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Alaska DOT&PF secures over $1B of transportation funding in FY2024 – Alaska Native News

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Alaska DOT&PF secures over B of transportation funding in FY2024 – Alaska Native News


STIP Amendment #1 partial approval resolves ten of 14 corrective actions.

(ANCHORAGE, Alaska) — The Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities (DOT&PF) concludes the 2024 federal fiscal year with the successful delivery of over $1B of transportation related projects. This includes over $650 million in federally funded highways projects, over $300M in federally funded aviation projects, and many other projects funded through the State of Alaska capital budget.

“Overall, as in previous years, we obligated every federal dollar available to us on transportation projects” said Dom Pannone, Alaska DOT&PF Program Management and Administration Director. “Our team successfully obligated $662 million in Federal Highways dollars alone, despite the fact that the August Redistribution amount approved by FHWA was lower than recent years.”

In addition, STIP Amendment #1 partial approval was received this week. Five railbelt projects were excluded, including the Richardson Highway MP 346 Bridge project that was determined in March to meet federal regulatory requirements for exemptions from air quality conformity analysis. This was confirmed March 8, 2024, by interagency consultation facilitated by FAST Planning and comprised of experts from DEC, EPA, FTA, and FHWA. The project currently resides outside the MPO boundaries but within the air quality non-attainment area. DOT&PF will be evaluating this finding, among others, with federal partners.

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Another 18 rural projects were excluded, which were all discretionary grants applied for by Tribal, village or other rural entities. This exclusion does not mean that the projects will not move forward, but rather FHWA’s preference for where the projects are listed. Whenever the directions from the federal government are not clear, the department will err on the side of caution, including discretionary grants in the STIP to avoid the project not being able to advance. The exclusion provides the clarity the state and local sponsors need to move forward.

Partial approvals have not been used in the past but are becoming more frequent for FHWA to communicate expectations to the State’s STIP team in writing to formally codify the new expectations with Alaska.

“We want to thank our federal partners for working with us over the past six months on successfully delivering Alaska’s transportation program in 2024,” said Commissioner Ryan Anderson. “Alaska’s unique challenges and opportunities require careful consideration of the State’s role in sovereignty in advancing infrastructure decisions, in coordination with federal, state, and local partners, in the last frontier.”

The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities oversees 237 airports, 9 ferries serving 35 communities, over 5,600 miles of highway and 839 public facilities throughout the state of Alaska. The mission of the department is to Keep Alaska Moving through service and infrastructure.”

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Alaska

Santa catches a ride with troops to bring Christmas to Alaska village

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Santa catches a ride with troops to bring Christmas to Alaska village


YAKUTAT, Alaska — Forget the open-air sleigh overloaded with gifts and powered by flying reindeer.

Santa and Mrs. Claus this week took supersized rides to southeast Alaska in a C-17 military cargo plane and a camouflaged Humvee, as they delivered toys to the Tlingit village of Yakutat, northwest of Juneau.

The visit was part of this year’s Operation Santa Claus, an outreach program of the Alaska National Guard to largely Indigenous communities in the nation’s largest state. Each year, the Guard picks a village that has suffered recent hardship — in Yakutat’s case, a massive snowfall that threatened to buckle buildings in 2022.

Santa and Mrs. Claus talk to a child in Yakutat as part of the Alaska National Guard’s Operation Santa program Wednesday. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)

“This is one of the funnest things we get to do, and this is a proud moment for the National Guard,” Maj. Gen. Torrence Saxe, adjutant general of the Alaska National Guard, said Wednesday.

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Saxe wore a Guard uniform and a Santa hat that stretched his unit’s dress regulations.

The Humvee caused a stir when it entered the school parking lot, and a buzz of “It’s Santa! It’s Santa!” pierced the cold air as dozens of elementary school children gathered outside.

In the school, Mrs. Claus read a Christmas story about the reindeer Dasher. The couple in red then sat for photos with nearly all of the 75 or so students and handed out new backpacks filled with gifts, books, snacks and school supplies donated by the Salvation Army. The school provided lunch, and a local restaurant provided the ice cream and toppings for a sundae bar.

Student Thomas Henry, 10, said while the contents of the backpack were “pretty good,” his favorite item was a plastic dinosaur.

