Investing in the Soil

In running the Metlakatla Indian Community S’ndooyntgm Galts’ap Community Garden, Gatgyeda Haayk has developed a particular relationship to soil. “People misunderstand soil,” she explained. 

Alongside permafrost, extreme climate, and a short growing season, poor soil is often cited as a reason why gardens will not grow in Alaska. “A lot of people think you could just throw something in the ground where it’s not that easy because our soil is so acidic,” Haayk said.

However, Haayk’s garden thrives. Watermelons and pumpkins, green onions, beets, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, beans, corn – Haayk grows a mix of Southeast Alaska staples and new plants.

The key is the dirt – investing in healthy soil can be a decades-long process. “The time and the effort and the love and all the energy – the soil that I have now, I built that soil,” Haayk said.

The investment is worth it to Haayk, because she believes community gardens help solve a basic challenge facing rural Alaskans: putting food on the table. 

Alaska’s rural retail grocery system is extremely costly to maintain, leading to unparalleled logistics challenges and famously expensive cheese. This is one reason the main source of food in rural Alaska is subsistence and personal use gathering. However, climate change, state and federal policy, and commercialization have disrupted longstanding practices of living off the land. 

As both retail and non-retail food systems come under stress, rural Alaskans are all the more willing to try new (and old) ways of obtaining food that align with their values, their budgets and their tastes. 

Small Planes and Fragile Supply Chains

More than 80% of Alaska communities are not connected to a central road network year round. These towns and villages are spread out over a tract of land two and a half times the size of Texas at the absolute periphery of the United States. Maintaining grocery stores is often impossible.

Additionally, Alaska is largely dependent on food from out of state. Mike Jones, an economist who studies rural food systems at the University of Alaska Anchorage, told the Daily Yonder in an interview that the food supply chain to remote Alaska is perhaps the most complex in the nation. 

Imported food reaches Alaska by plane or, mostly, by boat to the Port of Alaska. From there in-state suppliers rely on a “hub and spokes model” to get the food out to regional depots where it is then shuttled on to individual communities. “It is not so much planes, trains and automobiles as it is planes, barges and snowmobiles,” Jones said.

Each link in the supply chain raises costs for the end consumer and raises the likelihood of something going wrong in transit.

Jones pointed to Automated Weather Observing System (AWOS) outages as an example of how one small pain point can affect remote Alaska’s entire food system. AWOS weather stations collect data on Alaska’s extreme weather conditions. Alaska has about 140 AWOS stations, (a station-density far below the lower 48). When a station goes down, it inhibits a pilot’s ability to track weather conditions and FAA guidelines prohibit a commercial pilot from flying in an area for which they don’t have that weather data.

Outages ground planes and forsake food to hangars that usually lack sufficient cold storage capacity. In September of 2024, there were 55 unscheduled outages. That means a lot of rotting food. “Combine this with other issues like runway plowing, maintenance, labor constraints … you get major backlogs” Jones said. This jacks up the price of produce in rural Alaska, where average household income in some areas is as low as $36,753.

“That’s how you end up paying $11 for a gallon of milk,” said Bruce Botelho, former Attorney General of Alaska who was part of the effort to oppose the recent Kroger Albertsons merger. “Rural Alaska is a tiny market spread across vast geography … it is very difficult to establish competitive prices and availability,” Botelho told the Daily Yonder.

Traditional Foodways

Eva Burk is Dena’ Athabascan. Growing up, her family lived on a fish camp on the Tanana River about 50 miles south of Fairbanks. Large portions of her diet and her family’s livelihood came from the trapline. “My dad was born before Alaska had statehood… He was born a free man, him and his family could choose when and where and how much to fish and hunt and trap,” Burk said.

Burk was born 10 years after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) passed in Congress, a time when Alaska Native people were still “getting adjusted to capitalism … adjusting to owning land and getting engaged in the cash economy,” Burk said. ANCSA, and subsequent state and federal action, brought huge disruptions to day-to-day life for many Alaska Native people.

Burk has spent her career tracing the ongoing effects of these changes on Alaska Native food systems. Burk studies rural community development at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and serves on advisory panels for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, The Federal Subsistence Board, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

A 2004 report found that subsistence accounted for 29-69% of caloric intake in off-road communities. Personal use gathering and hunting has become more expensive as inflation drives up supply costs (like fuel and equipment) and regulation drives up permit costs. Climate change and commercial overuse have jeopardized key subsistence resources. Fisheries that have sustained Alaska native communities for millennia are in crisis. 

“We’ve been shut down from subsistence fishing for five years now,” said Burk, explaining that salmon depopulation sets off a series of cascading consequences for the subsistence system. Less salmon means increased predation of caribou calves and moose, both species traditionally vital to subsistence lifestyles. Loss of access to land and subsistence resources has forced Alaska Native communities to alter the food they eat. A University of Alaska Fairbanks report cites growing consumption of processed foods as a reason for higher instances of diabetes, childhood dental cavities, and colorectal cancer. 

Perhaps the most insidious threat is cultural loss. Burk worries that the next generation won’t have access to the methods of fishing, trapping, and hunting that her people have prized as part of a fundamental connection to nature. “Everything is spiraling out of control,” Burk said.

