Town forced to pay for roads it can't use

This story gives us a glimpse of what life would be like under a Sarah Palin bureaucracy.

The GOP claims to be the party of reducing red tape and taxes, but this item should silence these boasts.

Alaska law says motorists in isolated communities are exempt from the state's car registration and insurance requirements. This law is sound, for the only car travel by residents of these places is on town streets. These communities have no roads leading out of town and are not linked to the state highway network.

The towns own the streets. The state doesn't.

But now some bureaucrat from the Palin administration has decreed that the town of Kotzebue - a hub of the Inupiat people since at least the 15th century - no longer gets these exemptions.

According to my road atlas, Kotzebue has not a single road leading out of town - which means motorists there only use town streets.

But Palin's bean counters say one street in Kotzebue has too many vehicles for the exemption. I find this rather fishy, because this figure - 3,300 - is greater than Kotzebue's population.

The Palin administration has nothing better to do than count cars in isolated villages just so it can squeeze more money out of residents?

It sounds like somebody's been doing that already. The average income in Kotzebue is about the same as it is in my working-class town, and most families there rely on subsistence hunting and fishing just to survive. Yet a gallon of milk in Kotzebue costs $9.49. A gallon of gasoline will run you $7.25. Electricity bills can be as high as $500 monthly.

And residents are unable to even comply with statewide registration requirements. That's because there's no insurance office anywhere in town. Further, the local DMV is only open part-time, because the state won't invest in that.

The Palin administration is changing a community's way of life in a manner that a majority of residents don't want. Transactions that would require a bank account elsewhere are made with cash in Kotzebue. That's going to change all because of GOP bureaucrats' ignorance and insensitivity.

And the new fees imposed on Kotzebue will pay for the state highway system residents can't even use!

Why won't the state investigate the price-gouging that's been going on instead of imposing another burden on a village that lives on subsistence hunting?

Several years ago, similar price-gouging was discovered in eastern Kentucky - yet the Bush regime wouldn't lift a finger to go after those who were responsible for it.

With the Republican base becoming more rural, you'd think they'd understand small communities. But they don't. This ignorance is intentional. And GOP leaders are laughing to themselves right now that they think they can exploit rural voters by making them think they care. Luckily, there are rural counties that aren't buying Republican demagoguery, and never did.

(Source: http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/rural/story/790230.html)