Author: kfskadmin

A crowd gathered on the dock at Icicle Seafoods in Petersburg Friday afternoon to welcome the Robert M. Thorstenson to town. Icicle re-named the large, floating processor after the company founder this winter. Bob Thorstenson Senior passed away last summer. He was part of a group of Petersburg fishermen who decided to buy the towns major cannery when it was facing closure in 1965. Their new company later became Icicle Seafoods and expanded with processing plants throughout Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.Thorstenson’s namesake is one of Icicle’s five floating processors. She was originally built in 1980 as a small cargo ship and was later retrofitted as a seafood processor in 1992. She was formerly called the Stellar Sea.
At 315 feet long, the newly-named Robert M. Thorstenson, or RMT, dwarfed the entire waterfront Friday at Petersburg Fisheries, as visitors remembered the company founder, took tours onboard and listened to the high school band. Matt Lichtenstein has this audio postcard:

A local dance group will bring some of the tougher issues of teenage life to the stage in Petersburg this weekend. Mitkof Island Dance Troupe will perform the new show PG13 for the public Sunday afternoon and again for the High School early next week. Using music and movement, emotion and expression, the performance aims at raising awareness about some of the struggles and choices that many teens face. Matt Lichtenstein stopped by the Steppin-Out dance studio for a preview this week:

Petersburg’s top municipal projects would receive more than ten million dollars in state funding under the capital budget draft now before the Senate Finance Committee. Overall, the bill proposes to spend more than 2.2 billion dollars statewide and faces plenty of hurdles before it’s finalized by lawmakers and the Governor.

City employees turned out in droves at Mondays city council meeting in Petersburg. Union representatives and individuals spoke out in solidarity, saying the city administration had treated them unfairly in contract talks. Matt Lichtenstein reports:

Tensions are running high over employee contract talks in Petersburg. The Petersburg Municipal Employees Association is accusing the city administration of not negotiating in good faith. The Alaska Public Employees Association, which represents the local union, has filed a complaint with the Alaska Labor Relations Agency, claiming that contract talks are at an impasse. The City Manager disagrees and has declined a Union request for outside mediation.