Borough mulls growth potential

PALMER — Look into your crystal ball at what the Mat-Su Borough will look like if a Knik Arm bridge is built. When Point MacKenzie is a mere 2 miles from downtown Anchorage, people are going to want to live there.

Is it reasonable to think that Point MacKenzie — now mostly farms, industry and lots of raw land, with little in the way of infrastructure — could handle the kind of population density in an Anchorage suburb? Could that even happen?

“Yes, it could happen,” said Lauren Driscoll, the borough’s head of planning.

One of the lynchpins, she said, is a recent development in wastewater treatment. Without some kind of a centralized system for the treatment of wastewater, housing can’t get much more dense than one-acre lots, she said. One-acre lots are much more Valley-like than what can be found in Anchorage.

But it would seem a stretch to imagine a city system — like the ones in Wasilla or Palmer — in that area.

Driscoll said that relatively recently, technology has been developed to bridge the gap between small-scale, single-neighborhood systems and large-scale city systems.

“If you’ve got the right kind of entity to step up and put those in, you can reach some of the densities that (the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority) was predicting,” Driscoll said, referencing projections the authority in charge of building the bridge has made for population growth in the area once the span is complete.

At the borough, looking at this question of just how dense the area could get has led planners to draw lines on the map. By taking into account where the large tracts of developable land are and where existing communities might absorb some of that new population, the borough has come up with six town sites it predicts could become dense enough to need those kinds of services.

Two of them are existing communities (Big Lake and Settler’s Bay), three are completely theoretical (Knik-Ahtnu Village, Fish Creek and Kashwitna Plains) and one the borough is already looking at planning — Point MacKenzie.

Driscoll stressed that the borough isn’t looking to plan any of the communities besides Point MacKenzie. It’s just a what-if scenario to show how that kind of growth is plausible.

“The end product that we want would kind of help people see this vision for us,” Driscoll said. It’s a tool they could bring to Juneau when the Legislature is in session “to say, you know, here’s the general area, here’s how it could be broken up.”

In addition to the wastewater issues, the study takes into account roads. A lot of people, when confronted with the number of roads that would be needed to serve that kind of population, balk at the price tag, Driscoll said.

But it’s feasible to think roads could be built over the course of five to 10 years with a mixture of state, federal and local dollars. When you break it up like that, the price tag isn’t as daunting. No single entity, neither the state nor the borough, has to swallow the entire cost in a single budget cycle.

“It’s coming in a phased budgeted way,” she said.

The Point MacKenzie town site, meanwhile, is all on borough land and thus the borough assembly has made clear it is more comfortable with things it usually opposes — zoning for one. It’s a town site Driscoll said the borough views as a growing area even if the bridge never becomes a reality. It’s close to both Port MacKenzie and the Goose Creek Correctional Center.

“Even with the port and the prison growing minus the bridge, you’ve got families, you’ve got workers for the prison,” Driscoll said.

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