Federal aid can't dim anti-government rancor

PALMER, Alaska — Backed by a blue row of saw-toothed mountain peaks, Republican state lawmaker Carl Gatto finds himself on a fine roll.

Roll it back, he says, roll back this entire socialistic experiment in federal hegemony. Give us control of our land, let us drill and mine, and please don't let a few belugas get in the way of a perfectly good bridge.

“I've introduced legislation to roll back the federal government,” he said. “They don't have solutions; they just have taxes.”

And what of the federal stimulus, from which Alaska receives the most money per capita in the nation? Would he reject it?

Gatto, 72 and wiry, smiles and shakes his head: “I'll give the federal government credit: They sure give us a ton of money. For every $1 we give them in taxes for highways, they give us back $5.76.”

He points to a new federally financed highway, stretching toward distant fir trees. “Man, beautiful, right?”

Alaskans tend to live with their contradictions in these recessionary times. No place benefits more from federal largess than this state, where the Republican governor decries “intrusive” federal policies, officials sue to overturn the health care legislation and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, voted against the stimulus bill.

Although its unemployment rate sits at just 7.9 percent, about 2 percentage points below the national rate, Alaska has received $3,145 per capita in federal stimulus dollars as of May, the most in the nation, according to figures compiled by Pro Publica, an investigative website. Nevada, by contrast, has an unemployment rate north of 14 percent and has received $1,034 per capita in recovery aid. Florida's jobless rate is 11.4 percent, and the state has obtained $914 per capita.

Alaska has budget woes, and, more perilously, oil production is slumping. But its problems are not mortal; last year, the ax falls on new police headquarters and replacement Zamboni blades rather than on teachers and libraries. The state avoided the unemployment devastation visited on the Lower 48 in part because federal dollars support a third of Alaskan jobs, according to a university study.

Not that this has eased anti-government rancor. Alaska's congressman, Republican Don Young, denounced the stimulus as appalling, done under the cover of night and without full disclosure. He also promised Alaskans that “if there are earmarks, we will have our fingerprints on them.”

Curiously, that pattern plays out in Louisiana, Wyoming and the Dakotas, states relatively low in unemployment but high in per capita stimulus aid and growling anti-government animus.

More Alaskans, particularly of the Republican stripe, identify the federal government and pork-barrel spending as the enemy, although Alaska was built by both.

Alaska's appetite for federal dollars has always been voracious and is not confined to the stimulus. A study by professor Scott Goldsmith of the University of Alaska, Anchorage, noted that an “extraordinary increase” in federal spending drove the state's pile-driver growth of the past 15 years.

In 1996, federal spending in Alaska was 38 percent above the national average. Thanks to the late Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, who was chief of the Senate Appropriations Committee for several years, and to the military, which keeps expanding its bases here, Alaska's share now is 71 percent higher than the national average.

Some of this owes to the expense of serving Alaska's rural reaches. But much is bred in the bone. The federal government carved this young state out of the northern wilderness, and officials here learn to manipulate federal budget levers at a tender age.

Still, many see strings attached. Lynn Gattis, a Republican Party official, lives by a lake in Wasilla, surrounded by aspens. She was born in Alaska, and she is a pilot, which means she threads her way around those cloud-hugging peaks. She knows that the federal government paid for the port of Anchorage and the highway that leads to Wasilla that allowed Target and Sports Authority to take root.

But she sees a government that delays oil exploration, as President Barack Obama did recently; that regulates timber and salmon harvests and hydropower; and that, in her view, cares more about polar bears than about Alaskans. (The government lists as endangered the beluga whales of Cook Inlet, a vast gray expanse that stretches out from Anchorage. Some Alaskans argue that this could stall construction of a multimillion-dollar bridge, which as it happens would be paid for by the federal government.)

“It just feels like the federal government intrudes everywhere,” Gattis said. “Enough Ivy League lawyers — let's get people who can dig a mine and run a business.”

This sentiment baffles Tony Knowles, a long drink of a man who worked on the North Slope oil rigs before becoming the governor of Alaska in 1994 as a Democrat. He understands the frustration that comes with bumping into federal officials at each turn. But the trade-off is not so terrible, he noted, such as having the feds pay to put broadband in Alaskan villages.

“Nobody likes to have all their eggs in one basket, and so you do feel vulnerable,” he said. “But Ted Stevens, who was a Republican and beloved, was never shy about bringing money in.”

Unemployment rose as the great recession blew through, although state residents still pay no sales or income tax.

As an editorial in the Anchorage Daily News noted, Alaskans pride themselves on a libertarian ethos but the state makes so much money from the oil companies that it sends every man, woman and child a dividend check each autumn.

The check this year will be about $1,300.

Still, uneasiness is palpable here, and perhaps it accounts for the political anger in the air. Oil production, the state's lifeblood, is winding down. Non-stimulus federal dollars have slowed, too.

All of which tends to reinforce that Alaska remains much as it was 50 years ago, dependent on drilling, mining and federal aid. The sense of history repeating itself is disquieting.

When Goldsmith looks out his window, he sees more buildings than in the past. But the landscape — the snow-capped volcanoes and waters of Cook Inlet — is overpowering.

“Californians wait for a new entrepreneurial wave to lift them,” Goldsmith said. “For us, the traditional extraction economy still rules.”

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