Ferry debacle is a ‘free’ teachable moment

Well, it finally happened. The other shoe has dropped.

This shoe came in the form of a letter from the Federal Transit Administration sent to the Mat-Su Borough on Tuesday.

The gist of it: the borough is now has 30 days to pay back $12.3 million in grants it secured to build a terminal for the ferry, to design landings for it, and to outfit it for passenger traffic.

We have devoted a lot of ink discussing the ferry in our pages. There are few updates on the vessel we have not covered. We’ve even wondered in print if the borough wouldn’t be better off if the vessel rested at the bottom of the ocean.

We can quibble about when the borough made the wrong decision here. Was it in deciding to take on a military prototype built for other uses as a ferry? Was it when the ferry’s capacity was scaled down and the borough agreed to move ahead anyway? Was the mistake in assuming Anchorage would be happy to have the vessel dock there, or in thinking that federal money would never dry up?

One thing is for sure — here we have a prime example of the perils the borough takes on when it pursues big, expensive projects.

We understand the appeal. Anchorage is so close. A ferry run would save commuters from the Knik-Goose Bay Road area a significant amount of time. It’s easy to see there’s a major market there just waiting to be exploited.

Also, this is a very cool ship — super fast, decked out with one-of-a-kind equipment, capable of landing a tank on a beach.

And (as they told us way back when this idea was hatched) the best part was its price — free.

Except now we’re finding, as we have with so many other boondoggles, sometimes “free” isn’t really “free.” Now it looks like the bill is coming due and paying it may well be painful for borough taxpayers.

We hope it causes sufficient pain to remind policymakers of their responsibility to do the homework and carefully study the issues before making such multi-million dollar wagers with public money.

These sorts of high-dollar gambles may be OK when the money at risk is yours, but such hubris with the public’s money is completely unacceptable.