Continuing a History of Adaptation

The challenges are steep, but Gatgyeda Haayk noted that for the thousands of years people have lived in Alaska, they have overcome intense obstacles to forage, gather, and hunt food in some of the world’s most extreme environments. That history is not stagnant, but adaptive. Haayk said that when Tsimshian people migrated to New Metlakatla from British Columbia, they brought plants of value to them and helped them grow in their new environment. “Even though we aren’t, what they say, “traditional farmers,” we have also had our ways of cultivating the land,” Haayk said.

According to Burk, the work to adapt and maintain Alaska Native food sovereignty for 2025 and beyond happens at three levels: systems, community, and individual.

Much of Burk’s focus is on systems change. Her “four buckets” of work are “water stewardship, food sovereignty, cultural revitalization, and community wellness.” This means that one day she is in a North Pacific Fishery Advisory Panel meeting, trying to reduce bycatch (the incidental catch of unintended species) and the next day she is working to secure financing for a community buy-back project to build a small farm in Nenana. “Many of us have to wear a lot of hats in this work … but that’s what it takes to have Indigenous voices represented in the decision-making spaces,” she said.

At the community level, Heidi Rader, Director of the Alaska Tribes Extension program out of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, works to teach practices that enhance rural food security and Alaska Native food sovereignty. Spreading knowledge means meeting people; via an Alaska gardening blog, youtube videos about stewarding wild blueberries, or workshops on how to can salmon. 

Finally, Gatgyeda Haayk helps individuals adopt the practice of gardening. Because gardening is not widespread in rural Alaska, getting started can be daunting. Locals may not know what grows in their area. Haayk has tried to create a space where gardeners can learn from each other. Experimentation has led to new discoveries, like how to grow healthy pumpkins in a short season. It has also led to the recovery of lost growing practices.

Cultivating “Indian potatoes” in Metlakatla was once widespread, but Haayk was only able to find one family still growing them. That family gifted Haayk six potato starters. “Two years ago, I was able to grow over 100 pounds of potatoes,” Haayk said. She gave half of her harvest to the elders. “For them to have that connection to a piece of our heritage that was kind of lost. And then to see more and more community members want to grow that potato and be connected to it. It’s eating a part of our history.” 

Economic analysts sometimes doubt whether these sorts of solutions can scale to a level that fills the massive gaps of Alaska’s rural food system. However, to many food security advocates, solutions that only consider how to produce the cheapest calories miss the point. 

“I lost my daughter in 2006, I had always wanted to do a healing garden for her,” Haayk said. Haayk had spent years building up the community garden in Metlakatla in her daughter’s memory, when Covid-19 hit. The pandemic threatened to cut off the one food supply barge Metlakatla, an island community, relies on for basic goods and produce. Haayk’s garden became a community resource and people who had never gardened before started planting in her plots.

Food intertwines economic, cultural, health, spiritual values. That means when a food-system suffers, it can have deep, corrosive effects. To combat this, Burk emphasizes leaning on cultural strengths. “Sharing in the bounty and having potlatch [an Indigenous gift-giving feast], which is our culture. That’s how we get by and survive,” Burk said.

The post Amid Ongoing Threats to Local Food Systems, Alaska Native and Rural Alaskan Leaders Imagine Alternatives appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

The billions of dollars approved by Congress to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells have been frozen as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to government spending, creating concerns that the cleanup will be halted just as it’s getting started.

President Trump’s barrage of executive orders included a January directive called “Unleashing American Energy,” which, among other provisions, ordered that federal agencies stop distributing money appropriated by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

The Trump administration titled this section of the order “Terminating the Green New Deal.” But in freezing this congressionally approved spending, the administration halted a program that paid for plugging and reclaiming so-called “orphaned” or abandoned oil and gas wells. The order stated that agencies should “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from those two Biden laws. It set a 90-day deadline, upcoming in April, for agencies to review their spending programs and make sure that they align with the Trump administration’s goal of increasing U.S. energy production.

The orphaned well program, which was modeled on a North Dakota initiative, had been widely used by oil states, including several in the West.

The program — which set aside $4.7 billion, a historically large sum, for plugging wells — was distributed to states via grants from the Department of the Interior. In January, days before Trump took office, New Mexico announced that it would be receiving $5.5 million to clean up abandoned wells in the state. California also received a $9 million grant.

California, Colorado, Montana and New Mexico had each plugged over 100 orphaned wells using the Biden funds, according to an Interior Department report in 2024. Wyoming alone plugged 1,021 wells in just one year using federal grants.

As of last fall, the U.S. government had released over half a billion dollars in grants. Wells have been plugged in the people’s front yards, in national park areas and deep in the remote Alaskan wilderness. More than $3 billion are still left to be distributed, but previously available information about the grants appears to have been removed from the Interior Department’s website.

In response to questions from High Country News, an Interior Department spokesperson said that the grant program is “under review.”

“President Trump’s decisive actions are necessary steps to eliminate bureaucratic waste and refocus our agency on its core mission: serving the American people and managing our nation’s natural resources with integrity and efficiency,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Orphaned wells negatively impact current and future oil and gas development activities and pose significant risk to national energy security and public safety.”

In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.

Now the future of that work is uncertain, in legal limbo alongside many of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting policies. The funding in question had already been appropriated by Congress, making it unclear that the Trump administration can indefinitely cancel it.

On March 20, more than 30 House Democrats sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, asking him to clear up the lingering confusion surrounding orphaned well funding and restart the grant program.

