Anchorage Daily News

Residents in the tiny wilderness town of McCarthy are in an uproar over a bill introduced by Gov. Frank Murkowski to give the University of Alaska 12,500 acres around their community. They say the measure would remove a buffer of accessible state land inside the country's biggest national park that is vital for firewood, wild game and other essentials of their rural subsistence life.

McCarthy residents say they are especially rankled by the fact that the state offered up the land without asking anyone in the area what they thought.

The land offering is part of a bill, now under consideration by the Legislature, that would award nearly 260,000 acres of state land to the university. Backers say the measure would provide a source of income to the university and also put more Alaska land into private hands.

But legislators who find it easy to back the general idea of land for the university are finding that specific parcels can stir up a bee's nest of local opposition.

Six controversial areas elsewhere in Alaska were removed from Murkowski's bill last month after residents in Southeast and Kodiak objected during a first round of hearings. More hearings on the bill are scheduled for today and Saturday.

In McCarthy, where word of the bill has spread only in the last two weeks, some residents fear the university will turn around and sell the land to the federal government, bringing more of the restrictions that complicate rural living inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Others fear the opposite, predicting the land will be cut up into subdivisions, bringing a population boom to their remote mountain hamlet.

Either route could spell doom for McCarthy, a historic mining town of some 50 year-round inhabitants struggling to maintain its rural way of life, residents say.

"This is the last remote community left inside a national park, relatively undisturbed and flourishing," said Neil Darish, an owner of the McCarthy Lodge. "This is the last chance to get it right. When we screw it up, guess what -- there's no more community in a national park."

Serving as a gateway inside the 13.2 million-acre national park and preserve, McCarthy has seen a sharp growth in summer tourism in the past decade. Even so, it remains a community of log cabins and woodsmoke, especially for those who stay through the cold mountain winters.

When Congress created the Wrangell-St. Elias park in 1980, the Park Service was told to allow traditional subsistence activities to continue, preserving a rustic lifestyle that had become a rarity in the modern world.

Some McCarthy residents say that's worked out reasonably well. Others disagree, saying the "lifestyle by permit" is onerous and unrealistic. But everyone seems to agree that the swath of state-owned commons near McCarthy has been an important safety valve -- a place to drive your truck or snowmachine, to shoot a moose or cut house logs.

"It's irresponsible for the state to undertake this land transfer without considering the effects on land owners and the community of McCarthy," said Kelly Bay, a local pilot and air service owner. "I haven't heard any support here for the land swap."

Indeed, for a community often split on national park and road access controversies, McCarthy is showing unusual agreement on this topic, several residents said this week.

University of Alaska officials worked with state land managers last year to put together a wish list of 260,000 acres of state lands, including the McCarthy area, where small university holdings already exist.

The list was unveiled in February, when Murkowski announced his new fast-track legislation. It included 71 parcels around the state, including 90,000 acres in the Nenana basin with natural gas potential.

The new measure would supplant a similar law that passed in 2000 but never worked. The earlier law survived a veto attempt by then-Gov. Tony Knowles and legal challenges, but created a restrictive and expensive process for selecting and transferring land. Murkowski administration officials say it's cleaner and faster to have the Legislature pick the lands.

Murkowski pushed unsuccessfully for a similar transfer of federal land to the University of Alaska while he was in the U.S. Senate. His daughter, Lisa, has introduced a similar bill now that she has taken his seat in Congress.

Critics, including Knowles, have called the land grant an ineffective way to fund the university.

Bay, who has been around McCarthy for 29 years, said much of the 12,500 acres is wet and not suitable for building. The best land will require a mile or more of new roads, he said. Recent subdivisions by the university have brought added traffic to the area's meager and muddy roads, he said.

McCarthy residents say they plan to make their case at the next round of hearings on the bill, which is known as SB 96 in the Senate and HB 130 in the House. The hearings will be today in front of the Senate Resources Committee and Saturday before the House Finance Committee.

Reporter Tom Kizzia can be reached at tkizzia@adn.com or in Homer at 907-235-4244.

A bill transferring 260,000 acres of state land to the University of Alaska will be the subject of two legislative hearings in Juneau in the coming days:

Senate Resources Committee, 3:30 p.m. today . Hearing to be teleconferenced; testimony by invitation only.

House Finance Committee, 11 a.m. Saturday. Hearing to be teleconferenced.

Online: For more information on the bill, including a list of specific parcels and links to maps, go to www.dnr.state.ak.us/mlw/ualands/