News

As the new borough administration continues to look for ways to balance the budget, some of those ideas will have effects in the borough’s cities. City managers, council members and others got together this week to discuss the latest plans from the borough administration.

Host Jenny Neyman interviews noted Alaska mountaineer Dave Hart about getting started climbing 30+ years ago, staying safe and what he's learned along the way.

Tag along with Dave up Redoubt, Iliamna, Torbert and Truuli peaks during a live photo presentation at 7 p.m. May 10 at the Kenai Visitors and Cultural Center. Admission is $5, or free for KDLL members.

Despite a vote to legalize and regulate commercial cannabis sales in 2014, economists are only now beginning to put together a picture a the new industry, which is still barely a blip on the radar compared to the state’s other big industries.

At the heart of the debate about the borough’s budget is the borough’s land trust fund. It’s got $7.5 million in it right now, but that money isn’t doing much, and there’s not a solid plan for what could be done with it.

  The latest Alaska-centric biographic work from Hardscratch Press is out now, and is focused on commercial fishing in Cook Inlet. “The 50-Year Summer,” the story of David Leuthe's decades of returning to Kenai from Wisconsin was published in January. Publisher Jackie Pels gave KDLL a preview of "The 50-Year Summer" when she was in Kenai last fall.

Leuthe died in 2015, and the book was completed by his widow Lynne working with Pels.

Welcome to Tune-In Tales, storytelling for kids on KDLL. Our first episode, May 3, is "The Three Mooses Mosely," by Sally Cassano, performed by Sally, Sara and Truuli Hondel, Austin Thomas and Mike Gallagher. Enjoy!

Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce’s budget plan took a $4.5 million hit at Tuesday night’s meeting.

Trinity Greenhouse on K-Beach Road has been a staple for Central Peninsula gardeners for over 40 years, and though it recently changed hands, the founder is confident the future is growing. Host Jay Barrett welcomes Trinity Greenhouse co-founder Ron Sexton and new owner Darren Henry.

With the city of Soldotna recently passing a ban on single-use plastic shopping bags, recycling has become a hot topic around the central peninsula. For this hour of special local programming for our spring memberhsip drive, we sit down with Jack Maryott, solid waste manager for the Kenai Peninsula Borough and Krista Timlin and Andrew Hanrahan of ReGroup, a local conservation group about different ways to keep our lives and our environment clean.

Each year, there are more opportunities to buy and sell local foods and other agricultural products on the Kenai Peninsula. In another special program for our spring membership drive, we sit down with local farmers Amy Seitz from Lancashire Farms and Brian Olson from Alaska Berries to talk about how the industry is expanding here and how to keep it moving that way.

Instead PRI's The World, for our spring membership drive, we'll hear from Kenai Middle School students Hadessah Parkki, Koda Poulin, Hermoine Lanfear and Milena Doyle and language arts teacher Susan Nabholz about their projects for community and future problem solving and how they're trying to make a little change in their corner of the world.

A lot has changed in healthcare in Dr. Peter Hansen’s 51 years practicing family medicine in Kenai. During this special Spring Membership Drive edition of Kenai Fresh Air, we talk with Dr. Hansen about his first trip to Alaska in the early 1960's, starting his own family practice in Kenai and the legacy of the Hansen name in Kenai.