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Verifying Sincerity

Or, is there a prosthodontist in the house?

A century of change (and bills) at Alaska’s family-owned bank

n November, Credit Union 1 (CU1) opened Financial Center South near the Dimond Center mall in Anchorage to give its member-customers a new way to bank. The sleek, self-service facility has virtual teller machines, multiple advisory suites, open-concept consultation areas, a coffee lounge—and no teller lines.

“It’s the cutting-edge of ‘branch’ innovation in our state,” says Interim President/CEO and Chief Technology Officer Mark Burgess.

Members of CU1 can use video machines to complete routine transactions, or if they have more complicated needs, they can tap on the screen to get assistance from a local employee, also by video. “These machines free up in-branch employees for non-routine service to personally consult on questions or be readily available to facilitate more complex financial arrangements,” Burgess says.

urbulence in Alaska’s aviation industry has forced some course corrections in the last couple of years. In-state air carriers have gone through a lot of changes to meet the needs of passengers, cope with supply chain issues, and adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The pandemic really changed the dynamics of aviation, especially on the 135 side,” says Dan Knesek, vice president of operations for Grant Aviation. Part 135 of Federal Aviation Regulations applies to helicopters, air ambulances, and commuter planes that carry fewer than ten passengers on at least five round trips per week. Part 121 covers larger scheduled airlines, while private general aviation pilots are under Part 91.

ith the click of a red “Enroll” button, anyone with internet access—and who can read and understand English—becomes a student of top experts in climate change based in Fairbanks. The button is on the website edx.org, host of massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by institutions of higher learning around the world. Berkeley, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are charter members of edX, and so is UAF. For its eCampus initiative, UAF chose edX as its platform for a dozen MOOCs, including two sets of three courses that can, for a relatively small fee, lead to professional certificates in geographic information systems (GIS) and sports business management.

One of the newest courses, launched last November, is Climate Change in Arctic Environments. Over four weeks, students watch video presentations from UAF’s world-class climate modelers, biologists, and social scientists to understand the effects of global warming on the atmosphere, land, water, animals, and people of the Arctic region. All that—plus climate modeling tools and links to additional materials—free of charge.

he 1958 creature feature The Blob ends (spoiler alert for a movie older than Alaska statehood) with the titular monster frozen in its slimy tracks and airlifted to the North Pole, not dead but at least defeated. “As long as the Arctic stays cold,” quips Steve McQueen’s character. Well, about that….

A blob menaced the Gulf of Alaska in recent years, and the marine ecosystem has yet to fully recover. The Blob is what researchers called the warm water anomaly that persisted in the region from 2014 to 2016. The event was followed by several smaller warm water anomalies in subsequent years. While some elements of the ecosystem have returned to pre-Blob levels, marine heatwaves that triggered the event are expected to increase in severity, duration, and frequency, with unknown consequences for the North Pacific food web and Alaska fisheries.

ngineers Week is a nationwide event founded by the National Society of Professional Engineers in 1951; the goal of the weeklong focus on engineering is to ensure a “diverse and well-educated future engineering workforce by increasing understanding of and interest in engineering and technology careers.”

The Alaska engineering community works toward this goal, in part, by recognizing local engineering professionals and projects that demonstrate the best that engineering can be. Below are brief descriptions of the deserving winners in Anchorage and Fairbanks.

laska Business’ Corporate 100 Special Section is an annual recognition that people drive business. From sole proprietorships to sprawling international operations, at every level people make the difference.

It’s exciting that the Alaska Business editorial team prepared this year’s special section with optimism in the air. Three forecasts for 2022—from economists Neal Fried and Mouhcine Guettabi and the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation (AEDC)—anticipate job growth in Alaska. According to Guettabi, “There are job gains in just about every sector, with the exception of oil and gas.” Fried’s forecast calls for 9,800 additional jobs statewide, which is approximately 3.2 percent job growth. And the 2022 AEDC Employment Forecast report states, “AEDC expects Anchorage to regain 2,400 more jobs in 2022 but remain below pre-pandemic employment levels. The pace of recovery is likely to match that of 2021.”

rovidence Alaska leads the Corporate 100 pack once again—with NANA Regional Corporation, Trident Seafoods Corporation, Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC), and Fred Meyer rounding out the top five largest private employers in Alaska.

Over the past year, the top five collectively provided jobs for more than 20,000 people, despite the challenges of the ongoing pandemic. These companies lead by example and represent about 27 percent of the 75,541 jobs reported by the 2022 Alaska Business Corporate 100.

he fireworks display over Anchorage on January 30 was too late for New Year’s Eve, too early for Fur Rendezvous. What was it for? The fact that it happened at Cuddy Family Midtown Park is a clue, for those who know the history of the Cuddy family and what happened on that day 100 years earlier.

good prosthodontist is hard to find. Only three such specialists may be currently working in Alaska, depending on how “semi” some semi-retired dentists might be. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), prosthodontist is among the rarest occupations in the country. As of May 2020, BLS counted 530 nationwide. Only private household cooks and wood patternmakers are fewer in number.

