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P E N I N S U L A
Vol. 50, Issue 68
In the news
Utility pairs with Tesla for battery system ANCHORAGE — An Alaska utility is working with electric car maker Tesla to install an industrial battery system to quickly release stored power into grids, an official said. Homer Electric Association announced the contract with Californiabased Tesla for the utility’s power plant in Soldotna, The Anchorage Daily News reported Wednesday. The electric cooperative wants to replace natural gas-fired power for short periods and cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Tesla components are expected to be installed in a battery energy storage system that should begin operating in fall 2021. Tesla did not immediately return an email seeking comment. Homer Electric ’s service area covers the western Kenai Peninsula and includes 34,000 electric meters and 24,000 member-owners. The battery system’s power can be delivered to its grid at a rate of 46.5 megawatts an hour and operate at that rate for two hours before it must be recharged, Homer Electric General Manager Brad Janorschke said. The battery system is expected to increase the utility’s ability to provide power without disruptions, he said. The system will be a backup source of energy that is available yearround and can feed power to the grid more quickly and efficiently than a gasfired turbine. “It will save significant dollars in fuel every year,” Janorschke said. “As gas prices escalate those savings will keep going up.” The utility did not disclose the battery system’s cost, but Janorschke said it plans to pay for the system using financial reserves and debt financing. Debt financing often involves issuing bonds to raise money from investors.
Wind chill alerts issued ANCHORAGE — The National Weather Service issued wind chill warnings for Alaska’s northern coast while more snow was forecast for the state’s largest See news, Page A3
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‘I don’t want it to be about me’ After series of attacks, local woman fears LGBTQ community is being targeted By Brian Mazurek Peninsula Clarion
This article contains descriptions of events that may be disturbing to some readers. Over the past two months, Tammie Willis — an employee of Kenai Peninsula College and a local advocate for LGBTQ rights — has experienced several instances of harassment and violence that led her to believe she is being targeted as a member of the LGBTQ community. Willis is a member of the LGBT Alliance at the college and also one of the organizers for the annual Soldotna Pride in the Park event, which coincides with other Pride marches around the country to commemorate the 1969 New York City Stonewall Riots and the beginning of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. The first incident occurred on Nov. 14, a few days after the first planning meeting for next year’s Pride March had been announced publicly, when Willis said someone left a note on her truck that contained homophobic slurs and threats of harm that ended with a warning to “Take it some where else before you get hurt!!!” Then on Nov. 22, the day after that first planning meeting took place, someone threw a large object at Willis’ truck and smashed her windshield as she was driving on Poppy Lane near the Kenai
Brian Mazurek / Peninsula Clarion
Tammie Willis is seen here at Kenai Peninsula College on Dec. 19. The bandage on her arm covers some of the cuts Willis received while being attacked at her home Dec. 9.
Peninsula College. And on Dec. 9, Willis was attacked in her home by someone wielding a knife. The attack, which was reported by Alaska State Troopers in their daily dispatches four days later on Dec. 13, sent her to the hospital
with cuts and bruises on her arms, legs and stomach. The assault on Willis in her home took place two days after the second Pride planning meeting had been announced publicly. “I mean it is an assumption; I
can’t say it is because I’m gay,” Willis said. “But when you look at it within the context of the note and the activities and the timeline, it definitely lends itself to looking like See attack, Page A13
Doctor West Coast fishery rebounds faces fraud in rare conservation ‘home run’ charges over By Gillian Flaccus Associated Press
WARRENTON, Ore. — A rare environmental success story is unfolding in waters off the U.S. West Coast. After years of fear and uncertainty, bottom trawler fishermen — those who use nets to scoop up rockfish, bocaccio, sole, Pacific Ocean perch and other deep-dwelling fish — are making a comeback here, reinventing themselves as a sustainable industry less than two decades after authorities closed huge stretches of the Pacific Ocean because of the species’ depletion. The ban devastated fishermen, but on Jan. 1, regulators will reopen an area roughly three times the size of Rhode Island off Oregon and California to groundfish bottom trawling — all with the approval of environmental groups that were once the industry’s biggest foes. The two sides collaborated on a long-term plan that will continue to resuscitate the groundfish industry while permanently protecting thousands of square miles of reefs and coral beds that benefit the overfished species. Now, the fishermen who see their livelihood returning must solve another piece of the puzzle: drumming up consumer demand for fish that haven’t been in grocery stores or on menus for a generation. “It’s really a conservation home run,”
