At least nine brown bears have been eating out of the Kodiak Island Borough’s landfill this summer. The area has become a tourist destination and a hazard for landfill workers. The Borough Assembly discussed possible solutions on Aug. 13. But they struggled to reach a consensus.
The Assembly had invited staff from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and other experts to discuss the situation at the landfill, which is owned and operated by the Borough.
Larry Van Daele, a retired wildlife biologist with Fish and Game and the current executive director at the Kodiak Brown Bear Trust, attended the Aug. 13 meeting as a consulting expert. He told KMXT in an interview on Monday, Aug. 17 that bears have been a problem in the landfill for years. The current bear deterrent at the landfill is an electric fence that is around 2 miles long according to Borough documents, and covers about a hundred acres of land.
The fence first went up back in the early 1990s. And for decades, Van Daele said bears were being kept out of the landfill. But he said that changed several years ago.
“Some bears started to find a way to dig under that fence, and it wasn't maintained as well as it should have been," he said. "We were kind of victims of our own success because we figured it was just going to keep doing okay.”
Once the bears started getting in, Van Daele said they began bringing their cubs there, creating a multigenerational reliance on the landfill as a food source. One bear even denned in the landfill with her cubs in the winter of 2024.
The Borough made extensive repairs to the fence last year by patching up openings in the fence, lowering the bottom electrical wire, and making other structural improvements as recommended by Fish and Game. Van Daele said Fish and Game also relocated some of the landfill bears.
“They tried moving one to Monashka Bay because it just wouldn't get out," he said. "It came right back like they usually do.”
The bears have found their way back into the landfill by digging under the fence. With the late start to summer and low salmon runs Kodiak has seen this year, Van Daele said the problem has only gotten worse.
The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation told the Borough that the landfill was out of compliance with their solid waste regulations during a landfill inspection in 2025. The department’s municipal landfill specialist Annemieke Powers attended this month’s work session virtually and she said that if the Borough doesn’t bring the landfill into compliance, they can be fined.
“So basically, it's just not working," she said. "It's not because anyone is doing anything wrong. It's just the situation is such that it just isn't working, and so we need to see a new approach for keeping the bears out.”
So what to do? Borough Manager Aimee Williams said that the top priority is to add a second fence around the area of the landfill that holds solid waste, and to repair, and possibly shrink the size of the original fence so it’s easier to maintain.
The head of the Borough's Engineering and Facilities department, Codi Allen, said at the meeting that they secured a grant to cover some of the cost of materials for a new fence. But he estimated installation of that fence, and repairing the original fence, could cost a million dollars or more. With that price tag, and the fact that their management measures didn’t work last year, Allen said he has a few concerns.
“This raises an important question to me as the director of the department, whose staff spent a great deal of time out there maintaining this equipment infrastructure," he said. "What is the path forward if the next round of recommendations is unsuccessful?”
Kodiak ADF&G Area Biologist Nate Svoboda said that they would need to keep adapting and trying new methods until all bears are out of the landfill for good. Other ideas the Borough is pursuing include hazing the bears using professionals from the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service or bear dogs from out of town. But those options will also cost a pretty penny: Allen said he was quoted more than $600,000 per year for federal workers to come in and nearly $40,000 for the bear dogs.
Then there’s the option seen as the elephant in the room: killing the bears.
“I’m going to go ahead and just voice what is wildly unpopular any time that I speak it," said Borough Assembly member Jeremiah Gardner. "At what point do we say that we are dealing with defense of life and/or property, and euthanize problem bears?”
Svoboda said at the meeting that they aren’t interested in euthanizing bears until there’s no other option. He said that killing all of the bears that have eaten at the landfill will just open up territory for new bears to come in and do the same thing.
But Van Daele told KMXT that euthanizing the most habituated of bears might be the only way forward.
“We need to tell the public that some bears are probably going to die as a result of this, and that’s sad," he said. "But it doesn't mean every bear has to die. You just get the ones that are not doing what we want them to do to be good neighbors.”
Van Daele said that once bears enter hibernation at the end of this fall, the Borough and Fish and Game will have a window to do more bearproofing at the landfill. But by the time the bears wake up again in the spring, he said they’d better have a solution.
