Borough OKs purchase for new Knik area school

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough Assembly has pin pointed the location for its next high school.

At the assembly’s Nov. 20 meeting, the body approved the purchase of 103.49 acres off Knik Knack Mud Shack Road. Negotiations with the seller landed on a $520,000 price for the parcel.

“It’s a combination high school-junior high to begin with, and then eventually it’ll be a standalone high school/standalone middle school,” assemblyman Jim Colver, who also sits on the school site selection committee, said in an interview Monday.

He said the process to pick the site was a long one.

“There’ve been other sites, but there have been issues. One site had a runway that was at 90 degrees to the school site so the flight path was right over the school, and that wasn’t going to work for safety purposes,” Colver said. “Another one the sellers didn’t want to sell.”

He said the final site also has some access issues.

The borough will have to build a road and extend utilities to the site, which is work that isn’t covered under the state’s school bond reimbursement program and, according to borough documents, could cost $1.32 million.

The borough, Colver said, will seek a grant from the Legislature to build the road.

There’s also the question a lot of people in the area are asking — wouldn’t this kind of traffic necessitate a stoplight on Knik-Goose Bay Road?

“What (the state’s Department of Transportation) said was that 2011 traffic counts of 2,171 vehicles per day didn’t trigger the signalization of the intersection unless traffic counts tripled to over 6,700 trips per day,” Colver said.

That, of course, could change. Population growth on Knik-Goose Bay Road is ongoing, after all.

Colver said he sees the architectural work designing the school going out to bid this winter and wrapping up a year later, at which time construction can start the following summer.

In the meantime, Colver said the borough should prepare itself.

“I hope we will have the adequate resources for staffing,” he said. “That’s always the thing that’s glossed over when people are crying for a new school site, they don’t pay attention to the operating costs.”

Each new site means new support staff, a new principal and more teachers. Plus additional operation and maintenance costs for the life of the facility.

“Elementary schools were a million dollar budget hit in 2010 dollars when I was on the school board,” he said.

And high schools are a much larger piece of the budget, he said.

Elsewhere in the borough, the site selection committee has wrapped up the process to acquire land for a replacement for Iditarod Elementary and is seeking a way to finance a new building for Fronteras Charter School.

The borough has land to build Fronteras on and is designing a building to house Valley Pathways based on the plans for Su Valley Jr./Sr. High School.

Look farther into the future, the borough also is seeking land on which to build a new elementary school in Palmer. That process has been bogged down by controversy as one of borough’s preferred sites is a parcel of farmland.

Colver said that school is years out, if only because the school district has made voters a promise — the $214 million in bonds passed in 2011 was presented to voters as a five-year package.

“The Palmer schools are at capacity or over, but there’s been this commitment (of) no more bonds for five years,” Colver said.

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