What Does "Taking Responsibility" Mean these days? Sheffield Resigns for $60K/year

ADN on line has this headline:

Sheffield resigns as port director
CONTRACT: Ex-governor will earn $60,000 a year as city's liaison on the project.
By ROSEMARY SHINOHARA
Anchorage Daily News Published: December 29th, 2011 11:06 PM
Last Modified: December 29th, 2011 11:26 PM

It took long enough to get him out of the Port.  The story tells us:

The cost of the port expansion project, as envisioned by Sheffield, has jumped from $360 million in 2005 to about $1 billion. [Anchorage Mayor] Sullivan has proposed a less ambitious project. The city late this year asked the Legislature for $350 million to continue port construction work.

The port was supposed to be finished in 2011, but the ADN reported last July, that the completion date is now 2021.  That's not a minor adjustment.  Why the delay?  Because Sheffield had championed a controversial, untested piling design which failed.

Some engineers are questioning whether the new dock can even be built as designed. Much of the work done in 2010 involved dismantling construction from just a year earlier. Numerous sheets of steel that were planted in Cook Inlet as part of the dock expansion have been ripped up and now lie stacked in twisted and warped piles at the port.

You can see some of these on a video of a Port tour in a 2009 post.

But according to Sheffield and his supporters, it wasn't his fault.

"The project has faced challenges but we have worked hard over the last two years to get the management and construction back on the correct course," Sheffield said in a written statement . . .

. . . Sheffield supporters say the port construction problems were largely beyond his control, and that a federal agency and a contractor are responsible for quality assurance, not the port director. Former Assemblyman Dan Coffey, whom Sullivan has hired to lobby the Legislature for additional port funds, says he thinks Sheffield "is the face of a mess not of his making."

Yeah, it wasn't me.  Just because I was the port director, you shouldn't blame me.  The Feds should have done it.  Ask the feds who was pushing the controversial pilings. 

Let's see.  This is the former governor who was brought up for impeachment inquiry by the legislature in 1985.  The LA Times reported:

Alaska's impeachment inquiry stems from what might be considered routine patronage politics in some places: the steering of a $9.1-million lease for state offices to a Fairbanks building in which one of Sheffield's supporters and fund-raisers held an interest. . .

. . .The office lease matter took a serious turn on July 1, when the special grand jury investigating it, citing page after page of Sheffield's failed memory in his testimony, declared that the governor is "unfit to fulfill the inherent duties of public office."

'Lack of Candor'
The jurors added that "Sheffield's testimony reflects a lack of candor and a disrespect for the laws of this state."

In the end, he was not impeached.

But here's some more history from a 2007 post I did on Carnival Cruise Lines:

1987 - Sheffield sold Sheffield Enterprises to Holland America [which belongs to Carnival Cruises.] His number two man at Sheffield Enterprises, Al Parish, eventually became a vice president of Holland America.
And from the Alaska Railroad website we get the following:
April 1995
Former Governor Bill Sheffield is appointed to the Board of Directors and elected chairman.

During his tenure, the Anchorage International Airport got a new train depot, that the Railroad says cost $28 million (I think that was just the federal money, others have hinted it was much more) that is now named after Sheffield.  The only passengers who ride on trains from that depot are people who travel to or from the airport to downtown train station (a ten minute taxi ride) which is part of their Alaska cruise ticket.  And the cruises only come up during the summer months.  But us Anchorage folks can rent it out for a party if we want. 

The Alaska Railroad's 1998 Annual Report says about the Depot:

Anchorage International Airport
What It Is: A $28 million project to develop a state-of-the-art rail
station at the Anchorage International Airport. The station will be
the centerpiece of all passenger services development at the
Railroad, connecting Seward, Whittier and Girdwood, making
commuter services to Wasilla and Palmer a more viable option. (p.10)

In the Chairman's message it even gives a time estimate:

And by 2005, we hope to be carrying commuters from the Matanuska-Susitna Valley and Girdwood into Anchorage with safe, cost-effective, environmentally friendly rail transit.(p. 1)

It's the end of 2011 and no one has gone anywhere but downtown from that depot.  But maybe, like the port, the commuter service had to be delayed 10 years.  But don't hold your breath until 2015.

