(R) Mary Nelson, (C) City Manager Layton Lockett, (L) Mary Prince/Photo Courtesy of the City of Adak

At the same time as Mitt Romney took the stage to give his concession speech, the last voter in the nation was filling in the Romney/Ryan bubble on her ballot.

“I didn’t know the winner," Mary Nelson says.

Nelson lives in Adak. The town had its own polling station for the first time this year, but the island is so far west, it's in a different time zone from the rest of Alaska. That pretty much guaranteed that the results of the Presidential election would be a foregone conclusion by the time the polls closed. Nelson says she knew her vote wouldn't swing the national race, but she wanted to do her part anyways.

Unalaska had record-shattering turnout for yesterday’s general election.

“The best that we can come up with is the highest turnout was 712, years ago," says City Clerk Elizabeth Masoni. "And we had 808 that actually came to the polls and then we had 87 absentees on top of that.”

That’s a total of 895 voters, or roughly half of all voters registered in the district. Masoni says there were long lines at the polls right up until the election was called.

Someone in Adak will have the distinction of being the last person in the nation to cast their vote in the Presidential Election today. Adak is in a different time zone from most of Alaska, so their polls will close an hour later than the rest of the state. City manager Layton Lockett knows Adak won't swing the general election, but he's still excited.

“I mean really any significance? No. I think we’re all going to know where we’re going to be at by that point, so it's kind of disheartening, but we figured you know, let's throw a little bit of humor into this, you know?”

The community development quota program was supposed to infuse Western Alaska villages with money from the Bering Sea fisheries. Twenty years after it started, the program’s coming under the microscope for the first time.

All six CDQ groups handed in self-evaluations to the state by Tuesday afternoon. The groups had to judge their success at bringing more jobs and economic opportunities to their member villages.

For the second year in a row, the Bristol Bay red king crab season echoed the derby days. In just three weeks fishermen have caught 95 percent of the 7.9 million pound quota.

Fish and Game area management biologist Heather Fitch says the quick season can be attributed to several factors. Preliminary numbers show boats pulling up an average of 30 legal crab per pot, compared to a 5-year average of 24. The average weight of the crab is also significantly significantly higher than the 5-year trend at 6.9 pounds, compared to an average of 6.4 pounds.

Tagalog ballot/KUCB

In Unalaska, there’s rarely a line at the grocery store, let alone the polls, but that’s exactly what voters faced when they went to cast their ballots at City Hall today.

As of 5 p.m. 506 Unalaskans had come out to vote. City Clerk Elizabeth Masoni expects a lot more before the polls close. The turnout is a record for Unalaska, and it’s also a big change from October’s municipal elections, when just 110 people voted.

Getting home for the holidays is always an issue for Unalaskans, but it’s not just because of bad weather or cramped flights.

Scott Habberstad, the marketing director for Alaska Airlines, says the company has a pretty good idea of what the problem is.

"During A season, there's about 4500 people that want to go from the lower 48 to Dutch Harbor. And unfortunately, it coincides with Christmas," he says.

When it comes to wastewater compliance in Alaska, the state is now taking over the reins from the federal government.

Up until recently, the Environmental Protection Agency was responsible for issuing discharge permits. Those permits set the amount of waste things like seafood processing plants, mining operations, and sewage treatment centers can release under the Clean Water Act. Over the past four years, the EPA has handed over control of the permitting process to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. First, they were given the authority to issue to permits to logging companies and hatcheries, and then they took on federal and municipal buildings. Yesterday, the final phase of the takeover was completed: the DEC is now taking over permitting for the oil and gas industry and all other facilities that hadn’t been transferred yet.

Unalaska’s assistant city manager resigned suddenly on Friday. According to human resources manager Kelly Stiles, John Fulton’s resignation is effective immediately. Neither Stiles nor city manager Chris Hladick would comment on his departure, citing the confidentiality of personnel matters.

Fulton was originally brought in as a consultant in January 2008. He was then hired as Unalaska’s city planner and eventually transitioned to the assistant city manager position. 

Hladick will be taking over his responsibilities at the city until the position can be filled. 

Fulton is the second prominent city employee to resign suddenly in the past two months - city engineer Tyler Zimmerman gave notice in early September.