The funding “protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

“We have already begun to hear from IIJA funding recipients impacted by this pause who now face an uncertain future after DOI issued a stop work order on their orphaned well remediation projects,” the letter states.

The letter goes on to say that the Interior Department has issued no guidance on the funds’ status.

“We urge you to resume distribution of this Congressionally directed funding immediately,” the letter stated. “It protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

ORPHANED WELLS represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “ playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.

The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.

The Biden administration’s infrastructure law was the first significant federal attempt to address the growing problem of orphaned wells across the United States, although the funding it provided paled in comparison to the scale of the problem.

The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”

Many state regulators are aware that their financial requirements for oil and gas operators are are aware of this pattern and struggle to prevent it.

Several state oil regulators stated this explicitly in a 2024 survey conducted by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), a quasi-governmental body that represents dozens of oil states. The documents were obtained via a records request by Fieldnotes, an industry watchdog, and shared with High Country News.

“Yes, this is the common life of a well,” regulators from Louisiana said, referring to the pattern of marginal wells being passed along to smaller companies.

Utah regulators agreed: “It is definitely a problem when wells are transferred to ‘poor’ operators.”

The plugging program was supposed to address these dysfunctional state programs, primarily by providing money. The Interior Department released its first round of grants in 2023, offering up $658 million to 26 states, including most of the oil states in the West.

The subsequent grants were intended to actually push states to fix their well-plugging programs and require that operators submit more money up front — enough to ensure that the industry and not the public ends up paying for the cost of plugging.

Known as regulatory improvement grants, these pools of funding required that states demonstrate higher financial assurance standards, increase scrutiny on well transfers, improve their plugging standards or show other reforms to their orphaned well regulatory regimes.

These grants essentially became the sole tool for the federal government to incentivize tougher state regulations. But the attempt immediately ran into headwinds: Oil states pushed back on these conditions. Some of this occurred via the IOGCC, which collaborated with the federal government on the rollout of the infrastructure law. This included initiatives to reduce orphaned well numbers, program implementation and data collection. Public documents show the inter-state commission lobbied to keep the federal guidelines as weak as possible. 

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere.”

In a meeting of the Texas Railroad Commission in May 2022, Commissioner Wayne Christian – also an appointee to the IOGCC – said that he was working to remove the requirements from the federal grants.

“I’m part of the negotiation with IOGCC on the dollars coming down,” Christian said. “The Interior Department kind of have slowed things down, because all of a sudden, surprise, surprise, they decided they wanted to tell us how to do our work. And so we’re kind of fighting back on that.”

Regulatory improvement grants would have made available an additional $40 million per state. Now the future of those grants and the improvement incentives are in jeopardy, though some groups are challenging the legality of Trump’s decision to freeze funds that had already been appropriated by Congress and passed into law.

Several environmental groups and many Democratic states have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, seeking to release the unspent funds from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts, the Biden administration’s landmark spending bills.

“The Trump Administration has continued to block funds needed for our domestic energy security, transportation, and infrastructure provided under the IRA and IIJA,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement in February, after filing an injunction alongside 23 Democratic attorney generals, attempting to halt the administration’s funding cuts.

Bonta’s statement noted that the administration was blocking funding that “creates well-paying jobs while simultaneously reducing harmful pollution.”

The post Trump halts historic orphaned well-plugging program appeared first on High Country News.

In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the U.S. military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the U.S. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples — Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others — that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.” 

When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the U.S. approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?  

Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes. 

“Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.” 

But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The U.S. military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals and 55-gallon drums. 

Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic. 

Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land. 

“By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says. 

This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October. 

The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.” 

“We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities.

A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded. 

The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Dept. of Environmental Conservation which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape.

“These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted. 

“DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said.

That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness. 

“It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages. 

“We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.” 

The U.S. military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through military training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and  Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70% of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more U.S. military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland. 

In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion. 

The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to U.S. federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the U.S. government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land. 

The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.” 

“The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint. 

“This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste on Mar 19, 2025.

What you need to know:

• The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District reached a settlement this week allowing students to engage in political discussions and peaceful protests on campus, with district officials having the authority to set protest time and place restrictions. The district must also pay out $30,000 in legal fees.
• The settlement resolves a 2023 lawsuit filed by two high school students who claimed their First Amendment rights were violated when officials blocked student political speech and investigated a student protest.
• Two additional lawsuits are pending: one challenges restrictions on transgender students’ bathroom access and privacy, and another class-action suit alleges illegal restraint and isolation of students with disabilities.

PALMER – The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District will allow students to hold political discussions on school grounds as long as they don’t interfere with others’ rights, according to the settlement of a 2023 lawsuit against the district announced this week.

The out-of-court settlement resolves a lawsuit filed on behalf of two high school students who said district officials repeatedly violated their First Amendment rights in 2023 by blocking their political statements on campus and investigating a protest staged at a school board meeting. 

The suit was filed in November 2023 by Quin Schachle, then a senior at Wasilla High School who served in student government, and Ben Kolendo, then a senior at Mat-Su Career & Technical High School who served as the student representative on the district school board. Schachle and Kolendo graduated in 2024. Kolendo lost a 2024 school board election bid to incumbent Tom Bergey.

