Academy Charter gets room to grow

PALMER — How many uses can the Mat-Su Borough get out of one parcel of purchased land?

Well, if the parcel in question is the one sitting next to Academy Charter School, the answer is three.

On Tuesday, the borough assembly voted to pull $905,000 out of the school site selection fund to buy the 19.25-acre parcel, which tallies in at more than $47,000 an acre. The land is west of the school. To the east of the school is a cemetery.

Academy Charter has $1.5 million in state money already in hand to begin the expansion process. The plan is to finally move out of decommissioned and ageing portable classrooms the school currently uses.

But if the school wants to expand it’ll also need more parking. In fact, the school needs more parking now, considering, according to the borough, that visitors often have to park on Arctic Avenue — a major thoroughfare through Palmer heading east into the Butte.

But even so, 19.25 acres is too large for those needs. The land’s owner wasn’t interested in carving off a chunk to meet the school’s needs, citing, according to the borough, the cost of that process.

But the borough has also had its eye on the property as a way to build a second access road to the school district’s administration building, which is north of Academy Charter, and to ball fields that are also there.

So that road is the second use.

The third? Perhaps expanding a nearby park.

With those three uses coming down the pike, Assemblyman Jim Colver proposed bumping up the figure taken out of the site selection fund by $50,000 and using the extra money to hire a landscape architect.

“Before anything happens, first you would map out where the expansion would go, their parking needs, the access to the school district and the public use expansion of Mat River Park,” Colver said.

His colleagues did not agree and voted his proposal down. In fact, Assemblywoman Cindy Bettine said she’d come to the meeting thinking she might suggest reducing the appropriation by $50,000 as a way to negotiate with the landowner.

Too often, she said, the borough is in the position of trying to negotiate with “landowners that know that their piece of property is the one that we want.”

Borough Manager John Moosey noted that the borough did negotiate, both by trying to buy a smaller piece of the land and by getting the land independently appraised. The borough’s appraiser wound up valuing the land at $840,200, but the landowner’s appraiser put it at $945,000.

The $900,000 price tag was a compromise, he said. The additional $5,000 in the appropriation was to pay closing costs.

Assemblyman Mark Ewing said he thought expanding the school would be a great thing for Palmer. He said he hopes the move catches the notice of a woman who wrote him a letter saying she believes it was his desire to see Palmer fall off the map.

“That is not my wish,” Ewing said.

Academy’s principal, Barbara Gerard, said she was very happy with the outcome.

“Academy staff, students and parents cannot thank you enough for all your hard work,” she said.

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