Alaska

Should You Retire in Alaska?

Published

1 hour ago

August 23, 2024

If you want to minimize taxes in retirement, Alaska may be on your radar. It has the lowest tax burden of any U.S. state.

Residents also get a cut of the state’s oil wealth, courtesy of annual dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which often exceeds $1,000. But if you’re nearing retirement age, don’t start packing your bags for America’s Last Frontier just yet.

An RV travels against the backdrop of mountains.

Image source: Getty Images.

The cost of retiring in Alaska

In addition to stunning scenery, Alaska boasts breathtakingly low tax rates. The total tax burden is just 4.9% when you account for all the taxes the state levies. There’s no state personal income tax, so you don’t have to worry about part of your retirement distributions or Social Security check going into state coffers.

There’s also no state sales tax and a flat property tax rate of just 1.07% of an owner-occupied home’s value. And Alaska hasn’t experienced the dramatic spike in home prices that’s occurred in much of the U.S. since 2020.

But out of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., Alaska has the fifth-highest cost of living. It’s topped only by Hawaii, California, the District of Columbia, and Massachusetts.

Life in Alaska is about 25.1% more expensive than the U.S. average, according to the Council for Community & Economic Research (C2ER) survey. Some costs that are significantly higher than average in Alaska:

The high cost of living may be part of the reason why people 65 and up account for just 13.1% of Alaska’s population. Only Utah has a smaller share of retirees.

Quality-of-life considerations

Money isn’t the only factor to weigh in choosing a retirement destination. Climate, recreation, transportation, and proximity to loved ones are other considerations.

You may find aging in place difficult, given the relative isolation, or find yourself spending more money on travel when you visit loved ones. If you’re thinking about retiring to Alaska, consider renting for a year or two first to see if you’re well-suited to the Last Frontier.

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Alaska

Youngest Alaskan woman convicted of murder could see case reexamined under new Court of Appeals ruling

Published

9 hours ago

August 23, 2024

Press Room

Youngest Alaskan woman convicted of murder could see case reexamined under new Court of Appeals ruling

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – After the murder of three Anchorage residents — a husband, wife and the wife’s sister — in 1985, Winona Fletcher was sentenced to 135 years in prison for her role in the grisly killings.

She was charged in the case when she was just 14 years old.

Now, following a new court of appeals ruling, she has the chance to have her case reexamined.

Last year, the Alaska Court of Appeals found that when sentencing juvenile defendants, the trial courts must consider on the record how juveniles are fundamentally different from adults.

On Aug. 9 of this year, the appeals court came to the conclusion that that decision is to be retroactive, and thus should also apply to past offenders — including Fletcher.

“We agree with the superior court’s conclusion that the Fletcher decision should be fully retroactive to those cases on collateral review, where juvenile offenders have received the functional equivalent of a life without parole sentence,” the ruling stated.

Fletcher and her 19-year-old boyfriend were sentenced for the murders of Tom Faccio, 69; his wife, Ann Faccio, 70; and Ann’s sister, Emelia Elliot, who was 75 years old at the time of her death.

With the conviction in the case, Fletcher was the youngest female to ever be convicted of murder in Alaska.

Fletcher’s attorney, Marcy McDannel, said that the state’s court of appeals is following a broader national trend regarding harsher sentences given to youth offenders, which she said started with the U.S. Supreme Court. She said that while Alaska is far from the forefront — and is actually lagging behind — she believes the state is unquestionably moving in the right direction.

“This decision recognizes the science that says that children don’t have fully developed brains and are very much at the mercy of their environment,” McDannel said. “That has a huge impact on their behavior, and that needs to be taken into consideration when deciding how we treat children, even when they’ve done something terrible.”

Suki Miller, however, disagrees. Miller serves as the executive director of Victims For Justice, which was founded in 1985 by Janice Faccio Lienhart and Sharon Faccio Nahorney, the two daughters of Tom and Ann Faccio.

Miller said that every time there is a new hearing of any kind, it retraumatizes victims and their family members, making the process of moving forward and healing nearly impossible.

“They’re always talking about, maybe, that they’ve been in there for a long time,” Miller said. “Victims are dead for a long time, they don’t come back, they don’t get second chances, they don’t get hearings, they’re gone.

“So it’s really hard for victims to go through that, and hear the different types of rehabilitation that the offender was able to have when their loved ones will never have that chance.”

Resentencing for Fletcher under the new criteria is currently scheduled for December 2024.

McDannel, who said Fletcher’s original sentence is now unconstitutional under Alaska statute, said the state is making efforts to have the Alaska Supreme Court review the court of appeals’ decision before the resentencing, which could potentially hold the process up for an undetermined amount of time.

She added that she’s hopeful the courts will allow the process to move forward, to give Fletcher the benefit of the appeals court’s ruling.

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Alaska

Alaska Supreme Court hears arguments in case seeking to keep ranked vote repeal measure off ballot

Published

16 hours ago

August 22, 2024

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Alaska Supreme Court hears arguments in case seeking to keep ranked vote repeal measure off ballot

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Alaska

Road section removed at Alaska’s Katmai National Park to protect archaeological sites • Alaska Beacon

Published

23 hours ago

August 22, 2024

Press Room

Road section removed at Alaska’s Katmai National Park to protect archaeological sites • Alaska Beacon

A 200-foot piece of dirt road that was punched into Katmai National Park and Preserve 10 years ago has been removed so the site can be revert to its natural state, protecting archaeological features there.

The small bit of road near Lake Brooks was built by mistake, without proper consultation with regional Native tribes and Native organizations, the National Park Service said. It wound up covering parts of two underground sod homes, sites known in Alutiiq culture as ciqluaqs and in Russian as barabaras.

Originally intended as tool to shorten an existing service road and help keep vehicles from getting too close to an historic cabin that had been hit a couple of times by buses, the road section was never actually used, said Mark Sturm, Katmai’s superintendent. The problems it caused became apparent shortly after it was built in the summer of 2014, he said.

“It was not appropriate for us to have done that, and certainly not to have done it in the absence of having done our due diligence,” said Sturm, who was not at Katmai at the time. Construction of the road section “upset a bunch of people,” he said.

“The biggest thing that we did wrong was to have done that work without having done proper consultation and without having done proper historic preservation,” he said.

The removal, which was completed last week, required some delicate work, including some hand digging around the two barabara sites, Sturm said. It was also the subject of an agreement between several Native organizations and the park, and a tribal representative monitored the work, according to the park.

Beyond this bit of road, the park has reformed its practices to ensure proper tribal consultation and prevent any similar problems in the future, Sturm said. “We have our ducks in our row,” he said. “We’re doing it right now.”

Katmai National Park and Preserve, which sprawls over 4 million acres, is known for its salmon-eating bears, its lakes and its volcanic landscapes. It is the setting for an annual online event called Fat Bear Week, which has drawn global audiences of people casting their votes for the bears considered to have been most successful at packing on weight in preparation for winter hibernation.

Katmai has been part of the U.S. national park system for more than a century. It was established as a national preserve in 1918, then expanded several times later until it was established in its present form through the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

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