Butte won’t join river service area

PALMER — Butte residents facing erosion issues won’t be joining a service area to facilitate the spending of $2 million to help them.

“I think we clearly got the answer of where the citizens were on this,” borough manager John Moosey said after the proposed service area expansion failed Tuesday to garner even one vote in favor of putting it on the October ballot. “I think everybody involved in this kind of knows what the situation is now.”

The borough received $2.5 million to spend on rivers in the last session from the Alaska Legislature. A half-million of that was to go to address rivers in the northern reaches of the borough. The other $2 million was for the Matanuska River specifically.

But borough officials say they have no authority to do work in the river. The way the borough could get that power would be to work with a service area. It’s similar to the way the borough handles roads. It doesn’t have road powers, but does build and maintain them through road service areas.

“If you’re outside (a service area) we do not have any authority to do any type of road work or road maintenance,” Moosey said.

So the idea was to rope in a couple of subdivisions in the Butte area that borough staff believed were most threatened by the erosion. That way, the borough could rebuild a revetment that failed in the flooding last fall and do other work.

But just about everybody hated the idea, a lot of them residents of the Circle View Estates subdivision that created the service area the ordinance would have expanded.

“We would effectively be acting as a one-way bank with no expectations of return on our investment,” said Circle View resident Hanna Martorell.

She pointed out that Circle View had taxed itself long enough that dikes were installed and extra taxes were on their way to decreasing. Bringing in these new homeowners would change that.

Residents of subdivisions to be added to the service area weren’t pleased either. Some said they built their homes on bedrock for a reason — they knew their property wouldn’t erode.

“I feel like I made good decisions and if this goes through I’m going to be punished for it,” said William Nilsson.

The assembly didn’t much care for it either.

“We’ve had pretty much overwhelming public testimony against this so I’m going to vote against this ordinance,” Assemblyman Warren Keogh said.

“It’s a hairball that’s been dropped in our laps,” added Assemblyman Steve Colligan.

Assemblyman Jim Colver questioned Borough Attorney Nick Spiropoulos about the money. The attorney told him the money couldn’t be spent on those Butte revetments outside of service areas, but what about dredging?

“If we’re going to use that material in some other fashion I think we can at least make the good faith argument that we’re able to get in there and use it as a source of material,” Spiropoulos said.

Colligan likewise asked questions about the grant documents and who could change them.

“It’s not fixed in stone,” he said. “Forming a service area isn’t the only way to do something is what I’m saying at the end of the day.”

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