As part of the settlement, Schachle, Kolendo and the district crafted a joint statement agreeing that students can assemble peacefully on school grounds, but district officials may set time, place and safety-related restrictions, according to documents shared by Kolendo. Setting those restrictions is a school district right established by previous case law, Kolendo said in an interview.

The agreement also allows students to have “open and honest” political discussions on any Mat-Su school campus as long as doing so does not interfere with the educational process or impact the rights or safety of other students or staff.

Schachle and Kolendo were represented pro bono by the Anchorage-based Northern Justice Project. As part of the settlement, the district must also pay $30,000 to cover attorney fees, according to terms shared by Kolendo.

The suit alleged that Mat-Su district officials violated students’ First Amendment rights through a trio of actions in fall 2023. 

A school board-directed investigation into whether teachers assisted students with a school board meeting protest intimidated students for expressing their opinions, the suit stated. Students were later banned from political speech during a pair of walkouts held throughout Mat-Su, including on Election Day, the suit alleged. Then, during the Election Day walkout, students were told they could not protest on the grounds of schools used as polling places, it stated.

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage. The notice of settlement was filed with the court Thursday.

School district officials were not immediately available for comment.

Kolendo and Schachle said they are happy with the outcome of the case.

“This is a good thing for students, that their rights are protected and the district is recognizing that,” Schachle said in an interview Friday.

A pair of other lawsuits regarding student rights filed against the district in late 2023 and early last year are still pending.

A lawsuit filed in Palmer Superior Court in January of last year on behalf of a transgender student argues that a school district rule banning him from using the bathroom of his choice violates his rights under the state constitution. It also contends that disclosing transgender students’ birth names and sex through the school’s internal information system is a violation of privacy.

A preliminary injunction issued in the case in late December requires the school district to address students by their parent-approved preferred name and not disclose their birth names. A trial date for the suit has not yet been set.

A class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage against the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in December 2023 claims the district illegally restrains and isolates disabled students.

A Feb. 26 court order in that case certifies the suit as representing all district students with an identified disability who have been restrained or secluded by district personnel. A trial date has not yet been set.

— Contact Amy Bushatz at contact@matsusentinel.com

What you need to know:

• Alaska state court officials are seeking $22.2 million in state funding to add three new courtrooms, offices and judges’ chambers to the Palmer Courthouse. The project would also add an enclosed second-floor shell on top of a portion of the new expansion for finishing later. 
• The expansion is needed because of the current large caseload at the courthouse and the region’s growing population. 
• Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s FY 2026 budget does not include funding for the expansion. Securing money for the project is a budget priority for state Sen. Shelley Hughes, who represents Palmer.

PALMER – A major expansion planned for the Alaska State Courthouse in Palmer would add courtrooms and chambers for more judges, an update court officials say is desperately needed to accommodate the region’s growing population and caseload.

The project would be the courthouse’s first expansion since 2008, when a $5.3 million project added about 15,000 square feet.

If approved as part of the state’s fiscal year 2026 budget, the new $22.2 million expansion would add about 17,000 square feet, including three courtrooms, bringing the total to 11, and space for three additional judges and their support staff, according to Alaska Court System officials. It would take up to four years to complete, according to project documents.

The expansion would also include a 9,900-square-foot second-story shell built over the new addition. That floor would be ready for interior finishes as part of a future, as-yet unplanned project and could accommodate up to nine additional courtrooms, according to a project master plan published in early 2023. 

“We all know that the Mat-Su area is the fastest-growing population in the state. The Palmer courthouse already doesn’t have enough room for the judges who are there,”  Alaska Chief Justice Susan Carney told lawmakers during a State of the Judiciary address Wednesday. “Palmer Superior Court judges have the highest per judge caseload of any judges in the state. We need more judges to serve the Mat-Su, but we need a place to put them.”

Last year about 2,700 new filings were split among four Superior Court judges assigned to Palmer, or about 660 cases per judge, according to state court system data. The average caseload per judge statewide is 459, court officials said.

The facility’s eight current courtrooms also host proceedings before a District Court judge and three magistrates, said Rebecca Koford, a spokesperson for the Alaska court system. More than 9,000 district court cases were filed at the facility in 2024, including about 1,880 misdemeanors, according to court data.

That caseload is anticipated to grow as the region’s population increases, Koford said. About 15,000 new residents are expected to move to the region over the next decade, bringing the population to about 131,000, according to state estimates.

The expansion project is the court system’s top need, Carney told lawmakers Wednesday.

“I do want to stress that the Palmer Courthouse is our number one capital priority this year, and I hope that you will very seriously consider this request,” she said.

Although the facility hasn’t seen a major expansion in more than a decade, it has received several renovations, including one to clean up flooding caused by a major windstorm in early 2022. The building was first constructed in 1987.

Under the expansion master plan, the three new courtrooms would be built on the south side of the existing building, near Courtroom 8. Two of the rooms would be separated by a folding partition that could be removed for larger trials, while the third could be designed to accommodate traditional, hybrid or remote trials, according to project documents.

Last year, the court system was given $7.5 million for some of the first steps of the planned project, including some utility work and the creation of a final project design. The state awarded a $2.6 million contract late last year for the design to architecture and engineering firm Stantec. 

If lawmakers grant the $22.2 million for the upcoming fiscal year, court system officials plan to next year request a final round of construction funding for a $6.3 million project to expand the Palmer Courthouse entrance, security area and clerk’s office, including additional file storage, Koford said.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal did not include funding for the expansion.

