May 18, 2018
Friday AM

While Juneau gets pristine roads without a pothole anywhere, Ketchikan gets a damned dog and pony show put on by DOT that includes toy trucks and hard hats for the kids. Plus the announcement that no improvements will be made to that hole in the road between the Coast Guard base and Saxman for at least three years. How much of this is racist????!!! Saxman is, of course, an Indian community.

In the meantime there are two sets of memorial wreaths, etc. set out to honor those who have been killed on that stretch of road in the past two or three years, which definitely makes this the most dangerous stretch of road on this rock.

So the solution that DOT provides us is a bunch of overfed duds eating pizza at a dog and pony show. Fire this bunch of worthless overfed bureaucrats. It is clearly pointless to employ them. They are more useless than lipstick on a pig.

Part of the problem here is the State does not want to use state funds to pay for this fix. They want a massive improvement project paid for with Federal funds, but no Federal funds are available, and this is otherwise an excuse for a bunch of planners to siphon the public purse for five years or longer; all for specs for a piece of road less than a mile long. This project is likely to be deferred for the next ten years the way things are going now.

What is clear is Ketchikan does not exist as a priority for DOT in any way, shape, form, or fashion. They can’t fix the dam potholes, and they won’t fix the road. So taking a paycheck from the government is just a form of dishonesty and corruption on their part. They cannot and will not deliver the goods, so this is the place to start with state government cost-cutting. Fire all useless duds, and if you are sitting around in a government office right now, you are a dud. There is a lot of field work that is being totally ignored.

This is the way of the future for Alaska, the Republican way as defined by these oil company lackeys who control the state senate. We pay 35% of the exploration costs for the oil companies, and the State collects no taxes of consequence from the oil companies, so there is no money to fix roads in hick places like Ketchikan, so far off the grid you have to take an airplane or a boat to get there. What’s available is all for Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau, and there is not even a hind tit for us.

If you keep voting Republican this is what you will be getting routinely henceforth. Dan Ortiz and cronies have shredded every one of your Permanent Fund Dividends the past several years, costing a single individual at least $5000 and a married couple with two kids no less than $20,000 just in the past three or four years. You all whine about your Federal income tax, which is comparative peanuts, and let the State casually rip you off like this. Your freight rates, already sky high and making Seattle filthy rich, are now higher as are ferry fares, dramatically so, while the quality of service has been erased to the point it is a null factor (hooray, it floats).

If you don’t tax the oil companies and concomitantly stop giving away 35% of their exploration costs for the privilege of stealing our oil, the road situation will only get worse, the schools situation will only get worse, and everything else you can think about will only get worse, too.

So the logical choice if you fervently believe in the ‘Coghill’ brand of Republican state politics, i.e. complete subservience to the oil companies and their interests with considerable amounts of payola directly offloaded to key state elected officials, is to roll the clock back 100 years to those thrilling days of pre-statehood where any roads were nothing but dirt tracks.

Let us begin, therefore, with this hole in the road between the Coast Guard base and Saxman. Let us recognize the fact that DOT and its enablers are racist pukes who don’t think a road to an Indian community has any priority at all, and let us, therefore, demand that DOT convert this section of road to a dirt road immediately in honor and in recognition of the fact that oil companies from somewhere else are far more important than any community of citizens who have spent their lives here.

Let us further recognize that it is compulsory on our parts to regress a century in terms of our infrastructure to cater to the whims and the bank accounts of John Coghill, Anna McKinnon, et. al, and their grand masters, the oil companies, and to “Oil Company” Walker’s obsession with a $55 billion pipeline the private sector refuses to finance. That this requires on our part recognition of the fact that we are lesser beings, entitled to less in services from our masters; that, therefore, in the future as the highways and byways of Ketchikan deteriorate, tear up the asphalt and convert all the roads to dirt roads.

Hooray for “Oil Company” Walker’s vision of the future.

Fire Dan Ortiz; start there. This guy is spineless and will sell you down the river in a heartbeat. He has not even twirped in objection to these taxing policies on oil, and has totally caved in to “Oil Company” Walker. He has completely failed to deliver the goods, and has forked out more of his constituents’ money to these oil companies than the Feds have collected in taxes from us these past four years. That has gone from ridiculous to obscene. And he can’t even prioritize the worst road hazard on this rock, and get it fixed. That’s a dude with his head way up his ass.

But don’t look to heir apparent Rodney Dial as a solution. Rodney will crawl into bed with Coghill in a heartbeat. He blames poor people and little people for everything; that is in fact character-definitive. Find someone else. Rodney is not part of the solution, he is part of the problem.

What the hell is going on with your Borough Assembly and your Borough Manager? We have a bunch of clowns who don’t appreciate the fact that every day people use the roads for work, for play, for whatever. They don’t think we see what a mess the roads are in while they are still drawing down their big paychecks, medical insurance programs, and retirement accounts???? I think a whole lot of my neighbors are taking note these days. I sense they are really pissed off this time.

So fire this Borough Assembly and the City Council, too. There is way too much complacency here, folks. We are just supposed to whine, then go away, and let them take their big financial packages home with them while accomplishing not much of anything.

So fire them en masse’. Get serious about this stuff. We pay more taxes than any other community in the state, and clearly get a whole lot less for it.

If that is what you want, let’s face reality and go back to dirt roads. Otherwise, fire the idiots, the incompetents, and the corrupt who think the status quo is good enough.

A bunch of overfed pigs at a dog and pony show are not the solution to our roads problem, or anything else for that matter.

David G Hanger
Ketchikan, Alaska

About:

Editor's Note:

The overall text of this letter was NOT edited by the SitNews Editor. A few minor edits in wording which did not change the context.

Received May 16, 2018 - Published May 18, 2018

Related Viewpoint:

Viewpoints - Opinion Letters:

Webmail Your Opinion Letter to the Editor

 

SitNews ©2018
Stories In The News
Ketchikan, Alaska

Articles & photographs that appear in SitNews may be protected by copyright and may not be reprinted without written permission from and payment of any required fees to the proper sources. E-mail your news & photos to editor@sitnews.us Photographers choosing to submit photographs for publication to SitNews are in doing so granting their permission for publication and for archiving. SitNews does not sell photographs. All requests for purchasing a photograph will be emailed to the photographer.