Butte buyout moves ahead

BUTTE — The first in a series of applications for money to buy out residents in flood and erosion-stricken areas of the community has been submitted, officials said.

Mat-Su Borough officials had submitted four applications for five properties, including a property containing a large pond in the often-stricken Mile 13 to 15 area along the Old Glenn Highway. Another application also was submitted for a property in Sutton, near where Ed Musial can watch the approaching Mat through his back screen door.

A meeting is planned at 7 p.m., Nov. 13 at the Butte Fire Station to update local residents about the buyout program.

Officials say they expect decisions on eligibility for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program to be returned by January 2015. The first two properties were submitted earlier this month. And an additional three properties are prepared for a second round of applications later this year, officials said.

The program is a 75 percent match, meaning borough funds would stretch farther, said assembly member Jim Sykes.

In all, officials were examining all potential sources of grant funding. However, not all sources were necessarily a good fit, said borough emergency manager Casey Cook.

Federal guidelines dictate that residents are paid fair market value for their properties. A commonly heard complaint about fair market value is that the river has eaten too much land and destroyed too much property for some property owners to ever recoup their losses. In some cases, now inundated or threatened properties abut the main channel of the river where they had been far away in years past. In other cases, houses or buildings have disappeared into the water.

“It will be tied to the fair market value as of 2012,” Cook said. “The land value will be based on before September 2012.

Those same federal guidelines dictate that no permanent structures can be constructed on lands purchased in a buyout, according to Cook. Borough officials are inventorying the affected lands with an eye toward those that would be better for purchase by the Department of Transportation Right-of-Way acquisition program, which would allow them to be used to protect the Old Glenn Highway from the encroaching river, and also would allow for the construction of revetments and other permanent structures to protect the highway, Cook said.

In the event of large-scale federal buyouts, the borough may have to make lemonade, Cook said.

“It doesn’t have to revert back to its natural state,” he said. “You could build soccer fields, or trails, you could build an outhouse type of thing, but you couldn’t build a parking lot. You just couldn’t build any permanent structures.”

Many of the grants are competitive nationally, meaning that after borough officials put out a request for proposal on grant-writing firms, they were more likely to consider a firm with success winning national grants. They eventually settled on Anchorage-based Boutet Company, said Michelle Olson, a licensing technician with the borough.

“We didn’t put a whole lot of weight on pricing, because we were concerned more about quality,” she said. “These are national competitive grants. We looked at qualification, history, things like that. We had a budget number to work with and they knew that going in.”

Potential grant funding for a buyout measured in the thousands, and borough officials were working with the grant consultant to identify the most appropriate funding sources.

While buyouts might serve the borough well in the short term, a politically unpopular long-term solution — zoning — may be necessary, Sykes said.

“Its going to come whether we want it or not,” he said. “People hate the word zoning, but when you talk about making sure you can protect life and property, they understand that. There is always a public cost. When we do have an emergency, people call 911.”

Sykes pointed to a recent FEMA report that reviewed the borough favorably for emergency management, but also noted that the borough has few mechanisms to prevent potentially hazardous construction.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269 or brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com.