In the 2024 Alaska legislative session, there were companion bills in the Senate and House to create a big game guide concession pilot program on state lands that would have a startup cost of half a million dollars. The organization I represent — Resident Hunters of Alaska — opposed the bills, for reasons I’ll explain later.

The ostensible rationale of these bills was that there were no limits on the number of hunting guides who could operate on state lands, and this was causing all kinds of problems — from conflicts in the field to overharvests of our wildlife. Exclusive guide concessions in certain areas, limiting the number of guides who could operate there, would fix the problems.

The Senate version of the guide concession program bill (Senate Bill 253) was heard in the Senate Resources Committee last session but never moved out of committee. The House version (House Bill 396) was heard in House Resources and passed out of that committee and was awaiting a hearing in House Finance. It was clear that House Finance, with our continuing budget crisis, was not going to pass the bill with a $500,000 fiscal note. It was never heard in House Finance.

In the final hours of the 2024 session, the language of HB 396 – along with other bills that had not passed – was inserted into another bill by Sen. Scott Kawasaki (SB 189) to extend the Alaska Commission on Aging. Legislators well understood that attaching all these other bills to Sen. Kawasaki’s bill to extend the Alaska Commission on Aging did not comply with the “single subject” rule, which was specifically written to prevent these kinds of shenanigans.

Sen. Kawasaki knew, too, that his bill—with all the other legislation now contained in it—didn’t comply with the single subject rule, but he wanted his bill to pass and voted for it, along with most legislators. So, SB 189 to extend the Commission on Aging, along with the guide concession program bill and others, passed the legislature and was sent to the Governor for his signature. You can read the final bill here.

SB 189 was not signed by the governor because he was advised that the way it passed wasn’t legal. However, everything within the final bill — including a guide concession pilot program — did become law, though the guide concession program wasn’t funded.

Subsequently, former Rep. David Eastman sued the legislature over the single subject rule violation. The case is currently awaiting judgment.

Fast forward to the current 2025 legislative session. Legislators were told that to resolve the Eastman lawsuit, everything within SB 189 that violated the single subject rule — including the guide concession program — had to be re-submitted exactly as written the previous session and pass this session.

The current guide concession program bill is Senate Bill 97, sponsored by the Senate Resources Committee. We again recommended some amendments to the bill. If this was going to pass, at least make it so the state was paid back by the guide industry, along with some other fixes to the bill. Some of those amendments were offered in the Senate Resources Committee and had majority support, but the legislative attorney told the committee that any amendments to the bill would not moot the Eastman challenge. The bill needed to pass exactly as written, including with any appropriations.

So, the bill wasn’t amended and SB 97 passed out of Senate Resources and will now go to Senate Finance, where members of that committee won’t question the half-million-dollar fiscal note as they would have under normal circumstances. They will vote to spend money we don’t have, pass the bill, and move it out of committee because they’ve been told that’s the only way to stifle the Eastman lawsuit. The final bill will pass both houses for the same reason.

The situation we are in now is one in which legislators knowingly violated the law the previous session, were called on it by a former legislator they don’t particularly like, and now, in order to fix their mistake, are going to double down on it so that former legislator doesn’t make them look bad. That isn’t the way bills are supposed to become law. You aren’t supposed to violate the law and then fix the mistake by doing an end-run around the process.

The main reason we oppose a guide concession program is that the problem was never “too many guides.” The problem is too many nonresident hunters who are required to hire a guide being given unlimited hunting opportunity by the Board of Game! Limit the number of nonresident sheep hunters, for example, that take 60-90% of the sheep harvested in some areas, and you thereby limit the number of guides they are required to hire. But the Board of Game refuses to limit nonresident sheep hunters, saying they only support a costly guide concession program as a solution.

The Big Game Commercial Services Board is the body that regulates the guide industry and has been saying for nearly twenty years that there are too many guides. They have the duty and authority to limit guides, yet have done nothing to check their own. They also only support a guide concession program as a fix.

Read our letter of opposition to a guide concession program here.

