much more contemporary to those times — were looking back on those times and remembering them,” O’Connell says.

Lynn Bastoky, an English teacher at Mt. Edgecumbe High School, is a returning book club member. For Bastoky, the big ideas in this week’s readings are spurring some big questions. 

“As we move through history and change and evolve, how do we feel about our past? How do we feel about ourselves now? How did we feel about our past when we were in the past?” Bastoky asks.

Faulkner says historical content can spark conversations about how diverse people from different time periods perceive the past. 

“Art doesn’t have to treat with history necessarily, but when it does, it introduces all sorts of contradictions and points of contention,” he says. “Not that it has to be something especially contentious, but it is definitely fun to talk about with peers in the community.”

O’Connell says we consume a lot of information — the things we see in the news or on social media. But we don’t always have the time to digest it all. In response to that, this book club offers some breathing room. 

“It is valuable to look at things with intent and to look at things carefully, and then to kind of sit with how you feel about those things to present that to other people, and also to be challenged by other people’s ideas,” O’Connell says.

In the coming weeks, the Big Ideas Book Club will analyze how sculpture, public art, and music capture American culture and memory. The group is full, but O’Connell hopes this creates conversations across the community.

The kick off event for Sitka’s Wearable Art Show will take place on Friday, August 28 from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at Highliner Coffee Co. The launch party serves as an introduction and recruitment event for the annual show on February 6. Tonia Puletau-Lang and Jennifer Younger joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss the event. Listen here: