Interior Ferry Bill in the state legislature
1-25-07
Tim Bodony

audio version of the story

The rivers of Alaska’s Interior have a long history of ferry service – from the ships that transported gold miners in the early 1900s, to the sternwheelers that moved passengers, cargo, and mail from village to village. 

Ferries disappeared from the rivers with the rise of air travel.  But a bill currently before the state legislature seeks to bring a new generation of ferry service to the Interior.  

Representative Woodie Salmon has sponsored a bill calling for a feasibility study on adding the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers to the Alaska Marine Highway System. 

Even with the legislature in Juneau under pressure to cut budgets, the supporters of the bill say that it is worth investigating, because of the economic boost it could bring to communities along the rivers.  

Representative Salmon spoke in favor of bringing state-operated ferry service to the interior on the campaign trail in 2004 and 2006, and his first legislative attempt to fund a feasibility study on the expansion died in committee last session. 

Speaking in a general election debate last October, Salmon argued that bringing the marine highway system to the Interior makes sense logistically, and would help village economies. 

Salmon:  “cheaper energy and cheaper transportation – that’s what we are looking for.  If you look at Alaska from the mouth of the Yukon all the way to the border, we have a highway system, a marine highway system. And if we don’t utilize it, we are defeating our own purposes.  The marine highway system down in Southeast – I used to oppose it, but once I rode it about 2 or 3 years, I mean that is one of best things that ever happened to the state of Alaska. And we can have that same system on the Yukon River.”  

The newest version of Salmon’s interior ferry bill, HB80, tacks on the Kuskokwim River as well, where the previous version of the bill only mentioned the Yukon. 

Salmon says that adding the Kuskokwim to the proposed feasibility study was motivated, in part, by politics.

Salmon: “The Kuskokwim is a long, busy river.  And it serves a lot of villages. And we thought that since there’s a couple of Senators in that area that are high on the food chain on the Senate side, it would give it a little better chance of surviving over there.”    

One such legislator who could be in a position to help the bill along is Bethel Demorat Lyman Hoffman, recently appointed co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee.   

Representative Salmon sits on the House Transportation Committee, where HB 80 will get its first consideration this session. His counterpart in the Senate, Angoon Democrat Albert Kookesh, is the chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee and a supporter of expanded ferry service. 

Kookesh:  “That marine highway system has moved all the way from Southeast Alaska to most of Alaska, so I don’t think it is beyond reason to have a little arm that goes through the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers. Of course it would only operate in the summertime, but I think it would be a great boon to the economy of that region.”    

Historic steamships like the Nenana were a crucial part of the early cash economy of the interior, not only as a means of transportation in the summertime, but in the other paying jobs they supported, such as wood-cutting.  The steamers’ engines required about one cord of wood per hour to operate. 

This time around, Salmon looks at the economic advantages of state-run ferries in terms of cheaper shipping costs and possible tourism enterprises.   

Two commercial barge lines currently move building materials, heavy equipment, and other bulk items on the rivers, including millions of gallons of fuel to power village electric plants.  But Salmon doesn’t see the marine highway system as competition for the barge lines – since the state ferries would handle passengers and smaller amounts of cargo, catering more to the smaller budgets of village families.    

Salmon:   “The barge system is good for big volumes of fuel and large amounts of cargo. But this is more personalized, back and forth situation. It’s almost like a highway – a subsidized highway.”     

Operating ferries on the Yukon and Kuskokwim would require a huge capital investment from the state, to build terminal facilities at villages that lack any such infrastructure.  Senator Kookesh doesn’t see the current climate in Juneau surrounding budget cuts as being very conducive to that level of investment.  

Kookesh: “I don’t know how far it will go, because you are looking at a huge cost, and with the new governor saying she wants to cut costs on everything, it would probably be hard to get a new project, a new idea forward. But we will make sure to make an effort to do that. I think it is a good idea.”     

In the end, Salmon emphasizes that House Bill 80 does not commit the Department of Transportation to expanding service to the rivers, but just to study if it’s economically feasible.  The bill is waiting for consideration by the House Transportation Committee.