Anchorage Daily News

KOTZEBUE -- Here, 26 miles above the Arctic Circle, the free ride is over.

It's nearly 9 p.m. on a recent Friday -- spring carnival night at the local elementary school, where kids bought hundreds of McDonald's cheeseburgers flown in frozen from Anchorage at $3 a pop. They painted their faces, gobbled their cotton candy and now, finally, parents are here to drive everyone home.

Twenty years ago the frozen parking lot would have been a jumble of four-wheelers and snowmachines. But tonight dozens of cars and trucks are crowded outside the school doors too.

Nearly half the vehicles don't have license plates. Of those that do, only one in 10 have current tags.

These drivers are in for an expensive surprise.

The Department of Motor Vehicles has found them.

Beginning this fall, the DMV plans to require local car owners to register their vehicles, to get insurance and generally join the bureaucracy of fees, fines and paperwork that comes with driving nearly anywhere else in the United States. Indeed, Kotzebue may well be the largest community in the country where such basic car-licensing laws aren't enforced.

In a town where a gallon of milk sells for $9.49 and a gallon of gas is $7.25, drivers that haven't had insurance before will have to pony up premiums to make their cars legal.

At the school parking lot, Kim Franklin pulled up in a blue Geo Tracker. She works for the borough and already knows about the looming rules change.

"It's going to be a huge problem," said Franklin, a pink cell phone in one hand, her black hair pulled into a ponytail above the wolverine-fur hood of her parka. "You have so many relatives that change over cars, and you buy and sell things without going through the bank or registering. It's going to be near impossible."

The tiny SUV idled as her kids giggled in their seats. The tags on the license plate read 1999.

Burning gas or busted budgets?

There are no roads going out of Kotzebue and no insurance offices, either. The DMV office, which is subsidized by the Northwest Arctic Borough and manned by a borough employee, is open only for a few hours a day, said city attorney Joe Evans.

A hub for 11 Inupiat villages on the edge of the Chukchi Sea, Kotzebue sits on a three-mile spit surrounded by endless miles of blinding snow and ice in the winter. Visitors travel from nearby villages in noisy air taxis or in the saddle of a snowmachine.

Trucks arrive on barges or in the belly of cargo planes. It's common to pay $4,000 or more to fly in vehicles that then linger in town long after they've conked out, scavenged for parts at the landfill or buried under snow along city roads.

Taxis charge you $6 a trip no matter where you're headed. Because really, you can't be going far.

But the number of cars and pickups circling the same, mostly gravel, roads that ring the city has been inching upward.

Recently, someone at the Department of Vehicles noticed an odd number. Back in 2006, those car counters the state lays across the road to count traffic volume came up with six times more cars than allowed for such a relaxed approach to driving in Alaska.

The cutoff is 499 trips per day on a single street. One stretch of road in Kotzebue topped 3,300 trips, according to the state.

By state law, the city no longer qualified for an exemption that lets more than 250 remote rural Alaska towns brush off registration and insurance rules.

"Right now there's way more cars in this damn little town than probably people," said 28-year-old Donald Tucker Jr. as he walked on the snowy bank of Third Avenue, sunglasses and a "Native Pride" baseball cap shielding his eyes.

Third Avenue is the town's main artery, stretching one mile from the airport to a seasonal tent city where visiting fishermen stay for the summer. It takes five minutes to putter the length of the road on a snowmachine, the smell of gasoline masking wood smoke in the air.

As Tucker talked, a fuel truck rumbled past, followed by a four-wheeler.

"You should see it out here on the weekends. Everybody just drives around. One big circle," he said.

Tucker grew up in Kotzebue and is OK with the new DMV rules. The town needs a change, and some people driving today shouldn't be behind the wheel, he said.

Others say the registration and insurances rules, if enforced, will be a blow to cash-strapped families.

On a nearby side street, handyman Chris Madison bent over a broken doorway at the local telecommunications company. He said people can barely afford to live in Kotzebue as it is without paying new registration fees and insurance premiums.

Kotzebue's population of 3,100 people is largely Inupiat, according to the state. You can buy both a $500 shotgun and a $7.65 bag of Doritos at the local grocery store and many families still rely on subsistence hunting and fishing to put food on the table.

