Author: Melissa Marconi Wentzel

Beginning May 11th and continuing through the summer, Sitkans will be able to ride the fast ferry Fairweather to and from Juneau 5 days a week. People are calling this summer’s ferry schedule one of the best to hit Sitka in years. But city officials fear, if Sitkans don’t use the improved service, they may just lose it. So, the City is kicking off an intensive marketing campaign to encourage ridership. It just happens to coincide with a similar effort on the part of the Alaska Marine Highway.

One year after launching a community-wide effort to raise awareness and improve safety, Sitka is officially a bike-friendly community. The Washington DC-based League of American Bicyclists today (5-1-08) awarded Sitka, and seven other communities around the country, a bronze designation for bike friendliness. The awards increase the number of official bike-friendly communities nationwide to eighty-four, in thirty-one states. Sitka is the first community in Alaska to win the designation.

Filming for the Sitka-based Disney movie “The Proposal” almost began here in Sitka this spring, that is until Hollywood found Rockport …Sitka’s stand in. (Click on "More" once you open the news story for links to pictures and articles.)

Despite a substantial municipal revenue sharing package from the state, Sitka’s budget for next year is starting out in the hole. The Sitka Assembly heard a first reading of the 2009 municipal budget at a special meeting Thursday (4-24-08) in Harrigan Centennial Hall. The featured speaker of the evening was city finance director Dave Wolff, who gave a blow-by-blow of the anticipated general fund deficit, which stands now at just over $400-thousand dollars.

Sitka’s recycling program logged another milestone this month. Just a couple of weeks before Earth Day the city test-ran a new bailer that will allow Sitkans to recycle more plastics than ever before.

Elected officials in Sitka are proposing a ballot question asking voters to exempt them from state financial disclosure requirements. The Sitka assembly Tuesday night (4-22-08) passed on first reading ballot language that would allow local officials to file the shorter disclosure forms used before the overhaul of state ethics laws last year. If it passes, the Alaska Public Offices Commission says Sitka would be the largest community so far to opt-out of the tougher rules.

The green movement in municipal government in Sitka lost a little momentum Tuesday (4-22-08) when the assembly declined to spend a thousand dollars to send a representative to an international environmental conference in Albuquerque next month. As a compromise, the mayor instead will go to a climate change meeting of the Alaska Municipal League in Anchorage.

Sitka Republican Bert Stedman is calling this year’s legislative session a “success”. The Southeast Senator helped bring in close to $170-million dollars in capital funding for his district. He also counts among lawmakers’ biggest accomplishments the passage of legislation that will help school districts and municipalities. Still, he thinks the abbreviated session shortchanged the legislative process.

Extended interview with author and Alaska Writer Laureate John Straley on the writing of "The Big Both Ways." With KCAW's Robert Woolsey.

Sitka resident and Alaska Writer Laureate John Straley’s newest novel will be on store shelves in May. “The Big Both Ways” is Straley’s seventh book, and his first departure from contemporary crime fiction. Gone are down-and-out detective Cecil Younger and the rest of the cast who have populated Straley’s earlier stories set in modern Southeast Alaska. Instead Straley locates his noir thriller on the troubled streets of Everett and Seattle circa 1935, as the pre-World War II labor movement comes to a head. The protagonists make their getaway to Southeast Alaska in a rowing dory, inspired by Bob DeArmond's real life journey.