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Wasilla’s All-Purpose Lobbyist
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Candidate
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Sep 05, 2008 10:59am |
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| Category | Analysis |
| News Date | Friday, September 5, 2008 02:10:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The ties that bind Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP vice-presidential nominee, to her state’s infamous “Bridges to Nowhere” just keep getting tighter.
Steven W. Silver, a Washington lobbyist who began representing the small town of Wasilla during Palin’s tenure as mayor, is also lobbying for construction of a controversial bridge linking Anchorage to the borough housing Wasilla, according to lobbying disclosure records.
That proposed span — dubbed “Don Young’s Way” after Alaska’s lone House member — gained notoriety in 2005, when Young and Sen. Ted Stevens (R) fought to earmark hundreds of millions of federal dollars for it and another controversial bridge connecting Ketchikan, Alaska (pop. 7,300), to an island airport. Both became symbols of wasteful federal spending, and were widely ridiculed as “Bridges to Nowhere.”
On Wednesday, Palin told the GOP faithful gathered in Minneapolis for the Republican National Convention, “I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that ‘Bridge to Nowhere.’ If our state wanted a bridge, we’d build it ourselves.”
But she hasn’t come out against “Don Young’s Way.” In fact, the Palin administration has plans to hire an outside contractor to estimate what the project would cost, according to a June report from The Anchorage Daily News. The contractor alone is expected to run the state $200,000, the report said. The bridge itself has been tagged at between $450 million and $1.5 billion. |
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