Palmer wants to be bigger

PALMER — The city of Palmer is working with a consultant to figure out the best way to fix problems with its annexation process before it tries to grow again.

According to Heather Stewart, an associate planner with Agnew Beck Consulting, a public meeting held May 20 was a means to figure out what went wrong with the last annexation attempt — in 2006 — and fix those problems.

“It was not as large a crowd as we would have hoped for a kind of large public meeting but it was a very good discussion I think because there was a smaller group,” she said.

The meeting was the first in a series. Folks wondering about the pros and cons of annexation will have more chances to chime in as the summer progresses. Look for dates and notes from past meetings at the company’s Web site – www.agnewbeck.com under the Current Projects section.

“Basically we’ve kind of tried to frame the discussion in terms of land use and land-use regulations and then taxes and services,” Stewart said.

Agnew Beck’s Web site also contains a brief history of annexation in Palmer. It claims Palmer has done more annexing in its 58-year history than any city in the state. Early efforts were piecemeal and tended to create pockets of unincorporated neighborhoods within the city. In 2002 those pockets were brought into the city. Palmer’s latest annexation effort came in 2006 with an attempt to bring in much of Greater Palmer.

Homeowners seeking water and sewer service generated a lot of the early expansions. These days, the Web site says, annexation would allow Palmer to more efficiently provide services like police, fire, sewer and water. There is also the notion that preserving the essence of the Palmer community is a goal best achieved through annexation, which would allow the city to guide development in the area.

And, of course, there is the tax issue.

“Unless the city can grow, and spread the costs of services and infrastructure improvements over a larger pool of taxpayers, Palmer cannot continue to provide the same level of services in the future. With a larger service area, the city can gain economies of scale and access to additional funding, which will lower the cost of service provision to individual taxpayers even more,” a pamphlet on the project states.

Sandra Garley, director of Community Development with the city has been working on the project as well. She said the 2006 effort failed when the city council voted not to send an annexation request to the Alaska Local Boundary Council, which approves such changes.

Garley said there are five different ways a city can annex property, one requires 100 percent of residents in the area to be annexed to sign a petition. Some require just a percentage of those people. And then there’s an option that requires no signatures.

In 2006, the council, most agree, was reacting to significant resistance from those who would be annexed. A lot of those residents simply had questions that the city didn’t have answer for, Garley and Stewart said.

Garley said the city decided to move ahead with this summer’s annexation meetings, “to help us understand the kinds of information they want to have before we start our next annexation process (and) frankly try to be prepared the next time we move into any annexation to have a process in place that people are comfortable.”

Though Palmer doesn’t have any specific annexations in mind, she said that cities, over their lifetimes, tend to expand, especially when there is growth in the area.

“The land around the city is becoming more intensely used,” Garley said, “At some point in the future we will (expand). That’s sort of the pattern that cities go through.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.