ALASKA NATIVES COMMISSION
JOINT FEDERAL-STATE COMMISSION
ON
POLICIES AND PROGRAMS AFFECTING
ALASKA NATIVES
4000 Old Seward Highway, Suite 100
Anchorage,
Alaska 99503
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Witness List | PDF
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COMMISSIONER PAGANO: Next one on the list, you have a Al Nakak, or something to that -- Al Nakak.
(Pause.)
Limit to ten minutes, please, and. . .
MR. NAKAK: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate giving the opportunity to speak to this group; and let me pre-state that I appreciate the high honor and integrity that Mary Jane Fate brings to this prestigious group of people.
My concerns go back, well, my whole lifetime. I've wondered ever since I was about four years old why things were the way they were, and started trying to come up with solutions as the barefoot kid from the village.
Let me also state that I've served in many different capacities, from just being a foot soldier, to being a council member in the village, or a tribal council member, or task board member of village corporation, chairman and president of the village corporation. I also served in the Legislature in 1977-78, from the Nome district, so I'm real familiar with the litany of problems that all of our communities have, not only in our region, but statewide, and the impact that the state and federal governments have on them.
I have attempted to present a basic solution to the issues which St. Michael faces; and my solutions are based upon the only asset we have; and the asset that St. Michael has over any other community in our area, or any other part of the state, is our geographical location. Historically, from when our people went there, it's because of its protected harbor. Our people are called the tutchuq abute (ph.). Tutchuq (ph.) in our language is big bay, and we are the people of the big bay -- St. Michael Bay. It's a natural island, separated from the mainland by a natural canal. Two communities reside on that island: Stebbins and St. Michael.
We just got a $10 million road project completed about two months ago, connecting Stebbins and St. Michael. Stebbins has a little bit over 500 people; St. Michael has a little bit over 350 people. That includes the transient population of the people who come to teach in the schools and then leave for the summer, or whatever. I mean, I'm hoping that, in the future, more and more people are local teachers, and so they'd be the resident population, as opposed to the transient population.
We are starting a 5,000-foot heavy industrial airport next year. We have $4.2 million to start that project. St. Michael also has dedicated a thousand acres to serve as an industrial yard for the Port of St. Michael; and we've been contacted by -- I've been in contact with an outfit called Gana-A'yoo. It's five Interior villages: Anvik, Grayling, Kaltag, Nulato, and Galena, who have 500,000 acres of harvestable timber. They need a seaside contact point from which to export that material.
The federal government has promised to appropriate approximately $225 million a year for the next five years, or six years, to address transportation issues in the state of Alaska. One of my solutions is an 80-mile haul road from Grayling to the coastal port community of St. Michael, our industrial yard, where local people from those five communities and St. Michael could be the truckers who haul out this harvestable timber, as opposed to putting it on a barge four months our of the year, and then not be able to work the rest of the year, because the river is frozen.
St. Michael's harbor has one-year ice. We've had ice-breakers in the Norton Sound and in the Bering Sea. If the traffic was such, it's conceivably possible that the four-or five-foot thick ice could be broken to haul any of than material to Korea, or to Japan, or wherever the market desired. It's also conceivably possible that the St. Michael harbor, the industrial yard of a thousand acres and all its supportive services, could serve not only the Bering Sea in the community development quota of Bering Sea fisheries, but increase traffic through the Bering Sea, the North Pacific, and into the Arctic Ocean, whether it's going toward Canada or toward Russia.
As I stated, the assets St, Michael has is its geographical location. The component parts are a heavy industrial airport, a' heavy industrial dock and yard, roads connecting it; and, in the future, we could connect further; but my answer to those other five communities, which have the harvestable timber, is connecting them on the north side of the Yukon, so that they are able to haul out their harvestable timber; thereby creating our own economies.
There are a myriad other issues, which I'm sure you've been bored stiff with, even though they're critically important. I proposed an issue such as beach and bank reclamation several years ago, where all the commercial traffic from a hundred years ago from White Horse, Yukon Territory, San Francisco, and Seattle, and Portland that went into the St. Michael harbor to serve the needs of the Nome gold rush, many of those ships and boats, which were my playground, now pollute our harbor and bay. As a child, they were my playground; but now they' re wrecking our boats; and now that all the commercial activities have made their profit, they left their mess there. And one of the projects I proposed was beach and bank reclamation. You know, a nice big bulldozer; a nice big forklift; a lowboy; and give me five or ten years to clean up all the beaches. And I could clean up the rocks and reinforce the banks along the shore.
