When the weather is so spectatular, I have no choice but to post a couple of pictures. A little out of Anchorage, Girdwood Valley and Turnagain Arm in the upper middle.
And then we flew into Juneau from the south, looping down and around and over downtown on the way to the airport. Below is the northern, upper part of downtown and a view up Basin Road to the Perseverance Trail. On the ground there was no snow and temps in the 50s.
The Alaska Redistricting Board has posted maps for all the districts. I've put their links below. But let's get clear about the terminology:
Amended Proclamation means the plan that was recently revised after the Alaska Supreme Court required changes in the original Proclamation Plan approved last June.
There is also an Interim plan that is a backup plan in case the Amended Proclamation plan doesn't get the approvals it needs in time (about May 15 to be ready for the June 1 candidate filing deadline.)
I don't see the Interim Plan maps and documentation on the Board's website. It's very close to the original Proclamation Plan, but the Fairbanks area districts have been modified to make them constitutional. Here's a link to a statewide Interim plan map, but I don't see the individual districts. Most will be the same as in the Proclamation Plan.
I'm waiting for my flight to Juneau for a meeting of the Pathway group (formally known as DELTA, the worst ever acronym) that works to prevent intimate partner violence in Alaska. So I took advantage of being here early to walk down terminal B and saw some artwork I hadn't seen before. Looks a little like piles of luggage scattered around, but it's all old Alaskana. I couldn't find anything that identified the artist or the name of the piece(s).
The waders in the upper left are part of the collection of pieces \
April snows have no teeth. There are already snow patches. The air doesn't stay too cold. The daylight says summer is near. The new snow's lifespan is short. But yesterday's flakes were enough to push this winter to Anchorage's snowiest on record - 134.5".
This wasn't a winter of big snows. Just regular snowfalls every few days November and December and beyond. Yesterday's snowfall was spectacularly unspectacular. The short hit past second that drives in the winning run.
Usually we know that there have been moose in our yard by footprints or deeper tracks in the snow. Or a pile of nuggets.
Actually seeing them there is less frequent. It always surprises me how animals this big can so easily blend into the background.
The one out in the open snow is pretty easy to see, and it's what I saw when I looked out the kitchen window this morning, but the second one* in the trees took a bit longer to spot.
These two moose were stripping the bark from our willow trees and trimming our high bush cranberries. You can see in the video the bare trunk under the freshly stripped bark.
There's a reason moose choose willow. This is from a report
Willows of Interior Alaska by Dominique M. Collet, who is the author of the Alaska Insect book.
Salicin, the chemical that preceded acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), was first isolated from willow. The bark of some willow species is rich in tannin used for the processing of leather. The primary use of willows today, however, is for reclamation of disturbed sites and stabilization of riverbanks.
In Great Britain and Scandinavia, where fossil fuels are expensive, there is a developing interest in willows as a source of renewable energy; the fast growing shoots are coppiced (harvested) every few years, and the dried chips are sent to electric power plants. This fuel burns clean, leaves little ash, and emits carbon less than or equal to that absorbed from the atmosphere by the willow during growth.
Herbivores
The foliage of most willow contain salicilin, a chemical (phenolic glycoside) that deters browsing by most generalist herbivorous insects and mammals. Only a small fraction of the diet of these herbivores, such as the snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) can consist of willows because the salicin distresses the digestive tract just as aspirin (methyl salicylate) does when taken on an empty stomach. A few generalist herbivores, like the moth Orgia antiqua, are able to complete their development on willow alone.
Specialized herbivores, like moose (Alces alces) and to a lesser degree caribou (Rangifer tarandus), cope well with these chemicals in their browse and are able to tap this otherwise little used resource. For a few specialist herbivorous insects such as sawflies (Tenthredinidae) and leaf beetles (Chrysomelidae), the volatile phenolic glycoside even serves as feeding and oviposition cues.
Herbivores that do not feed on willow may still depend on the plants for shelter or for the microhabitat they create. This results in a compartmentalization of the fauna in willow-rich habitats: a majority of herbivorous species avoids feeding on willows while a small fraction is totally dependent on them.
*It's to the left of the greenhouse and and the two trees there.
"I cannot escape the feeling that the tendency so far has been to say that labor must make sacrifices of wages and hours because of necessities of national defense. I have yet to see anywhere a statement that manufacturers and business concerns . . . shall make this same type of sacrifice by cutting profits and reducing the salaries of executives."
[Note: This may not look like much, but I spent a lot of time trying to sort out the important points, including the maps and links. And getting it reasonably short. My eyes are glazing over so let me know if you catch any errors so I can fix them.]
Yesterday the Alaska Redistricting Board formally approved a new Proclamation Plan (I think they call this the Amended Proclamation Plan) and an Interim plan in case the Amended plan doesn't get all the approvals it needs in time for the June 1 candidate filing deadline. Below is my understanding of what they covered yesterday as they went over their timeline of things that need to be done.
Overview
There’s a June 1 deadline for candidates for the legislature to file. A plan must be in place before that so they know which districts they are in. There is some possibility of pushing the filing deadline, and probably the primary election, back two weeks, but they want to avoid that. But a new Federal law with deadlines for sending military ballots may prevent that.
It’s April 6 now, so that leaves less than 60 days.
The Board’s new Proclamation Plan has to
get pre clearance from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to insure it meets the Voting Rights Act requirements AND
go back to the trial court to determine if they followed the court mandated “Hickel Plan” to first draw up a constitutional map and then make the least amount of deviance from the constitutional requirements necessary to also comply with the Voting Rights Act.
