Quit picking on Ouzinkie

The one time I saw it, from the stern of a 24-foot skiff, Ouzinkie didn’t look like much. A patch of siding sticking out here and there from a riot of green forest. And I was probably distracted, too. At the moment, the skipper of the skiff, my host, was telling me the story of an accident that had taken the lives of a boat full of Old Believers nearby some years earlier. Rescuers, he said, could hear them trapped in the hull of the overturned vessel, clawing in vain for a way out, but could do nothing to help. As we skiffed through the narrows that day, the ocean didn’t seem particularly treacherous. But that story, and scores of others like it, underscore the dangers still inherent to travel in many parts of the state.

I made a mental note of seeing it, because I knew my wife had flown to there on a work trip not long before, but I didn’t give the little town much more thought. Until this week.

Ouzinkie caught my eye in a news story that surfaced Monday—a report in which the village appeared to be well on its way to becoming the state’s latest icon to Outsiders of what wasteful government spending looks like.

Besides that treacherous stretch of water, the only other way for Ouzinkie residents to get off Spruce Island is the village’s airstrip, an untended 2,000-foot gravel runway. Thanks to the federal stimulus package, $15 million will be spent building a new airport there.

And that’s a scandal. Or at least that’s the impression you might take away from a CBS report on stimulus spending. 

“Tiny Airports Get Big Cut of Stimulus Cash,” the headline blared. “Small, Rural Airports Get Big Payouts While Safety Violations at Major National Airports Get Little Attention.”

Let’s leave aside for a moment the question of whether “big” is an appropriate adjective for a $15 million grant in the context of a stimulus package that runs close to a trillion dollars. The CBS report suggests that airports like Ouzinkie’s are undeserving of the federal money simply because of their small size. At one point, the story calculates that with a population of 165, Ouzinkie is getting $90,000 per person, a type of statistic that might sound familiar to residents of Ketchikan. That’s the sort of misleading factoid that lends a patina of certitude to a story that otherwise lacks it.

Likewise, the CBS report suggests that airports like Ouzinkie’s are soaking up funds that by rights ought to go to relieve major problems at major airports: “More than $350 million of federal stimulus money is being spent on hundreds [of] little-used airports or ones catering to recreational flyers, corporate jets and remote communities around the country, even as the nation's largest commercial airports are denied safety upgrades,” it reads. This despite the fact that the rest of the more than $1 billion in airport funds from the stimulus did go to larger commercial airports. The report also questioned the job creation value of these grants—based solely on their inability to track down a job creation figure at one small airport the report covered.

Although CBS is the big media heavy with the reach to get the story out, an outfit called ProPublica did most of the journalistic heavy lifting. The non-profit was founded a few years ago to fund investigative journalism—“journalism in the public interest” reads a banner on their homepage—free from the financial restraints dogging many traditional news outlets, then disseminate their work through traditional outlets (Alaska Dispatch was the only Alaska outlet I could find that picked up this particular story).

The ProPublica version of the story is better and fairer; it goes into greater depth and lacks the sensationalizing language of the CBS piece. It asks and answers the question of why bigger airports didn’t get more money (most of their major safety projects were already funded through other sources when the stimulus plans were announced). And it explains why airports in Alaska are a more important part of the basic transportation system than they are elsewhere.

Of Ouzinkie’s airport it reads: “The existing gravel runway is too short, subject to 60-mph crosswinds and built near a landfill frequented by seagulls,” [Ouzinkie utility manager and Vice Mayor Tom] Quick said. “A new airport might attract a fish-drying facility or a tourist lodge, he said, leading to a rare commodity—stable jobs.”

Pretty much exactly what the stimulus plan was meant to do, right? But you’d have to read all the way to the end of the piece to discover this information. And you wouldn’t have learned that general aviation accounts for over a million jobs nationwide or that it’s one of the few remaining manufacturing sectors where the United States dominates.

The point here isn’t so much that government spending ought to be free from scrutiny (it ought to be scrutinized, and ProPublica mostly does a good job with that) or that general aviation is a wonderful, too-maligned industry, or even that Alaska should fight for the federal spending the benefits us.

The point is that we should think carefully about what’s really involved before criticizing something. Good reporting is important and there’s not enough of it; but so is critical, creative thinking about one’s subject. There’s not enough of that either. We need more people involved in our public dialogue willing to imagine what facts really mean from multiple perspectives. Otherwise thing such as Ouzinkie’s lifeline will continue to be someone else’s taxpayer waste, and important systems will keep being derided sarcastically as “something called ’volcano monitoring.’”

That won’t stimulate the economy, and it especially won’t stimulate a sense of shared community or destiny in a nation already deeply divided over who we are and where we’re headed.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com