Rails may be lifted from downtown Palmer

PALMER — The city council is seeking the authority to rip out downtown’s train tracks but won’t do it without first asking its residents.

According to Sara Jansen, special assistant with the city of Palmer, the council voted Tuesday to send a resolution to the Alaska Railroad Corporation asking for management of the tracks.

She said the council has heard some community members say that there hasn’t been enough public process on the issue and is therefore going to proceed cautiously with the plan.

“Before any tracks can be removed, (it) has to approved by the city council and there has to be two public meetings,” she said.

Removing the tracks is one piece of the city’s overall Urban Revitalization Project. The tracks are unused and would need significant repair to allow regular train service. The resolution passed Tuesday cites the revitalization project as one reason for asking for the authority. The others include:

• Providing better access for seniors, strollers and wheelchairs to downtown

• Ending traffic back-ups caused by school buses and trucks required to stop at the tracks

• Creating more space for free parking

• Creating more park space 

• Making room for community gardens and recreational activities

• Removing impediments to east-west traffic

• Lowering the grade in the area and “lessening the visual division of the downtown corridor”

At least one councilman opposed the resolution. Richard Best said all the revitalization plan documents he’d seen included leaving the tracks intact.

“My biggest complaint was that I felt that the public had input in the original Downtown Revitalization Plan,” he said.

Taking out the railroad tracks, in his view, goes against what the public signed off on in the first place. He also sees the council, with this move, being hasty. He chalks up their haste to the potential of landing federal stimulus money to help with the revitalization.

Palmer City Manager Bill Allen, “said that the urban revitalization plan with the railroad track in place would not meet the (stimulus funding) criteria,” Best said.

The revitalization plan includes an as-yet conceptual plan to link downtown to the Alaska State Fair with a pedestrian walkway that would run from the fairgrounds to Eagle Street. There’s talk of linking that trail into the Crevasse-Morraine trail system as well and making a Palmer greenbelt in the process. The greenbelt plans, though, are more of a long-term picture. In the short term, the ball is in the railroad’s court.

“Next week I’ll be forwarding this on to the senior management at the railroad and asking them to forward it on to their board of directors,” Jansen said of Tuesday’s resolution.

According to the railroad’s Web site, the next board of directors’ meeting is July 28 at the corporation’s Anchorage headquarters. Jansen said she hopes to get the matter on the board’s agenda for that meeting.

Best said he expects the council’s plan will likely be adopted, as evidenced by testimony from the railroad at Tuesday’s meeting.

“The railroad has full intention of doing whatever it is that the city requests,” Best said, summing up that testimony.