Unalaska, AK – The state's version of the Izembek land swap bill passed the state's House of Representatives Wednesday night and will now go on to the governor. The bill passed through the Senate earlier this week. The bill gives the Department of Natural Resources the authority to trade 43,000 acres of state land to the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in exchange for the 206 acres needed to build a one lane road corridor through the wilderness area to connect King Cove with the airport in Cold Bay.

Della Trumble with the King Cove Corporation has been working on the land exchange for close to 30 years.

"I equated this to the saying that it's another small step for mankind. This whole thing has been on going for so long and it's been a number of small steps for us to get to where we are today and to continue to move forward slowly. It's huge. And we're just so very, very thankful."

The King Cove Corporation will also give an additional 15,000 acres to the refuge as part of the exchange.

Trumble said that the harsh weather in King Cove makes transportation to and from the airport via boat or hovercraft unreliable and dangerous. Patients get trapped without help. "As recently as last month we had a situation where an 8 or 9 year old little boy broke his leg sledding on a Friday and because of the bad weather couldn't get to Cold Bay at all by any mode of transportation until that Monday," she said.

A spokesperson from the Aleutians East Borough said that once the road is built and community members have constant access to safe transportation they will decommission the hovercraft that currently connects King Cove to Cold Bay.

Representative Bryce Edgmon, who introduced the original bill last session, said the Department of Natural Resources needs statutory authority to exchange lands that are of unequal value and involve tidelands. He said the final passage of the bill is an important step in the land exchange process.

"The bill did pass both the house and the senate without a single vote of opposition, which was pretty important in terms of sending the message back East that this is a real important issue not just to the people of King Cove the and Aleutians East Borough but it's a pretty important issue to the state as a whole."

The Aleutians East Borough and the residents of the communities still face more hurdles before the land exchange is complete and the road is built. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service needs to complete an Environmental Impact Statement for the project and the Secretary of the Interior needs to see if the exchange is in the better interest of the public.

If the project goes through, the 10-mile long section of the road through the wilderness area would be one lane wide, made of gravel, and have steel cables on each side to prevent people from driving off.

"And so a very rigid criteria for the actual dimensions of the road and how it's configured and who can actually use it. And so there are restrictions basically everywhere written into the federal law that provides the authorization for it to happen," Edgmon said.

Environmentalists have protested the exchange for years because the area for the proposed road includes critical habitats, such as eelgrass beds and wetlands, which would not be part of the new acreage.

The land swap also includes 1,600 acres near Kodiak that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service already planned on conveying to the state.