Assembly declines to endorse new traffic route

BIG LAKE — The Mat-Su Borough Assembly declined Tuesday to follow the Big Lake Community Council’s lead in endorsing a specific route for traffic flowing from the proposed Knik Arm bridge to the Parks Highway.

The bridge project would connect Point MacKenzie to Anchorage. It’s billed as many things: a spur to development in the Point MacKenzie area, an alternate route between Anchorage and Mat-Su in case of disaster, a shorter route from Anchorage to Fairbanks, and the North Slope.

It’s that last one that has had residents in Big Lake uneasy. Existing roads to get from Point MacKenzie to the Parks Highway either run up Knik-Goose Bay Road or up Big Lake Road.

When headed north, that second route is the shorter of the two, but Big Lake has a downtown area with an elementary school, a fire station, a library and a shopping center.

“This community has rejected the idea of having a major highway come down through its town center,” Big Lake resident Dan Mayfield told the assembly at its Tuesday meeting. “We haven’t wavered from that whatsoever in the last seven years.”

Numerous Big Lake residents backed Mayfield up, including Jim Hutton, co-chair of the Big Lake Community Council’s Transportation Committee.

“We do not want 21,000 cars a day coming through Big Lake,” Hutton said.

Big Lake, in fretting about the road, participated in a Community Impact Assessment to try and figure out a route that would work better.

In the end, Big Lake settled on a route referred to in planning documents as Route 3a. It bypasses the city center to the east and, in traffic data, seemed to be the one most likely to keep in-town traffic at its current levels. This is the route the Big Lake Community Council recommended to the assembly.

However, the neighboring community of Houston has a different opinion. A resolution that body passed in October 2013 endorses Route 2, a road that would connect to the Parks Highway in the Houston area.

“It is projected that businesses and industry would likely emerge along this route and increase economic development in Houston, with Houston realizing additional employment and prosperity,” the resolution states.

Houston is also engaging in its own Community Impact Assessment. Lance Wilson, who spoke at Tuesday’s meeting as a citizen of Houston but who is also the Houston city councilman who introduced the resolution endorsing Route 2, said that the borough should wait before picking a route to endorse.

“The city of Houston is conducting a CIA,” Wilson said. “A portion of that (CIA) project is going to consider the impact of various routes to the Parks Highway from Port MacKenzie The results of our CIA should also be considered by the assembly as another valuable tool in your decision-making process.”

The assembly eventually more-or-less agreed not to endorse a specific route. Assemblyman Darcie Salmon successfully moved to strip mentions of a specific route out of the assembly’s resolution.

“What’s left here in this resolution is palpable detail as to what Big Lake does not want,” he said.

The next step in the process is for the state to conduct studies and do other work to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement, Salmon noted.

He said that the point of an EIS is, “to come to a conclusive decision as to which … in fact will be the best.”

Assemblyman Vern Halter said that he thinks there is room for Houston and Big Lake to come together. The road would be a commercial corridor from Anchorage across Knik Arm to Fairbanks, he said.

“I don’t understand why there should be any animosity between the city of Houston and the (community) of Big Lake at all,” he said.

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