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| March 22, 2007 Editor’s Desk by Aaron Selbig, insurgent49  It’s been a seaworthy week here at Insurgent Headquarters.Last August, Alaska voters ignored a slick, expensive ad campaign on the part of the cruise ship companies and passed Ballot Measure 2, a citizen’s initiative aimed at further taxing and regulating the cruise industry. Part of the initiative, in a section entitled “Ocean Rangers”, read: “An owner or operator of a large commercial passenger vessel entering the marine waters of the state is required to have a marine engineer licensed by the United States Coast Guard … on board the vessel to act as an independent observer for the purpose of monitoring state and federal requirements pertaining to marine discharge and pollution requirements ….” Seems pretty cut and dried. Alaskans, sick and tired of reading about the latest episode of cruise ships dumping pollutants in our waters, decided that the industry could no longer be trusted to monitor itself and required an "Ocean Ranger” aboard the ships to look over their shoulders. Leave it to certain members of the state Legislature to turn a straightforward demand from voters into a real problem. Reps. Mike Kelly (R-Fairbanks) and Kyle Johansen (R-Ketchikan) are among a group of House Republicans who are attempting to subvert the will of the people by radically altering the waste monitoring provision in the new law. Their wish is to either limit the Ocean Ranger program to ships that are docked in port or to scrap the whole plan altogether. Why would they want to do such a thing? Kelly reasons that the oversight is unnecessary. “Putting these guys on these cruise ships to cruise around is like a cop now being able to pull me over and say, ‘I don't like the way you're driving. I think I'll sit over on the right-hand seat,'" he told Channel 2 News last week. Mr. Kelly is likening the behavior of the cruise ship industry to poor drivers? Perhaps he is forgetting some recent Alaska history. In April of 2002, for instance, Carnival Cruise Lines was convicted on multiple felony charges for dumping oily bilge water and falsifying discharge logbooks. In May of 2001, Holland America’s Westerdam was caught releasing untreated wastewater into Juneau harbor. And, in 2004, the Ryndam was convicted of dumping 20,000 gallons of sewage, also into Juneau harbor. Wow. That’s pretty bad driving, all right. Perhaps, if a cop had been sitting in the right-hand seat, the drivers of these luxury vehicles wouldn’t have been able to dump bilge water and sewage out of the window and onto the roadway. Rep. Johansen, who coincidentally received a campaign contribution from the CEO of Royal Caribbean Lines right after the election, uses a different analogy to describe it: “It's akin to Legislative Affairs hiring twenty extra security guards to keep the giraffes out of the parking lot. They're just not there." Considering the numerous charges of illegal dumping on the part of the cruise ship industry recently, maybe Legislative Affairs would be wiser to try to keep sewage out of the parking lot. It was House Speaker John Harris’ (R-Valdez) comments on the subject, however, that are the most offensive to Alaska voters. “In the whole debate over a cruise ship head tax … the Ocean Ranger program was never discussed by anybody”, he reasons. So, in other words, Mr. Harris is saying that Alaskans didn’t know what they were voting for … that they didn’t bother to read the wording of Ballot Measure 2. Personally, I am insulted by Mr. Harris’ insinuation that I am too ignorant to have fully understood the necessity for Ocean Rangers. I completely get it. As a matter of fact, I think the state should expand the program to the North Slope, so that we can better keep an eye BP’s half-hearted anti-corrosion efforts. We could call them “Pipeline Rangers”. Aaron Selbig is an activist and media junkie who resides in an undisclosed location in downtown Anchorage. He is the winner of a 2006 Alaska Press Club award for Best Editorial Writing, host of KUDO 1080 AM's 'The Aaron Selbig Show' and a co-founder of Insurgent49. Aaron may be contacted at editor@insurgent49.com 'Editor's Desk' appears on insurgent49.com every Thursday. |
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