Securing money for the project is a budget priority for state Sen. Shelley Hughes, who represents Palmer. Hughes said she discussed the project’s importance with state Rep. Delana Johnson, who represents Palmer and oversees capital project funding as co-chair of the House Finance Committee.

Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.

— Contact Amy Bushatz at contact@matsusentinel.com

What you need to know:

• Mat-Su School District Superintendent Randy Trani and top district officials met with parents, teachers and students at Mat-Su Central this week to explain proposed program changes that could dramatically alter the school’s structure and costs to families.
• The district faces a $22 million deficit and aims to increase local state education funding by changing how per-student payments are calculated for Mat-Su Central. The restructuring could generate about $3.3 million in additional funding in the first year. The proposal would administratively split Mat-Su Central into two schools, increase district correspondence school allotments, raise class fees and offer lower graduation requirements.
• Parents and advisory members worry the changes will affect the school’s community-focused, family-oriented atmosphere. The proposal will be considered at a Feb. 5 school board meeting.

WASILLA — Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District officials sought to allay parents’ and teachers’ fears about major proposed changes to Mat-Su Central school’s operations and funding during a meeting this week, even as details about how those updates will fully affect families remained unclear.

Top district officials, including Superintendent Randy Trani, met with several dozen staff, families and students at Mat-Su Central’s Wasilla campus Tuesday afternoon for a nearly two-hour emergency meeting of the school’s Academic Advisory Council.

The meeting followed about a dozen days of rumors and uncertainty within the school about how the changes would affect enrolled families and existing staff, some of whom feared for their jobs as a result of the announcement, they told Trani during the meeting.

A program restructuring proposed by Trani at a school board meeting this month would administratively split Mat-Su Central into two schools, reclassifying its in-person classes as a hybrid brick-and-mortar school with new staffing and administrative requirements under state rules. The plan would keep the day-to-day operations of the correspondence program largely unchanged while introducing a new payment structure for enrolled families.

School staff and families said they were not notified of the changes before the announcement. The proposal must be approved by both the school board and state education officials. The school board will consider the plan at its Feb. 5 meeting.

The proposal is key to a district effort to boost incoming education funding by updating how the state calculates per-pupil payments to Mat-Su Central while also attracting more homeschooled students to the program, district officials said.

The district faces an estimated $22 million deficit for next year and will propose budget cuts, officials said at the school board meeting. If approved, the Mat-Su Central program change could generate about $3.3 million in additional funding within the first year, they said. Officials hope to have the changes in place by August.

Mat-Su Central, the district’s largest school with about 2,800 students, operates as a homeschool correspondence program with some face-to-face classes taught by district teachers or vendors. About 500 students enrolled in one or more of those classes this school year, according to district officials. A new 45,000-square-foot, $24 million Mat-Su Central school building, funded by the borough, will be completed this spring and will include nine classrooms.

Unlike the district’s brick-and-mortar schools, some of which receive $12,000 per student, Mat-Su Central is funded by the state as if it did not offer in-person classes, officials said. Instead, it receives the lower correspondence student rate of about $7,000 per student, about $3,000 of which is passed on to families as the state’s home education allotment.

If approved, the Mat-Su Central proposal would change that calculation, officials said. The restructuring would allow correspondence students to enroll in hybrid program classes on an as-needed basis, much as they do now, while the district would be reimbursed at the higher in-person rate. Students from other district schools could also take those classes, which could be offered at nontraditional times such as nights and weekends, officials said.

The hybrid program would also introduce a high school diploma option with requirements set below the district’s current 25.5-credit standard, a change that officials said would attract students who do not want the full district diploma and are currently enrolled in other programs elsewhere in the state.

“We’re facing a $22 million shortfall — things will need to be cut,” Trani said at the Tuesday meeting. “This is a way not to cut things.”

An estimated 3,000 Mat-Su students are enrolled in correspondence programs outside the district, according to state education data.

The updates would also likely allow the district to pass along higher state education allotment payments to enrolled correspondence school families – about $4,000 instead of the current $3,000. At the same time, class fees would likely increase significantly to better reflect the cost of providing them, officials said.

Families currently pay $50 for most classes offered at Mat-Su Central and pay nothing to enroll in secondary classes at neighborhood schools, which are available on a case-by-case basis. Under the new structure, families will likely pay hundreds of dollars per class, and neighborhood school enrollment would no longer be free, officials said.

The district has not yet determined the final proposed allotment amount, the new class fees, or whether both programs will be overseen by Mat-Su Central’s current administrators, Trani told parents at the meeting. Fees will likely be set on a sliding scale based on grade level, subject and other factors, he said in an interview. Administrator decisions are in progress, he said.

Advisory committee members, administrators, teachers and parents at Tuesday’s meeting said that while they understand the need to raise class fees, they are concerned that the overall changes will fundamentally alter what they value about the school, including its current administrative team.

“I will not just leave Mat-Su Central; I will leave this school district if you do not retain them,” parent Heather Lockwood said of Mat-Su Central Principal Stacey McIntosh and Assistant Principal Nathan Chud. “And if you do not put them in full charge of this program, you will find other students that don’t attend the on-site classes will leave.”

