Big Lake to study local impacts from port, bridge

BIG LAKE — Community members nervously eyeing development to their south that’s going to need to connect to the Parks Highway to the north will have their chance to speak up this evening.

In 2010, the Mat-Su Borough requested — and in 2011 received — $250,000 in state money to conduct a community impact assessment looking at how things like Port MacKenzie development and the Knik Arm Bridge will impact Big Lake.

Cindy Bettine represented the area on the borough assembly when the money came through. She said that her neighbors are mostly very pro-development and pro-Port MacKenzie.

But Big Lake also has a downtown area that might not fare well with increased traffic. It also has some dangerous and rough roads — the windy South Big Lake Road, the unpaved and at times impassible Burma Road — between downtown and the port.

“They didn’t want to stop any development, they just wanted the borough to think in terms of really planning in advance,” Bettine said of her neighbors.

So the impact assessment is an attempt to figure out what the alternatives are, to figure out how to link the port and highway without wrecking Big Lake.

But this first meeting isn’t being called to choose a route. Indeed, the impact assessment isn’t an attempt to choose a route either.

It’s an attempt to gather information. Tonight’s meeting is the first piece of that process; laying out what’s already been studied and where the impact assessment goes from here.

“It’s a meeting where people can see that the community impact assessment is first looking at all the other studies and it’s going to show the people that,” Bettine said.

The assessment isn’t going to examine just one thing. It’s not going to look at just what the cheapest route is, what route will have the least impact on land or business, she said. It’s going to look at all of those.

“It takes social and economic impacts into consideration which, in my view, is something that should be done more often,” Bettine said.

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