Ms. Murkowski said Democrats had demanded significant changes, including measures to require more environmental study and to give the interior secretary discretion to determine whether the project was in the “public interest.”

Opponents, however, say the bill as they interpret it essentially directs the secretary to find that the proposal is in the public interest. If that were to happen, the road could be financed by the state using money from the federal Highway Trust Fund, instead of an earmark, according to state transportation officials and Ms. Murkowski’s office. The road is not currently in the state transportation financing plan.

Versions of the bill have cleared key committees in the House and Senate and await floor votes. However, given the economic bailout plans Congress is considering, the prospect of a measure passing this year “looks grim,” said Bill Wicker, a spokesman for the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Image

If the road is not approved this year, it will not be the first time. In 1998, the Clinton administration opposed the road, being pushed by the Alaska delegation, and instead brokered a $37 million deal to provide a hovercraft across Cold Bay to improve transportation for medical evacuations; the plan also upgraded a medical center in King Cove. But the hovercraft just started operating last year, and residents say weather and high costs make its use unpredictable. The local government also says it costs about $100,000 a month to operate. Opponents of the road, however, say it, too, may be unusable in foul weather and they note that the hovercraft has conducted medical evacuations since it came into use. Residents say the road is a matter of public and economic health.

“They say those people over there will be killing all the ducks and ruining the environment and decimating the country,” said Mayor Stanley Mack of the Aleutians East Borough, much of whose population is Native Aleut and Yupik. “Where do you get off saying that? We’ve been out here for 4,000 years, protecting the country.”

The Izembek National Wildlife Refuge has long been overshadowed by its northern cousin, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the fight over building the gravel road has lacked the political tension of the fight over drilling for oil. But environmental groups have also long felt that building a road, on an isthmus between two wildlife-rich lagoons in the refuge, would threaten the welfare of a dwindling caribou herd and hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, including Pacific black brant and the threatened Steller’s eider.