Borough to decide community council expansion issue

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough assembly is set to take up anew tonight a move to allow community councils to expand their memberships to include property owners who live elsewhere.

Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss originally brought the idea to the assembly late last year. The ordinance would let individual community councils decide if non-resident landowners should be allowed status as full voting members of a council.

Corporate landowners could designate someone to attend on their behalf. Owners of multiple properties would get just one membership.

DeVilbiss noted at the time that the current arrangement would exclude the owner of, say, a large apartment complex, but include all of his many tenants.

The ordinance was delayed in December 2011 to give the community councils more time to discuss the proposal and weigh in.

“The sense I’ve gotten is that our more remote community councils we’ve had requests in the past, from Lake Louise for instance, there’s a lot of non-resident property owners there,” DeVilbiss said at the time. “Chickaloon kind of flirts with that issue to some degree with their existing bylaws, but I think the more remote and the less populated the community council areas the more need there might be for allowing this.”

Also on tonight’s agenda is a resolution that would establish a commission to advise the assembly on the much-discussed mega-project to build a hydroelectric dam on the Susitna River.

The task force would contain seven members: the chair of the Matanuska-Susitna Fish and Wildlife Commission — formerly the Mayor’s Blue Ribbon Sportsmen’s Committee — or his designee, the borough manager or his designee, a community member put forth by the Talkeetna Community Council (the closest borough community to the dam site), the public works director or her designee, a tourism representative put forward by the Mat-Su Convention and Visitors Bureau, a member of the borough’s planning commission, and one at-large member.

Further on tonight’s agenda, the borough will formally accept a massive amount of borrowed money for bonds sold at the end of last month. The voters approved the Mat-Su Borough School District’s five-year, $214 million spending plan at the ballot box last year.

Projects listed in this first $100 million batch of bonds include $50 million for a new middle/high school in the Knik-Goose Bay Road area, $10 million for a new Mat-Su Day School, $19.5 million for a new Valley Pathways school and $8 million worth of athletic fields, among other things.