Advisory committee members and school staff also said they resent Trani’s initial announcement and presentation of the program change this month because of how he discussed the school’s performance and his comments about the committee.

Mat-Su Central has the lowest graduation rate in the district at about 73%, in part because some students drop out to enroll in other correspondence schools with lower graduation requirements, according to district data. While Trani noted the dropout cause during his board presentation, parents and staff said he did not sufficiently emphasize the challenges it poses for the school.

During the same board meeting, Trani also described the nine-member advisory committee as a group that is no longer needed.

Established by school board policy, the committee includes parents, staff and district representatives and is charged with making recommendations on school policy and budget. It was created to allow the school to operate as a district-run program with some of the freedoms of a charter school, Trani said.

“I call them the blue extension cord — the extension cord that used to run something very important, but now just this blue extension cord would keep walking across the top of it. We wonder why it’s there,” he told the school board.

Parents and advisory members objected to that characterization.

“This group of people here … They were publicly referred to as the blue extension cord you keep stepping over,” said Andrew Lockwood, a parent who also teaches classes at the school and at Mat-Su College. “But that’s not how we see them. We listen. We chose them, and we listen to their advice.”

Siyen Emmert, an advisory committee member who also served on a group that guided plans for the school’s new facility and who has been involved with the school for more than a decade, said she worries the new program will hurt the school’s family-oriented atmosphere.

“I’m not sure that that’s totally recognized by the district, that this is a very community-based, family-based program,” she said in an interview after the meeting. “We really focused on how to make this a family-oriented space. So it was not designed for what he’s talking about as a hybrid model. It wasn’t designed for kids to come for four classes at a certain time of day.”

— Contact Amy Bushatz at contact@matsusentinel.com

By Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon

How much are Alaskans willing to pay for produce that is homegrown? A newly published study has some answers: a significant premium, especially when they have information about the benefits of locally grown food.

Alaska grocery shoppers on average were willing to pay $1.90 extra for a head of lettuce if it was labeled as “Alaska Grown,” the study found. When given information about locally grown products’ benefits to health, the environment and the state economy provided by products with the “Alaska Grown” label, that premium jumped to $3.31 on average, the study found.

The study is based on surveys and interviews of shoppers at Anchorage grocery stores and farmers markets. The surveys and interviews were conducted by University of Alaska Anchorage students; the study was led by Qiujie Zheng, an associate professor of business analytics at the University of Maine. Zheng was previously at UAA.

While the surveys and interviews were conducted several years ago, in 2018, Zheng said she believes the results still stand.

The COVID-19 pandemic that came later may have changed food consumption patterns worldwide, she said by email. “However, due to Alaska’s unique geographical location, I believe that the state’s agricultural supply and consumers’ fresh produce options have remained relatively stable over the past few years,” she said.

There has been no interruption in the Alaska Division of Agriculture’s annual Alaska Grown $5 Challenge program, a summer and fall campaign that encourages residents to spend at least $5 a week on locally grown food, she noted. The information the researchers used from the state has been consistent, she added.

It was important to study consumer preferences for Alaska Grown products because the subject has gotten much less attention than consumer attitudes about local foods elsewhere, Zheng said.

And Alaska has reasons to bolster its local sources of food, she said.

“Alaska’s unique geographical location significantly influences its food supply. Since the majority of Alaska’s food is imported, Alaska’s food supply is vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and natural disasters,” she said by email. “A stronger local food system could improve the resilience of the state’s food supply. Understanding consumers’ preferences for local foods and identifying potential marketing and communication strategies are critical before promoting local food in Alaska. This helps strengthen the local food network, and, in the long run, enhances the resilience of Alaska’s food supply.”

The study also analyzed consumer preferences about lettuce labeled as organic and lettuce grown through the hydroponic method, which uses a water-based nutrient solution as a substitute for soil.

Taken in isolation, the Alaska Grown premium that consumers were willing to pay was higher than that for organic food and for hydroponic-grown lettuce. Without being given extra information about benefits, consumers were willing to spend $1.74 more for organic lettuce and 73 cents more for hydroponic-grown lettuce.

Consumer preferences were more complicated when the Alaska Grown, organic and hydroponic labels were combined and when additional information was provided, the study found.

Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on Facebook and X.

What you need to know:

• Mat-Su officials want to leverage health powers held by the area’s cities to better distribute more than $2 million in opioid settlement funds for addiction treatment and prevention services. The Mat-Su Borough does not have health powers under Alaska state law and can currently use the funding only for training and education services.
• Under the proposal, the borough would use the cities’ health powers to significantly expand the types of organizations eligible to access funding for opioid-related treatment, prevention, recovery and harm-reduction services.
• About 360 Alaskans died from drug overdoses in 2023, a nearly 45% increase from 2022, according to state health data. An average of 21 drug overdoses occurred in the borough annually between 2018 and 2022, according to borough data.

PALMER – Millions in funding could soon be available for Mat-Su-based opioid treatment services under a proposed grant partnership between the borough and the region’s cities.

The plan would allow officials to distribute more than $2.3 million in opioid settlement funds to a wide range of local addiction treatment and prevention services by co-opting the health powers granted to the region’s cities under Alaska law, Matanuska-Susitna Borough Manager Mike Brown said.

Brown said that without such a workaround, the borough can spend the money only on training and education because it has no health powers of its own.