Accountability
Heads of agencies and governments and corporations frequently tell us that they have the responsibility to make important decisions, but when things go bad, they rarely seem to be held accountable.  How are those bankers doing who made all those bad loans?  Do you think W. is going to apologize any time soon for getting us into Iraq?   The only Alaskan politicians who have been held accountable were convicted by the feds after an FBI investigation.  And the ones who spent the most time in prison were convicted of crimes involving $10,000 or less. 

Mayor Sullivan's been cutting the Municipal budget on the grounds of being fiscally responsible, but this is the end of his third year as mayor.  He's left Sheffield at the port all this time. 

Some folks thought the political corruption cases might change things, and they did for a bit.  They helped get Sarah Palin elected governor, for example.  But just looking at Sheffield's record as Governor, railroad president, and head of the port raise very troubling questions about accountability in this state.  The gift of the railroad depot to the cruise lines all by itself should have been investigated.  It has cronyism written all over it. 


Who's accountable for it never being used for commuter service?  Who still thinks there was ever that intention?

The current ADN story says that no one knew about the resignation and it was announced at a Wednesday night fundraiser for Mayor Sullivan at Sheffield's home.  Sweet deal.  I'll resign and I'll give you a fundraiser, but I want a $60K retainer after I resign.  Or even worse, maybe he didn't have to ask.  

The Beautiful Depot Stevens (and a few others) Built for Carnival

It's been a little over two years since we took friends downtown to catch the bus to Seward and their cruise south and my interest was piqued to check on the cruise lines.
That led to a post about how Carnival owns most of the cruise related businesses in Alaska (Holland, Princess, Sheffield Hotels) plus they have significant connections with the Alaska Railroad. (The former head of the railroad and current Port Authority Director, Bill Sheffield, sold Sheffield Hotels to Holland and his assistant became a honcho with Holland, and Stevens helped the cruise lines get a railroad depot at the Anchorage Airport and it was named after Sheffield... and much more at that old Carnival Cruise Lines post and a little more at New Pirates on the Seven Seas.)

Well, yesterday we took our visitors to the Sheffield Depot to catch their train to their Princess cruise out of Seward. Still, four years after the depot opened, the only people I know of who use it as a train depot are people who buy an Alaskan cruise. I've also heard you can rent out the depot for parties since most of the time this depot is not in use.
So dropping them off gave me an opportunity to get some pictures of this beautiful present from Ted Stevens and members of the legislature to Carnival and the Alaska Railroad.

Here are some of the passengers waiting for the train to take them to their cruise.


And here's the train waiting for the passengers to be called to the platform. Eventually a man came out and yelled, "Alllll Aboard!"

We had a little extra time so we wandered with our friends down the tunnel with the northern lights arts project and the ten or so aerial photos the Anchorage Airport over about a 50 year span. I'd forgotten about this tunnel which we used to take before all the new buildings got put up and the easy access through the station from the parking lot ended. What I also discovered was the new rental car facility, somewhere I never go since I never rent a car here.

I know Andrew Halcro complained when all the money was being spent on the railroad depot and not on a new space for the rental car offices. [Update Monday evening: Actually he "opposed the rail depot because it was built with $30 million in federal taxpayer money even though the feasibility study showed it would never be used for anything other than cruise passengers for four months out of the year." You can see more details on his thoughts here. I thought I'd linked to this, but didn't.] I have less of a problem with the rental car space. This is a feature of all airports. Every passenger has the option of using a rental car, and thus this space. It isn't dedicated to a couple of companies and their clients exclusively. Plus there's a tax on rental cars and I believe some of that was used for this space. Not sure what percent was paid that way.

But it is pretty fancy and the new parking lot is huge.

