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.
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The View From ‘Nowhere’
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What also went unstated was our town's need for development. Ketchikan is perched on the side of three mountains and is only a few blocks wide in spots. There is no place for it to grow. Gravina, the island with the airport, is one of the few spots in the region with flat, undeveloped land. We need that space for the houses and businesses we hope will replace the timber industry that once dominated the area. A bridge would provide more access to that land.
But this rarely got reported, and so we continued to take our lumps in the news. In a matter of weeks, the entire country began to equate my town with government waste. By the end of 2006, things finally quieted down a bit and we went back to being blissfully anonymous.
Then Sarah Palin became John McCain's vice presidential nominee, and there on national television was our governor bragging (not quite truthfully) about how she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere. Just like that, we were back on the front page, exhibit A in Palin's reformist résumé.
We settled in for a second round of public lashing. Sure, we had been unhappy last spring when the governor shelved our project by sending press releases to the media and not telling us to our face. But we were really disappointed when she called us "that community" on national television, in the same tone of voice that Bill Clinton had once used to describe "that woman."
But we will get over it. We will even make up with our governor, no matter what happens on Nov. 4. That's what Alaskans do. We pull together to make a go of it in a place where survival—physical or economic—is not necessarily a given.
Ketchikan does not claim to be representative of anything, least of all some long-lost fantasy of small-town America. We are a working-class community that is trying—like many others—to transform itself from a resource-based economy into a service economy. We are struggling to create new jobs and stanch the flow of residents to the big city. And we have problems that are unique to our geography: our frequently unpleasant weather and our island topography, which makes roads without bridges an impossibility. But we are a small part of this country's greater whole. We are not "nowhere." We are somewhere. In America.
Kiffer is the newly elected mayor of the Ketchikan Gateway Borough.
© 2008
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