Alaska
Alaska lawmakers expand food stamp program with goal of preventing hunger, application backlogs • Alaska Beacon
More Alaskans will be able to access food stamps following lawmakers’ vote to expand eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on Wednesday night.
The change comes after more than a year of extreme delays in food stamp distribution across the state that left thousands of vulnerable Alaskans without aid for months at a time, driving many into debt and inundating food pantries with food insecure families. State workers caught up on the backlog in March.
Alaska will join 42 other states in using an approach called “broad based categorical eligibility” to streamline applications for the program. The move eases the requirements to get benefits and should reduce the administrative burden that contributed to a backlog in the state’s Division of Public Assistance.
Ron Meehan, director of government affairs for Food Banks of Alaska, said he shared the news with fellow advocates and food bank managers in a flurry of late-night text messages.
“We are feeling really relieved and excited about the implications of this,” he said. “This is something that has been a pretty significant priority for the Alaska Food Coalition and the Food Bank of Alaska, not just in the two years since this latest significant backlog, but really for at least a decade.”
Broad based categorical eligibility makes households with incomes less than twice of the federal poverty line eligible for the program. Previously, the threshold was 30% more than the poverty line in Alaska. It is a priority for food advocates because it allows more people to qualify and save up enough money to gradually exit the program. The bill also removes a component called the asset test, which kept people with more than $4,000 in savings from accessing food aid. That meant anyone with a car or a house would have to liquidate those assets and spend down cash before qualifying, Meehan said.
There was just such an opportunity in the midst of all of that chaos to really step back and think, ‘What are the things that we can do to make sure that this doesn’t happen again?’
– Rep. Genevieve Mina, D-Anchorage
Rep. Genevieve Mina, D-Anchorage and the bill’s sponsor, has pushed for the legislation since last winter, when the state was still in the midst of the backlog. Her proposal, House Bill 196, was rolled into another piece of legislation, House Bill 344, on the last day of the session. The Senate passed it unanimously, while the House voted 26-14 to agree to the final version of the bill. Some lawmakers have lauded its success as one of the session’s major accomplishments.
“We have the ability to feed thousands and thousands of more Alaskans. It also allows more kids to have access to free lunch. And I think that is a great thing in terms of the food crisis that is in our state,” she said on the House floor Wednesday night.
Mina saw the inception of the current food stamp backlog as a legislative staffer after the number of jobs handling applications were reduced in 2021. Now, as a lawmaker, she is responsible for a policy change that she says will streamline the process. She said her efforts as a member of the House minority were boosted by support from veteran Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, the Senate majority leader — and because the problem affected every region in the state.
“There was just such an opportunity in the midst of all of that chaos to really step back and think, ‘What are the things that we can do to make sure that this doesn’t happen again?’” she said.
Since 2022, the state government has been scrambling to address the backlog and Gov. Mike Dunleavy has added more than $70 million to state budgets over the last two years to fight the crisis. The money has gone to computer upgrades, new staff and direct aid to food banks. Supporters say the new legislation marks a turning point to a proactive response to food instability in Alaska.
Though the changes could dramatically increase food aid to Alaskans, they will cost the state only about $140,000 because the SNAP benefits are paid for by the federal government.
Mina worked with the program’s state manager, Division of Public Assistance Director Deb Etheridge, to make sure the changes would help workers get through food stamp applications more efficiently. She credited the state administration with investing in new technology and said it is also important to retain staff at the Division of Public Assistance.
“Those are all just pieces that are starting to come together,” she said. “Hopefully by next year, we’ll see more Alaskans being able to eat and also more Alaskans able to transition off the program.”
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Alaska
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.
“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.
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.
“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.
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.”
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.
Alaska
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.”
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.)
Alaska
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.
“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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