Cindy Bettine says goodbye to assembly

WASILLA — When Cindy Bettine left the Mat-Su Borough Assembly last week, she got a borough seal signed by various employees and officials.

A lot of them also left little notes. Her favorite?

“I could tell that with every vote you had the taxpayer in mind,” one borough employee wrote.

“There was a lot of nice things on there and that wasn’t a particularly nice thing, it was a factual thing,” Bettine said.

But she said the note got at the heart of why she served and what she thinks the role is of a borough assembly member. She said that in that light, serving on the assembly is actually harder than serving in the state Legislature.

“A state representative never has to tax,” she said, referencing the state’s lack of an income or property tax. State revenue comes from corporate taxes mostly paid by oil companies.

“It’s very personal,” she said of the job of explaining to local residents where there money is going and why.

When she left, Bettine was the longest serving member of the assembly. It wasn’t a tough decision to go. It wasn’t a decision at all, really. Bettine had reached her limit of two terms. But talking to her Thursday, it was clear she enjoyed her time there but is just as happy to have completed her service.

“Some of the people were saying ‘we’ll be sorry to lose our historian,’” she said of her farewell meeting.

Bettine is clearly that. She’s been active in politics since her 20s, back in the 1970s. She worked on campaigns then and got to know local politicians, many of whom she is quick to share stories of.

As for her achievements on the assembly, Bettine said probably top on her list was something she got started on almost as soon as she took her seat at the table.

Goose Bay Elementary was overcrowded.

“When my son was in elementary school the Big Lake Elementary School was the most crowded,” she said. “So I know the first-hand impacts of overcrowding.”

Simple things become big annoyances, like the lack of adequate bathrooms.

“When I ran for assembly I didn’t know that that was going to be the first thing I grabbed onto,” she said.

But a raft of school bonds that contained money for a new school in the area failed at the ballot box. And then the state told the borough that at the end of the year their program to pay 70 percent of a bond was going to end. That’s when then-Sen. Lyda Green came to the assembly and spelled out what was at stake.

“Are you saying that we need to get it passed before (the regular election) next October?” Bettine recalls asking the senator. “She said yes.”

That meant it needed to be its own special election, a costly proposition and a burden on borough clerk staff who were getting ready to go off for the winter holidays.

Bettine drafted an ordinance to put the special election together. It passed the assembly, but then the mayor vetoed it. He didn’t like what it would cost to hold a special election.

But Bettine said the cost to hold the election paled in comparison to how much the borough was going to have to pay to build that school without the state’s help.

The veto was overturned. The voters approved the bonds, and the result stands today right there next to Goose Bay Elementary. It’s been dubbed Knik Elementary School.

Bettine said she learned a lot during that process and it led to another of the accomplishments she’s proud of — changing the way school sites are selected.

“It took me five more years to finally get done,” she said.

There was trouble with the Knik Elementary site. A plot in the Settlers Bay subdivision had trouble with road access.

The old process was to draw a big circle in which the borough wanted a school then make an announcement that landowners should offer up land if they wanted to sell it to the borough for that purpose.

But the problem, Bettine said, is that sometimes a landowner sees the government’s deep pockets and starts asking more than what he or she might have asked from a private party. The new process, Bettine said, passed just this year, is what’s called a double blind. The borough looks for land but the landowners don’t know the party looking is the borough.

“We’re going to be looking for it without making a big announcement. We’re going to do it like big business does,” she said. “We’re going to save the taxpayers some money.”

And at the same time they’re going to take a look at road access and utilities and soils.

Roads are another area Bettine said she believes she did some good. Bettine is the type of person who gets excited, animated even, talking about things like turn pockets and bike lanes.

“I’m a big believer in infrastructure,” she said.

And the district she represented, which includes the borough’s port district and two of the most dangerous roads in the state, has a cornucopia of infrastructure issues.

So what’s next for her? Bettine opened her day planner to show how it’s still filled with government meetings. She’s not unplugging right away, but she’s also planning to get back to business.

Bettine owns ABC Travel Time in Wasilla. She said she saw the last six years as kind of a hiatus from that job.

“This staff kept this business going,” she said. “But did business suffer? Yeah. Because I’m a key part of this business.”

She said the assembly has become more than just a part-time job. And she says she sees that at the assembly table where more and more often members come to the meetings without having prepared everything they want to do with a particular ordinance beforehand. But she doesn’t fault them for it.

“It’s because it’s too much,” she said.

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