Anchorage Port: Fire Sheffield

January 25, 2011: In the Anchorage Daily News front page exposé of the billion dollar boondoggle, otherwise known as the Anchorage Port expansion project, the take away is clear: Former governor Bill Sheffield has his fingerprints on yet another mishandled taxpayer funded project.

Sheffield, the Anchorage Port Director, was the loudest and most powerful advocate for the current design, which according to the Daily News, has been questioned by the Anchorage engineering community from the “get go.” Other more affordable and traditional designs were proposed, but Sheffield decided the more complex design was better, even pitching the idea that it would be cheaper.

“It's a very attractive alternative for us,” Sheffield reportedly said in 2002. “It's bigger and it's millions cheaper and money is getting harder to come by now.” Nine years later, Sheffield's predictions have all turned out to be reckless and wrong. The project’s costs have ballooned from $360 million to $1 billion, the expected completion date has been pushed back ten years and the port's biggest users are skeptical of whether the design will work at all.

Despite all of these problems, Sheffield remains confident he'll get the remaining $700 million needed in cost overruns through port revenue, loans, state and federal grants and—of course—federal earmarks. I'm sorry, could someone remind Sheffield of the federal government's $14 trillion hole?

But this isn't the first time that the former governor has danced with poor planning and arrogance when it comes to taxpayer money. In fact, a $28 million dollar example lies in mothballs at the Anchorage International Airport.

In the late nineties, Sheffield was head of the Alaska Railroad when former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens procured a $28 million earmark for construction of a passenger rail depot at the Anchorage airport. The earmark was obtained over a year before any feasibility study was done to see if the project even made sense. But taxpayer wellbeing be damned, Sheffield built the rail depot regardless of the cost or the usefulness of such a facility.

In December of 1998, as an incoming member of the Alaska State House with a seat on the Transportation Committee, I was invited to lunch with Sheffield where we discussed the proposed rail depot. This is a waste of taxpayer money, I told him, but to no avail. His argument was that 8,000 people worked at the airport and the depot could be used for mass transit, which would make the line profitable during the winter months. Yes, 8,000 people worked at the airport, but they work at various times and not all work at the terminal, I replied.

Sheffield wasn't hearing any of it. With the federal cash secured, it was going to be his legacy to build the shiny glass and metal structure we see standing empty today. Even after the feasibility study was released six months later, which cast significant doubts on the benefits of the facility, Sheffield ignored the economics and pushed on to construct the Bill Sheffield Railroad Depot, as it officially became named.

When the feasibility study was released it pointed out the same thing I had told Sheffield six months earlier. Although 8,200 people work at the airport, “it appears that the schedule of workers and the locations where they live are not conducive to mass transit.” Still, that didn't stop the railroad from projecting that by 2004, two years after the scheduled opening of the depot, 80,000 local residents would be using the train to get to the airport annually. In the eight years since opening, the train hasn't carried one local resident to the airport.

Even the questionable lure of cruise ship passengers had been foretold by industry officials. Cruise ship lines fretted privately that they were being pressured into committing passengers to the rail service when motor coach transfers were more efficient. In 2003, the first year of service carrying cruise ship passengers, the rail depot hosted 34,000 passengers. By 2009, that number had dropped to 29,000.

Today, the Bill Sheffield Railroad Depot sits empty eight months of the year and is underutilized the remaining four months.

The bottom line is that Sheffield has created an impressive history of overreaching when it comes to taxpayer-funded projects. He failed to listen to reason about the rail depot and he failed to listen to reason regarding the design of the Anchorage Port expansion. Regardless of who is ultimately to blame for both projects, our congressional delegation for securing questionable earmarks or lack of backbone by the railroad board or the City of Anchorage, one thing is clear; Bill Sheffield is the common denominator in feeding these runaway projects.

His close personal political ties and fundraising clout for policymakers has opened doors to government funding that has fueled mismanagement and arrogance at the expense of taxpayers. Local, state and federal officials shouldn't allocate one more dollar to the Port of Anchorage project until Sheffield is replaced.