Big Lake flirts with incorporation

BIG LAKE — Staring down a pair of very large construction projects, some Big Lake residents are looking at the option of maybe incorporating a new city.

“Big Lake is sitting right in the middle of huge transportation projects and we also don’t want to have a giant highway come through the center of town and not have any say,” said Seth Kelley, Big Lake Community Council President.

“We don’t want to raise taxes and we don’t want to have this heavy-handed government thing, but we do want to have a say in what happens.”

He said the idea is in its most nascent stages. He’s formed a committee to look at it. And there has been some research into what it would take and what the state’s boundary commission would view as prerequisites for incorporation.

Kelley said he’s also looked at tax rolls. The idea, he said, is to see what’s feasible.

“If we just keep the same property taxes with no sales tax, what does the budget look like?” he said was his main question in looking through the tax rolls.

Ina Mueller is a member of Kelley’s committee. She said the committee is meeting Thursday at 6 p.m. at the Big Lake Library.

“This meeting that we are having is completely just an exploratory meeting. We are just trying to put our finger on the pulse of the community,” she said. “Is this the road we want to head down?”

Both Mueller and Kelley said the reason this is coming up now has to do with big construction projects. Port MacKenzie is poised to expand. With that comes traffic, a lot of which will likely be headed through Big Lake. There are plans to build a route from the port to the Parks Highway, possibly by upgrading Burma Road and South Big Lake Road.

That concerns a lot of Big Lake residents, since traffic could potentially move right through what residents consider to be their downtown area.

The other big construction project in the area would bring railroad tracks from the main Alaska Railroad line past the north side of Big Lake to Port MacKenzie.

Incorporating a city might give Big Lake a more powerful voice on these issues.

“If Big Lake doesn’t stand up together and make our wishes known we are not going to have a say-so and it will be done for us,” Mueller said.

But, Kelley said, there might be a better way to get that voice. The community council is also looking at the possibility of using the borough’s process to create some kind of special use district. A special use district is one of the borough’s tools to guide development. A number are already in place. There’s one that guides development at the port and another that protects dog mushing trails in the Knik area.

The confluence of big projects led the community council late last year to successfully suggest to the area’s borough assemblyperson, Cindy Bettine, that funding for a study of project impacts be included in the borough’s yearly list of projects seeking funding with the state Legislature.

Bettine said that process required her to convince her colleagues such a thing was a good idea.

“If they were a city they would put that on their priorities, send it on to Juneau and that would be that,” Bettine said.

Going the borough route also means the project is mixed in with other borough projects. When the governor goes to make his vetoes, he might choose to strike the impact study with the idea the borough would still be getting some money, if not all the money requested.

“If you were a city he’d be looking at it as a separate entity,” Bettine said.

Bettine said she doesn’t have a big role to play in the incorporation discussion. Whenever one of her constituents has asked her about the possibility she has suggested forming a committee like the one Kelley has now created. But she can understand where residents are coming from.

“We are poised for growth,” Bettine said. And more than that, Big Lake has kind of come to resemble a city in a lot of ways, with the post office, grocery store, fire station and library all in a relatively compact area. “We have everything, really, that Palmer and Wasilla has.”

Between that and some pretty high-value homes, Big Lake has a lot going for it in terms of a possible move to incorporate.

But both Kelley and Mueller said that where the process is now they’re just trying to gauge public opinion. Do people in Big Lake want to do this or are they dead set against it? Mueller said she’s not sure what to expect at Thursday’s meeting.

“We all may be met with .22s and tomatoes at the meeting, and if that’s the case then we’ve got our answer,” she said.

But, so far at least, there hasn’t been a lot of that.

”We’ve been surprised at the degree of interest that is out there in terms of finding out more information.”

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