As we drove past the parking pay booths, we got this glimpse of the engine waiting above the road.

I wonder if the FBI has collected data on how money got funneled to this project. When they were lobbying for it they promised commuter service to downtown, Girdwood, and the Valley from the airport. None of which ever materialized. Sierra Club, do you feel a little sheepish now for supporting this project? Maybe you can still redeem yourselves.

We could still have a train car that went back and forth to provide service between the airport and downtown every half hour both ways. I'm sure someone has invented a fairly inexpensive, fuel efficient vehicle that can run on railroad tracks. Knowing that one had, at most, a 30 minute wait would mean that it would be an attractive alternative for passengers who needed to go downtown and people downtown needing to go to the airport.

Again, the details are all in the previous posts.

More Anchorage Airport Railroad Depot Background

This comes from Andrew Halcro's website. Halcro was a Republican state representative from 1999-2003. On his site his biography says he is

President, Avis/Alaska (Statewide Family business owned and operated
since 1955) 2002-Present

He ran for governor of Alaska in 2006 as an Independent. He's sharp and talks straight. Below is his account of how the depot got built from a discussion of a candidate forum in Seward in March 2006. He's discussing John Binkley, then a Republican primary candidate for Governor.

Basically this is consistent with what I wrote earlier and fills in a few more details.

But the most amusing comments was his defense of the $28 million dollar cruise ship passenger depot at the Anchorage Airport. In fact, reconciling his comments to the audience on Friday with history, is a great lesson on how some politicians tend to lose memory when they run for office.

In the spring of 2001 while I was in the legislature I had my first conversation with John Binkley. He came to my office to address my concerns as a vocal critic of the railroad spending $28 million dollars of taxpayer money to construct a facility that was going to serve a limited use (cruise ship passengers) and be closed for 8 months a year.

During that conversation, Binkley who was the Railroad's Chairman of the Board and supported the rail depot, told me that the reason they went ahead with the project was that they didn't want to embarass Senator Ted Stevens by giving back the money. Even though the railroads own feasibility study raised questions about the project.

However on Friday, the rail depot turned from a "must do" to a "must have".

In his comments on Friday, Binkley defended the depot as a vision for the future. We built this so we could encourage commuter transportation and not have the roads clogged up with rental cars, eliminate the need for $56 million dollar parking garages (referring to the new Anchorage Airport car rental facility under construction) and to eliminate the need for expanding the Glenn Highway to four lanes. [Although Halcro has his rental car background on his biography on his webpage, and may assume that people know this about him, it would be nice if had made that clear for people who find this on the web and don't know. It doesn't change anything, but letting people know your connection to an issue a good habit to get into.]

Now lets stop here.

First, when the railroad board gave the rail depot the green light there was no car rental garage planned yet. Even so, would you rather have a $56 million private structure that generates millions in revenue or a $28 federally subsidized rail depot that's closed eight months a year?

Second, those rental cars clogging all the highways (unlike the tour buses from cruiseships) actually pay local and state taxes that reduce tax burdens of Alaskans. In Anchorage alone, the industry contributes almost $10 million dollars a year. Not to mention another $5 million dollars a year to the Anchorage Airport in concessionare and lease fees that help keep the airport open.

Third, I'm sure the 40,000 Alaskans a day that commute from the Mat-Su would love to know that John Binkley's vision for improved transportation in the region is based on them giving up there vehicles for a train ride.

Ironically, the railroads own economic feasibility study panned the idea of commuter rail to the airport due to a lack of railroad infrastructure, a sparse population base and the reality of infrequent trips.

But then again, anybody who would have taken the time to read the airport rail depot's feasibility study would have known that. But this was never an issue of what was best for taxpayers, this was about self interest.

In December 1998, a month after being elected to the State House I was invited to lunch with former Governor Sheffield who was head of the railroad at the time. I brought up the subject of the proposed rail depot. At the time, the railroad was still in the process of having a local firm conduct the feasibility study.

