his magazine debuted in January 1985 with 56 pages held together by staples. Apart from the cover, only a couple of pages had color graphics. Full-color photos arrived that April, and the October issue swelled to 84 pages, all for $3 (closer to $9 today, adjusted for inflation). After the statewide economic crash that year, the cover price retreated to $2.50. The first issue longer than 100 pages was published in October 1989.

A glossy magazine of Alaska news published every month (plus a thirteenth issue, the Power List compilation) feels like a luxury when web-based media are displacing printed periodicals. Seeing their readership migrate to online presentations, the Anchorage Daily News (ADN), Juneau Empire, Peninsula Clarion, and Homer News all scaled back printed editions last year. ADN owner Ryan Binkley noted that just 7 percent of approximately 19,000 subscribers interact via print.

ueues for car washes in the Anchorage area are longer than they need to be. From that observation, other questions arise. How many more car washes would satisfy demand? Where should those car washes be? What price should they charge?

“We have spent a lot of time and effort, even in the Lower 48, figuring out the best way to analyze markets,” says Tamara Davis, CFO of Wild Pines Ventures. The family-owned company brought the Tommy’s Express Car Wash franchise to Anchorage last year, adding a fourth state to its chain of six locations in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and her home state of Kansas.

The Lower 48 is seeing a boom in car washes, Davis says, more so than in Alaska. But it wasn’t the market opportunity that put Alaska on the family’s radar; it was love. Her daughter-in-law is Alaskan, so Davis has been spending more time in the state visiting relatives. That’s what alerted her to the expansion potential around 2018.

emand for medical project financing is growing in Alaska, with financial institutions reporting increased loan requests from medical facilities, surgery centers, dental practices, and other healthcare businesses. Various factors contribute to this trend.

For instance, payment delays from insurance providers can place a financial strain on medical establishments, according to Melissa Reiser, senior healthcare lending officer at First National Bank Alaska. And staying current with new medical technologies and addressing the healthcare needs of Alaska’s growing aging population require significant investment.

Medical practices are also looking to enhance operations by acquiring new equipment, including adopting AI tools to improve patient care or streamline administrative tasks. “Securing equipment loans is crucial for practices to stay at the forefront of medical technology and provide high-quality patient care,” Reiser says. “Additionally, medical equipment costs can trend high, particularly for specialized items like PET [positron emission tomography] scanners and imaging machines. We are also seeing a significant increase in the number of surgery centers being established to meet the growing healthcare needs of Alaskans.”

hysicians in training choose a specialty for their final year of medical school. After sampling fields ranging from obstetrics and pediatrics to psychiatry and surgery during clinical rotations, medical students audition for residency positions during sub-internships. This is the time to discover a passion that will guide the physician’s career.

Whether a medical specialty is available in a community, therefore, is partly up to the whim and fancy of the youngest doctors. In rural Alaska, even general physicians might be several hours away from where people live, and urban residents may find themselves traveling Outside to receive specialized care.

In some specialized areas, though, Alaskans have the home advantage. Thanks to one doctor who has dedicated his career to addressing hearing loss, and one hospital program working to help families of infants born with substance abuse withdrawal, Alaskans have access to some of the best specialized care in the nation.

he concept of employee engagement is a familiar one, as are the positive impacts of high employee engagement on the bottom line. Engaged employees are more productive, have lower absenteeism, provide better customer satisfaction, perform their work more safely, and the list goes on. High employee engagement is the key to a healthy organization, isn’t it?

Highly engaged employees are still willing to take that phone call from the recruiter about opportunities at other companies and may even spend their lunch hours searching for a job that offers them something they aren’t getting in their current workplace. That is, engaged employees with a low level (or the wrong type) of commitment to the organization will keep their options open.

lare is a mid-level employee at a large Alaska corporation. She’s been dependable during her seven years with the company, but recently she’s been calling in sick a lot, less interested in tasks she previously enjoyed. She seems withdrawn during team meetings, with trouble concentrating and managing multiple tasks. You’ve heard that last year she went through a difficult divorce and has been taking care of an aging parent. As her employer you might ask how you can promote and prioritize employee well-being, which affects your organization’s productivity, turnover, absenteeism, and work culture.

