Lisa Murkowski: DOI decision leaves Alaska Native village at risk

The Aleut of King Cove, Alaska want safe, reliable access to medical care – something nearly all other Americans already have and often take for granted. All that is needed is a one-lane, 11-mile dirt road through a corner of a federal wildlife refuge, which would ensure that residents can always reach the nearby all-weather airport in Cold Bay.

To most of us, the road is common sense and desperately needed. To the federal government, it is not worth building.

U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell rejected – two days before Christmas – a proposal that would have allowed a road in exchange for more than 56,000 acres of tribal and state lands being added to the refuge, including the first new federal wilderness in Alaska in decades. It was a 300-to-1 deal in favor of the federal government, and by far our best option to protect the health and safety of local residents.

Secretary Jewell claims the short road would irreversibly harm wildlife and that new wilderness was not an acceptable substitute. Jewell’s message to me has been that I needed to ‘just get over it and move on.’

A better understanding of what is at stake – and at risk – shows the breathtaking absurdity of Secretary Jewell’s decision.