Initial Report and Recommendations - Alaska Department of Law

The expense of travel in Alaska often surprises individuals in the Lower 48; airfare from Anchorage to many villages far exceeds air fare from Anchorage to Seattle.Some examples are roundtrip fares from Anchorage to the Pribilof Islands and theAleutian Islands chain, which can exceed $1,100. Travel to small villages in Western,Northwestern, and Northern Alaska require flights to hubs, such as Bethel, Nome,Kotzebue, and Barrow, which can cost as much as $900, followed by a second flight inan “air taxi” – most often a single engine Cessna – to a small, dirt airstrip in the remotevillage. 37 While flying, the traveler is often surrounded by boxes of groceries andsupplies, stacked from floor to ceiling. Not only is travel expensive, but it can bedangerous as well. Alaska ranks first in the United States in general aircraft crashes percapita. 38 Expense is not limited to travel. Living expenses in rural Alaska are alsoextraordinarily high. Fresh milk in a rural village costs three times what it costs inAnchorage, and in many rural villages, fresh milk is not available at all. In fact, in manyvery small rural villages, there is no store, and neither food nor any commodities areavailable; residents have to bring everything in or order supplies from retailers in a hubcity or Anchorage and have it mailed or air freighted in. Beyond the important culturalaspects of subsistence activities in rural Alaska are the basic economic needs that the useof natural resources for food and clothing help meet. But villagers cannot escape theneed for cash, in order to purchase heating oil, electricity, gasoline, and other supplies;and for salaries, and living allowances. These and other financial factors that inflate thecosts of bringing more law enforcement, justice, treatment, and other personnel into ruralAlaska must be considered when reviewing the Commission’s recommendations relatedto increasing support and staffing of justice and law enforcement entities. Simply stated,in remote rural Alaska $10,000 often buys about half what it could buy in Anchorage.Construction costs, which are heavily dependent on transportation costs, are alsoextremely high in rural Alaska; the farther away an Alaskan port is from Seattle (the portof origin for most supplies) and then from the port to the village site (such as in Westernand Interior Alaska), the higher the costs. A study comparing the cost of shipping a fixedset of construction materials to Ketchikan with the same set delivered to Barrowcalculated the Barrow costs were 8.2 times higher. 39 Transportation of constructionmaterials to villages in the Interior, Western Alaska, and other sites far from ports and offthe road system requires commercial air carriers, and, as one might imagine, airfreighting rebar and concrete can raise the cost of even a simple building astronomically.373839Airfare expenses, which are constantly changing and usually increasing as a result of the increasing costof fuel, were obtained from Alaska Airlines and Peninsula Airways, two major carriers in Alaska.During the 1990s there were a total of 1,684 general and commercial aircraft crashes in Alaska,equivalent to a crash every two days. Of these crashes, 188 were fatal and resulted in 402 deaths. Onaverage there were 19 fatal crashes per year with two fatalities per crash and 40 fatalities per year,equivalent to a fatality every nine days.See http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2002-115/pdfs/2002115g.pdfSurvey conducted by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development for the AlaskaHousing Finance Corporation, 2002. Available at the Department’s website:http://www.ahfc.state.ak.us/iceimages/grants/2002constco.pdfAlaska Rural Justice and Law Enforcement Commission - Page 24