The nearly $400 million Gravina Access “bridge to nowhere” project, which would connect Ketchikan (population 8,000) to Gravina Island (population 50) over Tongass Narrows was cancelled by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in September 2007...sort of. Instead of building the bridge, then-Governor Palin spent $41 million in federal transportation funds to build an underpass and a three-mile road on Gravina in 2008 to the beach where the bridge would have gone. Because of her decision, the federal government will require repayment of the $15 million in federal funds the state spent to plan the bridge project and the $41 million spent to build the so-called Gravina Island “Highway” to the deserted beach. With the intent of not repaying the federal government for the millions of dollars the state spent on this “road to nowhere,” the Alaska Department of Transportation announced on March 10, 2010 that it again is considering building a bridge to Gravina at a cost of $240 million or more.
According to a recent audit of the Gravina Access project by the state legislature, Governor Palin’s decision to build the road was “not in the public’s best interest.” She proceeded with this project even after conservation and fiscally-conservative organizations joined forces asking her not to do so. Instead of acknowledging the state’s mistake and moving on, however, Alaska DOT is compounding its widely-recognized financial problems by spending millions in additional federal and state transportation dollars to justify having built a “road to nowhere.”
How did we get to this point? Alaskans thought that this expensive bridge project, which would allow cruise ships to pass underneath and would open up Gravina Island to logging, would be funded by the federal government – after all, both Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young were heads of key Congressional committees several years ago. When the U.S. public learned via the media including a November 2005 Parade magazine cover story that Alaska had two “bridges to nowhere” (the Gravina bridge and the Knik Arm bridge; the latter was never cancelled by Governor Palin and the in-state fight against that bridge continues) costing the federal government over $220 million each in earmarks, Congress removed the earmarks. Alaska still received that federal money for its transportation projects, which is why Sarah Palin’s “thanks but no thanks” statement is untrue since Governor Palin never returned the earmarked money to the federal government.
The Gravina Access project is one of five costly projects examined in a February 2010 Alaska Transportation Priorities Project report entitled: Easy to Start, Impossible to Finish: Alaska Spends Millions on Roads and Bridges without Financial Plans to Complete the Projects. The report shows that the state only has 6% of the $5.4 billion it needs to complete the projects, yet for political and other reasons various state administrations continue to spend millions of federal and state dollars on these projects annually.
For those interested in more information and visuals on Alaska’s many bridges and roads to nowhere, built or proposed to be built using mostly federal dollars, here’s a link.