Back to the drawing board

PALMER — There were four options on the table Tuesday, but the city council somehow managed to choose option five — spend some time developing a vision for the Matanuska Maid block before spending $3 million to buy it.

The purchase of the property has been an ongoing process for two years now, having won approval at the ballot box in 2010. Since then, the city has entered into negotiations with the various owners and found some don’t want to sell and some want more money than appraisers say the property is worth.

For instance, one of the properties belongs to the state’s Agricultural Revolving Loan Fund.

“ARLF is basically a lending bank,” said Richard Best, a city councilman who is representing the council in the land negotiations. “They kind of see it like a bank and that’s an asset.”

As such, the ARLF wasn’t amenable to a land-swap and is standing firm on its asking price of more than $900,000.

“That, in conjunction with a couple of the other properties that currently have activity happening on them, it was going to put us over the $3 million threshold that the voters had approved,” Best said.

The city administration came to the council with four options — buy all the land, buy just the ARLF property (possibly using state grant money), buy the parcels where sales will be easiest to negotiate, or stop altogether.

As the meeting progressed, Best said he narrowed the list for the “buy some of them” option to two. Both border parcels with past usages that has the council worried about potential contamination.

The council, he said, decided to hold off on any purchases. Instead, it wants to hold some meetings to gather public input on what kind of things residents would like to see built there if the city buys the property.

He said he understands what the council is getting at, even if he doesn’t quite agree.

“There was robust, diverse discussions. Nothing was personal. Everybody is trying to have a better understanding of it,” Best said Tuesday.

But then, it’s not the most elegant of processes and Best said he worries about getting bogged down.

“We’re two years into this, two years plus, and it just seems like it’s taking a long time,” he said.

He noted that the idea is to basically do a “downtown visioning effort.” Those kinds of efforts aren’t foreign to Palmer.

“There’s been many of these. That’s kind of my problem with us going forward with this right now,” he said. “One thing about the Mat-Su is we do not lack in opinions. … It could be a three-month discussion, it could be a three-year discussion.”

He said he still believes there’s interest from the council in buying those properties. He worries that one parcel owner, the Palmer Arts Council, might feel the city isn’t interested, but hopes he can make clear that’s not the case.

Meanwhile, he’s pretty well convinced that the contaminated parcel isn’t going to get cleaned up without help from the city, the Mat-Su Borough and possibly the state. And he hopes at some point to do some testing there.

“It’s at that point (if) the city backs out, at least those property owners now know definitively what is on there,” he said.

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