Borough nears a first-class crossroads

We’ve lately pondered a facet of local government we never took much notice of before; the Mat-Su Borough was formed as a “second-class borough.”

We don’t mean that as a disparaging remark; rather, we mean that, by state law, the Mat-Su has been incorporated as a second-class borough. The distinction between classifying a borough as second-class or first-class is important for a number of reasons.

One difference that his risen to the top recently is the way second-class borough interacts with service areas.

At the last Mat-Su Borough Assembly meeting, Assemblyman Jim Colver seemed somewhat frustrated by discussions about whether to annex certain roads into service areas. As long as the Mat-Su is a second-class borough, he said, annexation is going to be the way the borough begins maintenance on new roads.

According to state law, a first-class borough can take on any power not strictly prohibited by law. A second-class borough, however, can only take on a certain short list of powers. Providing road service and fire service are a couple of “powers” that are not on that list. To get road service in a second-class borough, residents need to organize themselves into road service areas, carving the borough up into regions served by their own service area boards and spending their own locally collected taxes.

It’s a system that can lead to headaches for borough staff and residents.

Last week, the headache was over the borough’s annexation into a local road service area of a road leading to a ski area. There are currently no taxpayers on that road. The assembly decided to annex it into an existing service area, essentially forcing the maintenance of that road onto the taxpayers within that service area. It also dilutes, to whatever small degree, the taxes paid to maintain all roads within the service area.

Such a system hardly seems fair.

It also seems unfair that someone in Willow has to pay more in taxes than someone in Wasilla because a small fire department is more costly to run than a large one and there are fewer neighbors to shoulder the burden.

First-class municipalities, like the Municipality of Anchorage, can have things like road maintenance departments and professional, full-time fire departments paid for in ways that spread the tax burden more evenly. Are we wrong to envy that equity?

Towns and municipalities, like children and puppies, grow and move through stages of development. The Municipality of Anchorage, which doesn’t have to bother with service areas, is in a state of development our borough has not yet entered.

We wonder what will be the driving force behind the Mat-Su evolving into a first-class borough. Will it be when maintenance of major roads is foisted on overburdened taxpayers in various service areas? Will it be firefighters forced to cut their hours to make up for a reclassification under the state’s retirement system?

Are we ready for a first-class Mat-Su Borough? Perhaps not at the moment, but as the borough matures, it’s clear that’s where this crossroads will eventually lead us.