Alaska Editorials

Air Force officials should be commended for delaying public hearings on the proposed move of Eielson Air Force Base’s F-16 squadron to the Anchorage area.

The meetings, previously scheduled for next week, will now occur in mid-July.

The original schedule, announced on May 31 with release of the draft environmental impact statement on the proposed move, left Alaskans with just 10 working days to develop comments to present at the hearings.

That wasn’t adequate, and Alaska’s congressional delegation let the Air Force know it.

In a May 31 letter to Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley and Gen. Mark Welsh, Air Force chief of staff, they asked for the hearings to be delayed.

“This afternoon our staffs had the opportunity to discuss this schedule with Alaska community leaders during a weekly conference call pertaining to the Eielson relocation,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Don Young said in a letter to Donley and Welsh. “The unanimous response was that this hearing schedule does not afford Alaskans enough time to formulate meaningful comments and should be delayed.”

The Air Force’s report shows just how critical this decision is to Fairbanks. The loss of personnel and spending associated with the F-16s would be a big hit for the regional economy. The report predicts that unemployment in Alaska’s Interior could rise to almost 9 percent. Property values in much of the borough likely would fall. And schools on Eielson would close.

Those aren’t reasons alone for the Air Force to continue to base the F-16s here, but they are reasons for Fairbanks to go over the Air Force’s analysis with a microscope. To date, the people reviewing the proposal have identified a number of places where it does not appear to be sound.

Young, in a news release Monday, said “this first draft EIS does not address any of our concerns with the move, including sparse housing options, limited school availability and outrageous and costly commutes.”

Murkowski, in a similar news release, encouraged Alaskans also to “point out that ‘America Needs Eielson AFB’ in its current or more robust form, to stem the threat from the Asia-Pacific region.”

“The proposal to move the F-16s just doesn’t make any sense from a strategic or financial standpoint,” said Sen. Mark Begich

Fairbanks residents and others have brought these issues to the Air Force’s attention during the past few months. We’ll need more time to see how those concerns have been addressed in the draft environmental impact statement. It’s good that Air Force officials have granted us some.

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June 9, 2013

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner: Eroded authority: Respected elder’s lawsuit posed challenge for state

Katie John, the Athabascan elder, was to be buried Saturday in her home village of Mentasta. The issues raised by her famous lawsuit will live on.

Ms. John deserved all the respectful remembrances prompted by her death May 31 at age 97. She was a practitioner and advocate of traditional Athabascan culture, and she would share her knowledge and enthusiasm with all who would take an interest.

The lawsuit that bore her name sought to authorize her fishing with nets at Batzulnetas, at the confluence of the upper Copper River and Tanada Creek, southeast of Slana. However, the lawsuit reached far beyond her fish camp, and, therefore, her effort drew opposition from people across Alaska’s political spectrum. In the end, her court victory in 2001 eroded the state’s authority over its own waters.

The case was extremely convoluted and lengthy. Throughout its course, the essential question was this: Should the federal government manage fishing on state-owned rivers and lakes in Alaska?

Ms. John and her attorneys advocated greater federal authority because they believed the federal subsistence law, which in 1980 created a priority for rural residents, would require that managers allow her to fish at Batzulnetas. The 1980 law also created the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and Batzulnetas was just inside the northern boundary.

The state had closed the area to fishing with nets and wheels in 1964 to protect salmon runs as they neared the upper reaches of the Copper River. In 1984, Ms. John began trying to reopen the areas to net fishing and, after some lawsuits and negotiating, the state Board of Fisheries allowed some limited fishing in 1988. Ms. John asked federal managers to set more liberal rules. They declined, saying the state was the manager. So Ms. John sued the federal government in 1990, asserting that it had an “interest” in the river and therefore should provide for subsistence fishing by rural residents under the federal law.

The final court decision, which took 11 years to reach, ruled that the federal government did, indeed, have management authority because of a concept called the “reserved water rights doctrine.” The doctrine upholds the idea that federal agencies ought to have some say about what happens on lakes and rivers in national parks and refuges — even if the lakes and rivers are navigable and thus owned by the states.

It’s not an unreasonable idea, but the multiple court decisions in the case demonstrated just how squishy this doctrine and others are. Judges were uncertain and inconsistent when applying them. It was and still is difficult to see where federal powers asserted under the doctrines begin and end. The case therefore posed potentially serious threats to what many people saw as long-recognized state control of navigable waters.

These people were neither anti-Native nor anti-subsistence, as is often suggested. “If we lose the Katie John case, we lose navigable waters to the federal government and, with it, Alaska’s ability to control her destiny in so many areas,” former Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles told the 2000 Tanana Chiefs Conference convention in Fairbanks. Gov. Knowles was a devout supporter of the rural subsistence priority on federal lands and of adopting a similar rule for state lands, but he wasn’t comfortable with simply turning over state property rights to federal managers. “No governor of any state, me included, can surrender this power to the federal government.”

Surrender he did, though, when he decided not to appeal the final 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision to the U.S. Supreme Court the next year. Some still consider his decision evidence of a flawed character. To be fair, the governor just did something we all do from time to time — he changed his mind.

Nevertheless, his initial assessment was a legitimate one. The final court decision undermined the state’s authority over its own waters in one more way, perhaps small, perhaps not — time will tell.

Recognizing that the state had important interests to protect during the course of the lawsuit shouldn’t tarnish anyone’s respect for Katie John. Nor should it diminish any appreciation for the lifestyle she was seeking to protect or her legacy as a leader.

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