ANVIK -- Richardson's Store stays open late in this Yukon River village of 100, and on a sultry night in early June it enjoyed a brisk run of last-minute buyers. A young man came in for a frozen steak and cigarettes. A teenage girl stocked up on cookies.
ANVIK (AN-vick)
Searchable
Robert Walker, the mayor, breezed in just before the doors closed in search of diet root beer. A heavyset man with meaty, calloused hands and several days' stubble surrounding his graying moustache, Walker has been Anvik's mayor for 25 years.
He laughed when asked why, as if the answer was obvious. "Nobody else wants the job," he said.
There's not much to laugh about in Anvik these days, Walker said. Jobs are drying up. Commercial fishing is kaput. Trapping no longer pays. State aid has evaporated. As costs rise and income falls, people here are plunging deeper into poverty, he said, even as they're expected to pay a greater share for services brought in by well-meaning agencies.
The tiny city of Anvik, like dozens of small municipal governments from Southeast to the Arctic, is on the verge of closing its doors. Sooner or later, Walker said, "we're going to have to dissolve the city."
Standing outside the store in sweatpants, tassel loafers and a frayed gray Carhartt jacket, Walker splashed on bug dope to keep the hordes of mosquitoes at bay. No one in Anvik, not even the mayor, gets a reprieve during bug season.
A cigarette in hand to help fend off the bugs, Walker said it burns him up that the state has billions of dollars in the Alaska Permanent Fund but stopped giving cities a small allowance. Anvik once used its revenue sharing grants for essentials such as workers' compensation insurance and streetlights, he said.
Now, with gasoline pushing $4 a gallon and electricity bills surging, it's all Anvik residents can do to feed and house their families, he said. They can't pay anything more.
"I don't know if the whole system is set up for us to dissolve," he fumed. "Does Alaska even care about the Bush?"
Anvik has laid off its administrator, leaving no one to seek grants, Walker said. It wants the Anvik Tribal Council to pay the $8,000 streetlight bill, because the city can't afford it. He estimated Anvik has $15,000 or less in reserves.
The municipality could get a financial boost when a $12.8 million runway reconstruction job begins this summer. Like many rural cities, Anvik owns several pieces of heavy equipment that it leases to construction companies. Given the size of the runway job, rental fees could keep the city afloat for a few more years, Walker said.
The village also is considering a plan that might be considered the "nuclear option" -- liquor sales. The city allows residents to import and possess booze. Maybe it should open a liquor store, Walker said.
"The good side is that we'll have money to run the city," he said. "The bad side is that everyone will be intoxicated."
The City Council was to discuss the idea further.
Forty miles down the Yukon, the city of Holy Cross has shut its doors and laid off its office staff, though former administrator Connie Walker was still going in a few hours a week as a volunteer. She had to, she said, to take advantage of a one-time state grant to help villages buy fuel.
When the tugboat Tanana stopped there for a few hours to deliver diesel and gasoline, Walker -- whose husband is a cousin of Anvik's mayor -- sat glumly at her kitchen table, pondering the fate of her community and its 200 residents.
Holy Cross has closed its washeteria three days a week. It's the only place for many residents to do their laundry and take showers, but the city was losing money, Walker said.
"We wanted to close it four days a week," but people rebelled, she said. "I don't know how long we can keep that open."
The city has not been good at collecting past-due water and sewer bills, Walker said, which is a common problem in many villages. To improve its collection rate, the city turned over its water and sewer utility to the Bethel-based Rural Utilities Cooperative, which promptly doubled fees, from $35 to $70 a month.
The cooperative, based more than 100 miles away, may find it easier to shut off someone's utilities when the bills go unpaid, Walker said.
There just isn't much money in the town, she said. Several job openings were posted at the Holy Cross store, but most of the positions are low-paying, part-time work with few benefits.
"The cost of living has skyrocketed, but our pay hasn't," Walker said.
When the Tanana pulled into Marshall a day later and another 120 miles down the Yukon, administrator Ray Alstrom said city belt-tightening has affected the entire community. The city is solvent, he said, but it has come at a cost.
Like many villages, Marshall has a mix of old log cabins and weathered plywood homes put up through various government programs. Some houses are so decrepit they're vacant, and locals say many homes have multiple families.
But at the east end of town, eight brand-new homes sit vacant, their windows boarded up. They were built two years ago by a tribal housing authority, which expected the city to run water and sewer services to them.
Wrong. Marshall couldn't afford the work and refused to do it, even though it meant leaving the houses empty, Alstrom said.
"The city would have gone broke. In this day and age when sources of funding are few and far between, we'd like to keep this city as financially sound as possible," he said.
Marshall may have lost one of the best-known village public safety officers in Alaska as a result of its penny-pinching, Alstrom said. The city last year suspended its financial support of the VPSO program after failing to get expected aid from tribal organizations, he said.
VPSO Richard Ellis resigned this spring without saying why and left town, Alstrom said.
"Some people blame the city" for the officer's move, he said, "but I don't think the city is to blame. We were just trying to be responsible for the financial health of the city."
Marshall has a 4 percent city sales tax. It's not afraid to cut off water when someone fails to pay a bill, Alstrom said. But when the state eliminated municipal aid, the city went into survival mode.
"You could feel the difference," he said.
The city has survived so far, Alstrom said. But as with most villages on the Yukon, he said, "we're treading water here."
