The Biden Administration rejected Alaska’s plan for road construction for the coming years and sent it back to the Department of Transportation, in what appears to be an attempt to hit at Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Alaska itself during an election year in which Biden already has a slim chance of winning the 49th state.
The Alaska State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) is the plan for how the state will use federal dollars between 2024 and 2027. The plan is the next generation of the 2020-2023 STIP, a document that is worked on for years and is worth at least $900 million in federal dollars each year. The current STIP ends March 31.
Every state submits a STIP document to the Federal Highway Administration that covers a period of work stretching four years. Alaska has never seen one rejected.
Sources say that that the Federal Highway Administration, under the Biden Administration, has a few midlevel activists who decided to throw a monkey wrench into Alaska’s STIP, forcing the state to redo some of its work. However, while they were empowered to reject projects that Alaska wants, such as roads, bridges, or ferry terminals, the federal agency made a number of mistakes during its rejection, so much so that the Biden Administration is now in panic mode, sending two people north to Alaska to straighten out the mess these activist federal employees made.
The mainstream media has endeavored to make this a “Dunleavy” problem, but Dunleavy’s Department of Transportation is staffed by people with decades of experience in developing the STIP.
But this year, the federal workers got picky. In one place in the STIP document, the State said it planned to build a road across the Susitna River. The federal government objected because the word “bridge” wasn’t included in the scope.
In another instance, the ferry terminal long planned for Cascade Point in Juneau has been approved in previous STIPs, but this time, the federal government didn’t like the project, which would support the most popular ferry route in Alaska, service by the M/V Hubbard. The feds said it is not a “transportation” project.
The feds told the Department of Transportation to redraft portions of the plan, but after the redraft, the agency would not respond to Alaska DOT about whether the plan was acceptable.
Then, the feds told the department to do a “soft submittal” so the feds could review it and look for any corrective measures that would need to be made. DOT complied and did the soft submittal, but got no answer from the Federal Highway Administration.
As the clock was running out on the deadline, DOT finally decided it was time to send in the formal document. That’s when the federal agency started nitpicking.
The Biden Administration objects to anything that has to do with potential development in Alaska, sources said.
