Can you move a State ????

[Moviemaniac4]

New capital up for dibs in Alaska

It's a safe bet no lawmakers in the Lower 48 have commutes to their capitals like Alaska state Rep. John Coghill's.

The North Pole Republican - not the North Pole but the town outside Fairbanks - makes a 600-mile, two-day January road trip through sparsely populated wilds, including a piece of Canada's Yukon. It's bitter cold, the highway is icy, survival gear is a must, and he never drives through remote villages without topping off the gas tank of his 1982 Cadillac.


"At 40-below, if you had a flat tire and had to idle for an hour, you just don't want any problems," Coghill, 54, says.


Because no roads go in or out of Juneau, the capital, Coghill's journey ends with a four-hour ferry ride. Legislators who choose to fly to Juneau complain about exasperating delays, even overnight diversions to Seattle, because of Juneau's chronically socked-in airport. Fog-prone and ringed by mountains, the city has one of the USA's trickiest airports to fly into.


Average Alaskans are more isolated from the seat of their government than any other Americans. Little wonder that campaigns to move the capital have roiled state politics almost since the day Alaska joined the union in 1959. Alaskans have voted no fewer than eight times on measures to relocate, or pay to relocate, their capital.


Talk of a move pierces the frigid air again this winter, but not for the usual reasons. Juneau Mayor Bruce Bothelo is pushing a plan to build a new Capitol to replace what everyone agrees is an outdated, cramped, arguably unsafe and decidedly unstately relic from Alaska's territorial era.


The city bought a 4.5-acre hilltop site and gave it to the state, then spent $250,000 on a national design competition. Bothelo will announce a winner Wednesday and a goal of dedicating a new $100 million Capitol on the golden anniversary of sta***ood, Jan. 3, 2009.


Weighing the cost


Many Alaskans are asking if the state is to spend $100 million, shouldn't the capital be moved closer to where most of the population lives, the "rail belt" between Anchorage and Fairbanks?


"It's clear to me we need a new capital," says Rep. Norm Rokeberg, R-Anchorage. But Bothelo's plan "is almost non-doable politically," he says.


Rokeberg's build-it-and-they-will-come bill would empower Alaska's five population centers - Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Matanuska-Susitna Borough and the Kenai Peninsula - to bid on landing the capital.


Two other legislators have filed bills requiring voter approval to use state money for a new Capitol building.


The last state capital to move was in 1910, when Oklahomans shifted theirs from Guthrie to Oklahoma City. At the time, Juneau was a booming gold-rush town and Alaska's commercial hub. Anchorage and the Alaska interior didn't grow until after World War II. Today, at least three-fourths of the state's 655,000 residents live in or near Anchorage.


After sta***ood, voters rejected moving the capital in 1960 and 1962. They approved it in 1974 but in 1978 turned down the $966 million price tag. In 1982, a $2.2 billion plan for a new capital near Anchorage in Willow, then a town of fewer than 200, failed. Cost worries killed yet another bid in 1994.


An idea backed by Alaska's elder statesman, two-time governor Walter Hickel, to move legislative sessions to Matanuska-Susitna but keep the rest of government in Juneau, failed 2-1 at the polls in 2002.


"It's so hard for guys from the villages to fly in," Hickel, 85, says. "They all come through Anchorage anyway."


Under Botelho's plan, Juneau would build the Capitol. The state would rent it for $6.5 million a year for 30 years to pay off $100 million in bonds. Then the state would take ownership of the building.

[Biomechanoid]

We could always sell it to Canada.