Klukwan residents focus on resource extraction, open government during talk with Kiehl, Story
- Chilkat Valley News
- Oct 17
- 5 min read
Community’s state legislators host office hours and two town halls while in the Chilkat Valley
By Rashah McChesney
Chilkat Valley News
Government transparency, oversight of permits, and the impact of logging and mining in the Chilkat Valley were a few of the topics state lawmakers Andi Story and Jesse Kiehl heard during an open house in Klukwan on Saturday.
The community meeting was one of a handful the local legislative delegation held during a long weekend trip to the region.
On the removal of regulation and oversight, Chilkat Indian Village of Klukwan vice president Kimberley Strong referenced a state executive order passed in the name of government efficiency, that could lead to automatic approval of natural resource permit applications if the state misses a deadline during the permitting process.
Earlier this year, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources Division of Mining, Land and Water put out an incomplete permit for public comment on a project that would see a log transfer facility, storage facility, and ship-mooring area in Lutak Inlet. The company hadn’t performed a required dive survey of the area it wants to use, and the state later withdrew the permit because of the omission, though it has since been resubmitted.
“We, as a small village, don’t have the resources to keep tracking every process that is in place – that they’re permitting – without any real onsite regulation of what is actually happening,” she said. “So that one got caught … by somebody else watchdogging that. So if we don’t even have that eye out there, what do you guys advise to help us make sure that the processes, the laws the legislative body put into place, are being followed?”
Kiehl said he thinks everyone is going to have to watch projects closer than they used to in the current federal and state political environment.
Kiehl said it’s natural for there to be tension between branches of the government and oversight is part of what legislatures have always done.
“But, boy, it seems like we’re having to do an awful lot,” he said.
He used the example of former Department of Revenue commissioner and current gubernatorial candidate Adam Crum, who approved a $50 million private equity investment shortly before leaving office in July. That account has typically been invested in such a way that it can be easily spent by the state on short notice.
“Those are the cash savings we use when things are tight,” Kiehl said. “Well, things are tight. And he took $50 million and on his own say-so put it into a long-term investment.”
Much of the conversation focused on the lack of federal oversight on projects and permits.
“There’s no checks and balances on the federal level that give us any idea that there’s any protections for the Lingít way of life in the Chilkat Valley,” Kimberley Strong said.
Council member David Strong asked if there was a chance to change the state’s process in permitting projects to include tribal consultation. Right now, that’s supposed to happen at the federal level, but Strong pointed out that it does not happen at the state level.
He told Kiehl and Story that he has been traveling and talking to tribal citizens in other parts of the state about the lack of meaningful tribal consultation – particularly when it comes to permitting for projects that impact Alaska Native communities.
“Each place I’ve been to was a topic of tribe and litigation in the state of Alaska, a lot of the tribes are talking about getting together to sue the state,” he said. “There’s got to be somebody talking about … working with Native communities to plan out – before they start actually building these projects – to get with the tribe and discuss their traditional territories.”
Kiehl said he thought it was an interesting idea, but believed the current governor would likely veto any legislative effort to overhaul the permitting system in that way.
Story said she sees that there is less respect now for meaningful government-to-government consultation, particularly at the federal level.
“That is alarming to everybody, I know,” she said. “They’re ignoring a significant part of the population.”
Kimberley Strong asked what the Juneau-based lawmakers think about the proposed Chilkat Connection, or Juneau access project.
The state is using federal highway funds to help develop the project. Nearly $30 million has been committed to develop a site at Cascade Point north of Juneau where a new ferry terminal could be built. Another $2.4 million is being spent to study having a road run up the west side of the Lynn Canal. Various iterations of the project have been discussed for decades and residents in Haines brought up the idea that it could be to open up the region to more mining during a recent community meeting.
Kiehl, who also heard about the Chilkat Connector from other communities in the Chilkat Valley, avoided taking a strong position. During office hours he hosted in the Haines library, he said he had not studied the differences between the west-side plan and the east-side plan, and is currently planning to “keep an open mind.”
In Klukwan, he expanded on that saying that he did not favor an expensive project, particularly one that did not have an extensive environmental impact statement.
“I’d be shocked if any of the concepts they put on paper going up the west side could be done for less than a billion dollars today,” he said. “I love to see my biologist friends employed, but I don’t think that’s how we need to spend everybody’s gas taxes.”
Story and Kiehl also held a townhall in Haines and hosted “office hours” on Friday at the library.
In their first visit to Haines since July, Kiehl painted a picture that not much had changed since the summer. In August, Kiehl, Story and the legislative majority overrode a school-funding veto by Gov. Mike Dunleavy — something Haines’ legislators had named as a top priority. But with the governor’s December draft budget deadline approaching, marking the start of next year’s budgeting, Kiehl said state finances remain bleak.
Dunleavy last year submitted a December budget with a $1.5 billion deficit. By the end of the legislative session, the legislature had cut back on spending toward a final budget featuring a $150 million surplus. At the end of the session, Kiehl said, the governor told the legislature that his December budget would feature a fiscal plan, detailing how the state might turn around its finances.
Kiehl said he would welcome a fiscal plan and more balanced budget from the governor.
“If the governor actually makes proposals that are serious and could put the state on a stable fiscal foot, and stabilizes state finances, that would be phenomenal. In no other administration have I seen a proposal to run a billion-and-a-half dollar deficit one year and a ten-year plan involving being $12 billion in the red in year ten.”
• This story originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.
