Last month the Murkowski administration announced a $108 million dollar road construction package that will create new natural resource development, help eliminate traffic snarls in urban areas and increase the level of safety for drivers and pedestrians across Alaska.

I am glad to see that the bond includes $26 million dollars to fix Anchorage's most troublesome intersection, Lake Otis Parkway & Tudor Road.

Anchorage residents are also glad to see that the next big step to settling this issue will be taken. Unfortunately, Mayor Mark Begich chose to criticize the road bond because it did not pay for his pet project to build more turn lanes at the intersection.

After the governor's road bond was announced the Mayor took the disappointing step of issuing a press release on December 14, 2004 that stated "this proposal does little to alleviate congestion at Lake Otis & Tudor."

Who on earth does he think he is kidding?

The bond pays to extend Dowling Road eastward so it will connect with the Bragaw extension. This gives drivers a way to completely avoid Lake Otis & Tudor. That is exactly what DOT, the municipal traffic department, private engineering companies and numerous traffic studies have said is the real solution for the past 20 years.

What many people may not realize and what the Mayor chooses to ignore, is that the Legislature and the Governor's office follow a tried-and-true process before funding any road project. The first and most important step is having the state Department of Transportation conduct traffic and engineering studies that tell us the best and most cost-effective way to solve a traffic problem.

The Murkowski administration left the Mayor's turn lanes out of the bond because DOT traffic engineers discovered it would improve the traffic flow by less than 10 percent and that whatever insignificant improvement did result would evaporate within a couple of years because the number of cars using the intersection continues to climb every year.

DOT officials made it clear to the governor, legislators and the public that adding more turn lanes to Lake Otis & Tudor is simply a waste of money.

Even in the face of all this, the Mayor insists the state pay for them anyway. His 2005 Legislative Program includes a $7.5 million dollar request to fund the turn lanes. As a member of the Senate Transportation Committee, a fiscal conservative and a former contractor who built many of Anchorage's roads, I can tell you that request has a long, rough road before it in the Senate.

The mayor's political supporters and one particular group of newspaper editorial page writers will tell you that what this really boils down to is just a bunch of Republican senators, like myself, who don't want to do anything that makes the mayor look good.

The truth is, Mayor Begich is the one who callously used the Lake Otis & Tudor issue for his own partisan political purposes during an election year. Last spring, he went to Juneau and led an effort at the Alaska Municipal League conference that resulted in a "no confidence" vote against the Republican Majority in the House and Senate.

He then put his knack for getting in front of the TV news cameras to work. He gathered all the news reporters and TV cameras in the Capitol building and went from floor to floor demanding that lawmakers' fast track legislation to pay his turn lanes.

After that failed he demanded that Republican legislators and candidates sign a pledge card promising to support his unnecessary road project. The November general election results indicate to me that voters may have seen the no-confidence vote, the pledge card stunt and the all the media hype for what it really was.

The real losers in all this are Anchorage's property taxpayers. The city has already spent several hundred thousand dollars buying up land at the intersection, land that is now off the tax rolls for a proposed road project that will solve nothing.

If the mayor really wants to solve Anchorage's transportation issues he needs to stop using them for partisan political purposes and do his engineering homework before asking lawmakers for road construction money.

My fellow senators and I are eager to finish the work we have already done to end the gridlock at Lake Otis & Tudor. But until the mayor stops trying to put us in a political box, the Senate majority will continue to have "no confidence" in his ability to work with us in an effective bipartisan manner.

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Senator John Cowdery represents District O in the Alaska State Legislature.