Butte to plan for public lands

BUTTE -- It's a community of nearly 3,000, much of it nestled in or dotted with parcels of public land or private land commonly used as public land. The Butte community is growing, and with that growth comes added traffic and, often, conflicting uses on the public and publicly used lands.

The Mat-Su Borough Assembly, in February, appropriated $45,000 to fund a study to identify the best uses for the public land in the Butte area of the borough. Land Design North has been contracted to perform the study.

So far, said Jeff Dillon of Land Design North, the company has interviewed about 25 people in the Butte area, setting the groundwork for what's to come. Tuesday, Dillon said, a community workshop will be held at the Butte Elementary School from 6:30 to 9 p.m. to give community members a chance to discuss how they would like to see the public lands used and preserved for future use.

The borough owns six different parcels in the Butte, said interim Planning Director Ron Swanson, totaling between five and six thousand acres.

"A lot of that is low wetlands," Swanson said. The area including is around the Butte Elementary School, in the Jim Creek area, near Maud Road and Mud Lake, along Matanuska River and Bodenburg Butte.

Dillon said part of LDN's effort to identify how the public areas can be preserved for future use includes coordinating with some of the larger landowners in the area -- the state Department of Natural Resources and Eklutna Inc. The process does not, Swanson said, attempt to restrict or regulate land use of private landowners in the area. The plan, he said, pertains only to the larger, public landowners and Eklutna, Inc.

During the Tuesday meeting, Dillon said, LDN staff will be focusing on hearing from the community what the land use issues are on the public land, and how those uses can be preserved or improved. Thursday, Dillon said, another workshop will be held at the elementary school from 6:30 to 9 p.m. to review the information gathered during the Tuesday session. That workshop, Dillon said, will give the community members a chance to make sure LDN correctly understands their wishes and knows what the primary issues are before they sets to work on the asset management plan.

"The first meeting, we'll listen and hear what the issues are," Dillon said. "[Thursday] we'll come back and say 'This is what we heard. Did we get it right?'"

Then, he said, the work will begin. Over the summer, LDN will compile information from the community and develop a vision for use of the public lands.

"We'll come back in the fall with another series of workshops," Dillon said, "a series of recommendations and actions for an improved quality of life in the Butte."

Those options, Dillon said, may include increasing enforcement, providing better trail access, determining the long-term public facility needs and other, related projects, such as road work.

For more information about the meetings, contact LDN at (907) 276-5885 or the borough's land management department at 745-9869.