Carrs chips in to fight road work change

June 3.2005

KATE GOLDEN/Frontiersman reporter

PALMER - Pioneer Square shopping center owners say a new three-legged plan for Dogwood Avenue extension in Palmer will be so detrimental to the Carrs grocery store that they've offered $97,500 - half the cost of the land needed - to revert to the original four-way intersection.

"By changing the plan … you are making the Carrs access worse in order to make the Fred Meyer access better," Bob Mintz of Carr-Gottstein Properties wrote to the Palmer City Council. The company owns Pioneer Square shopping center, which contains Carrs.

Mintz also suggested that the city could transform the chunk of land at the corner into a park memorializing Palmer police officer James Rowland Jr., who died on duty in a May 1999 gunfight there.

The council recently decided that the right-of-way costs would be too expensive to punch Dogwood Avenue from downtown Palmer through the Glenn Highway this summer.

For the last two years, the plan has been to create a four-way intersection. Eventually, the city intends to connect Dogwood with a Felton Street extension from the west.

North of the Glenn Highway, an access road from Dogwood would lead to the Pioneer Square shopping center. The existing on and off ramps from the shopping center to the Glenn would be demolished.

But Palmer has to purchase land on the north side of the intersection to complete a four-legged project. The council offered Gary Lundgren, the owner, around $75,000, according to Mintz. Lundgren was willing to sell, but his counteroffer of $3 per square foot came to almost $200,000. In a May 10 meeting, the council rejected the offer.

Designers switched to a three-way plan.

In both scenarios, the Glenn Highway ramps to and from the mall would be replaced with a driveway closer to the Palmer-Wasilla/Glenn intersection. Mintz said this would slow traffic on the southbound Glenn Highway and worsen congestion at the Palmer-Wasilla intersection.

Judy Dougherty, DOT project manager, noted that a "pork-chop median" on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway that currently allows eastbound left turns into the mall is designed to be closed off in the four-way, but not the three-way, Dogwood intersection plan.

Since the change in plan, DOT engineers have asked for recertifications from the Federal Highway Administration, which is funding most of the project.

Mintz argued in a letter to DOT dated Wednesday that the revised plan is so significantly different that it should go through a full DOT reevaluation and public process again.

"The economic impact is major," he said, although he maintained it wouldn't shut Carrs down.

Dougherty, having just received Mintz's letter on Thursday, said she did not know yet how DOT would address the issues.

"This is all news to me," she said.

The roughly $2-million project is a cooperative effort between the city and the Alaska Department of Transportation. DOT agreed to move the project up on the statewide transportation improvement orogram list if Palmer would provide the design and rights of way, said city manager Tom Healy.

So far the city has put up about $200,000 for the design. Healy said it would not cost significantly more to revert the design to a four-way intersection if the Lundgren right of way is purchased.

On the other side of the Glenn, Fred Meyer Stores Inc. contributed more than $1.2 million to the Dogwood Road construction, according to the company's real estate director in Portland, Tom Gibbons. Fred Meyer dedicated land to the state and also built part of Dogwood.

Gibbons said Fred Meyer doesn't have a particular interest in which plan is chosen, although he noted that it's better for the city's long-term plan to develop the four-way intersection sooner.

Mayor John Combs said he'd like to stick to the original plan, if possible. "Ideally we'd like to go ahead and push that thing all the way through," Combs said Thursday. "I've seen people jumping curbs out there."

Contact Kate Golden at 352-2284 or kate.golden@frontiersman.com.