The borough will receive the $2.3 million over 18 years, with about $300,000 of the disbursements received so far. Only four organizations applied for grants last year under the borough’s current narrow distribution rules, leaving more than $230,000 unspent and limiting options for using the remaining money, he said.

About 360 Alaskans died from drug overdoses in 2023, a nearly 45% increase from 2022, according to state health data. About 80% of those deaths were caused by opioids, the data show. From 2018 to 2022, the Mat-Su region averaged 21 drug overdose deaths per year, according to a borough fact sheet.

That deepening crisis means the borough needs to find a way to legally distribute the money to services that need it most, Brown said. While the borough could also get the health authority it needs through a ballot measure or from state lawmakers, working with the cities offers the easiest path, he said.

“We should do our best to get this deployed into the community because that was its intended use — not for the borough to just sit on it,” he said.

Expanding the scope of eligible addiction services could significantly impact the region’s programs, said Michael Carson, former chair of the Mat-Su Opioid Task Force and vice president of MyHouse, a Wasilla-based nonprofit youth shelter. The organization received $23,000 of the borough’s settlement funds for training and education but would apply for additional funding under an expanded program, he said.

“We’re going to have to get the word out, like, ‘Yo, guess what? Now you can access money for direct services.’ I would think that would put a lot of smiles on a lot of people’s faces.”

Although the borough needs to strike an agreement with only one of the cities to go forward with the plan, officials hope to reach agreements with all three, Brown said.

If approved by the city councils and the Assembly, the borough’s new health power would be limited to opioid settlement-related activities and would expire when the money is exhausted, Brown said. The arrangement would allow funds to be distributed to organizations throughout the borough, not just those operating in Houston, Palmer or Wasilla.

Funds distributed under the plan would follow a set of guidelines approved by the Mat-Su Assembly last year, Brown said. The rules require the borough to use 30% of the funds for treatment, 30% for prevention, 10% for recovery, 10% for harm reduction, and, for the first five years only, 20% for media about the effort.

The plan would allow Wasilla, which is receiving its own payout from the settlement estimated at about $80,000 annually, to continue to distribute its funds according to its guidelines, Brown said. Palmer and Houston were not eligible for settlement funds because of their smaller populations.

Brown first approached the cities about the proposal in September and held an informational meeting with officials from each city just before Christmas.

Palmer Mayor Steve Carrington and Houston Mayor Carter Cole said they plan to brief their city councils on the plan this month and work to introduce legislation in February. Both said they support the plan but want to ensure the cities have a role in selecting grant recipients under the agreement.

“Our area has been hard hit with those afflictions, and I just want to be sure that whatever we’re going to do is going to make an impact,” Cole said.

In Wasilla, the proposal is “currently a work in progress,” Mayor Glenda Ledford said in a statement.

Brown said he hopes to have an approved health powers agreement in place in the next few months.

— Contact Amy Bushatz at abushatz@matsusentinel.com

What you need to know:

• An Alaska State Trooper post proposed for the Talkeetna area aims to improve public safety and reduce response times. The post would serve areas along a roughly 60-mile stretch of the Parks Highway, from Willow to just north of Trapper Creek.
• The post would include six full-time positions. It was proposed as part of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s fiscal year 2026 budget and would cost $2.4 million to fund in its first year.
• The post was proposed in response to local concerns about an inadequate trooper presence in the area, highlighted by community feedback following a 2023 kidnapping and double homicide linked to drug trafficking.

WASILLA – An Alaska State Trooper post proposed for the Talkeetna area would add dedicated law enforcement officers to the upper Matanuska-Susitna Valley as part of an effort to improve public safety response times, officials said Thursday.

Funding for the post is included in Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s proposed $16.8 billion budget for fiscal year 2026, which begins in July. The budget proposes $2.4 million to establish the post with six new positions: a sergeant, three full-time troopers, a wildlife trooper and a criminal justice technician, public safety officials said. The post would be part of B Detachment, which patrols an area the size of West Virginia, stretching hundreds of miles from Glennallen to Cantwell.

If approved, it would not be the first time a trooper post has operated in the Talkeetna area. A facility on Talkeetna Spur Road was closed in 2016 due to state budget cuts, and its six employees were transferred to the Meadow Lakes post.

Rather than field its own police force, which borough officials estimate would cost at least $14 million annually, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough relies on troopers to provide law enforcement for much of the region. About six troopers patrol the vast area at any given time, public safety officials said earlier this year. Incident response times vary widely, with some calls to locations outside the core area taking hours, borough officials said.

Reopening a post near Talkeetna would help address that problem, said Austin McDaniel, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety. Troopers assigned to the new post would cover a roughly 60-mile stretch of Parks Highway from Willow to north of Trapper Creek, he said. They would not be regularly called to core area patrols or incidents, he said.

McDaniel said the funding request for the post stems in part from feedback gathered at a community meeting following a kidnapping and double homicide near Trapper Creek in 2023 that was linked to drug trafficking.

“They were very clear that they felt that the responsiveness from the Alaska State Troopers wasn’t up to what it should be,” he said.

Both a Mat-Su Assembly resolution passed unanimously in January urging residents to arm themselves and a free gun safety and live-fire training program approved by the Assembly in May were created in direct response to the lack of trooper presence in the Trapper Creek area, said Assembly member Ron Bernier, who represents the area and sponsored the measures.

