Hats off to Sarah Palin for once again standing her ground with the Department of Transportation on the proposed Juneau Road, pet project of DOT's Southeast Region. This is the same Juneau office that let millions of dollars in contracts in the final hours of the Murkowski administration for the so-called Pioneer Road, contracts the new governor wisely canceled.
Since day 1, Sarah Palin has promised Alaskans open and transparent government and a fully informed process. Apparently, Southeast Region never got that memo. Its creative number crunching has led to charges of favoritism and cooking the books. In a recent letter to DOT Commissioner Von Scheben, Mayor Bob Weinstein of Ketchikan accused the department of "having an emotional commitment to the Juneau Access project" and "driving the project forward through the use of what appears to be inaccurate, incomplete, and/or misleading information."
The department's recent bad press started when officials of the Southeast Region testified at a Senate Transportation Committee hearing on the Juneau road in February. Sounding for all the world like vacuum cleaner salesmen on late-night TV, they testified to amazed legislators that the Juneau road would be "self-financing" and "would pay for itself." At the same hearing, the department unveiled its plan to pave five miles, take a break for a year or two while the road is litigated, then drag construction out over 12 years, riding the state's credit card and doing design work as they go.
More incredibly, the department's geotechnical consultants, Golder and Associates, testified that the department had "terminated" the contract for geotechnical analysis on the most difficult section of road along the proposed route. It is unclear at this point what alignment and design measures the DOT will implement to protect drivers from the 112 serious geological hazards in the 22 miles south of the Katzehin River. The Golder consultant stated that without geotechnical analysis, the cost estimates were a "work in progress," a polite way of saying that the agency has no idea what the full costs of the project will be.
In his letter, Mayor Weinstein suggests that cancellation of the geotechnical analysis is a deliberate effort to conceal from the agencies and the public the true costs of this project. "In other words, by not completing the geotechnical work DOT appears to be deliberately avoiding developing meaningful cost estimates; rather the strategy seems to be to bluff the governor and Legislature as to the true total costs and start building."
The department officials who are pushing hardest for this project are retirement age and clearly want the road to be their legacy, but the tactics they have used fly in the face of everything Sarah Palin stands for. If she sticks to her guns, she will be the only Alaska governor in recent history to rein in the engineers who earned their department its nickname "The Independent Sovereign Nation of DOT."
Jan Wrentmore is a business owner who has lived in Skagway since 1978 and is chair of the Skagway Marine Access Commission.
By JAN WRENTMORE