Pastors of local churches providing congregational support to Love In The Name of Christ turned out in force Tuesday afternoon to learn more about the problems besetting the faith-based social services clearinghouse.
Without a functioning board or professional staff, the pastors decided to step up and personally deal with the crisis.
By meeting’s end, an ad hoc advisory committee had been selected consisting of six pastors and Terry Reichardt, one of Love INC’s founding members and longtime directors.
Pastors include the Revs. Philip Kuehnert of Zion Lutheran; JR Markle of Jubilee Worship Center; David New of Fairhill Community Church; Bob Sugden of Two Rivers Community Church of the Nazarene; Paul Teyler of Fairbanks Lutheran Church; and Al Woods of Door of Hope.
Approximately 60 area churches donate $8,000 monthly to Love INC to help those in need, and many of their congregants donate hundreds of volunteer hours to the telephone clearinghouse as caseworkers and with various programs and projects.
It turned out to be an expensive caribou hunting trip.
The four hunters who got two pickup trucks stuck in the tundra off the Dalton Highway last year trying to retrieve caribou they shot have paid $10,000 in restitution to the U.S. government, officials with the Bureau of Land Management in Fairbanks announced on Tuesday.
The fine will cover “penalties, rental and other administrative costs,” according to a press release issued Tuesday.
“I think that’s a significant fine,” said public affairs specialist Doug Stockdale with BLM in Fairbanks. “I hope this is something that makes people take notice.”
According to the press release, the hunters also told BLM officials that they spent more than $32,000 to extract and repair the two pickup trucks, which were stuck for nearly six months before the hunters were finally able to remove them by using jackhammers to dig them out of the frozen tundra.
A Fairbanks woman faces several charges after severely injuring a relative.
Virginia R. Smoke, 57, was charged with first-degree assault after police say she stabbed a man in the head several times Sunday night.
The pair had been drinking and the man fled the home on the 100 block of Second Avenue to get help after the attack when Smoke took the phone away from him as he tried to call for help, according to a criminal complaint filed in court.
Smoke told Fairbanks Police the man had been bothering here, but she did not stab him, the complaint stated.
The man suffered several cuts, with some going as deep as the skull, as well as a brain hemorrhage. He was transported to Anchorage for medical care.
The gifts from Santa’s Clearing House go out 10 days from today. The word so far, however, is that donations have been slow to arrive this year.
Digging into the pocketbooks to find money to donate to others, or to buy gifts for others, is a little harder to do nowadays given some of the economic realities of the year. Prices of many things seem to be going up, and people could be having a little less to give.
While conditions might have changed, what hasn’t changed is the pleasure that comes with giving — especially to those in need.
Fairbanks has a long history of giving, as demonstrated through the annual success of the Santa’s Clearing House drive and other holiday assistance efforts. The Clearing House, a charity coordinated by the Daily News-Miner but operated through the hard work of volunteers, has been around for many decades. The people it has served, who have had their holiday season boosted a bit more than they might have expected, number in the many thousands.
We need to keep it up.
Fairbanks Police are searching for two men following an armed robbery at the Pizza Hut on Airport Way on Sunday night.
Employees at Pizza Hut were counting money around 10:30 p.m. when two men, one with a semi-automatic pistol, entered the store demanding money.
One man was described as 6 feet tall, stocky and wearing camouflage pants and a black hooded sweatshirt as well as a black ski mask and sunglasses.
The other man was described as 5 feet 9 inches or 5 feet 10 inches, thinner than the first man, wearing a camouflage jacket and camouflage pants as well as a black paintball mask. The second man was holding a bag as well.
The races of the men were unclear because of their clothing, Lt. Dan Welborn said.
When school starts after Christmas vacation in January there will be one less school bus route and earlier boarding times for students at Tri-Valley School in Healy.
There are currently three routes, but as of January, the north, middle and south routes will be combined into two routes, a move that will save money for the district. For example, according to Healy Laidlaw Manager Bill Mitchell, the south route only serves five students.
The change means that some students will have to get up a little earlier, as their bus may arrive about 20 minutes sooner than it does now. The middle route will be gone. The south route will serve students on Otto Lake Road and the north route will pick up students on Stampede Road.
Students who live closer than 1 1/2 miles to the school will no loner receive bus service. School buses can only travel on state-maintained roads, and apparently that doesn’t apply to driving on gravel roads through local neighborhoods.
The Denali Borough School Board approved the change at its last meeting.
Planners have completed work on a master plan for the 400-acre Isberg Recreation Area five miles southwest of Fairbanks. The Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly will vote Dec. 13 on a proposal to formally approve the blueprint for the area, which was rezoned in 2005 to protect it from development and is used for a variety of sporting purposes.
The assembly two years ago approved $70,000 for the master plan, and borough parks officials held public meetings to gather input as the planning project progressed. Parks planner John Haas said some people asked the borough to maintain a “rural atmosphere” at the recreation area while segregating noncompatible trail uses to protect visitors and the trails themselves.
“We feel we have faithfully incorporated a majority of the wishes expressed by the participants into the (master planning) process,” Haas wrote in an e-mail to the News-Miner.
