July 24, 2014
Thursday

I think it appropriate to seriously consider the recall of the five members of the Ketchikan Borough Assembly who voted to give Oceans Alaska $600,000 of Borough money. Please note, I have never previously called for the recall of anybody, but this is nuts. I do not know if these people take their stupid pills just on nights of Ketchikan Assembly meetings, or also on every other day of the week; but this decision is colossal stupidity.

At a time when eliminating sales tax and property tax exemptions for seniors on limited, fixed incomes is being openly discussed by our current crop of elected officials, this bunch of clowns wants to dole out $600,000 of taxpayer money to an outfit that to date has produced nothing but a big hole in its own wallet, all of this with millions of dollars of government money. Never forget this was the project conceived by a group of government wonks and Snob Hill “sophisticates” that was going to replace to a large extent all those tacky jewelry stores and tourist shops, etc. downtown. The tourist experience in Ketchikan was to be upgraded and uplifted by the arrogance of this bunch, and this ready market of tourists would be siphoned off using government funds to create a business operation that would cause all these tourists to goober all over themselves in their mad rush to absorb and experience this upgraded and uplifted new tourist experience, and all those tacky tourist shops would go out of business.

So now all those tacky tourist shops and jewelry stores, which in fact generate millions of dollars in local sales, are expected to finance via higher taxes the continuance of this abomination called Oceans Alaska. (Now let’s get two things straight here lest some moron think they have an angle that they don’t. If you are really good at managing your retail tourist shop, on a million dollars of sales you can reasonably expect to net $60,000 to $150,000; but the majority of the shops gross $200,000 to $500,000 apiece, so you do the math in terms of what their net earnings are likely to be. The high turnover in tourist shops is simply representative of the fact that it is a hard business in which to make a buck; made harder by the graft and corruption of payola out the ass required to get those high grosses. Second, while it is possible this $600,000 technically comes from the vestige of some economic development fund, it remains the fact it is tax money that will have to be replaced by new tax dollars.)

What the hell is Oceans Alaska? A tourist operation set up with millions of government funds, an aquarium, then a “dead fish aquarium,” an operation that will introduce a whole new fishery to our shores and will provide more than 700 new jobs within 20 years; and now an operation that will provide us with some “mariculture???” jobs in 2015!!!!?? Is this an invasive new species you are proposing to introduce? I do not believe the fishermen and women of Southeast Alaska would overlook an opportunity worth 700 jobs that has been right here all the time, but no one else has ever seen it. So what is this fantastic new opportunity that without any voter approval whatsoever is costing us $600,000? My bet is it is just another “wooden bowl” scam.

Duly note the record of the Borough Assembly when it comes to so-called “economic development.” They have blown tens of millions to date, more than $20 million in the past 15 years, for squat. Not one single job exists today for all of this wasted money. Steve Seley tried hard, and to him the credit. But for the rest of it we got wooden bowls and a tax dodge disguised as an outfit called Gateway Forest Products. Their plan was in fact to give themselves sufficient tax write-offs to last a lifetime, and it almost succeeded.

These people in local government do not comprehend the time value of money, in fact very basic business math, thus it verges on the impossible that they understand any semi-basic business math such as “net present value analysis” which is frequently used by big business to determine the efficacy over time of a business investment. These elected officials, on average, have two or three semesters of college, if that, so any decision they are likely to make tends to border on the juvenile. They just don’t have the chops.

But the so-called professional managers are supposed to know better. Obviously they don’t, and they, too, need to be replaced.

None of that, of course, is likely to happen, and so added to the list of folks who need to seriously consider voting with their feet I must add Ketchikan’s senior citizens.

By any standard Ketchikan City Manager Karl Amylon is his own phenomenon. Whether you like it or not, his record is exceptional, and his longevity is absolutely incredible. To belittle the man by not noting we are dealing with an amazingly talented individual would simply be wrong. There are doctoral dissertations available in some number for studying individuals like Karl Amylon. Amylon’s reputation and career has nothing to do with Barack Obama. When Amylon became Ketchikan city manager Obama was in his late twenties or early thirties, and probably had not yet seen his way clear to running for national office, let alone the big job.

Nor is it likely his replacement(s) will in any sense be better, and most likely he or she will be worse.

