Lately I’ve spent too much time at the Seattle airport and not enough time exploring the Emerald City.

It’s not just about downtown Seattle, either. I’ve been catching up with friends in the area and we shared stories about visiting the nearby San Juan Islands or taking the Victoria Clipper up to Vancouver Island (bring your passport).

There are some seasonal events, though, that make a trip to Seattle more compelling.

First on the list is Seattle Museum Month. Every February, area museums team up with local hotels to offer half-price admission.

There is a catch. To get the half-price admission, stay at a downtown hotel. There are 70 hotels from which to choose. Even if you just stay for one night, you can get a pass which offers up to four people half-price admission.

It’s very difficult to visit all of the museums on the list. Just visiting the Seattle Art Museum, right downtown near Pike Place Market, can take all day. There’s a special exhibit now featuring the mobiles of Alexander Calder and giant wood sculptures of artist Thaddeus Mosley.

But there are many ongoing exhibits at SAM, as the museum is affectionately known. Rembrandt’s etchings, an exhibit from northern Australia, an intricate porcelain sculpture from Italian artist Diego Cibelli, African art, Native American art and so much more is on display.

It’s worth the long walk to the north of Pike Place Market to visit the Olympic Sculpture Park, a free outdoor exhibition by SAM featuring oversized works, including a giant Calder sculpture. The sweeping views of Elliott Bay and the mountains on the Olympic Peninsula are part of the package.

My other favorite art museum is the Burke Museum at the University of Washington. What I remember most about the Burke Museum is its rich collection of Northwest Native art.

But the term “museum” covers an incredible array of collections. A visit to the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum is a chance to see the most fanciful creations of renowned glass blower Dale Chihuly. It’s right next to the Space Needle.

You have to go up to the top and see the new renovations.

“They took out most of the restaurant,” said Sydney Martinez, public relations manager for Visit Seattle.

“Then they replaced the floor with glass. Plus, they took the protective wires off from around the Observation Deck and put up clear glass for an uninterrupted view,” she said.

If you visit the Space Needle in February, there’s hardly ever a line!

Getting from the airport to downtown is easy with the light rail system. There’s a terminal adjacent to the parking garage in the airport. The one-way fare for the 38-minute train ride is $3. From downtown, there are streetcars that go up Capitol Hill and down to Lake Union.

Martinez encourages travelers to check out the Transit Go app.

“All of the buses require exact change and sometimes that’s a hassle,” she said. “Just add finds to your app using a credit card and show the driver when you get on.”

Pike Place Market is a downtown landmark in Seattle. Fresh produce, the famous fish market, specialty retailers and restaurants — there’s always something going on. Now there’s even more to see.

Following the destruction of the waterfront freeway and the building of the tunnel, the Seattle Waterfront project has made great strides on its revitalization plan. The latest milestone is the opening of the Overlook Walk.

The Seattle Waterfront project encompasses much more than the new waterfront steps. Landscaping, pedestrian crossings and parks still are being constructed. But you cannot miss the beautiful staircase that comes down from Pike Place Market to the waterfront.

“There’s a really large patio at the top overlooking Elliott Bay,” said Martinez. “The stairs go down to the waterfront from there, but there also are elevators.”

Tucked under one wall is a completely new exhibit from the Seattle Aquarium, which is right across the street on the water. The Ocean Pavilion features an exhibit on the “Indo-Pacific ecosystem in the Coral Triangle.” I want to see this for myself!

Wine lovers love Washington wines. And Seattle shows up to showcase the increasing variety of wines available around the state. Taste Washington brings the region’s food and wines together for an event in mid-March.

Hosted by the WAMU Center near the big sports stadiums, Taste Washington features 200 wineries and 75 restaurants for tastings, pairings and demonstrations. There are special tastings, special dinners (plus a Sunday brunch) and special demonstrations between March 13 and 17.

There’s another regionwide feasting event called Seattle Restaurant Week, where participating restaurants offer a selected dinner for a set price. No dates are set yet, but Martinez said it usually happens both in the spring and the fall.

It’s not downtown, but it’s worth going to Boeing Field to see the Museum of Flight. This ever-expanding museum features exhibits on World War I and II, in addition to the giant main hall where there are dozens of planes displayed. I love getting up close to the world’s fastest plane, the black SR-71 Blackbird. But take the elevated walkway across the street to see the Concorde SST, an older version of Air Force 1 (a Boeing 707) and a Lockheed Constellation.

One of the most interesting exhibits is the Space Shuttle Trainer — used to train the astronauts here on the ground. There’s an amazing array of space-related exhibits. Don’t miss it.

