February 14, 2020
Friday AM

It certainly does not surprise me that Dick Coose’s fingerprints are all over this looming disaster. This particular buck-ass private of industry was fundamentally culpable for the train wreck that was Gateway Forest Products, the largest (and most corrupt) bankruptcy in the state’s history, and the wooden bowl scam, etc., and now he wants to sell your future away so he can toy with and burn rapidly through another $35 million of someone else’s money. Forfeiting local control of our docks for 30 years, and who knows how much more, means nothing to Dick Coose because long before then he will be dead and gone, but for many of you both you and your children will still be around.

For those unaware (I don’t know how that would be possible, actually.) Ward Cove and the old pulp mill is a highly contaminated Superfund site. Pile driving through the sand that was dumped into Ward Cove to cover (not remove) 40 years of polluted filth will begin the process of churning all this crap back up, and the screws and the rudders of these oversized hotels will do the rest.

Currently, were you to rent or lease business property at Ward Cove you will not only receive written warning notice that it is a highly contaminated Superfund site, you will also receive a video on the same subject.

Will all the tourists debarking at Ward Cove also receive a written warning notice and a video tape describing the polluted conditions? If not, I think that raises very serious questions of legal liability. As a tourist if you knowingly exposed me to the pollution of a Superfund site without notifying me well in advance, I would sue. I think others will tend to do so even sooner. If they are warned, will they even get off the boat? Or on it in the first place, for that matter?

Not to fret otherwise we are told. All these tourists will be shuttled into town, so that local merchants will not be affected by this new proposal. What bull!!! Let’s assume that a tourist bus carries 40 passengers (I think the number is more like 36.). Thus no fewer than 50 buses will be required to move 2000 tourists downtown via Tongass Highway, and that is just one way. So to move 2000 people back and forth requires a minimum of 100 bus runs a day, and any idea of a shuttle would require a whole lot more than that. To move 6000 tourists requires 300 minimum bus runs a day; a shuttle service would add 100 to 150 more.

Tongass Highway from Ward Cove into town is already a potholed mess, and running hundreds and hundreds of buses over it every day will grind it to powder in no time at all. How much do these greed heads propose to pay for that damage?

And what about the inconvenience? Where will the local cars and trucks fit if there are 50 to 150 or more buses moving tourists back and forth to downtown? This is an absurdity manufactured by fools.

What about the tourists? I doubt they will be anyone’s willing accomplice in all of this with a great many of them not going to town at all. That, of course, is the intent. The cruise ships want the tourists to buy from the shops on board the ships. I hear talk of a theme park out at Ward Cove, also intended to keep the tourists from the downtown area.

It sounds to me like “Johnny come last” is planning on stealing the better part of the town’s tourist business, and all of the people who developed all of this over the past 50 years can just go to hell.

Perhaps it is time for recall petitions because I hear the really big news in town is how much Karl Amylon is about skip town with, eight figures some say. Is all of this a smokescreen to keep us from seeing that?

I wonder.

David G. Hanger
Ketchikan, Alaska

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Received February 11, 2020 - Published February 14, 2020

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