Either board could fix the known problems without such a high cost to the state. The reason they have refused to do so for so long is because a guide concession program is the guide industry’s preferred solution. Unlike other states, in Alaska we don’t look at things from the point of view of what’s best for resident hunters and our wildlife; we look at it from the point of view of what’s best for the guide industry.

Mark Richards is the executive director of Resident Hunters of Alaska.

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The planned lease termination of the Alaska Volcano Observatory in Anchorage has reportedly been reversed amid threats of a volcanic eruption.

The observatory had appeared on lists of federal building leases set to be terminated by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency as part of efforts to shrink the size of the federal government.

However, the office of Representative Nick Begich, a Republican from Alaska, told Must Read Alaska that he had intervened to block it. The congressman said in a statement that the lease was “critical for mission objectives, particularly in the midst of a growing volcanic threat.”

Newsweek has contacted Begich’s office and the Alaska Volcano Observatory for further comment via email. The General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate, has also been contacted for comment via email.

Why It Matters

The General Services Administration, working with DOGE, has notified landlords that federal agencies will be terminating hundreds of leases for offices and buildings in the coming months.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory, run by the United States Geological Survey, has long monitored dozens of volcanoes in Alaska for risks of eruption, providing crucial information that leads to early warnings that allow evacuations or changes to air travel.

In recent weeks, employees worked with uncertainty amid signs that the likelihood of Mount Spurr, a volcano near Anchorage, erupting in the next few weeks or months had increased.

What To Know

On March 6, NOTUS, a nonprofit news organization, reported that the Trump administration was in the process of terminating the leases for the building that houses the observatory in Anchorage and another building used to monitor volcanoes in Hawaii.

The building that houses the Alaska Volcano Observatory, one of a number used by USGS on the Alaska Pacific University campus, had a lease termination date set for August, NOTUS said, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Relocating the equipment in the observatory building could cost more than $1 million and would risk damage to sensitive devices and computers, the sources said.

Begich’s office said the lease was officially restored on March 18.

On Wednesday, the observatory said unrest was continuing at Mount Spurr, with “numerous small, shallow volcanic earthquakes detected beneath the volcano over the past day.”

What People Are Saying

Representative Nick Begich said in a statement to Must Read Alaska: “The Alaska Volcano Observatory federal office lease is critical for mission objectives, particularly in the midst of a growing volcanic threat. This observatory is important to Alaska’s safety and aviation industry. My staff and I worked with the Department of Interior and the GSA to address this issue as a high priority.”

The Alaska Volcano Observatory said in a statement on Wednesday: “AVO continues monitoring activity at Mount Spurr for signals indicating that the volcano is moving closer to an eruption. Based on previous eruptions, changes from current activity in the earthquakes, ground deformation, summit lake conditions, and fumarolic activity would be expected if magma began to move closer to the surface. Therefore, if an eruption occurred, it would be preceded by additional signals allowing warning.”

What Happens Next

The observatory reported on March 11 that an eruption of Mount Spurr was “likely, but not certain, to occur within the next few weeks or months.”

A state development agency might consider doing some oil exploration work in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge next winter, following a federal judge’s ruling Tuesday that the Biden administration lacked authority to cancel the agency’s oil and gas leases there, an agency official said.

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority may not be able to pursue a full exploration program there next winter, with seismic surveys across the leases, agency executive director Randy Ruaro said in an interview Wednesday. But some seismic surveys — using seismic waves to map the subsurface — may be possible, he said.

That’s because the Biden administration threw up a major hurdle when it issued a decision in December that sharply limited exploration activity there, he said. That hurdle must still be removed, he said.

“They left part of ANWR open, even the Biden administration did, because they had to,” Ruaro said. “But quite a bit of it is zoned out.”

The agency is challenging the decision in court. It can also work with the Trump administration, which supports drilling in the refuge, to reverse Biden’s decision, he said.

“We’ve got a couple options,” Ruaro said.

But it’s unknown how long either option will take, he said.

The possibility of drilling in the refuge took a big step forward in 2017 when the Republican-led Congress passed a law opening the refuge to development.