Institute focuses on uninsured
A research summary from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage indicates many small-business owners who don’t offer health insurance to workers cite, as reasons, the difficulty of controlling insurance and administrative burdens.
Each morning our guests at the Inn enjoy a full, hot breakfast combined with winning and entertaining conversation.
Breakfast is the time when the staff and the guests join to share their travel stories, to seek advice about what lies ahead on their journey, and to just have a relaxing and restful haven from their busy, hectic lives. Breakfast is often the highlight of a guest’s stay at the Inn, the butter on the toast, as it were.
If you think Fairbanks is a small town, you should hear some of the coincidences that pop up over an early morning meal with complete strangers. The only breakfast rule is that each guest introduces themselves to everyone at the table.
A guest sitting next to a fellow from Israel mentioned he had recently returned from Israel after visiting an old friend. They began to talk of places visited, sights seen and where he had stayed. He stayed in his friend’s home on Some Street. We live on Some Street, replied the Israeli. What is your friend’s name.
Mr. Somebody was the reply. No way, Mr. Somebody lives next door to me!
The state high school skiing championships are soon returning to Birch Hill Recreation Area, but softball will have to wait until at least 2012.
So decided the Alaska School Activities Association board of directors at a meeting this past Friday and Saturday in Anchorage.
Birch Hill hosted the ski championships from 2002-2005 and will get another three-year stint beginning in 2009.
“That one was a gimme,” Walt Armstrong, Region VI representative for the ASAA board, said Tuesday of the group’s vote. He cited the excellent facilities, the Nordic Ski Club of Fairbanks’ experience organizing major events and the consistently good skiing conditions at Birch Hill as reasons for the approved bid.
“It’s great news,” said Greg Whisenhant, coach of West Valley High School, which will host the event with NSCF. “It’s always nice to have a championship on a home course and also in front of the home crowd.”
M. Dale Harris
A celebration of the life of Fairbanksan Dale Harris, one of the most experienced and conscientious drivers on the Dalton Highway, will be held Monday at 4:30 p.m. at the Elks Lodge.
His first name was Marvin, but his friends and family knew him as Dale and his fellow truck drivers knew him by his CB handle of “Spud.”
All Dalton Highway drivers are invited to join in a truck parade on Sunday at noon, starting at the Sourdough Express yard on Driveway Street. The semi trucks will leave Sourdough and go on the Steese Highway and the Elliott Highway to the Hilltop Truckstop as a memorial salute to Dale.
Dale’s family and other friends are invited to gather at the trans-Alaska pipeline viewpoint in Fox to watch the trucks roll by.
The Public Safety Report is compiled from criminal complaints filed in state and federal courts, as well as some police blotter information, trooper dispatches, fire department reports and interviews with public safety officials. Individuals named as arrested and/or charged with crimes in this report are presumed innocent until proved guilty in a court of law.
Assault
Andrew Gerald Dixon, 51, of Fairbanks, was charged with fourth-degree assault after a man said he punched him on Thursday.
Laura Ann Giffin, 42, Fairbanks, was charged with first-degree assault after a man said she scratched and hit him and tried to hit him with a frying pain full of meatloaf on Sunday. The man said she also threw a boiling pot of vegetables and potatoes at him, according to a criminal complaint filed in court.
Saturday’s newspaper had one of those stories that no one likes to see.
In the Fairbanks Police Department’s annual report to the Fairbanks City Council, it was noted that police received 669 calls in October about public inebriates — almost twice what is average.
This kind of spike, which is mammoth by any scale, corresponded with the timing of the Alaska Federation of Natives Conference.
But these facts should not be viewed as a commentary on the conference organizers or on Alaska Natives.
The AFN convention took place here in 2005 as well and, while Fairbanks Police Chief Dan Hoffman did note there was a spike at that time, it was nothing on the order of what our community saw this year.
Thanks to mission
Nov. 25, 2007
To the editor:
Thanks very, very much to the Fairbanks Rescue Mission for pitching in at a time of need and serving some 500 Thanksgiving meals to our community — folks who might have eaten that day at the Catholic Church had it been able to be open this year.
And thanks to all who contributed time or funds to helping the Rescue Mission with this rescue! But it reminds me that last summer, the News-Miner printed articles and letters about the Rescue Mission’s near-closure from lack of funds.
In the year since her swearing in, Gov. Sarah Palin has overhauled the state’s approach to getting a natural gas pipeline, reworked its oil production tax, and helped rewrite its ethics laws, among other things.
“It was certainly an energized year,” she said Monday in a telephone interview. “We’ve certainly done what voters mandated.”
Palin began her first term as governor a year ago today at a swearing-in ceremony in Fairbanks. She chose Fairbanks over Juneau to recognize the drafting of the state’s constitution here 50 years before, and to make the event accessible to Alaskans along the road system.
No governor had done so before.
Palin won laughs, cheers and rounds of standing applause as she promised to limit state spending and defend the state’s interest “like a nanook defending her cub.”
With a pack of bold, hungry wolves running around the outskirts of Fairbanks snacking on pet dogs, some residents in Alaska’s second-largest city are getting skittish.