I told the governor I thought the project had a limited appeal and was a bad use of taxpayer money. However, it was very clear from his response that regardless of what the projected economics concluded, his was going to spend $28 million on the depot.

In December 2002, Sheffield and others sipped champagne as they celebrated the grand opening of the Bill Sheffield Airport Railroad Depot complete with a bronze bust of the former governor.

Today the rail depot is open on a regular basis only for cruise ship passengers from mid-May to September who pay nothing for the facility. The total yearly passengers are less than 50% of what their feasibility study projected they'd be by this date.

At least the next generation of taxpayers won't have to look down the tracks very far to see why they're inheriting an $8 trillion national debt.

All aboard.

How did Carnival Cruise Lines get US taxpayers to buy them a $28 million train depot?

Our friends Harry and Michelle, former Alaskans, stayed with us a few days before catching a Princess Cruise to Vancouver yesterday. Yesterday morning I took Harry to the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport to return his rental car. We passed the Bill Sheffield Depot, which in 2004 won an American Institute of Architects Award.[Depot picture not my picture, from AKRailroad site]

Later we took them downtown to catch the bus to Whittier where they get on the cruise ship. Getting the tourists and their luggage from here to there is like an assembly line. I knew this already from taking other visiting friends to catch their buses to the cruise ships and from people who work for the cruise line.
You can get a sense of the enormity of the business from looking at all the luggage lined up at the hotel for just a few of one day's set of passengers.



But what got me thinking, and which you can't see completely on this picture, is the sign on the bus that says "Holland-America Tours" and the sign on the post to the right of Harry's head that says "Princess Tours." People had told me a lot of the cruises were all owned by the same company, so I started googling when I got home. Here's what I found.

The Princess Cruise Line, along with Holland America, is owned by Carnival, the largest cruise line company in the world, with a 2006 net profit of $2.279 billion In addition to Princess and Holland America, Carnival owns, as their website lists, "our brands:"

Carnival
Princess
Holland America
Cunard
Aida
Costa
P&O Cruises
Ocean Village
Seabourn
P&O Cruises Australia

Different financial sites lists their competitors as Royal Caribbean Cruises, the second largest, with 2006 net income of $633.9 million. The other two listed are TUI AG (a German firm) and Hong Kong based Star Cruises.

Alaskans heard a lot from the cruise industry prior to last fall's election because Ballot Measure 2 called for strict regulations of the cruise industry - including putting rangers on all the cruise ships to monitor them in Alaskan waters and requiring them to disclose the commission they get from Alaskan vendors they send passengers to. Despite a very expensive industry sponsored campaign against it, Ballot Measure 2 won. In this last legislative session there's been a lot of public concern because of legislative attempts to water down the new regulations. So, we aren't ignorant of the cruise industry and its influence. But I started thinking.

Back to the Bill Sheffield Depot at the airport. Anyone who asks a few questions knows that, despite the arguments when it was first proposed that supporters argued that it would help ease commuter traffic in Anchorage. The Alaska Railroad's 1998 Annual Report says about the Depot:

Anchorage International Airport
What It Is: A $28 million project to develop a state-of-the-art rail
station at the Anchorage International Airport. The station will be
the centerpiece of all passenger services development at the
Railroad, connecting Seward, Whittier and Girdwood, making
commuter services to Wasilla and Palmer a more viable option. (p.10)

In the Chairman's message it even gives a time estimate:

And by 2005, we hope to be
carrying commuters from the Matanuska-Susitna Valley and Girdwood into
Anchorage with safe, cost-effective, environmentally friendly rail transit.(p. 1)

The originally arguments that this train spur would help Anchorage commuters was never too convincing since it only would go from the airport to downtown and that's not where most commuter traffic goes. There's nothing here about cruise lines, yet today, in May 2007 the only people who ever use the airport depot to get on or off a train are cruise ship passengers.

