Alaska’s public pension gap grew by nearly $1.4 billion last year, bringing the public employee and teacher plans’ “unfunded liability” to more than $11 billion, according to new numbers made public last week.

The unfunded liability is the difference between what it will cost to provide retirement payments and benefits and what the state expects to have available to make those payments.

The increasing unfunded liability comes despite hundreds of millions of extra state dollars deposited into the retirement savings accounts during last year

The House Democratic Caucus is offering what they say can be a solution to a budget deadlock that has the Alaska Legislature 12 days into a special session with no end in sight.

The plan calls for the Senate to give up its budgetary attempts to protect energy project from a veto by Gov. Sean Parnell, while at the same time calling on Parnell to back off his threat to veto projects made during oil tax negotiations.

Then, those two sides and the House should negotiate which projects they find acceptable, House Democratic leaders said at a press conference Thursday.

ANCHORAGE — A federal study has found that fewer Alaskans are dying from traumatic injuries while on the job, including in the commercial fishing industry that remains the state’s most dangerous occupation.

Work-related deaths of Alaskans declined from 648 in the 1990s to 379 a decade later — down by more than 42 percent, according to a report released Wednesday by the Alaska Division of Public Health.

FAIRBANKS — Some Interior villages are already sold on biomass.

Community leaders shared how they harvest energy from the forests and rivers around them with roughly 200 attendees at the Alaska Wood Energy Conference on Wednesday.

“We are a rural community that wants to promote to other rural communities that this can be done,” Tanana city manager Bear Ketzler said.

The three-day event focused on various fuel types, technologies, environmental impacts and supply issues associated with wood energy.