Readers write: Letters to the editor, June 5, 2016

Small fish don’t make much money. As a commercial fisherman, I was dismayed and worried by the ADN May 21 article on how our famous Copper River reds are only two-thirds their normal size this season. This is the second year in a row of small sockeye. The big worry is this trend will sock the rest of the state as the blob of warm ocean water makes itself felt in all our fisheries. Small fish carry smaller eggs or fewer eggs. Either way, the impact on future runs is grave.
How did we get a blob? Plainly, burning fossil fuels for 150 years has gotten us here. Though our civilization has gained greatly from these stores of energy, the carbon dioxide that comes with them now imperils our fisheries and that same civilization. And all that extra CO2 has produced climate change. And, the blob and ocean acidification.
What can be done about it? Will it “somehow” get better? No. There is plenty we can each do to cut our impact on the climate, but it takes policy — national policy — to make a big enough impact to turn things around, and that is the realm of Congress. Sens. Murkowski and Sullivan and Congressman Young must lead. Alaska and Alaskans are in too much peril. Pursuing half-measures won’t get us or our children through.
We don’t send our members of Congress to Washington to be captives of their party, but to problem-solve. The very apparent trend of a much warmer Alaska and the high levels of ocean acidification are more than unsettling. They require bipartisan solutions; we’re all in this together.
Our members of Congress need to decide. Will they be small fish, helpless against the tide, or big fish who are up to the charge?

It’s far past time we call what we have in the Legislature by their true names and natures. I don’t believe in nasty phrases, but they have taken it beyond any limit. Call each one out one at a time in ADN, and then vote them out.
Do you really think we can do any worse? Street people could do a better job than the current Republicans, who now tell us not to get into the blame game. Should we reward total ruin of the state? It’s not blame, it’s accountability, and the Republicans are the poster children for lecturing us on how we have to be accountable, but it does not apply to them of course.
Rep. Lance Pruit pushed through
$18 million for a road project the people of Anchorage do not want. We badly need to replace the health department building, but no, we get $18 million for something that’s not needed (remember the tennis courts? Want to guess what party that person belongs to and what he is doing now?).
All we need to do is hold the line this year and vote in people next year that really care abut the state and public service.

I was confused by Anchorage fiscal officer Robert Harris’ statement in the front page article in ADN, June 3. A few weeks ago I happened to get into a discussion of Peach Investments, proposed project with someone at Agnew Beck. As I understood it, the city would not give up any actual taxes. It would continue to collect taxes at the current appraised level. What it would give up under the agreement would be the increase in taxes the property would be assessed for the first 10 years after it was built.
If the development never happens, the city never gets those taxes anyway. If it does happen, then after 10 years the city gets a huge increase in taxes.
I had been told Peach Investments did not want to spend hundreds of thousands on specific plans and drawings unless they knew they would have the tax deal and could go ahead with the huge — and to my mind very exciting — development they envisioned. That makes sense to me.
If the city refuses the deal, it never gets the potential increase in taxes, the construction industry doesn’t get the jobs it would have had for the development, the uninhabitable properties continue to deteriorate and downtown doesn’t get the tremendous boost it could have had from the exciting development the company proposed.

Steve Haycox’s excellent column (ADN, June 3) pointed out over 60 percent of our state is federally administered. Most of this land is managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service. Because this is public land we are free to hike, hunt, fish, camp and float on hundreds of thousands of untouched acres. This land is owned by Americans and we don’t have to ask permission for entry.
I think Haycox is correct in his assertion we need reasonable leaders to help manage this land in a balanced fashion. With that goal in mind, I suspect one real threat to our public lands in Alaska is privatization of our publicly owned forests, tundra and fishing streams by extraction industry “overreach.” When folks like our Sen. Murkowski, the chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee, receive large sums of money from extraction industries this may create an uneven playing field for Alaska land management and unfairly tip the scales in favor of “locking up” our publicly owned lands by private interests.

— Tom Mader
Cooper Landing