Another, 9-year-old Mackenzie Ross, held her new plush seal toy as she walked around the school gym.

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“I think it’s special that I have this opportunity to be here today because I’ve never experienced this before,” she said.

Yakutat, a Tlingit village of about 600 residents, is in the lowlands of the Gulf of Alaska, at the top of Alaska’s panhandle. Nearby is the Hubbard Glacier, a frequent stop for cruise ships.

Some of the National Guard members who visited Yakutat on Wednesday were also there in January 2022, when storms dumped about 6 feet of snow in a matter of days, damaging buildings.

Alaska National Guard soldiers and airmen shovel the roof of a building in Yakutat. (Dana Rosso/U.S. Army National Guard via AP)

Operation Santa started in 1956 when flooding severely curtailed subsistence hunting for residents of St. Mary’s, in western Alaska. Having to spend their money on food, they had little left for Christmas presents, so the military stepped in.

This year, visits were planned to two other communities hit by flooding. Santa’s visit to Circle, in northeastern Alaska, went off without a hitch. Severe weather prevented a visit to Crooked Creek, in the southwestern part of the state, but Christmas was saved when the gifts were delivered there Nov. 16.

“We tend to visit rural communities where it is very isolated,” said Jenni Ragland, service extension director with the Salvation Army Alaska Division. “A lot of kids haven’t traveled to big cities where we typically have Santa and big stores with Christmas gifts and Christmas trees, so we kind of bring the Christmas program on the road.”

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After the C-17 Globemaster III landed in Yakutat, it quickly returned to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, an hour away, because there was nowhere to park it at the village’s tiny airport. Later, it returned to pick up the Christmas crew.

Santa and Mrs. Claus, along with their tuckered elves, were seen nodding off on the flight back.



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Alaska

Trump Wants Denali Renamed

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Trump Wants Denali Renamed


Opposition to President-elect Trump’s renewed suggestion to change the name of Alaska’s 20,310-foot mountain back to McKinley includes many Alaskans, including Indigenous people, and the state’s two Republican senators. Sen. Lisa Murkowski advocated for years to remove the name of the nation’s 25th president, who never visited the mountain or had any connection to it, the Anchorage Daily News reports. “There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali—the Great One,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski wrote on X.

Trump brought up the idea in a speech Sunday at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, where he praised William McKinley as a fellow supporter of protective tariffs. “We’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it,” Trump said. In 2016, Trump had said he might change the name back, a notion he dropped when Alaska’s senators objected, per the AP. Denali is the Koyukon Athabascan name that was used by Indigenous people for centuries. It translates to “the high one” or “the great one.”

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The federal government named it Mount McKinley in 1896, which stood until Barack Obama’s administration in 2015. That switch came after years of effort by state officials and Native groups. Sen. Dan Sullivan once told an Alaska Federation of Natives conference that Trump made the same suggestion when he and Murkowski met with him at the White House in 2017. The senators objected vehemently, he said. An aide texted the Daily News that “Sen. Sullivan like many Alaskans prefers the name that the very tough, very strong, very patriotic Athabaskan people gave the mountain thousands of years ago—Denali.” (More President-elect Trump stories.)





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Alaska

Alaskan-named snowplows revealed by state

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Alaskan-named snowplows revealed by state


ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Coming soon to Juneau-area roads; a trio of festively-named snowplows!

After hundreds of suggested names were entered in its annual naming contest, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities announced Monday that it had narrowed its search down to three winning names for three of its snowplows.

The winning names were Berminator, Salt-O-Saurus Rex, and Ka-PLOW.

The names were chosen by DOT staff who felt they were most appropriate and represented Alaska the best, according to Eli Kesten-Brackett, a project assistant with the department.

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“Since they move in formation, [DOT] thought it’d be cool to have them all named as a unit,” Kesten-Brackett said.

The Name-A-Snowplow contest that ended on Nov. 28 saw over 400 individual entries from residents around the state.

Kesten-Brackett said after noticing the popularity of similar contests in other snow-laden states in the Lower 48, the state thought a way to get people’s creative juices flowing was what Alaska needed.

“We thought this would be an awesome way to foster community engagement,” Kesten-Brackett said.

The winning name in the inaugural contest last year was Darth Blader, according to Kesten-Brackett.

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