While googling I found out that on May 7 of this year, Anchorage Daily News published a letter from a David McCargo of Anchorage:

"About a year ago I called Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport to inquire about scheduled train service to and from downtown Anchorage. The person who took my call was not even aware that there was a train station at the airport, which started me wondering why we spent almost $30 million to build one. My next call was to the Alaska Railroad, which was worse than trying to get through to an airline representative in Bangladesh. After considerable persistence, someone finally called back to say that the only way that I could get to the airport by train was to book a cruise from Vancouver."

I further found a Railways enthusiasts' website that had a page entitled "Lines with obscure passenger services" with this interesting tidbit:


"Anchorage, Airport Branch Junction, AK - Anchorage Ted Stevens International Airport US28
This spur line - approx. 2 miles long - is used only by chartered trains for various cruise companies (including Holland America, Princess, Carnival, Royal Celebrity and Radisson). On days when a relevant cruise vessel arrives at Seward, a train leaves there for the airport in the morning (journey time 4½ hours) and returns at about 1330 from the airport to Seward to connect into the vessel's evening departure. Tickets are obtainable only from the cruise line concerned. Reported: August 2005"

So how did the cruise lines, Holland America, Princess Lines, and Carnival principally, get this $28 million depot and train spur between downtown Anchorage, and the ports of Whittier and Seward to take their passengers directly to the Anchorage Airport? Rattling some old brain cells and working google leads to this narrative.

Bill Sheffield (for whom the Depot at the airport is named) owned Sheffield Enterprises, which eventually was a chain of 16 hotels in Alaska and the Yukon.
1982 - Sheffield is elected Governor of Alaska and serves until 1986
1987 - Sheffield sold Sheffield Enterprises to Holland America. His number two man at Sheffield Enterprises, Al Parish, eventually became a vice president of Holland America.
And from the Alaska Railroad website we get the following:
April 1995
Former Governor Bill Sheffield is appointed to the Board of Directors and elected chairman.
1997
Former Governor Bill Sheffield becomes CEO and President of the Alaska Railroad and John Binkley is named Chairman of the Board of Directors.
1997
Alaska Railroad develops a program of projects with plans to build new depots and docks, improve rail infrastructure and modernize through new technology.
2001
Former Governor Bill Sheffield retires from the Railroad. Patrick K. Gamble, former Four Star Air Force general, named new CEO and President of the Alaska Railroad Corporation.

So, Sheffield has close ties with Holland America - which eventually gets bought by Carnival which owns most of the ships cruising in Alaska - because he sold his company to them and his number two man becomes a VP for Holland America. When he retires as governor he becomes head of the Alaska Railroad and pushes for a train depot (which bears his name) at the Anchorage airport. Uncle Ted, as Alaska's senior US Senator is affectionately called, gets $28 million funneled to Alaska from US taxpayers to build the depot at the Anchorage Airport (which bears his name.) Since it was completed in 2002 it has only been used by summer cruise line passengers and is closed most of the year.

Now I think Sheffield and Stevens believe that what they were doing was in the best interests of the State of Alaska. And most Alaskans appreciated the federal largess that Stevens has sent our way, though many have smirked a bit at some of the excesses like the train depot. But the so called "bridges to nowhere" have brought attention to the cumulative effect on the US budget of all the special earmarks Congress has slipped in. And in this case, there is a project whose sole beneficiary in its first five years has been the cruise ship industry.

Did I mention that Carnival and its subsidiaries also own in addition to the Sheffield Hotels, a series of Princess Hotels, where many, if not most, cruise passengers sleep when they are on land. And they own Grayline of Alaska which their cruise passengers travel in when they aren't on the railroad. And they steer their passengers to shore based shops and services for which they get a hefty commission. One of the reasons Ballot Measure 2 passed was to give passengers more information about the business relationships between their cruise ships and the businesses they recommend.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the Baranof Hotel in Juneau, where the Veco executives were taped by the FBI bribing Alaska politicians, is part of Holland Alaska.

June 7 update: For a more recent post on cruises see New Pirates of the Seven Seas
For more on the Airport RR Depot,
click here.