Troopers receive about 2,500 calls annually to the region between Willow and north of Trapper Creek, McDaniel said, or about 15% of calls received area-wide each year, according to trooper incident data. Since 2021, troopers have logged 262 welfare checks and 421 vehicle collisions in the area north of Willow, he said. Since 2020, they have recorded 785 reports of illegal drug use, he said.

If funding is approved, the exact location of the proposed Talkeetna post would be determined through a state leasing process, McDaniel said.

Mat-Su Borough officials said they are eager to support the proposal and could share land or space in an existing facility.

“This is a huge deal for us and something that I think we all want to dive into and lend our support wherever we can through this legislative session to retain what the governor has done,” Mat-Su Borough Manager Mike Brown told the Mat-Su Assembly during a meeting Tuesday.

While the reopened post would add new trooper positions if approved, filling those spots is a separate challenge, public safety officials said.

Fourteen of B Detachment’s 72 trooper and wildlife trooper positions were vacant as of Oct. 1, according to public safety data. A dozen recent academy graduates – nine troopers and three wildlife officers – are expected to fill some of those positions, McDaniel said. The department is also working to solve its staffing challenges in part by refocusing its recruitment and retention efforts in the state, he said.

“They have doubled down on in-state recruiting, which is an area that we have frankly overlooked for a few years as we focused on out-of-state applicants,” he said.

Dunleavy’s 2026 budget proposal marks the first recent effort to reopen a trooper post in the Talkeetna area with new staffing.

In June, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District considered a proposal to convert portable buildings at Su Valley Junior-Senior High School for use as temporary office space for troopers passing through the area. The school board rejected the proposal in a 4-3 vote, citing the lack of permanently assigned troopers.

— Contact Amy Bushatz at abushatz@matsusentinel.com

What you need to know:

• Preliminary Mat-Su voting results show both a $36.4 million bond for 10 major road projects and a $58 million proposal to fund three new charter school buildings won voter approval. A fire service area change for Caswell and Willow also appeared to pass.
• All incumbents appeared to retain their seats in the Mat-Su Mayor, Assembly, and School Board races, according to preliminary results. Newcomer Andrew Shane ran unopposed for the School Board District 4 seat. 
• Unofficial preliminary results include only votes cast on Election Day and early votes cast by Friday. All other votes, including about 7,000 absentee and questioned ballots, have yet to be counted.

A pair of major Matanuska-Susitna Borough funding packages appeared to win voter approval Tuesday, while incumbents appeared to keep their seats in every borough race, according to preliminary results available early Wednesday.

The bond packages provide $36.4 million for 10 major road projects across the borough and $58 million to fund the construction of three public charter school buildings. Combined, they would increase Mat-Su property taxes by up to $51 per $100,000 in assessed value, according to borough estimates. 

Road funding appeared to win approval by a wide margin, with a vote of 18,283 to 7,639, according to unofficial results that did not include all ballots. Funding for charter school construction also appeared to pass, with a vote of 13,325 to 12,682.

In the Mat-Su Assembly race, all incumbents appeared to retain their seats. In District 7, which includes Talkeetna, Ron Bernier led challenger Sheena Fort, 2,145 to 1,675, according to preliminary results. In District 3, which includes parts of Palmer and Wasilla, incumbent Dee McKee led challenger Luke Hyce, 2,559 to 924. In District 6, incumbent Dmitri Fonov ran unopposed.

Unofficial preliminary results include only votes cast on Election Day and early votes cast by Friday. All other votes, including about 7,000 absentee and questioned ballots, have yet to be counted. The Assembly is scheduled to certify the election on Nov. 19.

Tuesday’s election saw a 28.5% voter turnout among Mat-Su residents, according to preliminary results. That compares with a turnout of about 33% in 2020, the last year with a presidential race also on the ballot. In 2016, another presidential election year, turnout was about 28%.

Borough Mayor Edna DeVries appeared to secure a second consecutive term, winning 22,426 to 1,374 against write-in candidates. Those included Hillary Palmer, who ran as a write-in candidate after her name was removed from borough ballots following confusion over a missed financial filing deadline.

In school board races, incumbent Tom Bergey led challenger Ben Kolendo 3,059 to 1,437 in the District 1 race. Kolendo previously served on the board as a nonvoting student representative. District 1 includes Butte and Sutton.

Andrew Shane, a former member of the school district’s now-disbanded Library Citizens’ Advisory Committee, ran unopposed for the District 4 school board seat, which includes the city of Wasilla. That seat is currently held by Jubilee Underwood, who appeared to beat incumbent David Eastman for the District 27 state House seat with just over 51% of the vote, according to preliminary state results. Find all other state House results here and state Senate results here.

Incumbent school board member Brooks Pitcher ran unopposed for District 5, which includes Big Lake.

A ballot question before voters in Caswell and Willow to officially combine the fire service areas for those regions appeared to pass in both areas, with 481 to 411 votes in Willow and 181 to 113 in Caswell.

This week’s election ushered in two subtle but significant changes to local ballots approved by the Assembly early this year.

Candidates newly elected to full terms as mayor or to the borough assembly will serve four years, up from three. Candidates for mayor, assembly, and school board also appeared on the ballot with a political party affiliation, a first for local governments in the state.

— Contact Amy Bushatz at abushatz@matsusentinel.com