Northern Journal

Anchorage's new mayor, Suzanne LaFrance, has pledged to fix what she describes as a broken city hall.

The team that she's hired so far is a group of technocratic policy nerd all-stars, and their three year term will function as a kind of test: Can an administration rooted in professional competence and policy expertise make meaningful progress in solving some of the deep-rooted, intractable problems facing the city? Namely, its homelessness crisis, but also the housing crunch, a looming spike in energy costs and the always annoying inability of snowplows to clear out streets within 15 minutes of a snowfall.

LaFrance joined the Northern Journal podcast for an hourlong interview on her background and the priorities and vision for her administration.

If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, the best thing you can do is to buy a paid subscription to Northern Journal. I'm also looking for underwriters and advertisers for this show — you can reach me at nat[at]northernjournal[dot]com. Thanks for listening.

There may not be any subject as serious as the one the last episode of this podcast covered — the emotional issue of salmon bycatch. So, now it's time to balance out that seriousness with frivolousness. And we mean serious frivolousness.

To be precise: This episode is about mammoth resurrection. And the possible transplantation and reintroduction of other charismatic megafauna to Alaska on a massive scale.

For this story to make sense, you have to read the original Northern Journal story. We've got a special guest host, Ephraim Froehlich. Apologies in advance for the puns.

If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, the best thing you can do is to buy a paid subscription to Northern Journal. I'm also looking for underwriters and advertisers for this show — you can reach me at nat[at]northernjournal[dot]com. Thanks for listening.

If you listen to this podcast, you probably know about "bycatch," the accidental harvest of fish that aren't boats' target species. The issue — specifically, of salmon bycatch by Bering Sea whitefish trawlers — has become an all-consuming debate for some Alaska commercial and subsistence fishermen, along with leaders of Washington-based seafood companies and Southwest Alaska tribes.

This episode features a rare interview with two officials from Bering Sea trawling-related businesses, Hunter Berns of Bering North and John Henderschedt of Phoenix Processor Limited Partnership. In it, we talk through the industry's history and operations — and the potential impacts of tighter regulations being considered by federal policymakers.

If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, the best thing you can do is to buy a paid subscription to Northern Journal. I'm also looking for underwriters and advertisers for this show — you can reach me at nat[at]northernjournal[dot]com. Thanks for listening.

For the past two years, we've been hearing about the impending shortage of the locally produced natural gas that we use to heat our homes and generate our electricity in Southcentral Alaska. But there's been little concrete information about how utilities plan to solve the problem. Now, we're hearing that supply gaps are developing sooner than originally expected — as soon as two winters from now. This recent piece from Erin McKittrick is a good overview.

In this episode of the Northern Journal podcast, we hear from one of the biggest players in the debate about what comes next. John Sims is the president of Enstar, which sells natural gas to households and commercial customers in Anchorage, the Kenai Peninsula and the Mat-Su. Enstar is privately owned, which means that some folks have been skeptical about its motives. Sims addresses those questions, plus many more, in this episode about the future of urban Alaska's energy economy.

If you like what you're hearing, the best thing you can do is to buy a paid subscription to Northern Journal. I'm also looking for underwriters and advertisers for this show — you can reach me at nat[at]northernjournal[dot]com. Thanks for listening.

Last month, we heard outrage from conservation advocate Brad Meiklejohn and tribal leader Aaron Leggett; those two guests thought utilities' new proposed plans to fix the Anchorage-area Eklutna hydroelectric project's harms to salmon were inadequate.

Now, it's time to hear directly from those utilities, which own the project at scenic Eklutna Lake. Guests on this episode include two utility spokespersons, Julie Hasquet from Chugach Electric Association and Julie Estey from Matanuska Electric Association, along with their consultant on the Eklutna project, Samantha Owen. They offer a robust defense of the utilities' study and planning process, and they share more details about why certain ideas for habitat improvements were chosen and others dismissed.

You'll get far more from this episode if you listen to the interview with Meiklejohn and Leggett first. Send your feedback and suggestions to nat [at] northernjournal [dot] com.