Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski visited Haines on Friday, taking the day to speak with borough officials, tribal officials, and attend the evening’s Beerfest festivities. She also sat down with the Chilkat Valley News and KHNS to discuss topics including the Lutak Dock, landless communities, and federal funding.
Lutak Dock
For all the Lutak Dock talk in recent months, the conversation has been largely limited to local opinions. One exception was two months ago, when Haines resident Cindy Jones told assembly members about visiting Senator Murkowski’s office in Washington, D.C.
Jones relayed what she said was displeasure from the congressional delegation on the issue. “We made all of Alaska look bad and we’re on a funding timeout for a while. People in D.C. aren’t happy with what’s going on here the last few years,” Jones said.
On Friday, Murkowski confirmed parts of the sentiment, but framed it slightly differently, saying that she was “reflecting the frustrations within the community about just how long things have ebbed and flowed.”
The senator largely framed that “frustration” as a process concern. “It’s not my role to determine what a community’s needs are or what the scope of the project is,” Murkowski said, but added that to be an advocate for federal funding, she needed “clear direction.”
Murkowski did not rule out the ongoing conflict having a negative effect on future funding, though she indicated the issue would not be with her, but with the funding organizations like MARAD, which is responsible for the borough’s current $20 million grant for the dock.
“If [funding organizations] see there’s been a withdrawal or a pullback, or whatever word you want to use to describe, they’ll be like, Well, wait a minute, maybe the community is not ready,” she said. “You don’t want them to think that you’re not ready, because it’s really easy to go on to the next [grant applicant].”
Landless Communities
Part of Murkowski’s visit to town was a meeting with representatives from the Chilkoot Indian Association and Chilkat Indian Village, and Murkowski said a priority for her in the Senate is securing land for landless communities.
When the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was enacted in 1971, a number of Southeast Alaska Native communities, including Deishú/Haines, were left out of the full benefits. “We’ve worked on this for multiple congresses,” Murkowski said, saying it continues to be a priority, in addition to securing land for Vietnam veterans who were left out of the land allotment process.
Bills sponsored by Murkowski in the past to establish a second Native corporation in the Chilkat Valley with land rights have repeatedly failed, including one introduced last year.
Murkowski said the main roadblock is “environmental interests, who want to preserve the federal estate and who have failed to appreciate the injustice that has been done to Alaska Natives.”
There’s a question of what federal lands would be transferred to tribes, as not all federal land is equally valuable, or practical to use.
“It is absolutely wrong to ask somebody, or to suggest to a Native elder at this point in time that, well, you can make your selection, but your selection is 400 miles from here, in an area that is not accessible by road, or may not have an airstrip,” Murkowski said. “That’s not right.”
Federal Funding
Since the beginning of the year, federal funds have been cut or marked with statuses “on hold” all over the Chilkat Valley, mostly without warning. Those cuts have almost all been done through executive order or president Trump’s DOGE initiative, rather than through Congress.
On Friday, Murkowski said she disagrees with a number of those funding cuts and will advocate to restore them. One of those disagreements was on FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which Trump has said he might try to eliminate altogether.
In defending FEMA, Murkowski pointed to specific challenges faced by the state, including the lack of nearby states for mutual aid. Murkowski also mentioned seismic activity, volcanoes, tsunamis, landslides, flooding, and forest fires, and brought up climate change changing or worsening these threats.
“FEMA is not perfect,” she said. “But there are some who are saying that the effort to basically protect your state should be pushed to the states. To say to Alaska, you’re just going to have to absorb all this yourself, that’s a really heavy lift.”
As for other funding, Murkowski spoke to a general theme of “not harming the most vulnerable.” Murkowski said she was worried about potential cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits – better known as food stamps. Those cuts are included in a massive spending bill, just passed by the House of Representatives, which would put much of president Trump’s agenda into law. The bill is now in front of Murkowski and the Senate for approval.
Murkowski said she recognized cuts to Medicaid could be “attractive” places to cut in order to pay for Trump priorities on defense spending, border spending, and tax cuts. “But again,” she said, “let’s not harm the most vulnerable.” As it stands now, the bill passed by the House would increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion by 2034, as projected by the Congressional Budget Office.
Elsewhere in that spending bill, Murkowski said she will push for a one-year extension to Secure Rural Schools funding, which paid $276,000 to the borough last year, but has since been allowed to lapse. Murkowski said she feels “pretty confident” about the inclusion of that funding into the final bill.
On a Chilkat Valley-specific funding note, Murkowski said she was opposed to library funding cuts that have mostly shuttered the Klukwan library. Murkowski called it “good news” that some states have won a court injunction to pause museum and library cuts. However, Alaska wasn’t one of the states who sued, so the Klukwan library’s funding remains cut.