Assembly, planning commission discuss land use issues

PALMER — Mat-Su Borough Assembly members and planning commissioners talked through nine possible land use and representation issues at a joint meeting Tuesday.

Most points of the meeting were informational, and focused on issues that could impact one or both legislative bodies. Presentations ranged from land use ordinance reform, updates on a federally mandated municipal planning organization, to a pamphlet urging residents to be good neighbors.

For example, David Batker of Washington-State-based Earth Economics made the case that a possible $22-million ballot bonding issue on trails and recreation facilities in the borough could pay larger economic dividends. Additional trails and outdoor facilities could boost property values, meaning additional tax revenue, Batker said. Additional outdoor recreation opportunities could lead to improved community health, which in turn could lead to decreased healthcare costs, Batker said. They could also provide more direct benefits in the form of tourism, Batker said.

“If you look at housing values in the Mat-Su basin, not somewhere in the Lower 48, not somewhere else, 37 percent of the value of the property is due to its location close to parks or water,” he said. “So the more you develop those trails, et cetera, you’re actually building your tax base and citizens hold greater value.”

Additional outdoor recreation opportunities could lead to improved community health, which in turn could lead to decreased healthcare costs, Batker said. They could also provide more direct benefits in the form of tourism, Batker said.

Maintenance for trails and parks typically pays out in unexpected ways because of the diffuse nature of the economic benefits, Batker said.

“If you put about $950,000 into parks and trail maintenance, you receive about 5-to-1 benefits of that investment,” he said. “That is a good investment. To put up a parks bond and offer people the chance to go in and tax themselves, that’s important particularly at this time, because you will get more jobs out of it. You will get more value for the citizens here. I think they’ll vote for it.”

Assembly members also discussed changing the way boundaries for the borough’s community councils are reviewed and formed.

Borough officials are required to review community council boundaries every three years by borough code, but the reviews have largely been ignored, planner Lauren Driscoll said. Some changes have been made based on petitions by individual community councils in the past, but officials haven’t performed the three-year reviews, Driscoll said.

Borough planning department staff have long discussed potentially changing the review period to sync up with the U.S. census, Driscoll said.

“One of the other things we’d like to look at and we’ve talked a little bit about, is having some kind of parameters about how community council boundaries are formed,” she said. “Right now there’s some loose language that talks about geographical identification, but we should really be considering those CDP’s, census-designated places.”

A census-designated place is a geographical unit constructed by the Census Bureau during the national census, according to the bureau’s web site. Examples include Meadow Lakes, Big Lake, and Talkeetna.

Some areas in the borough’s core area fall between the areas represented by the community councils, Driscoll said.

“The core area is going to have to take a little bit of extra TLC,” she said.

Then there’s the idea of the borough core area itself, which is widely and frequently used, but poorly defined, Driscoll said.

“We haven’t updated that boundary in a really long time,” she said. “I think most of us can attest to the fact that what used to be a few neighborhoods nestled between Palmer and Wasilla is now almost out to Meadow Lakes, headed down KGB, and we use that core area to really define our urban area of the borough.”

The assembly also introduced two measures slated for a public hearing at the April 4 assembly meeting: an amendment to the Port MacKenzie Master Plan; and a reauthorization of a portion of the $2.5 million emergency funding to fix a large hole in the docks at Port MacKenzie.

The assembly also convened in executive session to discuss financial impacts of potential litigation over insurance issues arising from damages sustained to the M/V Susitna. The assembly took no action following the executive session.

Contact reporter Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.