Borough smoothes out Seward Meridian problem

WASILLA — In an effort to smooth relations between the state and the Mat-Su Borough over the Seward Meridian Expansion, the borough passed a resolution indicating its intention to maintain the extended road if it’s ever punched through to Seldon Road.

The road, expanded in 2012 to four lanes over the previous two lanes, was the subject of something of a tug-of-war between the borough and state over maintenance.

Historically a borough-maintained road, the borough had offered to trade it with the state. If the state would maintain it, the borough offered, the borough would take some smaller local roads off the state’s hands. But the road service areas that would have to pay for that upkeep balked.

Those roads were in smaller road service areas whose budgets paled in comparison to the comparatively much larger budget of the RSA that includes Seward Meridian.

“We talked about that, tried that, the RSA boards didn’t like it,” said borough transportation planner Brad Sworts at an Oct. 15 assembly meeting. “That only left us with one option, take back the road and maintain it ourselves, which is what we did last winter.”

But as those negotiations dragged on, the state decided to, temporarily at least, shelve plans to push Seward-Meridian north. The state went so far as to actually take it out of its master infrastructure planning document, the Surface Transportation Improvement Plan (STIP).

“In the latest versions of the STIP, they’ve actually bumped the construction funding completely out of the picture, out beyond 2015,” Sworts told the assembly. “When I asked them how we could get that upgrade back into the mix they said that the only way that they knew was to get a resolution from the assembly saying that we support the upgrade and we will operate and maintain it just like we do the rest of the road now.”

So that’s what the assembly did Oct. 15, in a unanimously passed resolution stating the assembly’s intention to maintain that new stretch if it’s ever constructed.

Though a relatively short road — just two miles from its southern terminus at Old Matanuska Road to its northern terminus at Bogard Road — Seward Meridian Parkway is an important one for the borough.

Seward Meridian “is one of only three major arterial roads (Trunk Road, the SMP and Main Street/Wasilla-Fishhook) running north to south connecting three other east-west arterial roads,” reads a report attached to the Oct. 15 resolution. “The SMP carries more traffic than any other north-south road in the borough with the exception of the Glenn Highway.”

An average of 9,767 cars use the road between the Parks Highway and Palmer-Wasilla Highway each day. That number increases to 10,634 on the stretch between Bogard and Palmer-Wasilla Highway. The borough estimates that by 2025, that will have doubled to 21,000 cars per day.

The state estimates that extending the road to Seldon would cost $2.9 million in land purchases and $26.3 million for construction.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.