drunta wrote: "What the mayor didn't do... is explain why I should pay for it. ... I have my own bridges and road maintenance to pay for and my own community's economic needs to finance."
Drunta,
Your bridges and road maintenance are paid for from the same federal highway funds that maintain our highways and bridges across the nation. Yes, they're your tax dollars, but they're also Alaskans' tax dollars as well, and they are as entitled to them as your own community.
Here's my explanation of why you should pay for it: The standard of living that you enjoy would be impossible if not for the federally-funded transportation infrastructure that maintains roads and bridges throughout the country, regardless of a given state's revenue picture.
Do you enjoy Florida oranges, Washington apples, Maine lobsters, and/or (let's not forget) Alaskan king crab? How do you think these items arrive at your grocery store, stiill fresh? Do you think Scotty beams them there?
What if those Florida oranges had to detour around Alabama and Mississippi, or be transferred to a rail car to travel through those states, because their taxpayers simply couldn't afford to maintain highways? Do you think that the oranges would still be as fresh when they arrived at your local grocer? And how much would they cost, if your purchase price included several such transfers between rail and trucks? (This is not a dig against Alabama and Mississippi -- my reference is based upon geographic considerations, not economic ones. If Alabama and Mississippi had no highways, this would mean a long detour through Georgia for freight trucks entering and leaving Florida. If I-10 didn't run all the way from Florida to California, it would be nearly impossible for Florida's orange growers to supply more than half of the country.)
That's the problem with most Americans -- we just don't see the bigger picture. We'll make a big deal out of our tax dollars building bridges in Alaska, without bothering to consider the obvious fact that Alaskans pay taxes which help us to maintain I-10 so that we can all enjoy Florida's oranges, and so that Florida can benefit economically from the sale of its crops.
Why should you pay for it? Because you benefit from it. It's that simple.
The View From ‘Nowhere’
Our town in Alaska sorely needed a bridge to its airport. Instead, we became a national punch line.
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Two years ago the small Alaska town of Ketchikan, where five generations of my family have lived, became the poster child for all that is wrong with the United States government. We wanted a bridge to connect us to our airport, which is on a different island from our town. The bridge had been promised to us 30 years ago when the government chose—over the objections of many in this community—to put our new airport across the narrows from Ketchikan. Unfortunately, when it finally arrived, the money for that bridge came in the form of a congressional earmark.
Earmarks were once considered a good way for elected representatives to meet the needs of their communities. The federal bureaucracy could not move fast enough or act specifically enough to meet those needs, whereas a targeted earmark could.
But since then earmarks have become synonymous with the worst excesses of federal spending, the pork-barrel projects that bloat our budget, compound our deficit and raise our taxes.
Earmarks actually make up less than 1 percent of the federal budget, but they are the political equivalent of a big, slow softball floating toward the plate. Politically, it's as pointless to be "for" earmarks as it is to be "against" moms and apple pie.
But the politics of earmarks didn't mean much to us up here in Alaska. We were too busy focusing on the need for a bridge to get to our airport. Then somehow our bridge became known as the "Bridge to Nowhere."
To us, the name seemed odd. Ketchikan was never "nowhere." It is 90 minutes north of Seattle by plane. The rest of Alaska, including Anchorage, with a population approaching 300,000, lies to the north—well beyond "nowhere." The media reports never seemed to mention that Ketchikan has a year-round population of 14,000—making it the fourth-largest community in the state. And they forgot to account for the more than 250,000 people who pass through our airport every year, and the nearly 1 million visitors who come here each summer, mostly on cruise ships.
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