Draft Southeast plan omits Juneau-Skagway road, comment closes Oct. 19

Alaska has argued about a road from Juneau to Skagway for twenty years. The state's new draft transportation plan for Southeast does not mention it.

The phrase "Juneau Access" appears nowhere in the 135-page draft. Neither does Katzehin, the terminus the federal government selected in 2006, nor any east-side road at all. The plan does not say the project was cancelled or reconsidered. It simply is not there.

The plan it replaces, from 2004, called for a 68-mile road up the east side of Lynn Canal plus a shuttle to Haines, at $285.7 million, on the argument that Juneau is the largest community on the North American mainland with no highway connection to the continent. The Federal Highway Administration signed off on that route in 2006. Conservation groups sued, a federal court threw out the environmental review in 2009, and the Ninth Circuit agreed. A later supplemental review drew 42,214 comments and testimony from 118 people. None of that history appears in the new draft either.

What appears instead is a feasibility study of the west side of the canal: a ferry from Cascade Point to William Henry Bay or Pyramid Harbor, or a road north of Haines to the existing Klehini River Bridge. A draft report is expected this year and has not been published.

The Cascade Point ferry terminal is furthest along, in design at $50 million to $100 million, as a public-private partnership with Goldbelt, Inc. on Goldbelt land. The department says it delivers Gov. Mike Dunleavy's priority of regional connectivity, and has said separately that it is building Cascade Point with money appropriated for Juneau Access, calling it an improvement to reliability rather than a substitute for the highway.

One other Juneau project stands out. The Juneau-Douglas North Crossing is priced at $360 million to $1.1 billion with only discretionary grants named as a funding source, footnoted to a study that is unfinished and unpublished. It is the only Juneau item in the capital table with no formula money attached. The plan calls the existing Juneau-Douglas Bridge the area's only crossing and raises emergency access concerns, while listing that same bridge among the region's at-risk infrastructure alongside the Ketchikan viaducts, Salmon Creek Dam and the Mendenhall flood risk.

The plan says outright that it cannot guarantee funding for any of it. Commissioner Ryan Anderson writes in an Aug. 31 letter that this is a regional multimodal plan rather than a ferry service plan, and that it reflects extensive coordination with tribes, local governments and businesses.

That coordination reached about 160 people in a region of roughly 70,000. The appendix summarizing public engagement is referenced twice and was not posted with the others. No resident, official, tribal representative or business is quoted anywhere in the 135 pages, in a plan that lists 19 federally recognized tribes and 13 Alaska Native corporations.

Comments close Oct. 19. A virtual open house runs at 11:30 am Sept. 21.