Then Fight for It! by Fred Paul

Author:Fred Paul [Paul, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781412244565
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Published: 2007-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

PART V: A COUP D’ETAT

61 A Coup d’Etat-Literally

The North Slope Borough is one of man’s grandest inventions. With its creation on 1 July 1972, the Inupiat living on the North Slope acquired the means they had long needed to deal with the white man’s world on their own terms. Let me digress a bit to explain the central importance of this concept to the negotiations that finally led to a settlement of land claims in 1971.

In 1956, Professor Vic Fischer reported to the Alaska Constitutional Convention that the Local Govt. Committee, of which he was chairman, did not want to see in Alaska the successive layers of local government that are typical of the Lower 48. In the state of Washington, for example, there is the state government, as well as many other forms of government at the county and city levels, fire and library districts, port, sewer and water districts, and many more. When the people who live around Lake Washington, near Seattle, wanted to clean up the lake, they had to secure the approval of twenty-three different communities to achieve their goal. Fischer’s committee wanted to avoid problems of this kind, and delegates to the convention were sympathetic to his recommendations.

Before Alaska statehood, there had never been any kind of local control over government, a fact that caused delegates to the convention to despise and fear centralized government, whether based in Washington DC or in Juneau. To answer the long-felt need for local control, the delegates favored the concept of borough government and, in the new constitution adopted, they gave extensive powers to the boroughs they hoped would soon spring up. An Alaskan borough is a municipal corporation, comparable in many ways to a county in the Lower 48. It has authority to plan and zone, assess and collect taxes, police, manage schools, promulgate building codes, etc. If, for example, an entrepreneur wished to build a pipeline within a borough, he need only secure the consent of the borough’s legislative assembly, a consent no other government agency could override.

One day during the winter 1968-1969, when I was discussing problems on the North Slope with Barry Jackson, he mentioned the borough concept as defined in the constitution and statutes of Alaska. I took a look at the books and began ruminating about a borough’s possibilities. Soon after that seminal discussion, I found myself on a flight between Fairbanks and Anchorage sitting next to one of my Father’s friends, Judge William Sanders of Nome. I spilled out my problems to him and asked what he thought about boroughs. He encouraged me in the idea and, with respect to the North Slope, he thought the bigger the borough, the better. It should extend, he suggested, from the Canadian border westward to the Chukchi Sea, then southward to include Kotzebue and maybe Nome. This huge area covers the existing election districts of Barrow, Kobuk, and Nome.

Soon after the Federal Field Committee had unveiled its report and recommendations in mid-February 1969, I happened to be at a dinner with the committee’s chairman, Joe FitzGerald.

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