Last week, we had a big storm; and, for us, a big storm is 70 miles an hour. There were about 18 boats lost -- wrecked on the rocks and on these old steamboat sternwheelers, and about 20 feet off the banks of St, Michael on the shore. It's not so much the erosion from the storm that's a problem, it's the secondary erosion after that happens, because the erosion that happened from the storm was what was essentially the tow of the slope that was taken away. Now the tow of the slope is taken away, the rest of the banks are going to erode; and then, after that, the s -- the ground that supports the homes on top of the banks are going to start falling, thereby creating another problem.
We've addressed the issues of development and economy by removing land acquisition as an artificial barrier. In other words, if either the federal or state government had the financial wherewithal to do a project, we just threw the land at it. In our opinion, at St. Michael, it's ridiculous to own 115,000 acres of land and have nothing happen, so in the case of the 5,000-foot airstrip, we've essentially put up 450 acres so that the state, in essence, is embarrassed into spending $5 b -- $5 million to build a 5,000-foot airstrip.
In a -- when I had a moment this morning, I told Senator Stevens, who has his hands on the purse strings of the Appropriations Committee, you know, I'll probably need another $2 million to make it longer, so that I can serve an even greater need in the area.
We've -- historically; ocean traffic has gotten into St. Michael, and because of our natural harbor, we have less of an expense to --
COMMISSIONER PAGANO: Well, you've had ten minutes, if you could wind --
MR. NAKAK: Yeah, okay, fine. I'll close up. Anyway, transportation, I feel, is the critical mode here; and we're offering to participate.
COMMISSIONER PAGANO: Any questions, Ella? Comments?
MS. ANAGIK: Bart, do you have --
MR. GARBER: In St. Michael, in your region, including (indiscernible), do governments: tribal, municipal, state, or federal, and their relationships cause any impediment to your development plans? Are there any things in those areas that could be improved to help you with your goals?
MR. NAKAK: Well, if you called the low lands' legislations --
wetlands or the plethora of governments and their agencies -- you know, a DEC
man comes from Nome, and he says:
"No, you can't that" --
but a Commerce man says you can. Therefore, because there's a disagreement, you can't. Those are some of the things that we run across. I mean, we've survived by gosh and by golly, because there have been persistence efforts -- persistent efforts by individual people to work through problems; but, yes, the plethora of governmental offices and agencies are, in essence, an impediment to our villages progressing (laughing).
Fur -- there's no doubt we can work through something; but I'm of a mind that, if I can do something in 40 minutes or in two hours, if a governmental entity is involved, it'll probably take eight months, so.
COMMISSIONER PAGANO: Do you have any?
MS. ANAGIK: Just one question here. Thinking international as
you're speaking, 'cause you mentioned Siberia and Canada in regard to import/export,
who's looking into that -- into the regulations, or are they falling into place just
--
MR. NAKAK: No, one of the things I
did prior to dedicating this was, number one,
I since our stockholders
own the property, I got their permission, and they approved
us dedicating it. After I got approval from the stockholders to dedicate
this thousand-acre industrial yard, then I contacted the United States Coast
Guard Department, Department of Commerce, and all their people, and I asked
a series of about ten questions. As a matter of fact, I wrote to the President's
designee of Transportation, who was Andrew Card (ph.) at the time, and then
he delegated his supernumeraries to answer each of the questions I had, with
reference to regulations and funding possibilities.
COMMISSIONER ELLIOTT: Just one quick question. Since St. Michael is at the mouth of the Yukon, and Grayling is on the Yukon, and to avoid wetland controversy and so forth with the haul road as you propose from Grayling to St. Michael, what is the advantage? Why not float the barge or otherwise to the Yukon to the mouth to St. Michael?
MR. NAKAK: The correction is St. Michael is 60 miles north of the Yukon. We're the first protected harbor in the Bering Sea -- north of. The argument against shipping by barge is you're limited to four or five months of operation. The haul road, it can be a year-round operation; and local people from Galena, Nulata, Kaltag, Grayling, Anvik would be employed in that activity on a year-round basis; St. Michael, again, being a frozen harbor four or five months of the year.
The reason for the thousand-acre industrial yard is if we needed 200 acres to stockpile material over the winter, we could do it; and then the Korean barges -- ocean-going barges can come -- or the Japanese barges can come into St. Michael in June and then operate through October.
COMMISSIONER ELLIOTT: Thank you.
COMMISSIONER PAGANO: Okay, I thank you for your testimony.
MR. NAKAK: Yeah.
COMMISSIONER PAGANO: I appreciate the time.
MR. NAKAK: I appreciate your time also, and I'd like to, again, thank Mary Jane for inviting me to participate.
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