But Karl Amylon needs to go. In a very real sense because he does his job so well.

I would commend Rodney Dial’s exceptional, if not brilliant, analyses of local government financial shenanigans were it not for his sappy conclusions. A liberal conspiracy in local government is not undermining the government and the community. Most of the people who work for local government and most of those elected are right wingers. The only extant cue-giving agency, the Chamber of Commerce, is so right wing it hates all American workers not willing to work for 28 cents an hour. Nor have I ever seen any evidence that Karl Amylon is a liberal; he is an autocrat who thinks government can do it better; who believes fiat is better than chance. So where is your liberal conspiracy, Rodney?

Not long ago I observed that the commingling of the local government and the construction industry had created a situation where this limited bunch of self-absorbed greed heads had sufficient votes unto themselves to win any and all local elections. One purported local liberal modified that to emphasize the merging of interests of local government and the construction unions; that was his perception, at which he could only shake his head at the insanity of it all. The problem with local government is not liberal, nor I suppose is it conservative, elements running amok and out of control; rather it is a cabal of self-interested individuals who disguise themselves as a local government, but they are not really interested in governing anything. They just want to make money at your expense.

Commenters calling for an elected “city manager” have at least hit upon the essence of the problem, albeit inadvertently, because in fact the city manager is a bureaucratic dictator, virtually untouchable; and when any city manager has had two decades and more in which to manipulate hirings, firings, and all kinds of other things in between, it is safe to say that basically they own the place. If you believe in representative democracy, that is not acceptable. If you believe in the council-manager form of government, you do not in fact believe in representative democracy because the council-manager form of government is a sham designed to predetermine elections and policy.

Established in 1893 by the self-proclaimed “reformist” National Municipal League, the council-manager form of government was intentionally designed to eliminate the “ethnic ethos” from local politics, and to otherwise eliminate the graft and corruption of ward system politics. The “ethnic ethos” they were concerned about at the time was primarily Irish, Italian, and Catholic; but as the decades went by it came to include Jews, Mexicans, Orientals, Native Americans, and Blacks. The graft and corruption they were concerned about was the existence of political parties that gave cues to their members that contradicted the desires of rich businessmen. So the rich businessmen got together and conjured a system of non-partisan grade school elections, always at-large without any district or precinct representation, which insured that all the elected officials were white males in perpetuity; but that the real power would, nonetheless, reside with professional management that no one ever elected; a professional bureaucracy forever shielded from any consequential direct access.

The contemporary version of this mess in Ketchikan is used and manipulated by a limited number of grifters, bureaucrats, and contractors for their own gratuitous benefit, leaving the citizens of this community with an incredibly large collective hole in its wallets. Fire Karl Amylon today and elected officials 20 years from now will still be constrained and restricted by the decisions that Amylon has already put into play. This guy does not just want to be remembered for now; he is building monuments to himself that anyone who lives in this town will be dealing with for decades. Allowing anyone so much power for so much time is nuts, and to allow an unelected official this much power is a form of evil, or a lot of folks out there do not really believe in representative democracy.

Back in 1975 there was a paint job at the hospital. The winning bid was $25,000, and then the guy hired two dudes for $2700 apiece to do the job and pocketed the rest of the money, the better part of $20,000. I have no particular confidence that local government bids are better managed today than they were 40 years ago, so I am quite concerned about how much these successful bidders are pocketing on these bonded projects. No, I do not think if you are that efficient you get to pocket $5 million or $10 million or $15 million on a local bonded project. I think you are a thief, and I think the jerks who let you get away with it are just as crooked as you as well as being totally incompetent. Oh yes, you should be reasonably rewarded for doing a good job in a timely manner. But if you do a purported $40 million job for $15 million and pocket the rest of the money, you are in fact a goddamned thief, because it was a $15 million job and never should have been bid for $40 million in the first place. And yes, the jerks who let you pull it off are jackals, too, who belong in a cell right next to you.

I think everyone in the private sector in Ketchikan is being taken for a big time ride. I can’t tell how extensive it is without more research, but I have little doubt that we are not getting much bang for our buck, and one or two families or so are getting rich as hell at our expense. In Bond City the tax bite is about to get even more intense.