All are craft-related occupations, observes Dr. Joseph Macy, who prepares dental prosthetics at Southcentral Foundation (SCF) in Anchorage. “As a society, I don’t think we tend to financially reward craftsmen,” he says. “I think we tend to reward production.”

core Rare Metals would like to break ground on its Strategic Metals Complex (SMC) sometime this year. In about two years, the facility could be cranking out rare earth oxides, materials prized for their special properties of magnetism, luminescence, and strength.

Currently, about 80 percent of rare earths imported to the United States come from China, according to the US Geological Survey. Therefore, the Biden administration zeroed in on a domestic supply chain as part of its climate and technology policy. Ucore’s business plan is in lockstep with that national strategy.

“Ucore has a very definitive vision and plan for an independent and comprehensive North American rare earth element supply chain,” Ucore Chairman and CEO Pat Ryan says. “To accomplish this, the fundamental component is the ability to have—first and foremost—operating commercial-scale rare earth separation plants. The ability to separate rare earth elements into oxides does not exist in North America today and is, therefore, the central objective of Ucore.”

he corporate neighborhood on the North Slope has changed significantly in recent years. Long-term anchor residents BP, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips formed an exploration and production foundation that held steady for decades as other oil and gas entities moved in—and more often than not moved out. These three international oil giants held the major interests in Prudhoe Bay and Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., and over the years have paid millions upon millions of dollars to the state in royalties and taxes.

Nothing lasts forever.

BP marked forty years of operating Prudhoe Bay in 2017, celebrating the milestone with a goal to “go forty more,” and in early 2019 BP crews were approximately halfway through a 455-square-mile seismic survey in Prudhoe Bay to “help really sustain a longer-term drilling program,” said then-BP Alaska President Janet Weiss. The long-term was quite a bit shorter than BP was publicly sharing at the time, as in August 2019 it announced its intentions to sell its Alaska assets to Hilcorp.

nnovation comes when and where it’s least expected; if it were obvious, it wouldn’t be new.

Honoring innovation in Alaska is itself relatively new, with the Alaska State Committee on Research starting its Innovators Hall of Fame as recently as 2014. The stated mission is “to celebrate and honor outstanding individuals who put Alaska on the map as leaders in innovation and to contribute to Alaska’s growing culture of innovation.”

Past honorees include the ancient creators of the Tlingit fishhook and Alutiiq angyaq skin boat; discoveries in ecology, aurora physics, and hibernation medicine; engineers of bridges and oil field facilities; promoters of the Gold Rush, television, alternative energy sources, peony horticulture, and innovation itself; and a vast array of inventors, often of measuring devices but also consumer products such as pack rafts, fat bikes, and fish oil tablets.

ou can say I am a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, devoted human resources professional. I got my bachelor’s degree in business management, with an emphasis in human resource management, from UAA in 1998. I passed the Human Resource Certification Institute’s Professional in Human Resources Exam and, two years later after completing the required work experience, I had earned the privilege of officially calling myself a PHR.

Early in my HR training I was taught in no uncertain terms that religious and medical discussions do not belong in the workplace. It was ingrained in me! At every company I have worked for, I’ve coached managers on the virtues of steering clear of those topics—and the risks of NOT avoiding them. I’ve handled complaints from employees about colleagues who engage in the prohibited discussions. Essentially, I’ve been the bouncer keeping those inappropriate religious and medical discussions out of the workplace.

ur work worlds are evolving.

With shifts towards hybrid work, sweeping technological advances, ever more global teams, and generational shifts bringing both Millennials and Gen Zers to leadership tables, we are undergoing some serious changes in our corporate spaces. A central theme alongside all this includes conversations about work stress, work/life balance, and how we will manage all the changes. I’m most inspired by the conversations that are shifting into more honest dialogue about what individual and corporate wellness really is—finally, we are having much needed conversations around work boundaries.

It’s about time.

We’ve needed work boundaries for decades. We’ve tried all sorts of stress management, time management, and efficiency improvers—and none of it has truly worked. It’s time to start identifying the crux of the matter: we are doing too much and we need to set some boundaries. The challenge is that the majority of us have never had formal boundary training or even really know the difference between our limits and our boundaries. Within our corporate environments, we don’t even know what this would look like.

nimals gotta eat. That fact of nature has kept David and Jon Underwood, the Co-Owners of Alaska Feed Co. in Fairbanks, busy during the COVID-19 pandemic—and kept the family business going since statehood. Established in 1959, the Underwoods’ father Dick took over management in 1974 and became owner in 1980. David worked at the shop more than Jon, yet by 1992 they both took over management and then bought the company from their dad.

It’s been a “good, solid occupation,” they say. Their main customers are pet owners and people keeping a little livestock, say a horse or some goats. More “backyard farmers” have sprouted during the pandemic, as the brothers have observed a trend toward gardening, raising chickens, and “homey things.”