Bogard plan still holding

MAT-SU — Area homeowners waiting on the edge of their seats for the Mat-Su Borough to decide the route of a proposed Bogard Road extension will have to wait a little longer.

Nine days to be exact.

The borough assembly, in a meeting held Thursday at Colony High School in order to accommodate crowds that had filled to overflowing previous meetings on the topic, voted down all three possible routes to extend the road to Palmer. It plans to revisit the issue March 18.

Borough planner Brad Swortz had come to the meeting to lay out the possible paths for the road — the red route, yellow route and a variation of the yellow route dubbed the blue route.

The Palmer-Wasilla Highway is dangerously overcrowded with 17,000 cars — double the acceptable capacity of a two-lane road — traveling the road each day, Swortz said. Borough staff projects the Bogard extension would pull between 6,000 and 8,500 cars off the Palmer-Wasilla Highway each day.

Swortz, noting that from 1977 to 2005 that stretch of highway saw 18.1 fatalities or major injuries per mile, spoke of a head-on collision he witnessed in which a grandmother, her daughter and two granddaughters were pushed into the oncoming lane of traffic while trying to turn left off the highway.

“I don’t want to witness that kind of thing over and over,” Swortz said. “I think it’s our duty to tackle that problem.”

But safety was also on the minds of many opposed to some of the routes proposed for the extension.

Many took note that the red route, the southern and most direct of the three, would be a straight line — some called it a “drag strip” — between Colony and Palmer high schools.

“It’s ironic that the red route is called the red route, because it’s going to have schoolchildren’s blood all over it,” Jay Clifford said.

A number of community members testified that subdivisions close to the proposed routes were filled with children.

“If a pedestrian is struck by a vehicle I can tell you who’s going to win,” said surgeon Brad Taylor, who spoke as a “concerned member of the medical community and concerned parent of school-age children.”

And then there are the farms.

“My family’s farm is basically in all the proposed routes,” Bill Wiederkehr said,

The yellow, northerly route bisects his farm. The blue, which follows the yellow’s path with the exception of taking a northerly arc, and red were less intrusive. Wiederkehr said he supports the Borough Planning Commission’s recommendation that the road not be built. The planning commission chose not to recommend a route to the borough but did not recommend no road be build.

Citing a Borough mandate to “produce a transportation system that will enhance the quality of life,” Wiederkehr said, to much applause, “This road won’t do this. It’ll probably only enhance more development.”

The blue route would run through a handful of farms, including Tracy Moffit’s. Asked how he felt about the blue route, Moffit said he wasn’t sure how much help he could be to the assembly.

“I’m not thrilled with it. I’m not thrilled with the yellow and I’m not thrilled with the red,” he said.

Mayor Curt Menard took two informal raise-of-hands polls. The majority of the room, it turned out, was in favor of a no-build option. And his question of whether the Borough should just focus on fixing existing roads drew about half as many hands and raucous applause.

Not everyone was opposed to building a road, however. Palmer City Manager Bill Allen spoke in favor of the red route as it would help ease congestion in Palmer, offers easier connections to existing roads and would allow for a traffic signal at the entrance to Palmer High School.

A number of folks echoed Swortz’s statements at the start of the meeting that no route is perfect. Others urged the Borough to listen to the experts it hired and go with the red route.

Bill Klebesadel, noting the disparity between the estimated costs to expand the Palmer-Wasilla Highway into four lanes and to build the Bogard extension, said, “If the Legislature approved $200 million for a road when a $35 million route was available, I’d vote them out of office.”

According to Swortz, the extension project has $12 million in state money dedicated to it. That will go toward design and buying up homes and lots in the path of the selected route. The full cost of the project has not yet been funded.

Diverting the money from the project to something else as many had proposed would require authorization from the state and involve a process lasting six months to a year, Swortz estimated.

After the public had its turn Thursday, Michelle Church echoed a lot of the sentiments expressed when she said people are tired of waiting to see where the road will go and want something to be done about the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

Assemblywoman Lynne Woods backed her up.

“It’s tough to make this decision, but the idea that this has to go on for much longer doesn’t seem practical to me,” Woods said.

When it came time to vote, the blue route failed first, to cheers from the section of the theater holding residents from Palamino Estates. Earlier in the meeting one of them, Ken Loggins, testified the road would destroy that subdivision.

The yellow and red both split the assembly 3-3.

Menard, realizing his vote on the yellow route could break the tie, sighed and covered his face with his hand.

“Oh! There’s some pressure,” an audience member shouted. Menard laughed.

“I’m going to support at this time a no-build option,” he eventually said.

In the end, he declined to break the tie, and the route failed. He took the same action on the red route.

The issue will be revisited at the March 18 assembly meeting at 6 p.m. at the Palmer Train Depot.

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