Borough opts to remain in natural gas game

PALMER — A Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman’s attempts to get the borough out of the natural gas business failed to get any support.

The borough has made big changes recently to what it calls natural gas local improvement districts. It used to be that a majority, even a slim majority, of homeowners could force their neighbors into a district and pay for the service even if they didn’t want it.

In April, the borough successfully put together an LID in Lazy Mountain that didn’t force anyone to join. The so-called “non-contiguous” LID process seems to have garnered interest in Houston and Big Lake.

But, on May 20, Assemblyman Vern Halter proposed doing away with gas LIDs altogether.

“I just think it’s time for the borough to step aside and let Enstar and the private property owners take over,” Halter said.

But the other assemblymen weren’t biting.

Assemblyman Darcie Salmon proposed a change that would do away with LIDs like Halter wanted, but only in the area of the borough north of the city of Houston.

“Are you serious?” Mayor Larry DeVilbiss asked Salmon.

Salmon stood by the change.

“It’s a point of disdain that this ordinance is before us,” he said. “Let me make it even more silly.”

The change eventually failed, but not before Halter got a word in about it.

“I don’t like the amendment. It was mean-spirited,” he told DeVilbiss. “You should have never accepted it.”

On a more serious note, Salmon pointed out that just having a gas line running in front of your property, even if you’re not hooked in, raises the value of the land significantly. As a man who has sold thousands of homes in the Valley, Salmon said that 80 percent of his customers won’t even look at a property that doesn’t have gas.

Assemblyman Jim Sykes asked staff how much of their time LIDs eat up. Finance director Tammy Clayton said that, actually, all the staff time dedicated to gas LIDs is rolled into the fees the borough charges the people setting them up.

“The borough doesn’t incur any costs in an LID. It’s all passed on to the property owners,” she said.

Clayton also said that the thing the borough can do that the natural gas company can’t, without a change to state rules, is set up the funding mechanism to build the lines. The borough puts liens on each of the property owners participating in the deal and there’s a mechanism to repay it.

Assemblyman Jim Colver called Halter’s proposed change a “job killer.”

“We are the leader in the state in housing, and that is driven primarily by access to Anchorage, developable land, water, utilities and natural gas,” he said. “The high cost of heating fuels in Alaska along the Richardson Highway, Valdez, virtually any community without natural gas, is killing our economy.”

Just before casting the lone vote in support of the change, Halter said that his gripe with the non-contiguous LIDs is that neighbors that opt out can sign up years later and avoid shouldering the startup costs.

“I just don’t like the fact that now you’ve got non-contiguous and people in that same subdivision are going to buy right back in and get a cheaper deal than their neighbors,” he said.

Halter also said he believes the barriers to Enstar taking this on were not insurmountable.

“I don’t buy this thing that Enstar can’t get involved and get together with people and with the banks and set this up,” he said. “They just don’t want to because this is a sweetheart deal.”

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