LETTER: Moving the state capital is attainable

To the editor:

On June 28, 2017, the Washington Post carried a story that stated Alaska is ranked second most patriotic state in the country. How can that be?! Surely, a remote state capital is not part of a patriotic state.

It is nearly 40 years past the period when Alaskans voted three times to move the Capital to the road system where it can be reach by ordinary citizens and voters. The opponents to the move came up with a phony cost and said it was too much. While the price is not cheap, neither are Alaska’s resources. All it would take is leadership. It is really simple after you set aside what has become politics run amuck. There is a way to do it which not only gets us a Capital/Capitol on the road system but also spurs development in the private sector in a good way.

This is how one state got a new capital in the real frontier days:

The Texas Capitol that now stands on Congress Avenue in Austin does not resemble the one-story, wood framed structure that the Republic of Texas first met in, in 1836. In 1876 the government set aside 3 million acres of state land in the Texas Panhandle to raise money for the construction of a capitol they could be proud of. However, construction didn’t begin until 1882 when an Illinois contractor was named to build the capitol. In return he received the Panhandle land, which later became the XIT Ranch. The building originally had almost 400 rooms and was the length of two football fields. When it was completed in 1888, the capitol building was the largest state capitol in the nation. Excerpted from: An Independent Texas, Chapter 11, Page 247,

—Budd Goodyear

Wasilla