Reply #20: Ted Stevens and Don Young made sure there was money ($223 million) for a "bridge to nowhere"

[Tanuki]

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/08/09/bridges/index.html

<<<< August 9, 2005 | A mess of thorny devil's club and salmonberries, along with an old chicken coop, surrounds the 40-year-old cabin where Mike Sallee grew up and still lives part time on southeast Alaska's Gravina Island. Sallee's cabin is the very definition of remote. Deer routinely visit his front porch, and black bears and wolves live in the woods out back. The 20-mile-long island, home to fewer than 50 people, has no stores, no restaurants and no paved roads. An airport on the island hosts fewer than 10 commercial flights a day.

"I can take off from the homestead and walk the beach for several miles before I get to any other habitation," says Sallee, a fisherman who also operates a small lumber mill. "There's two main mountain ranges on the island and a big valley of forest and muskeg."

Yet due to funds in a new transportation bill, which President Bush is scheduled to sign Wednesday, Sallee and his neighbors may soon receive a bridge nearly as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and 80 feet taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. With a $223 million check from the federal government, the bridge will connect Gravina to the bustling Alaskan metropolis of Ketchikan, pop. 8,000. >>>