Homer gasline approved
Gov. Sean Parnell approved funding for the South Peninsula Natural Gas Pipeline Monday, leaving intact the entire $8,150,000 request in the 2013 Capital Budget.
The governor said it made a difference that customers along the Enstar line would help pay for construction through the $1 tariff. “That is what I had requested and I was glad to see it was followed through. I will be glad the people of the Southern Kenai Peninsula will have access to natural gas,” Parnell said during a press conference explaining his budget decisions.
Losing no time, the Homer City Council passed a resolution Monday night to begin the process for obtaining natural gas. A workshop is set for June 4 to “initiate a broad community review process on the merits of public financing for gasline construction.”
“This is what we’ve waited a long time for,” said Mayor Jim Hornaday, who often mentions the town has sought natural gas heat for 40 years. “It’s going to make a tremendous difference in our bottom line, for every business and individual in town.”
Brown bear spotted on Greer Road
A brown bear is the suspected culprit of a chicken coup raid and of seriously damaging a spring garden after ripping into a high tunnel off Greer Road, nine miles East End Road in the Fritz Creek area. The bear has also wreaked havoc on Yukon Road before Greer.
Adam Green found all his plantings ruined – carrots, beats, potatoes, greens.
“All trampled,” he said Monday. “The bear came along and put his paws on it and pushed in all the sides every four feet. He ripped open doors on each end – absolutely ripped it apart,” Green said. The damage can be repaired but it’s going to take some work.
Tiglax gets tied up in first sign of federal budget cuts
In a difficult cost-cutting move, the research vessel the M/V Tiglax will sit tied to the Homer dock for two weeks this summer.
The Alaska National Maritime Wildlife Refuge owns the famed research ship, built in 1987 especially for difficult work in the stormy Aleutians. Refuge Manager Steve Delehanty said the move will save the refuge $80,000.
“This will be the most noticeable cut in terms of the public, because the ship will be tied up at the dock for two weeks in the prime of the season,” Delehanty said.
The cuts also mean foregoing or postponing research at Barren Islands, a long-term sea bird monitoring project studying ocean health through bird diets.
The refuge’s annual budget of roughly $4 million goes to all operations throughout the Alaska National Maritime Wildlife Refuge. With increasing costs and budget cuts of 2 percent, the refuge has a budget shortfall of about $400,000.
HoPP recruiting volunteers all week
HoPP will be recruiting building volunteers and helpers for its Karen Hornaday Park Playground Project starting Sunday and running through to May 27.
The old Karen Hornaday playground was taken down by the City of Homer this weekend, leaving open ground for creating the ambitious nature-themed playground for Homer’s children.
Organizer Miranda Weiss said the Sunday-to-Sunday building schedule still needs to be filled in with people geared toward one of three tasks.
“There are three ways to help out: On building, helping with child care or helping to serve or donate meals,” she said.
Excavator accident takes local man’s life
A Homer man has died in a construction accident off West Hill Road Friday when an excavator he was operating flipped and crushed him.
David William Boone, 57, was pronounced dead at the scene at 5:07 p.m.
The Homer Police Department received the call to Rebar Road off West Hill on Friday afternoon. First responders from the Homer Volunteer Fire Department found that Boone had been pinned by the equipment and could not be revived.
Boone’s son, Corey, said his dad was helping a friend. “His friend is moving to Homer, and Dad was clearing a lot for a potential building site,” Corey said Monday. He owned the backhoe, which he had used in a land-clearing project several years before. “Then he just kept it, and used it mostly to help friends,” he said.
Shorebird Festival launches a flight of its own
When the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival was conceived, Homer was only a few seasons outside the doldrums of the 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.
It was a time of concern about the future of Mariner Lagoon, the habitat where shorebirds rested and ate – locals talked about filling it in for a park.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service occupied offices in the small mall by the Best Western Bidarka Inn – it lacked the presence of the Alaska Islands and Ocean Visitor Center that later, once constructed in 2004, would combine many federal agencies under one scientific roof. It lacked an auditorium for the big-name featured speakers.
But that didn’t much matter at the time. They had a million shorebirds, said Poppy Benson, one of the festival’s originators.
“I was at a training session, and I remember someone was talking about putting on a festival – a carp festival. And I thought, Really? A carp festival?” Benson recalled.
Kenai Peninsula School District won’t see red after all
As Kenai Peninsula Borough School District funding settles into a rosier outlook than expected, the district is hoping to get its expenses squared away in its budget, as well, before the 2012 fiscal year calendar turns a page to 2013 on June 30.
A big part still up in the air is ongoing negotiations with employee unions over three-year contracts to start in fiscal year 2013.
Negotiation teams for the district, the Kenai Peninsula Education Association and Kenai Peninsula Education Support Association, meeting since January, had not come to agreement by the end of April, prompting a two-day session of mediation May 1 and 2 that also ended without agreement on the big remaining sticking points — salary and health care. Generally, the next step after mediation is for the parties to enter advisory arbitration, which would occur in the fall.
HoWL DiRtBaGs Clean Up Homer
They’re dirty, they’re stinky, and they’re picking up your trash. For six days, the HoWL DiRtBaGs have been wading through ditches and trudging through town, picking up litter to raise money for their HoWL summer camp scholarships.
The DiRtBaGs picked up 4,444 pounds of trash this year. They took home the top prizes at the Chamber of Commerce-sponsored Clean-Up Day for both litter picker-uppers and recyclers. The DiRtBaGs hauled in 386 bags of trash, 66 of which were just recyclables. They also rolled over two dozen abandoned tires up and out of the ditches.
Tsunami debris reaches Montague
Chris Pallister’s worst nightmare came true over the weekend when he took a first look at the outer islands of Prince William Sound on a flight to check for snow thaw.
Beaches were exposed from ice, but a whole lot of other flotsam – large chunks of wall insulation, hundreds of gas canisters – were there as well.
For 50 miles or more, massive amounts of debris litter the beaches. Black snarls of fishing nets and canisters that may still contain oil, fuel and kerosene. Carcasses of urethane foam torn out of buildings in the Japanese Earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck last spring also washed ashore.
On May 5, the Gulf of Alaska Keepers had planned to get started cleaning beaches. This is why Pallister was checking on the progress of break-up. He is the president of the Gulf of Alaska Keeper Organization, a group that monitors 17 beach cleanup sites and 122 miles of coastline. Over the past 10 years, GOAK gained an idea on what constitutes the normal haul of heaved up trash – they’ve collected 1 million pounds.
‘No’ to $2 head tax on tourists
At the end of hearing from about a dozen water taxi and charter boat operators on a proposed $2 head tax, the Homer Port and Harbor Commission nixed the idea entirely.
They also crossed off the proposal to build a new $2 million Harbor Office to replace the ailing building. And they put a ceiling of $4 million on the amount of the revenue bond.
The commission took public testimony at its Wednesday meeting on four proposed fee increases toward helping to pay for $12 million in harbor improvements. They were looking at fuel wharfage, moorage increases, fee rates at the Deepwater Dock and the head tax as ways to raise funds toward debt payment on a $6 million revenue bond. The other $6 million would be paid for in grants available to the City of Homer. A grant deadline looms in July, so the idea was to have the financing figured out ahead of time, said Harbormaster Bryan Hawkins.
But the first number to change in the request is the amount. Instead of $6 million requested of Homer in the form of funding a revenue bond, the commission voted to lower it to $4 million.
