Hoping to save on heating oil, some villagers in the Koyukuk River community of Alatna are driving snowmachines eight or nine miles out of town this winter for firewood, said acting tribal administrator Amelia Edwards.
The village sits along the Arctic Circle, just west of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Gasoline, flown to a nearby village and hauled behind snowmachines across the frozen river, costs $7 a gallon, she said.
“Most people need the gas to haul wood and hunt. But some people can’t afford that … they go without,” Edwards said.
While heating oil and gasoline prices in rural Alaska have dropped since hitting staggering highs in summer of 2008, costs remain more than 30 percent higher than in 2005, according to a recent survey by the state Division of Community and Regional Affairs.
The costs, combined with high unemployment rates, limited local economies and local governments struggling to provide basic services “continue to present rural Alaskan communities and households with challenging circumstances and no current long-term solution,” the division reported in January.
Meantime, lawmakers are considering a slew of proposals that would shift the way Alaska oversees energy. Alaska Federation of Natives leaders on Thursday told legislators they support pieces of an expansive energy bill that would:
-- Require that schools and major public construction projects are built to energy-efficient standards.
-- Create a state Department of Energy.
-- Remove restrictions on nuclear power projects.
-- Create funds to pay for “emerging technology” and small-scale alternative energy projects.
-- Establish renewable energy tax credits.
It doesn’t make sense that schools aren’t required to be energy efficient in arctic and sub-arctic communities that pay some of the highest energy costs, said Ralph Anderson, an AFN board member and president of the Bristol Bay Native Association.
Speaking before the House Special Committee on Energy, Anderson also called on lawmakers to inject money into the Power Cost Equalization program that subsidizes rural electric rates and said Alaska is long overdue for a separate Energy Department.
The meeting was a follow-up to a legislative energy hearing at the AFN convention in October.
“We heard everywhere that we went during our many travels throughout the state that people wanted sort of a centralized place in state government that they could turn to for help with the problem of solving the energy challenge here in Alaska,” said Rep. Bryce Edgmon, a Dillingham Democrat and co-chairman of the committee.
AFN delegates did not weigh in on all of the proposals in the 21-page bill, which collects nine proposals introduced in the Legislature last year. The committee co-chairs say the federation has endorsed the bill.
The average statewide price for gasoline was $5.01 per gallon in January, according the Division of Community and Regional Affairs.
Arctic Village, 290 miles northeast of Fairbanks, had the highest cost among the 100 communities surveyed at $10 per gallon. The low was in Fairbanks, at $2.32 a gallon.
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