OPINION: Infrastructure akutaq in a time of plenty

There are a lot of recipes for akutaq in Alaska. I am not sure which one is the best. The secret, I am told, is in what you do with your ingredients.

We have the opportunity to make an infrastructure akutaq that will leave a good taste in the mouths of Alaskans if we do it right.

Millions of dollars of infrastructure deal money will be coming to Alaska over the next few years. That’s the good news.

More than 1,000 people, in person and virtually, gathered to plan for this future of plenty at the Dena’ina Center earlier this month to connect with grant people and state leaders, and reconnect with contacts after our pandemic hibernation.

I shook hands with the Department of Transportation commissioner. I told him that Bethel’s Yuut Elitnaurviat People’s Learning Center was denied permission from the state to train truck drivers to drive water and sewer trucks because Bethel lacked a 2-mile stretch of four-lane highway to practice lane changes and because we don’t have onramps or offramps on which to practice.

In the commissioner’s words, “Yes, that is a problem.”

How could we modify rules and regulations in a reasonable way to solve a simple problem?

Then there is the vast internet connectivity money that was talked about. More money than ever before is available. By my reckoning, for $250 million (and we have close to $1 billion available), we could launch our own satellite and service the whole state in less than 5 years. Instead, we are bickering about where to extend fiber optic cables or building microwave towers and maybe in 3 years, regional hubs will have fast internet, but the rest of the Bush will be left in the lurch again. How will we use what will become available to us?

Then there was talk about all the need for workforce development.

Thanks to the federal government’s push for higher graduation rates and two years of pandemic educational pivoting, we have a great number of high school graduates who can’t score high enough on the Test of Adult Basic Education to get into vocational training centers or get a job with our regional health corporation. The state has a developed an Adult Basic Education Program — perfectly suited for Juneau.

For adults who want to get their GED or for graduates who want to better their skills, the first step is a 5-6 hour series of registration and placement tests. Certain people might have difficulty with that, such as parents of small children, people working a job in the time the test centers are open, people who didn’t finish high school because they didn’t test well in the first place. Previous rounds of Tests of Adult Basic Education took only an hour, a much more manageable and less daunting beginning. We need to get back to a more nimble approach to working with adults who want to move forward in their lives.

Federal regulations that strangle rural Alaska development, infrastructure money misdirected to old-school interests, and an educational system that is so heavy with bricks and mortar that it can’t do the job are rotten berries we need to replace with fresh fruit.

What is the recipe for good infrastructure akutaq? It’s what we do with the ingredients!

Walter Betz is Director of Programs at Yuut Elitnaurviat People’s Learning Center in Bethel.

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