Back to starting line for borough racetrack regs

PALMER — Next month the Mat-Su Borough will start the process of revisiting a section of code that sparked months of fighting the last time it came up — racetrack regulations.

“The entire racetrack ordinance is a direct result of Northstar (Speedway) and was written as a knee-jerk reaction to that,” said Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman Darcie Salmon, who has introduced a raft of changes to the ordinance that the borough Planning Commission will take up Dec. 16.

He said the regulations as currently written apply to all racing, even one-time or very infrequent races.

“It would be like having a rock concert at the Palmer fairgrounds. If you’ve got Grand Funk out there, they’re not daily, they’re not nightly and the people want them, so I guess if the people want them, being as it’s not an issue to me personally, I’d bring the issue forward for discussion,” Salmon said.

The changes exempt nonprofits from the regulations and throw out most of the more technical regulations regarding monitoring noise and providing equipment to do so.

Michelle Church, who served a term on the assembly after coming to politics by way of the fight over the now closed Northstar Speedway, said she will likely come out for the debate on this one. She said a lot of people who talk about attracting people to invest, or live, in the Valley say the borough needs to work on its reputation.

“The borough needs to rebrand itself as not the ‘Mad Zoo,’ and this totally flies in the face of that,” she said.

She said the speedway was a great example. Soon after it opened, the borough’s assessment of her own property went down 40 percent. One homeowner ended up filing a lawsuit against the speedway after seeing a $220,000 house drop to just $40,000 in value.

“The Mat-Su Valley wants to compete with Anchorage, but it’s basically if you want your investments to be secure don’t make those investments in the Mat-Su Borough,” she said.

But Bill Haller, the planning commissioner working most closely on this, said that in his mind the whole reason for redoing the regulations is to make sure that the racing activity that already goes on in Big Lake is legal. Right now it is not.

“They’ve been going on for 20-some years and they’re a huge part of the economic factor for Big Lake,” Haller said. “And they’re all illegal, every single one of them, under the racetrack regs.”

He said other changes to the noise parts of the code were to end discrimination against racetracks.

“It’s really challenging when you have different sets of rules for different entities. They don’t make the construction companies that run gravel pits go out and buy monitoring equipment,” he said.

He also explained a change to lighting requirements for racetracks.

“They took out the deal about the lights because the racetracks, the regular racetracks, can only operate in the summer and they can’t operate past 10 o’clock,” he said. “Why are you making them install a $100,000 lighting system when they can’t operate when it’s dark?”

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