There are two fundamental composites to Ketchikan City Manager Karl Amylon’s make-up: First, he deplores the private sector and actually believes government can do it better. He somehow fails to comprehend that government produces nothing. Second, and probably because of the first, he lies without hesitation in a business deal. In the Ketchikan Internet Service negotiations of 15 years ago there are banker’s boxes full of Karl Amylon’s untruths and deceptions. Certainly there are cons on Main Street, but they are routinely exposed, and their efforts and their effects are always short-term. You do not get ahead on Main Street by lying through your teeth. Apparently you do get ahead on Wall Street by lying routinely; and I am still awaiting a contemporary politician of any persuasion who can open his or her mouth and speak a truthful word.

Let’s see now, we have an overpriced new fire station situated in an area that would be optimal for retail development, but no………….. We have the White Cliff scam and what seems like a thousand feet of floor space for every government worker in town. How is that benefiting the businesses, the workers, and the citizens of Ketchikan? Didn’t even get to vote for it, and let’s see, oh yeah, there’s that certain somebody there collecting lease payments from us every month. For a building that we own(ed??). And a new library that has less shelf space than the old library plus a vaulted ceiling that adds how much to the annual heating bill??? $42 million in bonded indebtedness, some amount of which will be used to do something at the hospital purportedly; but probably way too much of which will end up in the pocket of some damned contractor. (But you got 30 years to pay it off, so that’s OK.)

Then there’s Ketchikan Public Utilities (KPU). Before Amylon came along the very idea that local government would try to compete with the private sector was completely off limits; it was not something this government or any government should ever do. As well as city manager Karl Amylon is also KPU manager, and as KPU manager he has maintained dossiers on every person in Ketchikan that go back decades, in some cases into the 1950s and ‘60s, because that is what KPU does. It spies on people. The IRS keeps tax records for seven years. Why is KPU maintaining customer records for decades, then routinely using these records to threaten and abuse customers? And how many $100,000+ salaries are there down at KPU now? Many.

Never forget KPU is the outfit that when an employee wrote an article to Sitnews in the summer of 2005 that mildly criticized certain aspects of KPU policies that article was immediately suppressed by KPU management, and is the only article ever published in Sitnews that I know of that was deleted and suppressed. You don’t hear anything bad about KPU from inside because of fear. In a country where freedom of speech and freedom of the press are purportedly held as sacred principles this government operation has primary market share for both internet and television service in this town. And, damn, we never hear anything bad about local government coming from them.

Karl Amylon is a dictator, and he is a bully. He is not the worst in that regard that I can imagine. Had any of these “gangs of four” that have periodically so dominated local councils had the wit that Amylon has, I think things could easily have been a lot worse. But the institutions and methods this man has established are now there for any tyrant to deploy to his or her advantage. In time this town will discover how disastrous that will be.

The role of city manager is to be a dictator, and that is what is wrong with it. No one elects him, and he is otherwise insulated from the electorate. Any city manager who is capable of manipulating human vanity can last a long time, but there are few who are true masters at that craft. Karl Amylon happens to be one, and I would not say it has all been bad. But our local government exists in a bubble and operates in a vacuum. It is only concerned about itself. The private sector is just there to be exploited, and otherwise to be ignored. The non-producers are sucking the producers dry for their benefit only, and it is time for a change.

My liberal friend of some pages back also noted several months before Rodney Dial’s latest reports that Karl Amylon’s next target was going to be knocking down and rebuilding the old museum building because the unions needed the work. I think Rodney Dial and others have identified the fact that our latest round of tax increases, and the ones being proposed for the next round, are directly linked to Amylon’s desire to do this museum project without voter approval; and that is how he is going to get the money to do it. It doesn’t matter that he is compromising local businesses with these high taxes, because as others have observed, we have a bunch of short-timers playing our local government for all it is worth to them before they leave, and, of course, leave their mess behind them.

The real problem is I do not think they can any longer be beaten at the polls. It is a small town, and almost 30% of the total jobs; and a much higher percentage of the good-paying jobs; are government jobs. If the government workers vote in high volume along with the construction workers, I don’t think that is a combination anyone else can come close to beating.

Within two or three years this voting with your feet thing might just be the most popular game in town for Ketchikan’s private sector.

David G. Hanger
Ketchikan, Alaska

Received July 24, 2014 - Published July 24, 2014

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