As the Alaska Legislature struggles to fund the state’s fiscal year 2018 budget, our delegation in Washington, D.C., is putting a huge new expense on Alaska’s plate — the proposed road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. The U.S. House passed a bill this past Thursday to authorize construction of the road through the refuge. The bill now goes to the Senate.
Because Alaska legislators are considering making a down payment of $10 million on the road in the 2018 capital budget, let’s look at how this major project fits into state finances and priorities.
How are roads built and maintained in Alaska? The state builds rural roads such as the proposed road through the Izembek refuge at the far end of the Alaska Peninsula using a combination of federal (90 percent) and state (10 percent) funds. Maintenance of the roads is covered by the state operating budget alone.
What’s the likely cost to build the Izembek road? If we look at another gravel road through rural coastal wetlands that is farther along — the Cape Blossom road to a proposed deepwater port near Kotzebue — the projected cost is more than $44 million. Because the Cape Blossom road will be more than 11 miles long and is likely to have similar construction challenges, it is reasonable to assume that the approximately 11-mile segment of the Izembek road through designated wilderness would cost roughly the same amount. (The six miles beyond the designated wilderness on the Cold Bay side, now a very rough 4-wheel trail, also would need to be constructed and would no doubt require tens of millions in additional dollars to complete.)
Given the annual contribution of approximately $500 million from the federal government to Alaska’s roads, the proposed Izembek road segment through designated wilderness that the Legislature is considering would eat up, conservatively, nearly one-tenth of the state’s capital spending on roads for one year, and still more would be needed to complete the road. In other words, roughly one out of 10 state road construction dollars for one year would go to the wilderness segment of the Izembek road, trading off road safety and capacity upgrades throughout the rest of the state, with potentially significant, adverse safety impacts to the state’s population.
While population numbers are not the whole picture, the community of King Cove, which has fewer than 1,000 people — or less than 0.02 percent of the state’s population — would receive a vastly disproportionate amount of transportation funding if the Legislature chooses to build this road.
What’s the likely cost to maintain the Izembek road? While it is not possible from state budget documents to determine the added cost to the state Department of Transportation to operate and maintain the road, Alaska DOT does produce an informative map showing winter road maintenance priorities (http://dot.alaska.gov/stwdmno/wintermap/). This map shows that roads such as the one proposed for Izembek would take 36 to 96 hours to clear after a winter storm, thus dramatically undercutting the argument that the road would address urgent medical needs.
Additionally, in October 2016 the state was forced to close four road maintenance stations due to the lack of state funds: on the Steese Highway at Central; on the Edgerton at Chitina; along the Richardson Highway at Birch Lake; and on the Taylor Highway at Obrien Creek. With Alaska’s current financial struggles, there is no guarantee the state would be able to fund necessary maintenance of the Izembek road in years to come, especially when those funds might come at the expense of education and road maintenance elsewhere in the state.
While it will not surprise readers of this piece that my organization, The Wilderness Society, opposes this road because of its likely serious, adverse ecological and subsistence consequences, and because of the precedent it would set by putting a road through the heart of a federal refuge, it’s clear that building and maintaining the Izembek road would also have significant financial and safety consequences for the state.
It is unfortunate that Rep. Don Young, Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and Gov. Bill Walker have chosen to ignore those consequences. State legislators still can, however, show fiscal leadership and choose not to include funds in the FY18 capital budget for the proposed Izembek road.
• Lois Epstein is an Alaska-licensed engineer and the Arctic program director for The Wilderness Society.
