The Supreme Court rejected the farmer’s case in an opinion issued Friday. The court upheld a Palmer Superior Court decision rejecting that argument and ordering DeVilbiss to pay the borough $2,295 in legal fees.
Basically, the five-judge opinion states, the validity of a tax doesn’t depend on whether a taxpayer gets a special benefit in return for paying it, as established by the U.S. Supreme Court and seconded by every state high court except New York’s.
“Childless couples pay taxes that fund schools, incorporeal corporations pay taxes that fund hospitals, and RSA residents who exclusively use state-maintained roads pay taxes that fund road services elsewhere in their service area,” the opinion states. “A tax bill is not a ledger to be balanced by the receipt of special benefits; it is ‘a means of distributing the burden of government’.”
An exemption for properties like DeVilbiss’ was added to state law that allows boroughs to alter service areas with approval of the majority of residents, the judges wrote. But that doesn’t mean exclusion is mandatory.
Eggert said around 5:30 p.m. that a search continued for Gronewald in Knik Arm near Anchorage. Gronewald was last seen around 10 p.m. Monday wearing a blue life jacket over a black jacket, the Coast Guard said.
The Coast Guard turned Gronewald's canoe over to the Anchorage Police Department, Eggert said. As geopolitical tensions between the United States and Russia have risen, there is at least one subject about which relations are warm -- the mutual desire to protect the Arctic Ocean from unregulated exploitation by vessels chasing northward-moving fish.
The two nations, along with Canada, Norway and Greenland/Denmark, pledged in July to keep their commercial fishermen out of the 1.1 million square miles of international waters in the central Arctic Ocean, at least for the foreseeable future.
"We did this because we simply do not have enough scientific information with which to manage the fishery,” David Balton, deputy assistant secretary of state for oceans and fisheries, said at Monday’s international Conference on Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience, also known as GLACIER.
Now the U.S., Russia and the three other nations are working together to try to convince the rest of the world to join a binding agreement to protect that large swath of international waters from unregulated fishing harvests.
Balton, who is also chairman of the Arctic Council’s senior Arctic officials, announced an upcoming meeting of representatives from five nations that is aimed at mapping out a strategy to accomplish that goal. The meeting is likely to be in early December in Washington, he said.
Balton also announced initiatives by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA to better understand the marine and fishery resources of the central Arctic Ocean.
Until recently, there was no need to worry about fishing vessels working in those northernmost international waters, Balton said. Sea ice once covered that area year-round, he said. But retreat of summer and fall sea ice has created big areas of open water, including a shallow area of the northern Chukchi Sea that, in the future, may hold fish targeted by commercial fleets, he said.
The campaign to protect the central Arctic Ocean’s international waters is not a new area of U.S.-Russian marine-conservation cooperation. In the 1980s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union launched an effort to end the uncontrolled harvests of pollock from a zone of approximately 50,000-square miles of international waters in the Bering Sea surrounded by U.S and Russian waters called the “Donut Hole.” That effort resulted in a binding agreement in 1994 between the U.S., post-Soviet Russia and the nations with commercial fishermen who had been using those waters.
Unfortunately, said Vyacheslav Zilanov of the Russian Association of the Fishermen of the North, that area was exploited and overfished before the multinational agreement could go into effect.
Zilanov, a former Soviet and Russian government fisheries manager who helped negotiate that Bering Sea agreement, pointed out that overfishing was also the fate of three other international zones of far-north marine waters.
There is the “Polygon Hole” in the Sea of Okhotsk, the “Loop Hole” in the Barents Sea and the “Banana Hole” in the Norwegian Sea, Zilanov told the GLACIER audience.
Before protective agreements were struck between the Soviet-Russian governments and fishery management partners in the U.S. and Norway, unregulated vessels managed to catch $3.5 billion worth of seafood in the international zones of the Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, Barents Sea and Norwegian Sea, Zilanov said. Protective agreements were important, but they came late, he said. “We were putting out the fire instead of preventing it,” he said through an interpreter.
Anyone with information on Gronewald’s whereabouts is asked to call the Coast Guard at 907-428-4100, he said.
Meanwhile, the administration piled up the grant money in its Wednesday announcement.
The Department of Agriculture offered up 33 new grants to improve rural water systems, for a total of $17.6 million, plus $240,000 in cooperative agreements with Native nonprofit groups to improve housing, community facilities, wastewater systems and broadband access. USDA will continue supporting grants to high-energy-cost households in rural Alaska, to the tune of roughly $8 million in grants this year. The program has paid over $48 million in grants to rural Alaska since 2009, the White House said.
NOAA will spend $300,000 on Alaska climate adaptation efforts.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs is offering up $1.38 million for its program supporting tribal youth internships directly related to climate change impacts. Investigators linked Terrell to Hill’s murder through a DNA test, using a blood sample they found at the crime scene, the charging documents say. Terrell has been charged with second-degree murder and first-degree burglary.
The details of what happened inside of the Lane Street home in the early morning hours of Aug. 23 have been pieced together by prosecutors and investigators and have trickled out in a series of press release and court documents.
In the charges against Terrell, filed Wednesday, the district attorney’s office depicted a chaotic scene with multiple weapons being fired and bullets striking at least two people -- Hill and Terrell.
Christopher Winters has been charged with first-degree murder in the case and is accused of setting the deadly plan in motion. Men living at the Lane Street home where Hill was killed were in debt to Winters, prosecutors say, and that sparked a series of violent text messages and death threats.
Another man, Quinton Henderson, was also arrested on second-degree murder and burglary charges. The charges against Henderson say he confronted a resident outside the home on Lane Street shortly before 2 a.m. on Aug. 23 and forced the man through a side door into the basement.
Henderson was one of three suspects at the home invasion and murder that night, according to investigators; charging documents say the altercation in the basement drew Hill down from the upper floor. Another man had also entered the basement as Henderson and the tenant struggled, and charges say both suspects had handguns and began firing shots.
Another suspect -- who has not been identified -- was standing outside in the carport and firing rounds into the home, charging documents say.
Hill was shot as he was coming down the stairwell to the basement, and suffered a single, fatal gunshot wound to the chest.
Henderson was found by police a short distance from the home after the shooting was reported, subdued by an occupant of the residence, according to the charges.
“The second man, the one that had been seen firing into the house from the carport area, fled and has not yet been apprehended,” the charges against Terrell state.