Driving Progress With an Eye on the Rearview Mirror
Guest Blog by Alaska Municipal League
Seventy-five years ago, a handful of mayors and elected officials came together to form what was then the League of Alaskan Cities. Some of their most pressing business was rallying Congress to build the roads, harbors, and public-works projects that the young Territory desperately needed. Looking back at some of the resolutions they passed in the early years feel uncannily relevant in 2025:
Asking the federal government to carry highways straight through municipal limits rather than halting at city boundaries
Pressing for an annual road-building budget that would be large enough to unlock private investment in fishing, mining, timber, and oil
Requesting for river-and-harbor appropriations sufficient to support Alaska’s substantial coastline and the vessels operating within Alaskan waters
Alaska-specific public-works program to keep pace with defense expansion
As Alaska Municipal League (AML) marks its 75th Diamond Jubilee, those historical documents are more than curiosities. They are a reminder that mobility, maritime access, and local self-determination have always been intertwined—and that progress happens when Alaska’s municipalities speak with a unified voice. Today’s transportation debates echo the same themes, only the context has shifted to thawing permafrost, Arctic shipping lanes, and the “once-in-a-generation” infusion of federal infrastructure dollars.
Linking Past and Present: What Has Changed—and What Hasn’t
In the early 1950s, traffic headed into Anchorage still funneled the Glenn Highway onto gravel streets downtown, and Fairbanks lacked a proper bypass for military convoys headed to Fort Wainwright. Getting freight to coastal villages meant lightering cargo from ocean-going ships to smaller barges because the existing port infrastructure was too shallow. Those gaps strained local government budgets and stalled private investment, prompting AML’s founders to insist that federal responsibility could not end at the city limit or the tideline.
Fast-forward to 2025 and many of those demands have been met in spirit, if not in full. The Alaska Marine Highway System links thirty-five coastal communities; the Dalton, Parks, and Seward highways form the spine of a 5,600-mile primary road network. Yet new challenges have emerged: permafrost thaw now buckles pavement faster than state maintenance crews can respond, marine terminals built for 1980s cargo volumes struggle with today’s container traffic, and many of Alaska’s rural airports must stretch limited capital dollars to maintain gravel runways that serve as Medevac lifelines. Meanwhile, municipal coffers are still covering snow-removal and safety costs on federal-aid routes that weave through town centers—an echo of the “inequitable financial burdens” cited in 1954.
The 2025 Infrastructure Scorecard
Alaska’s transportation network remains a marvel of engineering in extreme Arctic and sub-Arctic conditions, but the numbers reveal significant stress. Roughly one-third of state highways are rated in poor condition, and the average urban bridge approaches fifty years of age. Freight tonnage through the Port of Alaska has doubled since the 1990s, yet its aging docks await numerous upgrades. The Alaska Marine Highway’s fleet has been reduced from eleven to nine vessels, putting strain on the system that connects communities in Southeast Alaska.
In a state where more than eighty percent of residents live in communities not connected via roads, runway light failure or degraded gravel surfaces can grind everyday mobility needs to a halt.
Inflation aggravates this gap. Flying asphalt into rural Alaska or barging steel to a western coastal community can multiply project costs fourfold compared with the Lower 48. Infrastructure life-span also shortens under Arctic conditions where bridges expected to last seventy-five years elsewhere may need major rehabilitation after forty, or less. Include construction-labor shortages and the backlog of projects widens, even where federal money remains available for these “shovel ready projects”.
Modern Tools for an Old Ambition
Against that backdrop, AML has modernized its advocacy toolkit without losing sight of its founders’ goals. The Transportation Funding Opportunity Hub, built with Alaska DOT&PF, is an online intake that translates a community’s wish list—be it a harbor dredge, a boardwalk realignment, or a Safe Streets corridor—into a tailored menu of state and federal programs complete with deadlines and eligibility flags. In its first year the Hub screened more than 150 local concepts worth nearly a billion dollars, helping villages such as Nunapitchuk and Whale Pass secure planning grants they might have missed without a full-time grant writer on staff.
Where the Hub identifies an opportunity, the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region’s Regional Infrastructure Accelerator (PNWER RIA) helps provide financial muscle. Through a project funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the RIA brings pro-bono analysts who can stack a low-interest TIFIA loan on top of a Port Infrastructure Development Program grant, or bundle a road-to-resources spur with culvert upgrades to score higher on federal resilience metrics. For municipalities that issue only a handful of bonds each decade, such expertise is the difference between winning a transformative award and watching funds roll to states with deeper benches.
Complementing those external partnerships is AML’s own Technical Assistance capacity. Over the past twelve months AML staff have facilitated the writing statements of work for dust-control strips, prepared climate-impact worksheets for ferry terminals, and drafted match-funding strategies that unlocked millions of dollars for Alaska’s transportation infrastructure.
A Roadmap Written Across Generations
AML’s Diamond Jubilee is less a look back than a call to finish what earlier generations began. The founders asked for highways that flow through towns instead of stopping at the outskirts, harbors that match a coastline longer than the Lower 48’s, and public-works budgets sized for explosive growth. More than 70 years later, Alaska still confronts remote logistics and funding gaps, but it also commands unprecedented resources with federal infrastructure grants, new models of public-private finance, and analytic tools that pair projects with programs in seconds.
The challenge is to fuse those modern advantages with the moral clarity of 1954. By doing so, today’s municipal leaders and legislators can deliver infrastructure that lasts another seventy-five years—roads that resist thawing ground, ports that welcome Arctic trade, and multimodal corridors that keep groceries affordable in the farthest village. When members gather this summer, they will stand on the work of predecessors who saw mobility as the backbone of self-governance. The task now is to honor that legacy by building the resilient, integrated network Alaska has sought since the days when the map still bore the word Territory.
Learn more about Alaska Municipal League at www.akml.org.
Explore the PNWER RIA’s Alaska projects here: www.rianorthwest.org/critical-connections.
