State claims ignorance of road plan requirement long understood by state, industry officials
The mishandling of the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan by the office of Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson is a real problem.
Anderson is now claiming he did not know about the rule requiring that projects in an area with a Metropolitan Planning Organization, such as Anchorage and Fairbanks, must have those projects included in the local plan to be in the state plan.
He also claims it is a new rule.
Anderson did know about this rule. And it is not a new rule.
Here is the letter he wrote attempting to get the STIP back on track. It’s a coulda, shoulda, woulda situation.
Here are detailed steps the state is taking to try to fix problems of its own creation and federal responses.
All of this should have been worked out months ago by Anderson’s department.
Meanwhile, the Dunleavy administration and its mouthpiece blog invented the story that the STIP was rejected by the Biden Administration to punish Alaska, but there is no truth to that.
The truth is that the state plan was not overseen by veteran state employees who are familiar with the painstaking details required by federal regulation. It was overseen by new state employees who made many mistakes in filling out the complicated forms needed to get hundreds of millions in federal money.
The STIP groundwork was handled within the commissioner’s office. The failure to manage this basic function of state government competently has placed hundreds of millions federal dollars and thousands of jobs at risk.
One of the numerous rules Anderson ignored was a long-standing one that projects within a local planning area, such as those for Fairbanks and Anchorage, had to be in the local road plan before being placed in the state road plan.
Anderson and his staff were warned about this last year. They could have fixed the problem. They didn’t.
Here is the September 13 letter from Fairbanks officials he ignored.
Here is the August 24 letter from Anchorage officials he ignored.
Anderson’s refusal to take the advice he received has had serious consequences.
The state has now responded to this crisis in a way that may or may not work to get the final document approved by the end of March.
The state lawyers who wrote Anderson’s response to the federal highway officials tried to be clever about the old requirement for getting local approval, saying “As you know, this is a new requirement . . .”
Might as well call a cat a dog and expect it to start barking.
In any case, Anderson has also agreed to follow the rule and remove the disputed projects because he did not follow the long-standing rule. This means the removal of two bridge projects in the Fairbanks area identified last summer and four projects in Anchorage. Numerous other projects have to be removed for reasons not related to the MPO issue.
Anderson needs to provide a clear message to the public and a list of projects that are gone from the STIP. All that has been provided so far are these jargon-filled documents being exchanged with the federal highway authorities. This is not sufficient.
While belatedly agreeing to remove the projects, Anderson is also trying to find cover by hinting that this may be a case for the Dunleavy Statehood Defense Initiative, coordinated by Craig Richards under an illegal $12,000-a-month state contract.
The transportation department is “inquiring to our sister states to see whether this heightened authority for MPOs to review, limit, or reject proposed projects by sovereign entities (state, federal or tribal) is required in any other jurisdiction,” he told federal officials.
It is not heightened authority as Anderson was told last summer.
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