A youth facility in Ketchikan closed indefinately Thursday as a result of statewide budget cuts.<\/p>\n
In a news release, the Alaska Department of Health and Human Services said it had to make \u201cthe difficult decision\u201d to close the Ketchikan Regional Youth Facility as a cost-saving measure due to Alaska\u2019s multibillion-dollar budget deficit.<\/p>\n
Fifteen full-time employees with the Division of Juvenile Justice received lay-off notices, and two positions were reassigned to other offices.<\/p>\n
DHSS Commissioner Valerie Davidson said in a statement her department is \u201ccommitted to a responsible state budget,\u201d and state funding had been reduced by $200 million since last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow youth in detention will have to be sent further away from their communities and hard-working Alaskans have lost their jobs,\u201d she said. \u201cHowever, given the financial realities our state is currently facing, we saw no alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Ketchikan facility oped in 2002 as a short-term youth detention facility serving Ketchikan, Prince of Wales Island, Wrangell, Petersburg, Metlakatla, Kake and other surrounding communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A youth facility in Ketchikan closed indefinately Thursday as a result of statewide budget cuts. In a news<\/a> release, the Alaska Department of Health<\/a> and Human Services said it had to make \u201cthe difficult decision\u201d to close the Ketchikan Regional Youth Facility as a cost-saving measure due to Alaska\u2019s multibillion-dollar budget deficit. Fifteen full-time employees […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-13402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13402\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13402"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=13402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}