Big Lake incorporation effort moves steadily forward

BIG LAKE — The effort to carve a fourth city out of the Mat-Su Borough appears to be gaining steam.

“People kind of chuckled when we first talked about this. They didn’t think we could do it,” said Seth Kelley, a former president of the Big Lake Community Council who is helping lead the effort to incorporate the Big Lake area. “Now they’re seeing that we’re almost complete (and) it’s shaking a lot of different places up.”

Kelley said this effort to incorporate Big Lake as a city has been ongoing for 18 months. He and his fellow volunteers meet weekly to discuss and plan what the city might look like.

The biggest fear he’s heard so far is of new taxes. But actually, the organizers said they think they’ve found a way to incorporate without raising anyone’s taxes. If Big Lake incorporated, Kelley said, the city could run on just the tax money the borough currently collects for road services.

“We can pay for that contract, and from the admin costs that the borough pays for that contract we can pay for the city administration,” Kelley said.

He said he’s not promising big changes.

“It’s not that we’re saying we can fix every road in Big Lake the first year, that there’s this big change that’s going to happen,” Kelley said. “It’s just that we don’t have to share our concerns or our priorities with everybody else in the borough.”

He also said he’s well aware of past efforts at incorporation that have failed. Frontiersman archives contain mentions of at least two previous unsuccessful attempts to incorporate the Big Lake area. Kelley said there might have been a third. Just about once every decade the idea is considered.

“I think it’s very different. It’s a very different group of people trying to get this to happen,” Kelley said. “Big Lake has always been in a position where it should have incorporated.”

The area has its own culture and its own downtown-type central business area, he said.

Kelley said this attempt is different, in that Big Lake is staring down a bunch of large projects with big implications for its future. The rail extension to Port MacKenzie will skirt Big Lake. Traffic coming off a Knik Arm bridge — if one is ever built — will likely run through or very close to the city. And, unlike in the past, these projects aren’t just speculation or the dreams of politicians.

“You can no longer sit there and say ‘they said that would happen before and it never happened,’” Kelley said. “All the projects are happening as we speak.”

Big Lake’s only voice now is through a single Mat-Su Borough assemblyman; further, that assemblyman’s district also includes Knik, the origin of all that traffic and a community with vastly different interests than Big Lake.

The hope is that a city council in Big Lake with seven council members would be able to speak with a louder voice on topics that impact the community.

The incorporation effort has received the endorsement of both the Big Lake Community Council and Big Lake Chamber of Commerce.

“What they’ve really done is that they’ve supported our intent,” Kelley said.

Volunteers are working to finalize a petition that will have to circulate to get the state’s Boundary Commission to evaluate the case for incorporation. Once the petition is finalized, volunteers will gather signatures. Then the Boundary Commission process takes about a year. Once it’s done, the idea will have to go to a vote of the people, which means it might have to wait a few more months until there’s an election.

But even now in its infancy, Kelley said the process has been exceedingly positive.

“It’s bringing people together,” he said. “Whether they’re for or against it, people are talking to their neighbors about it.”

The idea of incorporating Big Lake came it to a vote in May 1974 and passed by a vote of 76-65. However, 11 Big Lake voters filed a lawsuit against the state of Alaska and Lt. Gov. Red Boucher saying 14 ballots should be tossed on the grounds of non-residency.

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