n003  0536  20 Jun 83
BC-ESKIMOS
(ART EN ROUTE TO PICTURE SERVICE CLIENTS)
By WALLACE TURNER
c. 1983 N.Y. Times News Service
    BARROW, Alaska - This low rise of land on the Arctic Ocean shore has
become a stage for the dramatic attempt of young Eskimo leaders to
bring their village out of the late 19th century and into the late
20th in a decade.
    ''How much will it cost us to get our standard of of living up to
the rest of the United States?'' asked Eugene Brower, 35 years old,
the mayor of the North Slope Borough, which has borrowed about $1
billion for public works projects over its 11-year life. ''I can't
answer it. In getting well started, we have accomplished a hell of a
lot.''
    The construction costs will run well over $100,000 per person for
sewers, water lines, roads, schools and other public works at Barrow
and seven smaller villages scattered across the borough, a vast tract
of frozen land covering 88,281 square miles on the northern edge of
the continent.
    State Sen. Frank Ferguson, a Democrat and an Eskimo, said that
without some of the works now in progress, ''soon Barrow would be
uninhabitable, health problems would be so bad.''
    This is a village where polar bears wander in and are shot, where
the major event each year is the whale hunt, and where the jets land
at Wiley Post-Will Rogers Airfield to bring in computers and
television sets.
    Nomadic primitive Eskimos lived a part of the year here by the edge
of the sea, but this was not a village site. Whaling ship crewmen
came ashore to stay in the late 19th century, and Eskimos settled
around them. One sailor was Charles Brower of New York, known as King
of the Arctic. He was Mayor Brower's grandfather.
    Thirty years ago there were fewer than 30 houses. Sanitation and
water supply problems became acute as the population grew to3,000,
mostly Eskimos. In five years the borough has built more than 300
homes, Mayor Brower said, while private concerns have built many
more. Shacks are disappearing, and no one now lives in an igloo,
which in Barrow is a dirt house.
    Jacob Adams, 36, the former mayor of the borough, is now president
of the Arctic Slope Regional Native Corp.
    ''We would like to enjoy the systems and services people in other
places take for granted,'' he said. ''We feel we're playing a catchup
game with other communities.''
    Adams said that when he was a boy, fresh water was obtained by
melting ice off the frozen sea.
    ''We would go with dog teams along the coast to look for
driftwood,'' Adams said. ''Sometimes we would burn blubber.'' In 1963
Congress gave the Barrow Eskimos the right to buy natural gas from
the line developed 15 years earlier to serve the Naval Arctic
Research Laboratory, which is just out of town on Point Barrow.
    The borough, which would be called a county in most other states,
has a $10 billion property tax base. It has issued about $1 billion
in bonds and has plans for further construction that will cost
several hundred million dollars more.
    Population is 7,552, almost entirely Eskimo. In the last election,
1,776 votes were cast.
    This year the borough's operating budget is $245 million, of which
about $200 million comes from taxes on the oil fields. About $126
million goes to principal and interest on the bonds. Repayment of the
bonds is scheduled in the 1990's, to come before the Prudhoe Bay
field runs dry.
    Anchorage, with 190,000 residents, has an operating budget of about
$200 million.
    Per capita debt is about $125,000 for North Slope Borough; for
Anchorage, about $1,900. But the Eskimo leaders say that when the oil
companies leave because the oil is gone, they will have paid off the
bonds and their villages will be rebuilt.
    ''The tax base is not going to be here forever,'' Brower said. ''We
want to take advantage of it while we can, to get all the money we
can so we can have the things others take for granted but we have
never had.''
    
    
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n004  0543  20 Jun 83
BC-ESKIMOS Addatend
BARROW: never had.''
    ''When I was a kid I didn't know anything such as a flush toilet
existed,'' said Eben Hopson Jr., an assistant to Brower and the son
of the borough's first mayor. Eben Hopson Sr., son of another whaler
who left his ship, was the first child born in a hospital established
here in 1922 by a Presbyterian mission. His long career as an Eskimo
leader ended with his death in 1980.
    In 1959, Hopson Jr., Brower, Adams and others who had finished the
seventh grade at the Indian Bureau school in Barrow had to go 1,000
miles south to Wrangell and Sitka to finish high school.
    Public demand forced the opening of a high school here not long
after a plane crash near Juneau killed 11 Barrow youngsters on their
way to high school in Sitka in September 1971. A brother and sister
of Adams were among the dead.
    A new junior-senior high school will open here this fall. About 275
students in six grades will use 125,000 square feet of floor space,
equipped with a swimming pool with water storage to be used in case
of a fire, a television production studio, wood and metal shops, all
in an attractive, modern building. The cost originally was to be
about $25 million but has climbed to about $71 million.
    ''We have to use the best,'' said Brower. The harsh Arctic climate
quickly exploits any weakness in construction, he said.
    Sewage and water lines, which the village has never had, are going
into an immensely expensive tunnel that had to be cut by rock saws
into the permafrost that underlies all of northern Alaska. About $125
million is allocated to the water system and $140 million to the
sewage system.
    The engineering problem is to prevent the permafrost walls from
thawing, which would collapse the tunnel, but at the same time keep
the water and sewage lines from freezing. Water circulating through
the pipes holds temperature in the tunnel at about 35 degrees, while
the thick wooden lining insulates the permafrost so it remains below
freezing temperature.
    When this is completed, the water trucks and ''honey bucket'' trucks
that haul barrels of excrement from each home to a city dump will
disappear from Barrow.
    In April, when someone pointed out that North Slope Borough's bonded
debt had surpassed the state of Alaska's, some of the Eskimo leaders
were offended by the way Anchorage newspapers reported on this
phenomenon.
    Brower wrote in an advertisement that the borough inserted in
several newspapers: ''I was not pleased by the tone or quality of the
newspaper reports. They were contrived, weak and condescending.''
    Adams, whose Arctic Slope Regional Native Corp. is owned by Eskimos
in this region and has a net balance of $56 million, said people who
have not visited Barrow fail to understand.
    ''Few people take a firsthand look,'' he said. ''People are ignorant
about how we have to live up here.''
    
    
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