Some travelers come to Seattle for sports. Take in home games from the Seattle Kraken hockey team or the Seattle Sounders soccer team this winter.

Other travelers come to see shows. Moore Theatre is hosting Lyle Lovett on Feb. 19 and Anoushka Shankar on March 13. Joe Bonamassa is playing at the Climate Pledge Area on Feb. 16. There are dozens of live music venues throughout the area.

It’s easy to get out of town to go on a bigger adventure. The Victoria Clipper leaves from the Seattle Waterfront for Victoria’s Inner Harbour each day, starting Feb. 16. If you want faster passage, fly back on Kenmore Air to Lake Union.

The Washington State Ferries offer great service from downtown Seattle to the Olympic Peninsula. Or, drive north to Anacortes and take the ferry to the San Juan Islands. Or, just drive north to Mukilteo and catch a short ferry over to Whidbey Island.

There are fun events all year in Seattle. But I’m circling February on the calendar for Museum Month. Plus, I need to see that grand staircase from Pike Place Market down to the water!

A key public-sector union and some Democratic state lawmakers are calling on Gov. Mike Dunleavy to release the results of a million-dollar study on how competitive the state’s salaries are. The study was originally due last summer — and lawmakers say that delays will complicate efforts to write the state budget.

It’s no secret that the state of Alaska has struggled to recruit and retain qualified staff for state jobs. An average of 16% of state positions remain unfilled as of November, according to figures obtained by the Anchorage Daily News. That’s about twice the vacancy rate generally thought of as healthy, according to legislative budget analysts.

“The solution, it’s not rocket science,” said Heidi Drygas, the executive director of the union representing a majority of rank-and-file state of Alaska employees, the Alaska State Employees Association/American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 52. “We have to pay people fairly, and we’re underpaying our state workers right now.”

Drygas says the large number of open jobs has hobbled state services. At one point, half of the state’s payroll processing jobs were unfilled, leading to late and incorrect paychecks for state employees.

“This is a problem that has been plaguing state government for years, and it is only getting worse,” she said.

Alaskans are feeling the effects, said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage.

“We’ve been unable to fill prosecutor jobs. We’ve been unable to fill snowplow operator jobs, teaching jobs, of course, on the local level, clerk jobs for the courts, which backs up our court system, and so on and so forth,” Wielechowski said.

So, in 2023, the Legislature put $1 million in the state budget to fund a study looking to determine whether the state’s salaries were adequate. The results were supposed to come in last June.

Wielechowski said he’s been hearing from constituents looking for the study’s findings. He’s asked the Department of Administration to release the study. And so far, he said, he still hasn’t seen it.

“This has just dragged on, and on, and on, and now we’re seven months later, and we still have nothing,” he said. “They’re refusing to release any documents at all, and that’s very troubling, because this is a critical topic that we need before we go ahead and go into session.”

Dunleavy’s deputy chief of staff emailed the heads of state agencies in early December with an update: The study wasn’t done yet. The governor’s office had reviewed drafts of the study and found them lacking.

They sent the contractor back to the drawing board to incorporate more data: salaries from “additional peer/comparable jurisdictions”, plus recent collective bargaining agreements and a bill that raised some state salaries that passed last spring.

“Potential changes to the State’s classification and pay plans informed by the final study report could substantially impact the State’s budget, and additional due diligence is necessary, especially as we look at the State’s revenue projections,” Deputy Chief of Staff Rachel Bylsma wrote to Dunleavy’s Cabinet on Dec. 6.

Though the final study has not been completed, blogger Dermot Cole filed a public records request for any drafts of the study received to date. But state officials have thus far declined to release them, saying they’re exempt from disclosure requirements under Alaska law.

“The most recent salary study draft records the state received have been withheld under the Alaska Public Records Act based on executive and deliberative process privileges,” Guy Bell, a special project assistant in the governor’s office who deals with records requests, said in an email to Alaska Public Media. “Any prior drafts that may have been provided are superseded by the most recent drafts, so they no longer meet the definition of a public record.”

To Wielechowski, that’s absurd.

“It’s laughable. It’s wild,” he said. “That’s not how the process works.”

The deliberative process privilege under state law protects some, but not all, documents related to internal decision-making in the executive branch, according to a 1992 opinion from the state attorney general’s office. It’s intended to allow advisors to offer their candid recommendations, according to the opinion.

“The deliberative process privilege extends to communications made in the process of policy-making,” and courts have applied the privilege to “predecisional” and “deliberative” documents, Assistant Attorneys General Jim Cantor and Nancy Meade wrote. However, “courts have held that factual observations and final expressions of policy are not privileged,” they continued.

