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Art and culture combined in masks
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CLARION
Some sun 33/16 More weather on Page A-2
P E N I N S U L A
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2014 Soldotna-Kenai, Alaska
Vol. 44, Issue 106
50 cents newsstands daily/$1.00 Sunday
KPBSD to talk projected $4.5 million shortfall
Question What do you think of the current weather pattern? n I’m enjoying the mild temperatures; n This is miserable, please bring winter back. To place your vote and comment, visit our Web site at www. peninsulaclarion. com. Results and selected comments will be posted each Tuesday in the Clarion, and a new question will be asked. Suggested questions may be submitted online or e-mailed to news@peninsulaclarion.com.
In the news Police: Body found in Chester Creek
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ANCHORAGE — Anchorage Police say a body was found in Chester Creek on Saturday morning. A woman walking her dogs in the area discovered the male body lying in the creek around 9:30 a.m. Police say the dead man is an Alaskan Native, approximately 40-50 years old. A preliminary investigation did not reveal any signs of foul play. Officers say the man was not carrying any form of identification and may have been homeless. According to witnesses who frequent the area, the man was not there yesterday. After the man is identified and his next of kin has been notified, his name will be released by the medical examiner’s office. — The Associated Press
By RASHAH McCHESNEY Peninsula Clarion
Photo by Rashah McChesney/Peninsula Clarion
Dwight Kramer, chairman of the Kenai Area Fishermen’s Coalition, looks at the schedule for the Board of Fisheries meeting Saturday in Anchorage.
Hundreds testify to BOF By RASHAH McCHESNEY Peninsula Clarion
ANCHORAGE — After two full days of public testimony, the Board of Fisheries is heard from the bulk of the 234 people signed up to testify on Upper Cook Inlet fisheries issues. Most who spoke were given three minutes to voice their support or opposition to the proposals the board will take up during its two-week meeting. About 20 people remain
‘It’s stupid to price people out of the market.’ ... See page A-6
‘This campaign is for the people, and starting from here, I believe that there will not be any fraud this time.’ ... See page A-7
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stakeholders in a particular geographic location and BOF members heard from several areas including Homer, Kenai and Soldotna, the Central Peninsula, Anchorage and Seward. Jim Stubbs, vice-chair for the Anchorage advisory committee said the group met for more than 30 hours in advance of the meeting to decide which proposals it supported —including two proposals to raise minimum escapements for king salmon on the Kenai River.
“Our early run kings are forecast at coming in at 1/6 of the minimum escapement goal...age six kings at only 5 percent of average, that means we’ve almost lost those,” Stubbs said. “I guess the question is, how long will we continue to watch as this decline continues before we decide to draw a line in the sand.” Stubbs said it was time for the Board of Fisheries to take action on the dwindling king salmon runs. In previous years, board See FISH, page A-10
See BUDGET, page A-10
Fascinating world hides in cold waters off Alaska By MARY CATHARINE MARTIN Alaska News Service-Alaska
Inside
to testify Monday before the board moves into committee deliberations. Several re-occuring subjects included popular, but struggling fisheries in the Mat-Su borough, Kenai king salmon, the personal use fishery and proposed gear and time restrictions on commercial set and gillnet fishing. Local advisory committee representatives were given more time to speak as they spoke about proposals voted on by committee members. Each committee represents
The Kenai Peninsula Board of Education will meet today to discuss a projected budget shortfall of more than $4.5 million for the 2014-15 school year. Previously, administrators had projected a difference between revenues and expenditures of about $3.4 million, however the original figure did not factor in the district’s new salary schedule, which includes 2 percent across the board raises for faculty and staff. The district’s preliminary budget projection has been available since November, but has been revised since then as it is not due in its final form to the board of education and school board until mid-April. The budget projection also includes $1.741 million in “one-time” funding from the state which it has received for the last three years. Assistant Superintendent Dave Jones said the district did not put that funding into its budget projections last year, but as it was included in Gov. Sean Parnell’s budget this year, the district included the amount in its own projections. Last year the school district spent about $1.2 million more than it brought in, Jones said.
Juneau Empire
JUNEAU — Giant pacific octopi hide beneath rocks, reaching out tentacles to explore a diver. Schools of spawning salmon swim upstream. Prowfish surround the wreck of the Princess Sophia. Recreational scuba diving in Southeast Alaska requires a little more work and offers different challenges than warmwater diving, but those who do it say it provides sights unlike those anywhere else in the world.
