By THAD POULSON
Sentinel Staff Writer
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, one of five Republicans on a bipartisan committee writing a trillion dollar infrastructure bill in the Senate, got a firsthand look at Sitka’s needs during an unannounced visit here Saturday.
After an afternoon tour of the Sitka Sound Science Center with director Lisa Busch, Murkowski sat down for a brief conversation with the Sentinel and Raven Radio.
She described her inspection of two of Sitka’s infrastructure needs earlier in the day, accompanied by Mayor Steve Eisenbeisz, Administrator John Leach and electric utility officials. She visited the proposed marine haulout site at Gary Paxton Industrial park and Green Lake, where power generation upgrades are under way at the hydro plant.
Murkowski told about the importance of visiting places that will be affected by the legislation she is negotiating in the Senate:
“Having the opportunity to come and see firsthand how a potential infrastructure project might impact not only the community of Sitka but the region as a whole, what it means for power generation, what it means for infrastructure in a port, what it might mean for that laydown area at the industrial park, but also talking about the Alaska Marine Highway System....
“We recognize that not all infrastructure is just roads, rails and bridges, it can be infrastructure that travels across a marine highway as well.”
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, right, shakes hands with Sarah Gravem as Kirsty Kroeber, center, looks on Saturday at the Sitka Sound Science Center. Murkowski was in town for the day as part of a tour of the state to look at infrastructure needs. Murkowski is helping craft a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Gravem, from Oregon State University, and Kroeber, from the University of California at Santa Cruz, are doing field research at the Science Center. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
At the end of her interview by the media, she said, “It was a good day in Sitka, and back to Washington D.C., and work on Monday.”
Murkowski’s visit to Southeast during the Senate’s two-week recess was timed for her to be on hand in Ketchikan Friday to greet the first large cruise ship to dock at Ketchikan in 19 months.
The Royal Caribbean Line’s Serenade of the Seas was making a simulated voyage with 300 volunteer passengers to demonstrate to the CDC the COVID mitigation measures that will be in effect when cruise ships resume their regular calls at Alaska ports later this month.
The voyage to Ketchikan was made possible by the signing of the Alaska Tourism Restoration Act by President Biden on May 21. Murkowski sponsored the bill, which grants cruise ships a waiver from the U.S. law that requires ships to make a stop in a foreign port on voyages between American ports. Canada’s ports will be closed to cruise ships through February 2022.
“Today marks an important step toward Alaska’s road to economic recovery from the pandemic,” Murkowski said at the welcoming ceremony for the ship at the Ketchikan dock.
One of Murkowski’s first stops in Sitka Saturday was at Allen Marine to discuss the effects of the pandemic on the company’s tourism and ship-building businesses, “how they were able to make it through with the CARES act, and some of the other federal relief programs, how they were able to make it through and how they are re-engaging, getting folks back on, getting business back underway...”
Murkowski described how she and a group of four other Republicans and five Democrats in the Senate worked for several months to come up with a lower-cost infrastructure plan than Biden’s $2.4 to 2.9 trillion proposal.
She said there was agreement in the group that “we need infrastructure investment in this country,” but the president’s plan “was so broadly defined that it might collapse of its own weight, and was there a way to separate out what we might call more hard infrastructure?”’
Biden signed on to the committee’s projected $1.2 trillion plan in June, and Murkowski said she and the bipartisan committee expect to have a final plan negotiated by the end of July.
She said the senators are comfortable with Biden’s announced intention to pass a bill by reconciliation – which can pass without Republican votes in the Senate – that will cover the “soft infrastructure” in Biden’s overall plan for the country..
She said the bipartisan committee respects Biden’s pledge that he will not use reconciliation to pad project funding that the committee has already negotiated.
Murkowski spoke about some of the opportunities as well as the challenges of the move toward electric vehicles. Nationally, she said, the issue is on how to make up for the loss of road building revenue provided by gasoline tax, and with the president opposed to fees to EV users based on vehicle miles traveled.
Also, she said, she believes Biden’s focus on electric vehicles limits innovation on other environmentally friendly technology.
But Murkowski expressed enthusiasm about the increasing numbers of EVs in Southeast, and was surprised that Sitka, unlike Juneau and Cordova, for example, has no public charging stations.
Sitka and other Southeast communities with limited road systems and hydro power, she said, “are exactly the prototype – they should be paying you to drive electric vehicles.”
Murkowski said she’s working on financing new vessels for the Alaska ferry system, not only in the infrastructure bill but in separate legislation. She spoke of the difficulty in convincing people outside Alaska of the importance of the Alaska Marine Highway in Southeast. She compared it to the same problem she faced in the Alaska Legislature, trying to educate legislators from other parts about the vital role of the ferry system in Southeast.
Without mentioning Gov. Dunleavy’s cuts to ferry system funding, Murkowski said state support of the system is one of the important requirements in getting federal support.
Of her current visit to Sitka, she said, “One of the reasons I wanted to talk to the folks over at Allen Marine is what’s the potential we might have for electric ferries.”
A former chairman of the Senate energy committee, and now the longest serving member of that committee, she said she has dealt with the issue of climate change for years. She summarized the task as developing a policy that provides “predictability” –that is, not subject to change with every change of administration in Washington – and that will not affect American competitiveness in international trade.
A moderate Republican, Murkowski was one of the few members of her party in the Senate who voted to convict former president Donald Trump in his impeachment trial for inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S Capitol. And on May 28 she was one of only six Senate Republicans who voted in favor of having a 9-11 type independent commission investigate the events surrounding Jan. 6.
That bill was defeated by the Republican opposition in the Senate.
Responding to a reporter’s question about that vote, Murkowski said:
“...“Every single senator was in that chamber when that capitol was breached by an angry, violent mob, and our capitol was desecrated, when the effort to stop an election that was inflamed by the words and the actions of our former president up to that event and the day of that event – and we were all there, and to have the thought that we should have an investigation of that event, and that was rejected by the Senate – that is still shocking to me.
“ Shocking to me” she repeated. “ And I am still very disappointed.”