The state agency acquired the seven leases, totaling 365,000 acres in the northwest corner of the refuge along the coast, in a lease sale held in the final days of the first Trump administration.

No major oil companies bid in that historic sale, and the state agency was the only bidder to hold on to its leases. But the Biden administration canceled the leases in 2023, citing legal flaws with the leasing program.

The 19.6-million-acre area for decades has been a battleground for pro-development advocates who say an oil discovery will help the economy and national security, and conservation and some Indigenous groups who fear it will threaten polar bears and caribou and add to climate pollution.

Judge Sharon Gleason, in her 22-page decision on Tuesday, said the cancellation violated the 2017 law calling for the refuge to be opened, because the Biden administration did not obtain a court order for the cancellation.

She sent the matter back to Interior, where the new Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, said last week that he plans to expand opportunities for oil and gas development in the 1.6-million-acre coastal plain of the refuge.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, representing elected Iñupiaq leadership from Alaska’s North Slope where the refuge is located, praised the decision.

So did Alaska’s U.S. senators, who helped write the provision in the 2017 law opening the refuge, and freshman Rep. Nick Begich III.

“After the first Trump administration developed a good program and AIDEA secured seven leases, the Biden administration spent four years attempting to turn the program on its head,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski said in a statement from the delegation Wednesday. “While we lost years of development to their willful intransigence, this decision is an important step to getting things back on track.”

Conservation groups and the Gwich’in Steering Committee criticized Gleason’s decision for allowing the agency to keep its leases. They said the state development agency has no ability to extract oil and gas, and has been has been the subject of reports showing it has made poor financial investments.

“AIDEA is the ‘grim reaper’ of Alaska megaprojects — when they show up to spend money, smart investors stay away,” said Andy Moderow, senior director of policy for the Alaska Wilderness League. “We will continue to challenge their misguided attempts to industrialize the Arctic Refuge, so that the Coastal Plain can sustain continued and new traditions for generations to come.”

‘Valuable deposits’

The refuge’s remote location in northeast Alaska, and the controversy over drilling there, has likely limited bidding interest from oil companies. The Biden administration held a second lease sale for the refuge early this year, but receive no bids of any sort.

Gleason’s decision suggested that the agency, which acquired its leases with the idea of working with exploration companies, could be sitting on sizable amounts of oil.

She said environmental reviews conducted under the first Trump administration and under Biden found that the coastal plain houses valuable deposits of oil and gas.

“Although these documents indicate that there are no proven plays, or groups of oil fields, due to the lack of oil and gas exploration in the Coastal Plain, they nonetheless confirm that the Coastal Plain contains valuable deposits according to the federal government’s best estimates,” Gleason wrote.

The U.S. Geological Survey in 1998 estimated that the refuge contains pools of oil that today would be comparable to large discoveries made in recent years in Alaska, far west of the refuge, such as at ConocoPhillips’ Willow field.

Ruaro said AIDEA has reviewed data from old wells drilled west of the refuge on state land. It’s also taken a new look at two-dimensional seismic surveys shot in the 1980s, when Congress allowed oil companies to drill the only well ever allowed in the refuge, he said.

“We think we have a very good idea of what’s in the northwest corner of ANWR, on our leases, and we think there are billions of barrels of oil,” Ruaro said.

The recent announcement of an oil discovery just west of the refuge also highlights the area’s oil potential, Ruaro said. The partners announcing the find included Australian-based Santos and Bill Armstrong, the geologist whose work led to major discoveries in Alaska and prompted ConocoPhillips to take steps that led the company to Willow.

“We think those trends continue into ANWR,” said Ruaro, referring to geological patterns that could support a discovery.

Next steps on possible exploration in the refuge will be considered by the agency’s board, he said. The agency will work with partners like the community of Kaktovik, an Alaska Native village in the refuge, along with the North Slope Borough and the Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, he said.

“I would say that all options to advance the project and development are on the table, and we’ll get full guidance from our board,” Ruaro said.

The board will likely consider what it will take to soon acquire detailed, new seismic exploration data, known as three-dimensional seismic, which replaced the old 2D seismic technology, he said.

“3D is the goal,” he said.