The Allure of the deep When Annette G. E. Smith was a child, she was in canoeing accident so traumatic, panic
would set in anytime she got water up her nose. It wasn’t until age 45 that an instructor in Fiji told her she should learn scuba diving. She laughed at him. “He said ‘I’ll teach you.’ And I was a challenge,” she said. “Once I got over that fear it was like ‘This is it’ for me. It’s an amazing world down there … What’s even more amazing is how incredible it is under the water here. People don’t think of there being much in cold water, but we have some amazing corals and sponges.” Now, when she dives, she’s relaxed to the point she can’t even think about her “land life.” “Any stress or troubles that I have in my land life are instantly gone,” she said. “It’s the most amazing thing.”
Local Challenges Local photographer Art Sutch is a certified dive master and dives regularly, selling photos and calendars from his underwater experiences at his downtown shop. “You’re dealing with a lot of adverse conditions up here,” Sutch said. “Deep, cold water, zero visibility, current, sea lions coming up chattering their teeth at you … the biggest prerequisite is to get trained well, and get experience with experienced people before you go do a lot of crazy things on your own.” Divers here used to wear wetsuits. It’s something Sutch said “just about killed me.” Most divers now use drysuits, which require additional
certification; divers have to counteract the lift of the air the suit traps with weights of between 30 and 40 pounds, said Phil Sellick, owner of the Scuba Tank. Southeast Alaska divers also face seasonal challenges. Winter, in which the ambient water temperature can hover around 37 degrees, provides for better visibility. Summer has more glacial runoff. It also has more plankton bloom. Winter, of course, also has shorter days and less light. “Learning to dive in Alaska is like learning to drive on a semi,” Sellick said. He estimates, along with classes he teaches through the University of Alaska Southeast, he certifies between 50 and 100 people every year. Not all of them are regular divers,
however — he guesses that active recreational divers number around 200. Sometimes the visibility can get so bad people panic, feeling claustrophobic and unable to even see their hands in front of their face, Sutch said. Then there’s the creatures. Some are more gentle than others. Sutch calls sea lions “aquatic bears.” “They will do everything to you underwater that a bear will do on land,” he said. “They’ll charge you, chatter their teeth at you.”
Sights Sutch likes diving on the outer coast the best. The outer coast, he said, is where the waSee SCUBA, page A-10
Shell looks for silver linings in canceled drill season BY TIM BRADNER Morris News Service-Alaska Alaska Journal of Commerce
Shell’s investment in its Arctic Alaska offshore exploration is approaching $6 billion after eight years. For all that, the company has two test wells partly drilled in 2012, one in the Chukchi Sea and one in the Beaufort Sea. Shell’s latest setback is the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeal ruling invalidating part of the environmental impact statement, or EIS, for the 2008 Chukchi Sea lease sale.
It will take time for the Interior Department to correct that defect, and the company has canceled its planned 2014 exploration in the Arctic. The decision not to proceed with 2014 drilling was a tough one for Shell, the company’s Alaska president, Pete Slaiby, said in a Jan. 30 interview. However, one silver lining was that the ruling was on a narrow issue that can be remedied, Slaiby said. Unfortunately, that can’t be done in time for Shell to drill this summer. The issue is now back in Judge
Ralph Beistline’s U.S. District Court in Alaska. Slaiby wouldn’t speculate on the options before Beistline, but he said the fault identified by the 9th Circuit was very specific. The appeals court invalidated Beistline’s district court order that approved the EIS for the 2008 Outer Continental Shelf lease sale in the Chukchi Sea. Shell and other companied bid $2.6 billion on leases in the sale. A coalition of environmental groups and two Alaska Native organizations sued the Interior C
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Department, arguing the EIS was inadequate. The one area on which the three-judge panel of the appeals court agreed with the plaintiffs, although it was a split decision, was that the government assumption of a discovery in the lease sale area — one billion barrels of recoverable resources — was unrealistic, and too low. All of the environmental analysis was based on that number, however. If a larger discovery was assumed, the environmental analysis would have to be broader.
“It was a very narrow issue the court identified,” Slaiby said. “The good news here is that the decision didn’t open up a wide range of areas for discussion.” “We believe this means all the other work accomplished in the EIS is adequate. We believe there will be a very focused amount of work to bolster the EIS.” Slaiby wouldn’t speculate in the interview on the mechanics of how the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, would remedy the defeat. BOEM See SHELL, page A-10