Assembly puts off ferry decisions

PALMER — A special meeting held Tuesday to talk about options for the M/V Susitna ended with the Mat-Su Borough Assembly scheduling another meeting.

“We’ve asked staff to put together some additional information because we could not arrive at a conclusion without knowing some additional details and that will be the basis of the meeting on (August) 21st,” said assemblyman Ron Arvin, who chaired the meeting in his role as deputy mayor.

The meeting came in the wake of a letter the borough received from the Federal Transit Administration demanding that the borough repay $12.3 million in grants it received to study landings for the military prototype vessel, to outfit it to handle civilians and cars, and to build a terminal for ferry traffic at Port MacKenzie.

The bulk of Tuesday’s meeting — 45 minutes of its hour-long run time, according to Radio Free Palmer, which had a person there recording it — was spent behind closed doors, in what’s called an executive session, though not every assemblyman agreed on going behind closed doors.

“I question whether or not we actually need one,” said assemblyman Jim Sykes, referring to the executive session. “If we are contemplating litigation or a litigation strategy I can see the need for it.”

Legal issues could form one part of the discussion, warranting an executive session, said assemblyman Steve Colligan.

“It is my intent to have some strong discussion, know what our options are, and formulate some legal plan,” he said.

Statutes allow the assembly to meet behind closed doors to have only a handful of different types of discussions, including legal issues.

Arvin pointed out that public discussion could potentially have adverse financial impacts to the borough, another subject eligible for closed doors.

“We’re facing a $12-million question and how that is dispensed with or dealt with the result of that action will have an adverse effect,” Arvin said. “If we get advice from the attorney that the topics of discussion, should they evolve in a certain way, should be in front of the public, we will come back into the public purview.”

In addition to Arvin, two members of the assembly also spoke.

“I think that the public should at least be able to know what our potential liability would be if we had to pay the full bill,” Sykes said. “I hope we can work our way out of this and never have to pay this. But I think we should know what that number is and if we did have to pay where that money would come from and I think that should all be public information.”

He asked borough staff to bring those figures to the Aug. 21 meeting.

Assemblyman Vern Halter said the whole ferry problem “irks me to no end.”

“The very first time I heard about this ferry when I sat on this assembly 5 years ago I was always quite skeptical about the ability to perform and it seems like we’re locked into a situation where we can’t perform because we can’t take the ferry across to another city, which just has not been very cooperative in letting us have a landing,” he said. “One good thing is that we do have a nice building out there at the terminal that’s been built and obviously we’re getting benefit from that so that’s kind of a fair deal to me but the rest of it bothers me.”

News that the FTA wanted the money returned wasn’t surprising, said Assemblyman Matthew Beck.

“This is a difficult situation and the writing has been on the wall for quite some time that something like this was going to come due sooner or later and I look forward to working through this,” he said.

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