The words “mental health” are frequently misconstrued as a problem to fix, and the mental health field is often characterized as the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. When mental health is framed as a continuum, much of the attention goes to the illness portion of the scale.

ast November, 183,744 Alaskan voters approved Ballot Measure 1, amending Title 23 of Alaska statutes to secure favorable wages and benefits. In a few short months, Ballot Measure 1 goes into effect, increasing Alaska’s minimum wage, establishing sick leave for most employees, and altering certain mandatory meeting requirements. By July 1, businesses will need policies and processes in place to ensure they comply with the new law.

The minimum wage in Alaska, as of this writing, is $11.91 per hour. It increased automatically on January 1 by $0.18 due to a 2014 ballot initiative that requires automatic annual inflation adjustments tied to the consumer price index in Anchorage. Another raise arrives on July 1, when Ballot Measure 1 takes effect and sets the minimum wage at $13 per hour.

laska businesses have out-of-state workers on the payroll for any number of reasons. For instance, a company might need certain expertise that is not available from a resident of the 49th State. Or a resident might move away while remaining on staff.

Outside employees make up a subset of remote workers. According to the US Census Bureau, the number of people working remotely tripled between 2019 and 2021 to 17.9 percent of the workforce. By the end of 2024, roughly one in five American workers were still signing in from home, with one in ten working remotely full-time, according to a Stacker analysis of federal survey data.

Employing a resident of another state must be worth the added complications. For businesses—especially the tax and payroll departments—the rapid increase in worker mobility across multiple states (and even countries) has brought new compliance risks, expanded tax liabilities, and additional reporting requirements.

n 2022, BDS Architects celebrated forty years of business as a leader in the design community, and for the entirety of that history, BDS made a nondescript office building in Midtown Anchorage our residence. Generally, the space functioned as an architecture office; there was a conference room, open office space, tiny kitchenette, and offices. Over the years, fun and character had been lovingly applied to our space in the form of Christmas lights and joke-laden whiteboards. But in 2024, we decided that we were ready for a change. BDS had new leadership, new skilled talent, and we were ready to make a fresh start with a new office space that reflected who we are now and what we value in a multi-generational workspace.

The first task was for BDS Architects to learn how to be our own client. As a design firm, BDS is filled with creative people who care about built space, resulting in lots of opinions about what the new office could be. With so many exciting options, we had to pause and ask ourselves, “What were we trying to accomplish by moving?” Organizing our collective answer to this question became our guiding design statement: to improve the lives of our current and future employees.

new player is making waves in the competitive world of commercial real estate. Tayal Brokerage is bringing a fresh perspective to the market by combining top-tier real estate services with a deep commitment to community reinvestment.

Aleut regional corporation launched the new subsidiary late last year. “Tayal,” which means “to buy” in Unangam Tunuu (Aleut), was carefully chosen through collaboration with elders. The company’s logo, a double-bladed paddle, or haasix, carries cultural significance too.

“We were very thoughtful about choosing the right name for this company,” explains broker-in-charge Mike Jenks. “It was important for us to honor our Unangâx heritage through Tayal’s brand. The double-bladed paddle symbolizes balance and forward movement; those are the values that drive our brokerage’s approach to serving both clients and community.”

he Nuyakuk River Hydroelectric Concept is a proposed run-of-river hydroelectric development that aims to deliver electricity and enhanced broadband access to six northern Bristol Bay communities: Aleknagik, Dillingham, Ekwok, Koliganek, Levelock, and New Stuyahok. The project site is at Nuyakuk Falls, approximately four miles downstream of Tikchik Lake on the Nuyakuk River within Wood-Tikchik State Park, and will occupy 357 acres of US Bureau of Land Management land.

