Fill the Heart
Dear Editor: February is Fill the Heart month, and Brave Heart Volunteers needs your help to continue serving Sitkans experiencing grief, loneliness, or end-of-life.
This year, your generosity goes even further – an anonymous former Sitka School District teacher has kindly pledged to match every dollar donated up to $8,000! With your support, we can raise a total of $16,000 to help support our mission.
Brave Heart Volunteers is non-traditional. We’re run by unpaid volunteers who are simply passionate about lending a helping hand, and our main source of funding is supporters like you. Our services – companionship for elders, end-of-life care, and grief education – are all completely free of charge and available to anyone in need.
In 2024, we served 562 individuals through bereavement and caregiver support, trained 82 incredible volunteers to provide companionship, and empowered 317 grieving residents through our programs. Our volunteers contributed over 1,800 hours of service, offering social and emotional support, sitting with individuals in their final moments, and walking alongside caregivers through deep grief. On average, our pool of volunteers collectively give 13 hours of their time every single day because no one should have to go through these experiences alone.
Brave Heart Volunteers relies on supporters like you to continue this work. If you believe in the power of community care, please consider donating today at braveheartvolunteers.org or by mail at PO Box 6336, Sitka, AK 99835.
Together, we can fill the heart and ensure that no Sitkan faces life’s hardest moments alone.
Jason Own, Executive Director,
Brave Heart Volunteers
Correlation?
Dear Editor: The Sentinel recently reported claims by the municipal administrator and school district that sales tax revenue is highly correlated to cruise passenger numbers.
They used plot with those values on its axes for calculating the correlation.
But as is well known, a statistical correlation can be spurious — that is, false or misleading rather than real. Reasons can be the characteristics of the two kinds of data, characteristics of the system that is involved, or how the data is prepared.
In this case, Sitka’s broad retail and services economy is the system.
A problem in the city’s analysis is that two of the six years of data were the economically highly unusual Covid years, 2020 and 2021. They are functional outliers that can distort the result. Without them there are only four good plot points (2019 and 2022-2024), which is insufficient.
Substituting 2017 and 2018 for the Covid years makes six comparable data points, and a strong *apparent* correlation does result.
However, doing the same plotting for air passenger arrivals at Rocky Gutierrez Airport shows an even higher correlation to sales tax revenues. This is true whether linear or non-linear (polynomial) correlations are determined from the plotted data.
What to make of this, and why?
That question is where the City’s and the School District’s correlation claim falls short. They did a quick and dirty calculation of a correlation value. No analysis is online to defend the claimed correlation as a real rather than spurious one and to explore what it means and why.
It is well established that Sitka’s sales tax source categories are not aligned with answering the question of how much sales tax gain is attributable to cruise tourism. Our sales tax economy is complex and diverse, so having a shortcut to the answer is an extraordinary claim requiring an extraordinary proof.
A chart Small Town SOUL recently presented to the Assembly underscores the need for such further proof. It has lines for sales tax and the numbers of cruise and air arrivals. Those lines show, for each year, the percentage by which travel and inflation-adjusted dollars are above or below their starting values at an origin year, 2001. It shows that even huge up or down swings in cruise numbers don’t affect sales tax all that much.
Jeremy Plank and Ian Dempster, of Safeguard Sitka’s Future, recently spoke to the Rotary. Their bar charts and numbers about sales tax gains are gross exaggerations because adjustment for inflation over the years was not made. Further, they attribute all the gain to cruise tourism. Nonsense, all the way around.
Larry Edwards, Sitka
