The Railbelt Reimagined

elling a business is a complex transaction with many moving parts and intricate details shaped by the needs of the different parties involved. It requires meticulous planning, from cleaning up inadequate books and tax records to sprucing up a business location or even increasing sales and reducing expenses to justify a higher asking price. These, and other strategies, can make it easier for business owners to attract potential buyers.

One of the most common reasons owners sell their business is retirement—especially if the company is profitable. Other situations that precipitate a sale are new opportunities, burnout, financial reasons, divorce, health problems, and death. Regardless of the rationale, experts say the deal should be a win-win for the buyer and seller.

laska businesses across various industries are using unique employee benefits to recruit new talent and help their existing workforce be more productive, healthy, and engaged. Many companies are focusing on inventive ways to promote employee well-being. Some offerings are directly correlated to health, such as onsite or near-site clinics; health fairs and flu shots; or onsite fitness equipment and gym memberships.

There’s also been an increase in companies offering wellness-related education and perks, from exercise and cooking classes to healthier food options available in lunchrooms or during meetings, according to Colleen Savoie, a principal and employee benefits producer at Parker, Smith & Feek. “For example, one of our clients subsidizes healthy options in their cafeteria; less-healthy options are offered at full price,” she says. “Some clients are making changes, such as removing sugary drinks like soda and replacing them with tea or flavored water.”

uilder’s risk insurance is a property policy purchased by building owners, developers, or general contractors to cover a loss of all or part of a building or building materials during construction. Fire and water are the most common causes of significant losses covered by a builder’s risk policy, and trespassers often are a contributing factor.

hen Bristol Bay Native Corporation (BBNC) first aired TV commercials featuring the tagline, “A Place That’s Always Been,” the reaction was surprising. Not only because they received numerous accolades and marketing awards for the campaign but because, at the time, it was rare for Alaska Native corporations to market themselves through the media.

“Prior to us launching the campaign eight years ago, Alaska Native corporations weren’t known for promoting themselves in the public beyond reaching out to our own shareholders,” explains BBNC President and CEO Jason Metrokin.

The show takes place in the fictional village of Qyah, Alaska, and features Molly and her family, her dog Suki, and her friends Tooey and Trini. Together they like to go fishing, build snow forts, and maintain dog sled teams, among other Alaska pastimes.

ere it not for a chance listing in a newspaper thrown his way nearly two decades ago, Alaska-grown photographer Brian Adams might never have turned his raw talent into the decorated career he’s carved out for himself today. And Alaska would be deprived of one of its most important artists.

“A few months out of high school, my brother was going to work and was frustrated with me, and was all, ‘You need to get a job.’” Adams recalls. “And I was like, ‘Yeah… I know.’

“So, my brother took the classified papers and tossed them at me, and I thought, ‘You’ll never find a job in there!’”

t’s nearly impossible to imagine how Alaska Native leaders must have felt when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was passed, creating more than 200 corporations across the state of varying resources, assets, and skillsets. In some ways ANCSA marked a victory in that Alaska Native peoples were awarded (legally, according to the standards of Alaska’s relatively new inhabitants) the rights to some of the lands they have occupied for almost countless years and monetary compensation for those lands now claimed by state and federal entities.

But that small victory also brought abrupt change and challenges to Alaska Native leaders tasked with launching corporations that would be profitable, support their communities and shareholders, make wise use of their lands and resources, build the economic stability of their regions, and preserve a cultural heritage that for decades had been under deliberate attack.

ittle Diomede—a tiny, rocky island with a population of less than 100—is located in the middle of the Bering Sea, only two miles from Big Diomede island, which is across the International Date Line and uninhabited, except by an occasional Russian military sortie.

Most of the island slopes 45 degrees to the water’s surface, and buildings on stilts cling to the side connected by walkways. Little Diomede has no harbor or airport and the weather in the Bering Strait is unpredictable, so traveling to the village can be tricky. For construction projects, it doesn’t get more rural—or more complicated.

ifty years ago, a typical oil drilling site on Alaska’s North Slope was spread out over 20 acres and the drilling technology of the day reached about a mile underground surrounding the pad. On the surface, wells were spaced about 120 feet apart.

Today, drill sites have much smaller footprints and drilling innovations such as new bit designs, fluid formulas, and advanced drill rig technologies allow oil companies to reach more than 100 square miles from one pad and drill around geological barriers. Developments such as directional, extended reach, and multilateral drilling allow wells to be drilled in all directions from a single well bore, like spokes on a wheel, leaving most of the surface environment undisturbed.

reen energy technology is built through mining. Without certain raw materials, such as graphite and rare earth metals, everything from the lithium-ion batteries that power Teslas to those storing electricity from wind turbines would be impossible to create, says US Senator Lisa Murkowski.

“We had a lot of opportunity since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to really appreciate in real-time how reliant we are as a nation on other countries for some very important goods and products,” Murkowski says in her podcast “Murkowski’s Message”—referring to medical supplies that were in short supply early in the crisis. “That experience has been a good reminder, I think, that much of what makes modern life possible, from cell phones to laptops for Zoom meetings to the electricity that keeps everything running—all of this comes from minerals.”

ragmented. Balkanized. Contentious.

These are just a few of the words the Regulatory Commission of Alaska (RCA) used to describe the state of the Railbelt in its 2015 letter to the Legislature. Exposing issues associated with the electric utilities’ independent operations in the region spanning from Homer to Fairbanks, the letter called for total institutional reform while proposing a few key recommendations.

One of the more glaring inefficiencies, RCA Chairman Bob Pickett says, was the recent outlay of almost $1.5 billion in combined and uncoordinated power generation projects between the six Railbelt utilities. “The Commission looked at it and thought the utilization and coordination of these assets, both generation and transmission, needed to be improved to get maximum benefit to the ratepayers.”

The Alaska Black Business Directory has published a directory including more than 200 black-owned businesses in Alaska. Per the organization’s website, the first “basic edition” of the directory was published in late July. Co-owners and operators Jasmin Smith and Shawn Idom plan to update the directory to include city organizations and contact information.
alaskablackbusinessdirectory.com

The US Army Corps of Engineers–Alaska District (USACE) published the final environmental impact statement (EIS) for the Pebble Limited Partnership’s application to discharge fill material into US waters for the purpose of developing a copper-molybdenum-gold mine project in the Bristol Bay region. The final EIS isn’t a permit decision and doesn’t authorize operation of the mine. The Corps is responsible for making a permit decision under two authorities—Section 404 of the Clean Water Act and Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act. The document is available electronically at the Pebble Project EIS website.
usace.army.mil | pebblepartnership.com