Caswell Lakes Road upgrade stymies borough assembly

PALMER — Cracks are starting to show in the planned upgrade of Mat-Su Borough roads with bond money voters approved last year.

“We got a project up there we told all the people up there we’re going to build this summer, and it’s a mess,” Assemblyman Vern Halter said Tuesday in discussing problems with a project to improve Caswell Lakes Road. “Holy smokes, that’s my comment.”

The problem, according to the borough, is that bids came in and the lowest — $1.663 million — is higher than what the borough has in bond money and state matching funds — $1.659 million.

“It’s hard for me to believe that you can’t find $4,000,” Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss said.

Borough staff replied that $1.663 million would be just for the project, with no contingency funds. That would mean every single potential overage would have to come to the assembly for approval, and coming to the assembly means delays. Also, construction season is over at the end of the summer.

“I’m real leery about doing something like that,” said Jim Jenson, head of the borough’s Operations and Maintenance Department.

The plan the borough had brought to the meeting was to pull $750,000 from a project in Big Lake, another from that raft of bonds approved in 2012. Jenson said the plan had been to upgrade an intersection, but it was a state intersection and the state didn’t get on board with the borough plan.

“The state (was) coming back to us and saying ‘you can’t do any work on our intersections,’” Jenson said.

He said he felt confident the state would be more amenable to a drainage project in the area. That’s a much smaller project, just $300,000, leaving at least $750,000 that could be pulled out to send up to Caswell to upgrade that road.

The road in Caswell is problematic because each spring it’s impassible. With the extra $750,000, the borough could upgrade Caswell Lakes Road and also two side roads. None would be paved.

“We’re digging out the bad spots where we have to close it down every spring, widening it and bringing it back up to standards,” Jenson said.

But Assemblyman Darcie Salmon asked that the $750,000 not be pulled out of his district.

“I was getting phone calls and there are a lot of people in Big Lake that think they’ve got ways to spend that money,” said DeVilbiss, who actually pulled back an ordinance redistributing that money because Salmon wasn’t at the meeting.

Assemblyman Ron Arvin first wondered if there was a way to reduce the project scope to get it done with the budget at hand, then asked if maybe someone needed to talk to Salmon.

“Sounds to me that you need to lobby Mr. Salmon not to object to taking that $750,000 out of his district,” Arvin said.

In the end, the assembly put off deciding what to do about the road until its meeting Sept. 5.

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