Four miles of Skagway's only road out have no money in the state's plan

Alaska's draft transportation plan divides the rebuild of the Klondike Highway, Skagway's only land route out, into five stages worth $158 million. One of those stages reads zero.

It is the four miles closest to the Canadian border. The draft shows nothing obligated, nothing programmed for the next four years, nothing beyond that, and a lifetime forecast of zero. It gives no reason.

The stages on either side are funded. The first, covering the Skagway River bridge and weir at the town end, carries $34 million over the next four years, and the stretch running up to the border station carries $44.5 million in the same window. Two more stages, worth $63 million together, are programmed for 2031 or later. Only the border miles have nothing at all.

The same plan names that stretch somewhere else. A statewide avalanche project, funded at $28.8 million with design next year and construction in 2029, would install remote control systems "to phase out the use of artillery for avalanche control." Its five priority areas include the Klondike Highway between mileposts 9 and 14.5, almost exactly the ground the unfunded rehabilitation stage covers.

Rockfall and avalanche work used to be part of the rehabilitation. A project poster the department displayed at a Skagway open house last year lists it among five categories of proposed work. The notice issued this week lists pavement, base repair, drainage, roadside hardware, utilities, signing, striping, bridge repair and weir repairs, and no rockfall or avalanche work at all.

The department holds an open house in Skagway on Sept. 22 about the first stage, the funded one. Comments on the draft plan, which contains the zeros, are due Oct. 29. Nothing in either document connects them, and nobody from Skagway appears in the published file on either.