What's up dock? Just another costly Dunleavy campaign stunt
The dock on Crescent Lake in Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. (National Park Service photo)
The little dock on Crescent Lake in Lake Clark National Park and Preserve isn’t bothering anyone.
No one with any sense wants it removed. You never know when you may need a good dock if you take to the waters of Crescent Lake.
Enter Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Administration Commissioner Corri Feige, who are putting on a big government overreach act for the Dunleavy reelection campaign.
With posturing worthy of professional wrestlers, they have branded the tiny dock as an illegal enemy of the people—built without a state permit—and a blight that must be removed—or else.
“You are hereby notified that this dock is unauthorized; constitutes trespass; and has been officially placed in trespass status,” Feige said in her blustery letter to Susanne Fleek-Green, the park superintendent.
Her name is spelled wrong on the state warning, which is addressed to “Susanne Fleck-Green.”
“You are hereby ordered to quit use of this dock and to remove it and any associated personal property within 30 days following receipt of this notice served by certified mail,” Feige demanded, starting the most serious parkland showdown since Yogi Bear got caught with an illegal picnic basket in Jellystone National Park.
If the federal government fails to move the dock onto dry federal land, the state may dispose of the dock and charge the National Park Service for removing it and picking up the remains.
The swagger and “You are hereby” tough talk will not strike fear in the heart of the federal bureaucracy. But it will make it harder for the state to be taken seriously.
The Dunleavy administration must be getting its legal guidance from Dewey, Cheatem & Howe. Or from graduates of Trump University.
The dock debacle is part of the anti-federal campaign theme chosen by Dunleavy, which costs the state plenty and costs the Dunleavy campaign nothing because the work is done by state employees.
Most likely the anti-dock campaign is led by Ron Opsahl, a new state attorney hired by the Dunleavy administration to spend his time attacking the federal government. His name appears on the litany of state lawsuits filed against the feds.
The state owns the land under navigable waters, but when the federal government disputes a claim, the matter has to be settled in court. Manufactured press release outrage about the fate of a tiny dock is no substitute for the years of legal work required to settle a complicated matter.
The Feige letter reads like an internet scam warning the recipient to pay up now or this will be turned over to the Repo Man.
She asks the Park Service to contact the state to “begin the process to remove the dock at issue from trespass status.”
The Park Service is not going to remove the offending dock. Nor should it.
Even the state doesn’t expect the dock to go. The legal “strategy” is for Dunleavy to declare that the refusal of the federal government to remove the dock equates to an official federal claim that the land under the lake is federal property, triggering a process under the Quiet Title Act to establish state ownership.
The thing to remember is that you can claim anything in court. Or while grandstanding during a campaign.
Alaska attorney Doug Pope, who represented John Sturgeon in his landmark Supreme Court battle, had it exactly right when he told the Anchorage Daily News that the Dunleavy approach to submerged lands is a “lawyer relief plan for the next 30 years.”
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