Borough banks on funding

PALMER — As the Mat-Su Borough continues the arduous process of convincing the federal government to pay for the last round of flooding, $2.5 million appears to be on the way here to help prevent another one.

Well, in the Butte anyway.

At Tuesday’s borough assembly meeting, staffers gave reports about what was happening with the cleanup. But probably the most optimistic talk came when borough manager John Moosey told assembly members about the $2.5 million state earmark to work on the Matanuska River.

“I believe this money is a miracle,” Moosey told the assembly.

He said he’d been trying to find a way to address the river’s recent course change that sent homes falling into its waters last fall, but just didn’t see the money coming. The earmark came at the last minute and will pay for a demonstration project to try to dredge gravel out of the river and change its course as well as home relocation assistance and depositing big rocks called riprap. It can be used once the money is distributed in July.

“I have an issue that I’m very concerned with, which is doing stuff that creates additional liability for us,” he said. “But, money is huge when you have none.”

Assemblyman Vern Halter, who represents Talkeetna among other communities, said that the original request had been for money to work on both the Matanuska and Talkeetna rivers.

“That’s the way it started, that’s not the way it finished,” borough mayor Larry DeVilbiss told Halter.

“It’s not over yet,” Halter replied.

As for the cleanup from the fall flooding and paying for the response, borough emergency manager Casey Cook told the assembly that the process of obtaining federal reimbursement is a 24-step process. For a lot of the projects seeking funding, the process is at step 16 — appealing decisions the Federal Emergency Management Administration made.

Some of those appeals are to the amount of money FEMA authorized. Some, though, are appeals of outright denials. Three projects denied include repairing dikes in the Butte that failed rather dramatically in the flooding, repairing dikes along the Talkeetna River and working on Talkeetna’s sewage lagoon.

Cook said that two of those are being appealed, the ones in Talkeetna. FEMA declared that it couldn’t determine if the river dikes there were damaged in the flood. He thinks that could be because they were covered in snow when FEMA visited. As for the lagoon, the assertion is that it wasn’t damaged in the flooding.

Cook said there’s a possibility for state money if the FEMA money falls through, or the borough could apply for money through programs aimed at avoiding future flooding problems rather than at cleaning up after past ones.

As for those dikes in the Butte, that decision is not being appealed because nobody claims to own those dikes — not the borough, not the state and not the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Dan Huddleston, who lives downstream of those dikes and whose view of the river contains a washed-out house, testified that he found a Corps of Engineers study on the borough’s own website stating that the borough owns the dikes.

“In some of the other studies that I’ve read recently they also gave them a cost analysis of what the yearly maintenance was going to cost them,” Huddleston said.

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