Timing for the DOJ and court clearance is uncertain. I’m guessing the Alaska courts will do things as quickly as possible (the Supreme Court ruled in one day the first round,) but what about the DOJ? They have a 60 day turnaround, but have an ‘expedited’ process. The board is unsure they can get it or what exactly it means.
Additionally,
The Division of Elections wants two weeks notice somewhere in the process
Both political parties wanted two weeks for something, not sure what.
Given all the uncertainties, the board has also adopted an Interim Plan. The Supreme Court offered this option if they can’t get the new Proclamation Plan done in time. The Interim plan is the basically the same as the original Proclamation Plan with changes to the two districts in Fairbanks that were declared unconstitutional and which the Board did not contest. (Proclamation Plan districts 1 and 2.)
Attorney White believes the Interim plan, though the Native districts are essentially the same as in the plan the DOJ already approved, needs pre-clearance because it was drawn up by the board, not the court. But he thinks it should be easy. And he believes court approval should be easy.
There is still some uncertainty whether they can put forward both plans simultaneously, but they hope to take that path. If it appears that by around May 15 the new plan will not get approved in time, they will go with the interim plan. Chair Torgerson said that is not his hope. He wants the new plan to go into effect.
That leaves the question of what is the difference between the Interim Plan and the New Proclamation Plan?
Most of the districts are the same in both plans. Southeast, Anchorage, and Kenai, and Matsu will be the same. The differences will be in the area that was white in the “Hickel Plan Template.” The colored in parts should be the same in both plans.
Hickel Plan
Sorry about the light and shadows on the Hickel Plan Template above. But if you look carefully you can make it out. If you're in Southeast, Anchorage, Matsu, Kenai, and the North Slope, your district shouldn't be different in the Interim Plan and the Amended Proclamation Plan. (There may be some minor changes in Kenai Borough, I think Seldovia moved.) They were only going to change district boundaries in the white section.
Click on the links below for bigger and better versions of these two maps
There are some big differences between the Interim Plan and the Amended Proclamation Plan. The Aleutians are split in the Interim Plan, but aren't in the Amended Plan. District They did fix Fairbanks house districts 1 and 2 from the old plan. For people who are interested in the plans in the area that was tinkered with - mostly in House Districts 35, 36, 37, 38, and 39 from what I can see - can look at the maps.
The Interim Planhas unfortunate district numbers that block details.
The Board promised the individual district maps would be up next week.
This map below shows the Proclamation Plan Fairbanks lines (in black) superimposed on the Amended Proclamation Plan. The Interim Plan looks to be pretty close (in Fairbanks) to the Amended Proclamation Plan. It's hard to match all this because the maps for different plans are in different sizes and my Photoshop was being balky when I was resizing. And it's still not detailed enough to see actual boundaries. And I don't really know Fairbanks at all anyway.
[The district to the left of 1A is 4B. Numbers are from Proclamation Plan. Letters are Senate districts.]
If someone really needs to know, this can get you started. Here are the links for the various Fairbanks maps on the Redistricting Board website. Those are high resolution pdf's that you can blow up and still get detail:
There's an interesting piece in the museum that I've been keeping an eye on. Thursday after the board meeting, I went back to the museum to get photos of it.
I'll try to get back here and write up a summary, but I fooled around too long and now I don't have enough time. Basically the adopted the plan they approved Saturday, which the staff cleaned up and prepared the metes and bounds for. They also approved a back up plan - one that is basically the previous plan with the Fairbanks districts 1 and 2 adjusted to be constitutional.
All the documentation is up on line (well, not all, individual district maps are coming soon) so you can look there. Below are my rough notes from today's meeting.
Remember, the notes below are very rough. There's a long gap where the attorney, Michael White goes over the time line. There's a gap because I videotaped that and I'll put it up when I get it done. Sorry it's not ready now. And there are still some loose ends, but I think they come out in the notes below.
Tuesday night at Election Central as the stories of people being turned away from the polls were told, people were also talking about 'the big turnout.'
That didn't explain, for me, how that would have affected things. After all, they are required, as I pointed out in the previous post, to have enough ballots to take care of a 70% turnout. Normal turnouts for Municipal elections range from low 20% range to the mid 30% range. The numbers on the election results from last night show turnout at 26.82%.
So, they had 54,946 people vote. 70% of registered voters (204,838) would have been 143,386 ballots. If they had that many ballots ready, even if 20,000 unregistered voters showed up, that shouldn't have put any strain on their supply of ballots. But people kept talking about high turnout.
The Anchorage Daily News has a story titled "Voter turnout creates ballot shortage" and quotes Municipal Clerk, Barbara Gruenstein:
The Clerk is a sharp lady so maybe I'm missing something, but here are the voter turnouts as I could figure them for the last Municipal elections going back to 2006. I got the numbers for the past election years from the Municipal Clerk's Website: Election History/Past Election Results. I got this year's numbers from this year's election results page.
[UPDATE April 23: The total number of ballots listed in the April 20, 2012 Election Summary Report is 71,099. That comes out to 240 more votes than the 2006 election. So this was a 'big' turn out by Municipal election standards, but only barely higher than the second highest count two mayoral elections back.]
The numbers are as of 11:48 pm Tuesday night, 118 out of 121 precincts reporting.
Even if 10,000 more votes were outstanding, this year's total would
not be a record in either total number or percentage of voters. Is
there something I'm missing?
As it stands, the turnout is less than the previous two mayoral elections.
What makes more sense, if lots of unregistered folks showed up, was that they ran out of questioned ballots. There were stories of people crossing out the Sample on the Sample ballots and using them. But there should still have been a lot of back up regular ballots.
All the documentation is up on line (well, not all, individual district maps are coming soon) so you can look there. Below are my rough notes from today's meeting.