said Shems Jud, regional director for the Environmental Defense Fund’s ocean program. “The recovery is decades ahead of schedule. It’s the biggest environmental story that no one knows about.” The process also netted a win for conservationists concerned about the future of extreme deepwater habitats where bottom trawlers currently don’t go. A tract of ocean the size of New Mexico with waters up to 2.1 miles deep will be off-limits to bottomtrawling to protect deep-sea corals and sponges just now being discovered. “Not all fishermen are rapers of the environment. When you hear the word ‘trawler,’ very often that’s associated with destruction of the sea and pillaging,” said Kevin Dunn, whose trawler Iron Lady was featured in a Whole Foods television commercial about sustainable fishing. Groundfish is a catch-all term that refers to dozens of species that live on, or near, the bottom of the Pacific off the West Coast. Trawling vessels drag weighted nets to collect as many fish as possible, but that can damage critical rocky underwater habitat. The groundfish fishery hasn’t always struggled. Starting in 1976, the federal government subsidized the construction of domestic fishing vessels to lock down U.S. interests in West Coast waters, and by the 1980s, that investment paid off. Bottom trawling was booming, with
500 vessels in California, Oregon and Washington hauling in 200 million pounds of non-whiting groundfish a year. Unlike Dungeness crab and salmon, groundfish could be harvested year-round, providing an economic backbone for ports. But in the late 1990s, scientists began to sound the alarm about dwindling fish stocks. Just nine of the more than 90 groundfish species were in trouble, but because of the way bottom trawlers fished — indiscriminately hauling up millions of pounds of whatever their nets encountered — regulators focused on all bottom trawling. Multiple species of rockfish, slow-growing creatures with spiny fins and colorful names like canary, darkblotched and yellow eye, were the hardest hit. By 2005, trawlers brought in just one-quarter of the haul of the 1980s. The fleet is now down to 75 boats, said Brad Pettinger, former director of the Oregon Trawl Commission who was key in developing the plan to reopen fishing grounds. “We really wiped out the industry for a number of years,” Pettinger said. “To get those things up and going again is not easy.” In 2011, trawlers were assigned quotas for how many of each species they could catch. If they went over, See fishery, Page A2
lab tests
By Dan Joling Associated Press
A physician who Alaska prosecutors say filed millions of dollars in false claims for laboratory tests has been charged with felony and misdemeanor counts of medical assistance fraud. Dr. John Zipperer Jr. defrauded the Alaska Medicaid program by performing more than 1 million unnecessary lab tests on patients’ urine samples at a lab he owned in Tennessee, prosecutors said in an announcement Thursday. Zipperer was reimbursed nearly $9 million for lab testing from August 2013 through August 2015, prosecutors said. That was more than 10 times the amount for laboratory test codes billed by all other providers in the Alaska Medicaid system, prosecutors said. Zipperer no longer practices in Alaska, prosecutors said in the criminal complaint. Online court documents do not list an attorney who could comment on the case and a message left on Zipperer’s Alaska phone number was not immediately returned. See fraud, Page A2
First ads for census launch in remote villages By Mike Schneider Associated Press
The first ads for the 2020 census launched this week in a remote part of Alaska with plans for an advertising campaign for the rest of the country slated for next month, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday. The advertising launched this week is aimed at residents of 220 small
Native Alaskan villages where census takers will begin the once-a-decade headcount next month. The count begins in January in these remote Alaskan villages because the ground is frozen then, allowing easier access than at other times of the year. The kickoff is the third week in January in Toksook Bay, a village on the Bering Sea west of Bethel. The rest of the country will begin
filling out the 2020 census questionnaire in March. This is the first year the Census Bureau has aired ads targeting the residents of the remote Alaskan villages. The campaign includes fullpage print ads, commercial signage, posters, radio ads and digital content. Nationwide, the Census Bureau plans to spend $500 million on a communications campaign to get
people to answer the questionnaire. For the first time, the agency is encouraging a majority of participants to fill it out online, though it can also be filled out by telephone or by mailing a paper form. The 2020 census will determine how many congressional seats each state gets as well as direct the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending.