Mat-Su gets ‘the government they deserve’

Last summer I wrote a gripe column about the wonderful experience my neighbors and I had wherein CIRI ran heavy equipment all day and all night mere feet from our homes.

The old potato fields across from Three Bears along the Palmer-Wasilla Highway were logged and pushed flat while most everybody in my neighborhood were kept awake all night. Why the big hurry? Beats me, because there it sits … empty. And now we have the joy of the wind whipping across the empty field, pushing snow across Old Trunk until it’s impossible to drive even my Jeep through it.

Thanks, CIRI! I can certainly see why there was such a big push that required you working all night and destroying any chance that anybody around could go to work the next day refreshed after a full night’s sleep. But more importantly, a big thanks to my Mat-Su Borough for not caring. What a wonderful idea to exempt construction crews from the noise ordinance, especially when it’s for something so important as … nothing. Zip. Nada. Nothing there.

When something does go in, it will be a commercial business. Guess that tells us where we the people rate with our assembly. I wonder how many of you will get the pleasure of dealing with this nonsense in a few weeks when the construction crews start again.

What is it with our borough government, anyway? How can it be that people who are elected into their positions can so blatantly disregard the people they’re supposed to represent? Perhaps we should just get it over with and replace “assembly” with “Politburo” and get it over with.

Take the ferry to nowhere that we got yoked to for a few million dollars. Great idea. Wonderfully planned, wonderfully executed. Did some people get hooked on this “build it and they will come” fantasy? Buy an expensive boat before we have any plans or guarantees in place that we’ll have a dock on both sides for it. Is that a smart idea to gamble on something that expensive with money that isn’t theirs?

Hey, assembly, here’s a great idea: let’s blow a billion dollars on a top-notch football stadium. Sure, there isn’t an Alaska NFL team, but hey, we’ll worry about that later, right? For now, let’s just build the stadium and surely we can work out how we’ll go about getting an expansion team later. (That’s sarcasm by the way. Lord knows I don’t want to give any of you another “great idea.”)

It was embarrassing when the ferry story finally made national news and (thanks to our borough government) Alaska was once again the butt of jokes across the rest of the country. It was like family business suddenly becoming public knowledge — humiliating.

Or how about the cellphone towers that started popping up like pimples all over the Valley? Yet another fine, fine example of our local government representatives “looking out” for your best interests. And when the outrage was immediate and evident, do you recall how they worked so quickly to address the rather obvious problem? Me either. Because they didn’t. It was several weeks of actual defiance, denial and arrogant indignation.

Finally and more recently, despite overwhelming ire about this nonsense wherein an assembly member can now “phone in” his representation, our local government officials openly thumbs their noses at us and say “tough cookies” about it. Cute. What’s the point of insisting that an assembly member reside in the district he/she represents if they, well, don’t actually reside there? What’s the point in having a rule that requires an assembly member to give up his/her seat if they move outside that district if it’s still possible to “phone in” your so-called representation from halfway around the world, for months?!

You know, I have an admission to make: at one time I considered running for the assembly, but the wife and I sometimes kick round the idea of relocating and it was therefore an easy decision to not run. Had I known that our borough government operates this way, perhaps I would have run anyway. I mean, heck, I can do better than Ron Arvin because I would actually Skype myself into the meetings. Wouldn’t that be great?

Imagine this on a state or federal level — Parnell moving to Hawaii and conducting state of Alaska business via the telephone. President Obama delivering his State of the Union speech via telephone from a home in France. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Well, so does having one of our assembly members honestly thinking that he can efficiently and effectively represent people he lives a few thousand miles away from. What a joke.

But to be fair, I can’t say that all the blame can be squarely leveled on our borough government. No, to be honest I’d have to point the finger at those most responsible for this embarrassing situation: you and I. That’s because we’re the ones who voted these people into their current seats. More accurately, many of you — the majority of you — didn’t bother voting.

So here we are, shaking our heads and sighing heavily as bad decision after bad decision is made. Even worse, we’re treated to flippant, condescending excuses by our representatives when we try to communicate our concerns to them. Our complaints are promptly ignored and they do what they want, the public be damned.

On that note, I end this column by quoting Thomas Jefferson: “People get the government they deserve.”

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column as “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.