Electricity alone costs $300 to $500 a month, Madison said. In mid-winter you have to let your car idle for a half an hour to warm up, burning that $7-a-gallon gas to take your kids to school.

State politicians ought to come spend a day here, he said. See how people buy fuel a gallon or two at a time because that's all they can afford.

"A lot of people are just existing. They're spending all the money they make," Madison said. "We're just living for the utility companies and the stores and for rental and landlords, fuel companies."

So which is it? A town where drivers burn gallons of gas on aimless cruising, or where the cost of living has long since busted family transportation budgets?

As in any city, Kotzebue Vice Mayor Ernest Norton sees a little of both.

"The guys that are employed are OK," he said of the coming changes. "But people that are on limited income and need a truck ... They won't be able to afford it."

The rules

It was DMV Driver Licensing Manager Kerry Hennings in Anchorage who noticed the high traffic numbers in Kotzebue. She alerted division director Whitney Brewster, who on Jan. 22 sent a letter to the Kotzebue mayor warning that the city would have to start enforcing state registration rules by late April.

The city argued it needed more time, and now the plan is for the new traffic laws to kick in Sept. 1, said Evans, the city attorney.

In the meantime, there's much to be done.

Drivers here trade Jeeps and Chevys between families with cash and a handshake.

"I would be surprised if 10 percent of the people up here have title to their vehicles," Evans said of the paperwork that car owners will need to show the state in order to register their vehicles.

Kotzebue drivers have also been able to earn "restricted" driver's licenses in the city by passing a written exam and skipping the DMV's road test. Anyone with one of those second-tier licenses who wants to keep driving under the new road rules will have to go back and take the driving test, Hennings said.

And it's not just car and truck owners that are in for a change.

Kotzebue allows snowmachines and four-wheelers to share public roads with larger vehicles. As the snow melts from the asphalt, snowmachines that once roared down the street simply shift to the snowbanks on the side of the streets, their skis scraping the gravel as they pass.

Evans said the new registration and insurance rules will likely apply those vehicles too.

He recently called a major insurance company to ask about rates for insuring an ATV.

"They said, 'What is that?' "

But Hennings, now acting director of the DMV, said there's a reason these insurance and registration rules exist, and why cities are forced to follow them.

"We do have record of crashes where death occurs in these small areas and there's no insurance. What's a person to do that's disabled for life and it wasn't their fault?" she asked.

Upholding the law

Told of the coming change, many locals ask the same question: Who is going to enforce it?

They point to another recent road rule as an example of a law that never seemed to grow any teeth: The city bans kids under the age of 14 years old from driving ATVs and snowmachines in town. But stand at any intersection long enough and you're likely to see boys and girls who look too young to be riding zoom past.

Police Chief John Ward said the law is indeed enforced.

"If we see them, we stop them and send them home," he said. "But unfortunately Mom and Dad turns around and sends them back out on the streets."

Ward didn't want to comment on the DMV rules, saying only: "If that's what we have to do, that's what we'll do."

Evans, the city attorney, said police are sworn to uphold the law and will enforce the new registration and insurance rules.

"I don't know that they could just wink and not and ignore it," he said.

Weathering the storm

The morning after the spring carnival an icy wind blew through town.

Kim Franklin -- the young mom with the Geo Tracker -- stopped by the EZ Market to start the day.

This place sells "girl coffee," she said. Lattes. Cappuccinos. The Kotzebue cost of living in Starbucks math: A 16-ounce mocha costs $5.50, compared with $4.05 in Anchorage.

Franklin had played a few games of poker the night before. The buy-in is $40, she said, and it's the safest thing to do on a weekend night when the streets are filled with traffic.

How busy was it last night, she asked the boy behind the counter.

Crazy traffic until 2:30 a.m., he said. Under-age kids staggering.

"So there was only one guy working cabs last night? That's what I heard," Franklin said.

That afternoon, a wet, blinding snowstorm delayed the last snowmachine race of the season on frozen Kotzebue Sound.

Normally, cars and pickups form a line a mile long along Shore Avenue for race day, locals said. For now, only a rusty-wheeled ATV, leading two pickups and a dump truck on a slow parade, crept along the road.

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Call Kyle Hopkins at 257-4334. Read The Village, his blog about rural Alaska, at adn.com/thevillage. Twitter updates: twitter.com/adnvillage.

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