The project would consist of an intake structure, power conduit, powerhouse forebay, powerhouse, and tailrace channel approximately 4.5 miles downstream of the Tikchik Lake outlet above a natural waterfall on the Nuyakuk River. The project’s river intake would divert water from the Nuyakuk River above Nuyakuk Falls to a powerhouse near the base of the falls.

Based on more than sixty years of federally sourced site-specific flow data, the run-of-river project could produce up to 12 MWh year-round. The seasonal generation capacity matches, or exceeds, the demand for power in the six communities and would replace up to 1.5 million gallons of diesel fuel each year.

ald eagles, snowy owls, Steller’s jays, and willow ptarmigan. Sandhill cranes, red-faced cormorants, emperor geese, and bristle-thighed curlews. The list of birds that live in or migrate to Alaska’s wetlands, coastal areas, and public lands, such as national wildlife refuges and national parks, is long—and so is the distance that birdwatchers from around the world travel to see them.

“Birding is big business in Alaska because of the healthy, resilient public lands and waters of our state,” explains David Krause, Alaska vice president of the National Audubon Society. “These places offer a bunch of different habitat types and, as a result, allow for a rich diversity of bird species.”

In 2022, Audubon Alaska released the study Small Sight—Big Might: Economic Impact of Bird Tourism, which tracked the economic impact of birding tourism. It found that more than 300,000 birdwatchers visited the state in 2016, spending $378 million and supporting 4,000 jobs.

ith a warmer-than-normal winter and an early construction season, Alaska contractors are already preparing for a busy building season. According to the January edition of Alaska Economic Trends, the construction sector added 2,000 jobs in 2024, and the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development’s forecast for 2025 predicts an additional 1,500 jobs.

This growth is driven by several factors, including the acceleration of oil project development on the North Slope, statewide mining operations, federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding authorization, and commercial and residential building projects across the state. Alaska is set to receive $1 billion over five years for Broadband Equity Access and Deployment, a nationwide initiative aimed at providing high-speed internet access to every American. In addition, Senator Dan Sullivan secured $723.3 million in military construction authorizations for upgrades to several military bases in Alaska, including Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Eielson Air Force Base, and Fort Wainwright.

This will make for a very busy construction season for Alaska contractors, which is a positive development for the state. Commercial insurance, specifically builder’s risk insurance, is at the heart of many of these projects.

Harvest Alaska is acquiring the Kenai LNG Terminal, repurposing idled export assets to import liquified natural gas for the Southcentral energy market. According to a joint announcement with Chugach Electric Association and Marathon Petroleum Corporation, the parent company of the terminal’s current owner, the first LNG could be delivered next year, ahead of full-scale operations in 2028. The Kenai LNG terminal was one of the first in the United States when it opened in 1969. Exports continued until 2015, when Cook Inlet gas supplies struggled to meet local demand. Harvest Alaska, an affiliate of Hilcorp, operates pipelines in Cook Inlet and the North Slope, including a 49 percent ownership stake in the Trans Alaska Pipeline System and Alyeska Pipeline Service Company acquired from bp in 2020.

harvestmidstream.com/mappins/anchorage-ak

Business lines acquired from Richards Distributing, Inc. (RDI) form the core of a new subsidiary of Aleut regional corporation. Renewable Energy Systems, Arctic Home Living, and Alaska EcoWater Systems are being folded into Aleut Energy, with Nick Goodman as president. RDI’s senior leadership, including Jeremy Lane and Eddie Davidson, remain in key roles during the transition. RDI, founded by Rob and Karlene Richards, has retail locations in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough providing spas, hot tubs, water treatment, and renewable energy systems. “RDI’s strengths in renewable energy and retail, combined with their exceptional reputation and expertise, will allow us to expand our impact across Alaska while continuing to drive value for our shareholders,” says Aleut CEO and President Skoey Vergen.

aleutcorp.com