Airport expansion threatens Point MacKenzie farms

PALMER -- Flo Pitcher has worked on other people's farms in Point MacKenzie since the early 1980s, doing the kind of work that hardens the hands and strengthens the back. Just a year and half ago, she and her husband, Jim, a former Montana rancher, finally scraped together the money to buy their own 480-acre chunk of rich Point MacKenzie agricultural land to run a hay farm and quarter-horse breeding operation.

But this spring, the couple learned a number of local, state and federal agencies and officials think the flat, expansive Point MacKenzie area would be the perfect spot to enlarge operations for the Anchorage Ted Stevens International Airport in the future.

"These are the very best soils in the district and they want to use it for the airport? It's crazy," Pitcher said Monday from her home. "Do we want to cover it up and put Hertz rental cars here?"

The Anchorage Ted Stevens International Airport Master Plan, released last November, identifies 15 square miles of land in Point MacKenzie as a possible site for potential airport expansion, looking out as far as 2030. The site would swallow up all or portions of a number of farms currently in private ownership. Other alternatives identified in the plan range from making do with the airport's current Anchorage home to moving to Fire Island, located in Cook Inlet across from the Port of Anchorage.

Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, supports Point MacKenzie for future airport relocation because it gives further weight to his requests for millions, possibly billions, of dollars to build a bridge across the Knik Arm from Anchorage to Point MacKenzie, according to his spokesman Steve Hansen.

The Municipality of Anchorage has already passed a resolution supporting the Point MacKenzie site for airport expansion.

The Mat-Su Borough Assembly postponed acting on a similar resolution at its May 27 meeting. After hearing from a number of Point MacKenzie farmers protesting the plan, the assembly instead rolled the issue into a Federal Aviation Administration study the borough is currently doing to inventory all its airports, airparks and air strips.

Aside from seeing this as "a land grab," Flo Pitcher was outraged by the lack of notice she said she and her neighbors received. She personally asked each member of her community council if they had ever been notified of the project. They said no, Pitcher said.

Dairy farmer Vicky Trytten also testified to the assembly that while she knows "progress" happens, she'd at least like to be included in the public discussion.

The borough advertised the proposal before both the borough's planning commission and assembly considered it, according to a borough planning clerk. But Pitcher asked the assembly on May 27 why the borough doesn't officially notice the people who would lose land if the airport is relocated to Point MacKenzie. She pointed out she received a borough mailing when someone applied to consolidate two lots into one right next to property she owns in Settler's Bay.

"If there's going to be an airport planted over my 477-acre ranch, just send me one of these, will you?" she asked as she waved the mailing.

Assemblywoman Jody Simpson, who represents the Point MacKenzie area, claims she personally notified a number of people in the area, including the local community council.

"It's unfortunate a group of people feel like they weren't plugged in," Simpson said Tuesday.

But Simpson points out that the borough did not author the airport's master plan identifying potential sites for growth. And this is not the first time the area has been proposed, she said. The idea gained resurgence when Young asked borough officials on a January visit to Washington, D.C., to pass the resolution to help garner support for the Knik Arm Crossing -- his bridge project that would connect Point MacKenzie to downtown Anchorage. The bridge has an estimated price tag between $700 million and $2 billion.

Such a mammoth public works project will require a combination of federal, state and local funds, in addition to possible bonding, Young's spokesman Hansen said Monday. But at the congressional level, "it helps politically to have an airport as an argument," Hansen said.

And those who envision the port district at Point MacKenzie as the new transportation hub of Southcentral Alaska see the airport as consistent with that theme.

"It (the airport plan) fits into the concept of what we'd like to do down there at the Port," Simpson said. "There are a lot of people who would like to see this happen."

She said she thinks it's a good idea but noted it will have serious long-term impacts.

Farmers could potentially be moved to borough-owned land near Fish Creek, Simpson said. Or the airport could be put at another site in the Mat-Su vicinity.

But that's little solace to Pitcher, who feels the political will is against her and her neighbors.

"This is supposed to be Don Young's legacy and we're in big trouble," she said.