Chambers hear Knik Arm Bridge still on the radar

PALMER — Would you pay $5 to cut your drive into Anchorage down to a mile? The Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority is betting you will.

Of course, for a lot of Valley residents, driving to Port MacKenzie is just as onerous as driving to Anchorage. But for people who live farther down Knik-Goose Bay Road and maybe even some people in the Big Lake, Houston and Willow areas, the save on the drive could be more than enough to justify that toll.

Kevin Hemenway, KABATA’s chief financial officer, said at Wednesday’s joint meeting of the Greater Wasilla and Greater Palmer chambers of commerce that the authority projects 8,000 people will choose the bridge soon after it opens. As the Valley continues to grow, that number will rise to 46,000 per day.

“Pretty similar to the Knik River Bridge today,” he said.

Still, even with $5 tolls, it’s a tall order. The project, he said, will cost roughly $700 million, including a $40 million stretch on the Anchorage end to do a cut-and-cover tunnel under Government Hill.

He said the plan KABATA is pursuing would be to have a private sector group build and run the bridge for the first 50 to 60 years. In that time, he said, projections show the revenue from those tolls could run to $12 billion.

But a good deal of that money will be going to pay back investors and also to upgrade the bridge by adding bike and pedestrian lanes. Hemenway said the bridge will likely not get built without some sort of corridor to run utilities — natural gas pipes, power lines, etc. — across the span. But some of the actual lines might have to come in once the money starts flowing.

“As traffic grows we will be able to afford the capacity improvements,” he said.

And at the end of those 50 or 60 years the private group would hand the bridge over to the state in “like-new condition.”

But what happens if the bridge is built and those 46,000 people don’t come?

“We only need to meet, over the long term, 56 percent of the base traffic forecast,” Hemenway said.

KABATA spokeswoman Mary Ann Pease said the state generally includes a lot of support for the bridge — 56 percent of Alaskans, a recent poll found, favored the project.

Pease said that was kind of surprising, considering Southeast Alaska lost its Gravina Island bridge when the whole “Bridge to Nowhere” controversy erupted, dealing a blow to both the Knik and Gravina projects.

Drilling down into the numbers, Pease said, there is some who don’t favor the Knik bridge but they seem mostly isolated to Southeast.

“They didn’t get their bridge so we shouldn’t get ours,” she said, summing up the view she sees coming out of that region of the state.

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