Loss of Cooperative Extension Service is a shot to the soul of Anchorage

Hey, Anchortowners, check it out. You're about to witness an amazing vanishing act.

The University of Alaska is closing the Anchorage office of the Cooperative Extension Service, transferring its technicians and advisers to the hinterlands and eliminating its programs. As a result, hundreds of volunteers who put in thousands of hours making our community the place we want to live will vanish before your eyes.

Is a nasty bug eating your trees? Is a disease killing your plants? Are you trying to improve your property with a decent lawn? Interested in the national sustainability movement? Are you a young family learning how to grow, cook and eat healthy on not much money? Want to learn how to preserve those berries you pick every fall? Need to manage diabetes? Want to test your pressure cooker for safety? Are you an isolated and frightened immigrant easing into a strange new world by working in the Refugee Garden and selling the vegetables you grow at local farmers markets?

If you drove downtown over the past few weeks, you probably saw crews performing the annual transformation of the Anchorage Pioneer Home grounds into some of the most beautiful public gardens in the city — with free labor and hundreds of donated flowers. They were Master Gardeners — a CES program.

I could go on, but you get the point.

The Cooperative Extension's 100-year mission across America is to translate university scientific and technical research into useful information, then get that information to the public so we can all benefit from the millions we spend on higher education. It's an outreach program, funded by a combination of state and federal money passed through local entities — in this case, the Fairbanks campus of the university. The Anchorage Extension office is the largest in Alaska, with the biggest pool of volunteers serving the most people.

The announcement that our office would be closed came as a shock. It appears no one involved with its various programs was consulted. Why university bureaucrats in Fairbanks have the power to unilaterally erase such an important Anchorage asset is a mystery.

The person who made the decision said his department has to cut its budget and shutting down the Anchorage office will save a lot of money. The UAF chancellor rubber-stamped the decision. This chancellor is headed out the door in August so won't be around for the fallout. The final decision rests with University president Jim Johnsen and the Board of Regents.

Any Alaskan with a pulse knows hard times are coming. State money is drying up. We will probably be forced to join the rest of the country and pony up some taxes. Everyone is going to have to give up something, the working class and poor more than others, as usual. Is this really the time to destroy a program that fosters self-reliance and frugality? That teaches doing more with less?

There are many lesser steps that can be taken to keep the Cooperative Extension in business: reducing current program overhead, seeking alternate revenue sources, forging partnerships with the municipality and like-minded agencies. None of these were explored before pulling the plug.

For officials struggling with current budget woes, with oil tax credits and schools and health care, Cooperative Extension is barely a blip on their screens. I'm afraid they don't understand how many ordinary people's ordinary lives will be diminished by its loss.

Killing Cooperative Extension is a disaster — not a fire-falling-from-the-sky disaster, but an eating-away-at-the-soul-of-the-city disaster. Surely there are people in our community who have the power, and who care enough, to stop this.

Sheila Toomey worked for many years as a reporter at the Anchorage Daily News, is a Master Gardener and a volunteer with the Cooperative Extension Service.

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