SITKA, ALASKA
Southeast has three projects in the package. The largest is $20 million toward an aquatic facility at the Mount Edgecumbe High School in Sitka.

Randy Hawk is superintendent of the boarding school for mostly rural residents.

“We are looking at this to be quite a resource for Mount Edgecumbe students. In our dorm setting and with the kids being here 24/7, it would be a great opportunity for them learning how to swim, PE connections and those kind of things. We’re excited about this facility potentially coming in,” he says.

The pool is also expected to become a training facility for the Coast Guard and state troopers, whose academy is nearby. It will also be open to Sitka residents, who are about to see an aging community pool shut down.

Senate Finance Committee Co-Chairman Bert Stedman helped assemble the bond measure. The Sitkan says the aquatic center will serve young people from all over Alaska.

“Most of the students at Mount Edgecumbe High School are from remote areas of the state that don’t have pool access, including Western Alaska. So by putting that pool at Edgecumbe High School you help alleviate some of that problem. A lot of those young Alaskans live in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, which is similar to Southeast. You recreate on the water all the time,” he says.

The bond package also includes $18.5 million dollars toward a new state library, archives, and museum facility in Juneau.

Bob Banghart, the museum’s chief curator, says his building and the archives are failing. A new structure would allow for a joint approach to preserving the state’s history.

“We just felt it was a good opportunity to bring everything together and see what new processes could be employed with us all being in the same building. And we’ll basically mitigate the fact that we don’t have any more room to collect anything,” he says. “And that the buildings are in such a state that we’re starting to see egregious maintenance costs. And then we’re having issues of water leaks and stuff that always pose dangers to the material in storage.”

He says the museum houses artifacts and art from prehistory up to the present. And the archives and libraries have companion collections.

“It’s a material chronology of the development of the peoples in the region here. The archives building holds the written material, the documentation of that process,” he says. “And the state historical library has photographs, documents, books, and anything we can preserve of significance that gives us an image of a day in the life of our past.”

The project, like some others in the package, will cost more that the bond measure provides. But Banghart says it would make a significant contribution.

The ballot package would also provide $3.2 million toward a vocational education center in Klawock, on Prince of Wales Island.

Local school superintendent Richard Carlson says it would provide training in a variety of job skills.

“What we’re hoping is that it would be something that would be fluid, so that it would not just be a construction industry orientation. It may facilitate things in medicine, it may be building construction, it may be mining, whatever the needs are,” he says.

He says the center would serve all of Prince of Wales island, as well as other parts of Southeast Alaska. And it would target high school and college students, as well as those in the workforce.

“The real goal is to bring the major players together – the school districts, municipalities, post-secondary institutions, industry and labor. It could create some rigorous programs that lead to student success in a competitive workplace,” he says.

Proposition B includes schools in Western Alaska, buildings for Anchorage, Kenai, Mat-Su and Fairbanks University of Alaska campuses and a research facility near Kodiak.

Stedman says it’s a mix of education-related projects.

“When we sat down and had a dialog amongst the other legislators that represented all the areas of the state, we had some discussions with the university and some of the other communities. And we were looking at the process trying to come up with a distribution so that all the projects weren’t concentrated in one or two towns,” he says.

Proposition B has seen little if any organized opposition. But individual critics, in letters to the editor and online postings, have said it’s unneeded or too big. Some have compared it to Congressional earmarks or “pork.”

Stedman says the state can pay back bond costs easily. And he says capital projects are one-time financial commitments.

“We are concerned about the size of the overall school expenditures in the state but if we don’t educate our kids we’re not going to be able to move this state forward. And quite frankly we’ll end up just a second-tier location,” he says.

Another bond issue is also on Tuesday’s ballot. Proposition A would guarantee $600 million in veterans’ home mortgages.
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