Borough recovers stolen fee station

BUTTE — In the annals of crime this one’s a head-scratcher:

Either Sunday or Monday someone pulled a fee collection pipe out of the ground in the Jim Creek Recreation Area. That might seem like an easy task, until you find out that those pipes are connected to 55-gallon drums filled with concrete, weighing, most would estimate, upwards of 900 pounds.

And, considering that they’re emptied daily and this one in particular was empty when it got stolen, the whole thing starts to seem kind of brainless.

“There’s a whole lot of effort for not a lot of reward,” said Mat-Su Borough Recreation and Library Manager Hugh Leslie.

After it was yanked from the ground, Leslie said, it was missing for a couple of days. But then, on Wednesday, a couple of his parks workers went up there to put in a new one.

“They said, ‘I don’t think this thing was put in a trailer I think they dragged it down the road.’ I said, ‘why do you think that?’ And they said, ‘look over here, you can see where there were bounce marks where this thing had bounced across the pavement,” Leslie recalled.

Leslie said he figured he’d just follow that trail.

“This thing is leaving gouge marks down the road,” he said. “Maybe this will lead me somewhere.”

He said he drove up Butte Airmen Road and up a trail — he was using his personal vehicle, not trail riding in a borough rig — and finally looked up a cross trail and spotted something.

“I could see the bottom of a 55-gallon drum and I figured it was either a bear bait can or it was the drum,” he said.

Turns out it was his fee pole. Whoever tied a chain around it and pulled it out of the ground had abandoned it. Leslie said he can’t tell if they gave up and unhooked it or if the chain broke.

The whole thing is really kind of baffling. But for a lot of people on social media it was more than that. It was upsetting.

“These are the kind of idiots who make it bad for everyone else, and this is the reason we get charged ridiculous amounts to do anything anymore, and this is why everything is being banned because of morons who have nothing better to do with their time than to vandalize things,” read one comment on the Mat-Su Borough’s Facebook post alerting people to the theft.

Others actually seemed supportive of the thieves, saying they don’t think they should have to pay to use the borough’s parking lot there.

Leslie said that, by and large, the motorized recreation community was supportive of the borough.

“There’s been a great outpouring of support from the community on social media,” he said.

The vandalism comes at kind of an inconvenient time for the borough. The borough assembly this year set aside $250,000 to help build improvements to the area to bolster the off-road community.

Early meetings on the project suggested:

-Improving the parking area by leveling it out and putting in better gravel to keep the dust down

-Fixing the approaches to the parking area so they’re not so rough on vehicles.

-Building a track for beginners to learn to ride ATVs

-Building a track, maybe, for racing remote controlled cars.

“With the fact that we’re making this big investment out there, it’s a tough time for something like this to happen but we’re meeting with the stakeholders tonight,” he said. “We’re going to keep going.”

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