Borough OKs headquarters expansion

PALMER — Despite vocal reservations from a couple of its members, the Mat-Su Borough Assembly approved $5 million to expand borough headquarters.

With that money, the borough intends to fill in the courtyard on the building’s east end between the north and south wings. In that additional space will be meeting rooms and offices for the assembly, administration, borough attorney and borough clerk.

Borough officials have long maintained that the current building is inadequate, with heating and ventilation problems and staff wedged into a maze of tiny workspaces.

In an assembly meeting May 15, assemblymen Ron Arvin and Steve Colligan expressed much the same reservations about the plan.

“This is a good project. It’s warranted for the individuals working in the building. It’s warranted for participation, but I want to remind everybody: please look at the numbers,” Arvin said. “We may reject for our own financial survival, accepting of the ferry. If we do that we may have a $23 million liability of which we have $8 million in the bank.”

Arvin was referring to the M/V Susitna, an ice-breaking ferry built as a naval prototype in Ketchikan. Borough officials have been worried for months about the ship. Just keeping it at the dock costs tens of thousands of dollars. There is no place to land it in either Anchorage or Point MacKenzie, and therefore the route it was planned for is a no-go.

But to back out now, the borough would have to repay $23 million in federal grants it has already received to set up a ferry system.

“I feel for the staff and other things, but seeing the other burning tires we have around our necks that past assemblies left us with and the pending lawsuit over the rail extension, I’d like to see some of that resolved first,” Colligan said, referencing a lawsuit that began last week in federal district court filed by a trio of environmental groups — Alaska Survival, the Sierra Club and Cook Inletkeeper, which are seeking to halt borough plans to bring rail service to Port MacKenzie.

But Assemblyman Jim Colver pointed out that the borough has the money to do this project now after many years of waiting, and that the money comes from unused funds in other accounts.

Since that money is already on the books, Colver said, the borough can solve its space issues with “no net impact to the tax rolls. This is for the public so they have a decent meeting space.”

Warren Keogh said that he became an assemblyman, in part, to address the borough’s administration building problem.

“I have to say one of the reasons that I wound up running for office is that on some issues in the past this place has been packed, we had people up and down the stairway and in the parking lot,” he said.

Assemblyman Vern Halter said that he supports it as well, despite the fact that such a move would likely kill hopes of getting a borough office building closer to where he lives.

“If anybody on this assembly should oppose this it should be somebody from Talkeetna,” Halter said.

Borough manager John Moosey told the assembly that waiting for the ferry issue to clear up would jeopardize a very cost-effective bid that gives the borough more in the building than officials thought they could get for the amount of money there is to spend.

The borough plans to break ground on the addition this summer and move in sometime around December 2013.

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