“It’s not a common situation,” Cathie Harms, spokeswoman for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks, said of the wolf pack that has been lurking around residential areas of North Pole and Two Rivers for the past month. “Everybody is used to seeing moose on the road, but not everybody is used to seeing wolves in their yard.”
Two dogs have been killed by what state wildlife officials suspect is the same pack of wolves — one in North Pole on Oct. 31 on the edge of the Chena Lake Recreation Area and one at 19.5 Mile Chena Hot Springs Road on Nov. 22 — while a third dog escaped the jaws of death when its owner chased down a wolf in his truck after it grabbed his 20-pound schipperke/dachshund mix from his yard on Nov. 27.
In the past week, the Department of Fish and Game has received several calls from people reporting wolf sightings along the first 20 miles of Chena Hot Springs Road, as well as residents worried about their dogs and children. Everywhere Harms goes, people ask her about the wolves.
“Everybody is talking about it, wanting to know what’s happening,” she said.
While Fairbanksans got a rare taste of wind chill on Sunday and Monday, residents in the far eastern Interior were coping with bone chill.
Winds of 15-20 mph whipped through Fairbanks on Sunday and Monday to create windchill factors of 15 to 20 degrees below zero, the coldest conditions thus far this winter, while the temperature a little further to the east dropped to 40 below, said meteorologist Rick Thoman with the National Weather Service in Fairbanks.
A low temperature of 40 below was recorded at Tok on Monday morning 200 miles southeast of Fairbanks and the temperature in Northway, a little farther to the southeast, bottomed out at 43 below, Thoman said.
The low temperature in Central, 125 miles northeast of Fairbanks, was reported to be 37 below on Monday.
It wasn’t as cold in the central and western Interior — temperatures in Fairbanks hovered around zero most of the day — but strong wind gusts pushed windchill factors to dangerous levels.
A Fairbanks woman froze to death Saturday night outside the home of a friend she was visiting in Hamilton Acres after failing to take a ride from a taxi that had come to pick her up.
Judy Geraghty, 44, was not breathing when friends found her outside the Craig Avenue home at 10 a.m. Sunday.
While family members speculate Geraghty may have fallen down the steps and been knocked out, the manager of a cab company that was called to pick up Geraghty said she was sitting on the steps outside the house when a cab driver arrived around 9:10 p.m. Saturday.
“She was sitting on the front step, playing with her cell phone and didn’t know where she wanted to go,” said Bill Northrup, manager for Yellow Cab,, speaking by cell phone Monday. “We left her sitting on the front steps. If she can’t get up and walk back in the door, that’s not our problem.”
The residents of the house discovered Geraghty the next morning.
Buddy, a 75-pound Chow, Red Doberman and Rottweiler mixed breed dog, turns 19 years old today.
In human years he’s a young adult, but in dog years, Buddy, is pushing 100. The old rule-of-thumb that one dog year is equal to seven human years is no longer considered accurate. The ratio is higher in young dogs and decreases as the dog ages
Buddy’s longevity is out of the ordinary for a dog of his size, said Dr. Denali Lovely of North Pole Veterinary Clinic, and just like humans, it is due to a variety of reasons.
“Probably he has some genetically good genes. He gets a lot of love, good vet care and preventative medicine,” Lovely said.
As the long circle of Buddy’s life draws to a close, Buddy’s owner Glen O’Rourke, and Buddy’s foster grandparents, Dot and Ed Keith, O’Rourke’s mother and stepfather, are making sure it is a happy one.
Charlie Rex is stepping down from the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly.
Rex, who has almost two years left on a three-year term, has been an elected official in Fairbanks for most of the past decade and is a former candidate for city mayor. His resignation will take effect Dec. 13.
Rex cited work responsibilities when discussing his decision Monday, saying his job has increasingly taken him away from Alaska for extended stretches of time, causing him to miss public meetings.
“I regret that my work schedule has made it impossible for me to serve as an assembly member,” Rex said. “I’m proud of (my) endeavor to make Fairbanks a better-looking place and a better-looking borough.”
Once Rex’s resignation is formally accepted by the Borough Assembly, the assembly has 30 days to appoint a replacement. The position will be advertised, and anyone who is a registered voter and has lived in the borough for one year is eligible to apply. Applications are available at the borough clerk’s office or on the borough’s Web site (www.co.fairbanks.ak.us).
Fairbanks could have as many as four new radio stations in the next few years.
For one week in October, the Federal Communications Commission took applications from groups around the country hoping to fill empty air space with noncommercial and educational programming. In Fairbanks, six groups applied to start new radio stations on the far left hand side of the FM dial.
The groups range from grass roots community efforts, to Christian radio enterprises, to an Alaska Native broadcaster, but many of the groups are not based in Fairbanks.
One of the groups that is based locally is Fairbanks Open Radio, working under the guidance of the Alaska Federation for Community Self Reliance.
Fairbanks Open Radio would be a public radio station at 88.7 FM airing locally produced content and possibly some syndicated programming, according to Jenn Peterson with the group, which began planning a station several years ago, before the FCC announced it would offer new licenses.