Somehow I missed seeing this thread sooner. Sorry to drag it back to the surface, but might as well fill in a few stray facts for y'all:
No, Willow has never been the capital of Alaska. The capital was Sitka from 1808 (under Russian control until 1867) and has been Juneau since 1912.
In the early days all the population centers were along the southeast and south-central coasts, but for the last 100 years, most of the population growth has been centered on Anchorage and Fairbanks. There's nothing wrong with the capital not being in the largest city (capitals were not moved from Sacramento to Los Angeles or Salem to Portland or Olympia to Seattle) but Juneau is hard to get to. From a dollars-and-cents standpoint, we spend a lot more money transporting our legislators and staff to and from their meeting site than we need to.
Anchorage would be a very practical site - or so Plexus and the people who live in Anchorage say. There are issues about the balance of political power. The city of Anchorage has more than half the total population of the state, and is the 800-pound gorilla of state politics already. The Fairbanks area is a distant second in size, but still big, and locked in something of a rivalry with Anchorage. The capital *can't* be moved to Anchorage - we actually have a state law that says IF the capital ever is moved, it must NOT be moved to Anchorage, Fairbanks, or any of their suburbs.
In the 1970s there was a strong movement to build a brand new capital city in a neutral but road-accessible location. No big surprise, the location chosen was just about as close to Anchorage as the terms of the it-cant-be-moved-to-Anchorage law allowed. There was a huge real estate bubble, with every land speculator in the state rushing to buy up undeveloped swampland and forest adjacent to the new capital site.
Then a funny thing happened: people figured out that it cost money to build a new city out of nothing. And -- big surprise -- the bond issue to pay for construction of the new capital failed, by a huge margin, as do all "do you want to spend more money?" ballot measures. This left things in a bit of a bind. The next election we were asked "now that you know how much it is going to cost you, do you REALLY want to move the capital or not?" In 1982 the revote failed, the bubble burst, and a whoooole bunch of folks went bankrupt or were left holding acres and acres of completely useless land.
Plexus's encyclopedia presumably dates from the late 1970s. In 1977 or 1978 the move, "to be completed by 01 October 1980," would have looked like a done deal to an outsider, and even in 1979 and 1980 it might not have been obvious outside of Alaska just how much trouble the plan had run into.
Supporters of the move didn't give up. They tried again, to move the capital to Wasilla (another little town in almost the same place as Willow.) They got voted down again. Then they tried to leave the govenor in Juneau, but have the *legislature* meet in Anchorage or Wasilla. We voted THAT down. Then they bought a big office building in Anchorage, and tried to leave the governor and the legislature in Juneau but move the rest of state government to Anchorage, and we voted THAT down. They just won't give up. Its sort of a warped tradition now -- every two years, we reelect Don Young, vote on moving some portion of the state government, and vote on legalizing marijuana.
Almost every one of these votes fails by roughly a 40-60 margin... so the move never happens, but the issue never dies.
At the height of the oil boom (late 70s and early 80s), Alaska could have afforded the billion dollars or so that the move would have cost. That was probably the only time the measure had any chance at all. Now its a matter of simple economics: it's cheaper to shell out a few tens of millions extra per year for the extra costs of having the capital in Juneau than it would be to service the debt on constructing a new capital somewhere else.
