Sink the Susitna

Far be it from us to root for arson or natural disasters, but it occurs to us in reporting the latest iteration of the saga of the M/V Susitna that maybe we should.

The embattled ferry, envisioned as a vessel to shuttle cars between Point MacKenzie and Anchorage, is parked in Ketchikan while the Mat-Su Borough decides its fate.

If you haven’t been following the plot of this soap opera, the “ferry to nowhere” was built without a dock in either Anchorage or Mat-Su at which to load and offload cars and passengers. The borough has some money to build the Point MacKenzie side, but the federal government has frozen those funds until the Anchorage side can be resolved. The Anchorage dock lacks a permit or strong support from that city and doesn’t have a dime of construction funding.

Meanwhile, the borough is spending $75,000 each month to keep the Susitna docked and staffed with a skeleton crew in Ketchikan. This past Tuesday, there were very few happy voices around the assembly table when staff requested $600,000 to insure the vessel for a year.

Which is where the natural disaster comes in.

If the borough doesn’t set up some kind of ferry service, it will owe the federal government $12 million to repay grants it received to build the ferry terminal and other elements of the proposed service.

But that $600,000 insurance policy covers a $60 million cost to replace the vessel if were to be destroyed.

The borough didn’t pay anything for the vessel in the first place — it’s a military prototype of a landing craft built for the U.S. Navy, which usually scraps such prototypes once testing is through.

And since the vessel itself was free, there isn’t any kind of a loan payment the borough has to make.

So say the boat sinks to the bottom of Ward’s Cove. The borough gets $60 million. Subtract the $12 million it pays to the feds and there’s $48 million profit. You could buy a couple of elementary schools or two-thirds of a high school for that.

So, like we said at the start, far be it for us to wish for an errant tidal wave, however …

Of course we’re being sarcastic. A tidal wave would devastate Ketchikan. Arson would needlessly put first responders at risk. We are not advocating for either.

Still it says something quite remarkable about how low this project has sunk that in some ways the destruction of the boat would yield the best outcome for the borough and its taxpayers.