Lawmakers are about to get to work on the state budget, and Wielechowski said it’s hard to do that without a sense of how, if at all, state salaries should be adjusted.

“Nobody knows how it’s going to turn out,” he said. “Maybe salaries are high. But it will certainly give us an indication of whether or not this is something we should be looking at as a Legislature.”

Wielechowski sent a letter to the agency handling the study in December asking for any of the drafts that the contractor has handed in so far. He said he’s concerned that the Dunleavy administration may be trying to manipulate the study’s conclusions.

“We didn’t fund a million dollars to get some politically massaged study,” he said.
“We funded a million dollars so that we could get an objective organization (to) go ahead and look at this problem and to tell us what the numbers look like to tell us how competitive we are.”

An ally of the governor, Sen. Mike Shower, R-Wasillia, said he, too, would like to see the results — but he said he sees the value in waiting to see the whole picture.

“I think that in this particular case, it is important that the administration, or even the legislature or the judicial branch, all of which commission studies, ensure that they are appropriately finished (and) vetted,” Shower said. “Sometimes you don’t get back everything you were looking for.”

Though he’s the incoming Senate minority leader, Shower emphasized that he was speaking only for himself. He said the caucus hasn’t discussed it as a group.

But majority-caucus lawmakers say they’re not interested in waiting. Incoming House State Affairs Committee chair Ashley Carrick, D-Fairbanks, said she plans to take a look at the issue as the session begins.

“I think that there are a lot of questions that are unanswered, and we will be spending the first week of the House State Affairs Committee, in part, addressing the lack of a response from the Department of Administration,” she said.

Drygas, the union leader, sent a letter to her membership on Wednesday asking them to sign a petition calling for the state to release the draft study. It quickly amassed more than a thousand signatures. She said the union is “eagerly awaiting the results,” which she said would provide helpful background for contract negotiations.

“Our membership is fired up,” she said. “We’re not going to just let this go.”

On any clear, dark night you can see them, gliding through the sky and reflecting sunlight from the other side of the world. Manmade satellites now orbit our planet by the thousands, and it’s hard to stargaze without seeing one.

The inky black upper atmosphere was less busy 68 years ago, when a few young scientists stepped out of a trailer near Fairbanks to look into the cold October sky. Gazing upward, they saw the moving dot that started it all, the Russian-launched Sputnik 1.

Those Alaskans, working for the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, were the first North American scientists to see the satellite, which was the size and shape of a basketball and, at 180 pounds, weighed about as much as a point guard.

The Alaska researchers studied radio astronomy at the campus in Fairbanks. They had their own tracking station in a clearing in the forest on the northern portion of university land. This station, set up to study the aurora and other features of the upper atmosphere, enabled the scientists to be ready when a reporter called the institute with news of the Russians’ secret launch of the world’s first manmade satellite.

Within a half-hour of that call, an official with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., called Geophysical Institute Deputy Director C. Gordon Little with radio frequencies that Sputnik emitted.

“The scientists at the Institute poured out of their offices like stirred-up bees,” wrote a reporter for the Farthest North Collegian, the UAF campus newspaper.

Crowded into a trailer full of equipment about a mile north of their offices, the scientists received the radio beep-beep-beep from Sputnik and were able to calculate its orbit. They figured it would be visible in the northwestern sky at about 5 a.m. the next day.

On that morning, three of them stepped outside the trailer to see what Little described as “a bright star-like object moving in a slow, graceful curve across the sky like a very slow shooting star.”

For the record, scientists may not have been the first Alaskans to see Sputnik. In a 1977 article, the founder of this column, T. Neil Davis, described how his neighbor, Dexter Stegemeyer, said he had seen a strange moving star come up out of the west as he was sitting in his outhouse. Though Stegemeyer didn’t know what he saw until he spoke with Davis, his sighting was a bit earlier than the scientists’.

The New York Times’ Oct. 7, 1957 edition included a front-page headline of “SATELLITE SEEN IN ALASKA,” and Sputnik caused a big fuss all over the country. People wondered about the implications of the Soviet object looping over America every 98 minutes. Within a year, Congress voted to create NASA.

Fears about Sputnik evaporated as three months later the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer 1, and eventually took the lead in the race for space.

Almost 70 later, satellites are part of everyday life. The next time you see a satellite streaking through the night sky, remember the first scientist on this continent to see one was standing in Alaska. And the first non-scientist to see a satellite in North America was sitting in Alaska.