August 07, 2013, 2013
Wednesday PM

I was a proponent of the bridge to Gravina back when the bridge made sense; today it’s laughable to consider putting $250-300 million, or more, into a project of that magnitude.

Think about the cost and the need. Do we need to spend an average of $21, 450 per person on a bridge?  Do we need a bridge to get to the airport? Consider the fact that 46 cents of every dollar the federal government spends is borrowed and go back to the necessity of this project. It does not pass the best-interest test or the red-face test to spend this amount of money on a project that is so far down the list of things we actually could use here in Ketchikan. These could include: repairing and resurfacing every road we have on this side of the proposed bridge, more hydro-electric projects (raising Swan Lake, building the Mahoney project, etc.), remodeling and modernizing our aging hospital and replacing all the water and sewer lines in the City. Keep in mind Ketchikan is one of the oldest cities in Alaska and we have the oldest infrastructure too. It’s all far overdue for repair and replacement. Funding the bridge is competitive with funding for the things we actually need and quite possibly never get because we wanted and got a $250-300 million bridge.

What about our maritime and tourism economy and the effects a bottle-neck bridge crossing would have on our cruise ship traffic? You know the answer to that; they would go elsewhere. The number one proponent of a hard link to Gravina Island is our good friends in Prince Rupert; the closest and most likely alternative cruise destination to Ketchikan.

Both hard-link options are too low for some of the ships that come here now and the cruise ships of the future are rapidly getting larger and larger. Both bridge options are too short and the other too narrow (500 feet between piers). The cruise industry does not want to use the narrower and much more dangerous back-side of Pennock Island, or cross under a too low and narrow bridge as proposed for the bridge option that starts near Wal-Mart.

The City of Ketchikan is going out for bonds to fund the hospital expansion. We project we will be able to fund those bond payments from the existing hospital sales tax if the economy keeps humming along as we project it will with a steady cruise ship traffic and no major economic crisis. We also have major harbor bonds and leases directly related to the cruise ships. If we do something to dissuade the ships from coming and we cut our revenue stream, we (all city residents) would be on the hook for these costs and we would have to pay them. Why would we ever do something as risky as building a too short and too narrow bridge that we have lived without and could continue to live without, that could cost the taxpayers of Ketchikan a huge amount of money? The short answer is we won’t ever do that. It’s not worth the risk.

This project needs to be scaled back from a bridge to improved ferry service to be mindful of the economic times we are in and to protect an industry we have spent the last 30 years constructing. The ferry options the City endorsed does this. It offers an improvement over the existing ferry service we have now and it protects a large and very important segment of our economy.  

Samuel E. Bergeron
Ketchikan, Alaska

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