Skip ads and navigation
Advertising
Our network sites seattlepi.comHelp

Sen. Ted Stevens: Alaska's money machine

Monday, December 27, 1999

By ALAN FRAM
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON -- From expanding an Anchorage senior center to replenishing Yukon River salmon, more than a half-billion dollars in federal projects will cascade into Alaska in 2000. And behind most of it is the state's venerable Sen. Ted Stevens.

There's $2 million to clear beetle-infested spruce trees on the Kenai Peninsula, and $5.9 million to try reducing fetal alcohol syndrome. The Federal Aviation Administration will get $2 million that Stevens says will help pilots by tracking volcano emissions.

And the state will receive $135,000 to dab anti-cavity sealants onto children's teeth.

There is more than $100 million for the national parks and military installations that dot Alaska.

Tens of millions more dollars will go toward improving rail service and spurring economic development in a state where in some communities, basics like roads and plumbing are scarce.

"Alaska, one-fifth the size of the United States, has been left out of a lot of things," Stevens said in a recent interview. "My job is to try to deal with some of these things."

But whether winning scores of such projects makes the gruff, 76-year-old Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee a hero or villain depends on where one sits.

The half-billion dollars places Stevens, who likes wearing "Incredible Hulk" ties when the going gets rough, among Congress' elite in bringing home federal largesse.

And that often puts him in the crosshairs of conservatives who form the philosophical core of the national GOP.

"Drunken sailor spending attitudes," is how Paul Weyrich, director of the conservative Free Congress Foundation, described Stevens' outlook last month.

Stevens also frequently runs afoul of environmentalists for his attempts to use spending bills to increase logging in national forests or build roads across virgin parkland.

Many of those efforts have been blocked by the Clinton administration, which in exchange often agrees to send millions of extra federal dollars to Alaska.

The view is different back home. A senator for three of Alaska's four decades in the union, Stevens is a major resource for a state whose total economy totals just $22 billion a year.

"He's a huge economic factor for us," said April Jensen, president of the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce. "We're really afraid that when he leaves, that will be it."

"Congress knew when they took us on as a state that we had handicaps," said Clara "Billie" Lewis, executive director of the Anchorage Senior Center, which is getting $2.2 million to expand its 16-year-old building.

She said Stevens "is probably the most respected man" in Alaska, where he is re-elected easily every six years.

Stevens became chairman of the Appropriations Committee in 1997, when conservative Republicans lawmakers were growing in number.

In recent years, some of Stevens' moderate views have come to better suit those of his colleagues, such as supporting a type of line-item veto.

Even so, he unabashedly cooperates with Democrats, a longtime tradition on a committee that controls one-third of the $1.8 trillion federal budget. Buttressed by a good rapport with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and a thirst by many conservatives for home-state spending that his committee controls, Stevens seems secure in his job and is unhesitant to confront his critics.

"All they are is a bunch of psychopaths that go around and raise money from the extreme right," Stevens responded when asked recently about a survey by the conservative Citizens Against Government Waste that ranked Alaska the No. 1 state in "pork" spending per resident last year. "They are idiots."

A press release issued by Stevens, covering the last five spending bills enacted in November for the new federal fiscal year, catalogs 140 Alaska projects with a combined price tag exceeding $300 million.

Coupled with the nearly $250 million in Alaska projects that Citizens Against Government Waste found in the year's other eight spending bills, the state's haul exceeded $500 million.

Using its own definition of "pork," that group also found that Alaska residents got an average $274 apiece in federal projects in 1999 -- tops in the country and well above the $19 national per capita average.

Stevens justifies the spending he brings to Alaska by saying he only does what other lawmakers have long done for their own states.

He also cites the extreme isolation and economic underdevelopment that afflicts many rural communities in his vast state.

"We have people living in poverty conditions you can't believe," he says.

© 1999 The Associated Press.
All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast,
rewritten or redistributed.

OUR AFFILIATES
NWsource KOMO
Pacific Publishing

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
101 Elliott Ave. W.
Seattle, WA 98119
(206) 448-8000

Home Delivery: (206) 464-2121 or (800) 542-0820
seattlepi.com serves about 1.7 million unique visitors
and 30 million page views each month.

Send comments to newmedia@seattlepi.com
Send investigative tips to iteam@seattlepi.com
©1996-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Terms of Use/Privacy Policy

Hearst Newspapers