Before the Alaska Municipal League and clueless legislators get to wound up on forcing unincorporated areas into Boroughs, I’m incorporating a reply I made on another post.
Boroughs only work where you have private property in mass, which definitely is not the Bush.
Dillingham is incorporated. The rest of us are unincorporated for a very good reason. We’re too spread apart without roads to receive services that we don’t already pay for ourselves. We don’t have taxable property. Almost everything out here is under BIA.
I was explaining to the Mayor of Bethel the other day that our Village wouldn’t have a single taxable house. Nobody owns property, unless it’s allotment property, which is still under BIA rules and protection. So, if the legislature forces a Borough, no Village is going to pay taxes on houses. The only taxable thing is the Village Corporation, which spends darn near every penny they make on hiring residents to fill the jobs they can create. In turn every Village charges a sales tax, without exemption on age to pay for City services.
So what good would a Borough do???? They can’t provide services that aren’t already provided, you and I both know that the tiny trickle of revenue from the Village corporations wouldn’t do enough but provide wages for more government employees that don’t provide a darn thing.
The railbelt has the appearance that everything is subsidized out here, which is only an opinion of the those that have never lived in the real Bush. That doesn’t include Bethel or Dillingham as they can escape on a jet multiple times a day.
I look at urban Alaska as the truly subsidized part of the State. Let me count a few of the ways your lifestyle is paid for by the Bush, without even considering that darn near all resources are in the Bush.
You get up in the morning and drink a cup of coffee that came across a PORT or Airport that every American pays to keep functionally sound, you load the products on trucks that leave the port and drive on roads that every Alaskan contributes too, whether they ever drive on them or not. We help pay for your road maintenance employees, your forever never ending upgrades in Anchorage so your School Buses can drive around on our nickel picking up your kids, while ours bundle up and climb on the back of a four wheeler or snogo to go to a school that gets a cost equivalent allocation for students.
Your school that’s heated by a resource that had subsidized piping to keep the building warm and fire the kitchens to prepare federally funded meals in a school that without fail was bonded and up till the last year or so was having it’s bonding reimbursed by the State. (Which is fine by me, that’s what the Corpus was designed for).
If you take this one step further, like Nenana or Fairbanks or the Kenai, you can add in another huge subsidy called the Alaska Railroad, which fortunately actually produces revenue, unlike the road systems we all pay for.
You folks in the railbelt do a whole lot of sniveling without connecting the dots. Like I read a couple years ago from State labor that 1 in 9 Anchorage residents make their livings from providing direct services to the Bush and a huge “undeterminable” number counted on income from business with the Bush.
You don’t take into consideration that the bulk of the yearly PFD that goes to the Bush, flows almost instantly into the railbelt economy. Whether you like it or not, your hub cities business models are heavily dependent on us living out here. Your architectural firms that design the schools, mechanical businesses, union trades that build the rural schools and all the big buildings out here. Your airfreight and barges. Your Wal-Mart and AIH’s.
Our combined problem is that we’re forever joined at the hip because legislators can’t get a grip on their spending. Big government happens because they keep enforcing a urban/rural division, to keep all eyes off of the incompetence of government itself.
Prime example of incompetent legislators is using OUR PFDS TO PAY FOR BONDS, WHEN IT’S THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO USE THE 75% OF their funds, to reimburse bonds.
Willy Keppel
Quinhagak, AK