It’s going to be a while longer until the neighboring Norton Sound villages of Stebbins and St. Michael gets an Alaska State Trooper outpost. According to the Department of Public Safety Commissioner, James Cockrell, the delay is due to setbacks in securing housing.
“It's just a matter of getting housing for them and essentially infrastructure,” Cockrell said in an interview with KNOM. “We can't have a post if we don't have housing and office space and a place to put people if we have to put them in custody. It's a priority of our department. Certainly a priority for me to put more law enforcement resources in rural parts of the state.”
The promise of increased law enforcement comes at a critical time for Stebbins.
Just over a mile up the road to St. Michael, a crew camp for ASRC Construction employees has been built. The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation subsidiary is ramping up work on Stebbins’ first piped water and sewer system, starting with the construction of a sewage lagoon next spring.
Stebbins received funding for piped water and sewage more than two decades ago, yet residents are only now approaching community-wide service. The project has had several setbacks, including a fire around 2005 that destroyed materials intended for the project, according to the village’s City Administrator Daisy Katcheak. She said arson was to blame for the fire.
“We've spoken to the contractors, they will have night guards and day guards, so there will be positions open once all the materials come in. In the meantime, my cops are on double patrol,” Katcheak said in June.
Construction is taking place in several corners of the village. Workers from ANTHC are putting the finishing touches on a new washateria near the beach. Once open to the public later this year, the big red building will provide washers and dryers, showers, and a haul water station to the community.
Near the center of town, a large gravel pad has been built to support a new, larger Norton Sound Health Corporation Clinic.
Work on a new school is expected to begin next spring. Representatives from Bering Strait School District visited the village in late August to share the school’s near-final design. The old school burned down in 2024. Investigators with the Department of Public Safety said the cause of the fire was likely electrical, and described the incident as “non-criminal”.
Commissioner Cockrell said the department will hire two troopers working two week on – two week off rotations. The positions are already funded, but with 65 open trooper positions across the state, Cockrell said it’ll still take time to fill them.
The department requires early-career troopers work away from their home region at least once between their second and fifth years on the job. Spokesperson for the department, Austin McDaniel, said that makes the rural rotations an attractive, if not necessary option for troopers planning on staying long term.
“Somebody that's lived in Fairbanks their whole life, that's where they did their training, they know they have to make a geographic move,” McDaniel explained. “To accomplish that, they'll work two weeks on, two weeks off in Stebbins or wherever our multiple two and two posts are across Western Alaska.”
McDaniel said the rural positions get priority over urban positions, and that the seniormost troopers get first dibs on which outpost to cover.
In a Jan. letter to the cities of Stebbins and St. Michael, Cockrell said he hoped to have the outpost up and running this summer, but that was if the department could secure housing and office space for the outpost. Cockrell said housing is still in the works, pushing the open date of the Stebbins and St. Michael outpost to spring 2027.
