Courtesy: Alaska Wildlife Troopers

Unalaska’s lobbyists will be gearing up for a fight to keep the state trooper patrol vessel Stimson homeported here.

At last night’s city council meeting, city manager Chris Hladick told councilors that state legislators want to relocate the Stimson to Kodiak.

He said it would save the state about half a million dollars as part of governor’s proposed budget for next year.

But Hladick said it would be bad news for the Aleutians.

City council is set to award a $3.9 million contract for the final phase of the landfill expansion at their meeting tonight.

City staff say they received three bids for the project, and the lowest came from Northern Alaska Contractors, LLC. The group is run by the same people as Northern Mechanical, a local construction company.

Their bid is about a million dollars lower than the city’s estimate for the project.

Over the past seven years, Unalaska has been trying to modernize its outdated public utilities.

Nancy Peterson had the job of overseeing all that development.

She left her post as the director of public works last week, heading off to retirement in Washington State.

Since Peterson started work in Unalaska in February of 2007, she’s had a pretty consistently full plate.

Governor Sean Parnell announced his proposed budget for fiscal year 2015 Thursday, and it doesn’t including any funding for Unalaska’s capital projects.

The city had asked for $4.5 million to pay for a fourth engine at the powerhouse, plus three other lower-priority projects. City Manager Chris Hladick says it’s no surprise to him that those requests aren’t in the governor’s budget.

A controversial trucking law got a tune-up at last night's city council meeting.

The council approved an amendment to a rule on hydraulic fifth-wheels -- a loading tool for tractor-trailers. It’s already illegal to drive a truck with the fifth-wheel in a raised position. The amended law takes that a step further. Now, it will be illegal to drive with the fifth-wheel in anything but “the lowest possible position.”

Since July 2012, it's been illegal to operate a tractor-trailer with the fifth wheel -- a hydraulic loading tool -- in the raised position. The law was intended to help extend the structural life of paved roads around town.

But representatives from the shipping industry have said there's no clear connection between fifth-wheel position and road wear. And they're also pushing back against the amendment that's up for consideration tonight.

City council took a first step toward amending a contentious trucking rule at their meeting Tuesday night.

Since July 2012, it’s been illegal to drive a tractor-trailer with the fifth wheel in the raised position. Public safety director Jamie Sunderland suggested some changes to the law that bans the practice, based on public safety’s first year enforcing it.

At tonight's meeting, city council will consider a proposal to tighten up a trucking regulation that drivers have found their way around.

Unalaska has prohibited tractor-trailer drivers from operating their vehicles with the fifth wheel in the "raised" position by code, since July 2012. The law was meant to prevent the city's roads from getting chewed up.

Since then, public safety has issued eight citations -- and plenty of verbal warnings -- to drivers.  And police officers have seen more trucks with new welding in place to prevent their fifth wheel from going down all the way, to circumvent the code.

More than a dozen municipal employees turned up at City Hall Monday night to hear the results of a year-long study of how Unalaska categorizes and pays its workers.

The work was done by Fox Lawson and Associates of Phoenix, Arizona and St. Paul, Minnesota. They sent consultant Lori Messer to Unalaska twice over the past year to research the kind of work that city employees are actually doing -- and what they're getting paid for it.