City doesn’t want to leave residents under water

If it were up to the city of Wasilla, Lake Lucille would be newly dammed, but if a permanent solution to a rotten problem can’t be found soon, residents in the area may end up all wet.

While a 40-something-year-old dam spillway (some accounts say it was built in 1964, others in 1967) crumbles, state officials are working this week to install a rockfill gabion downstream on Lucille Creek. Built by the state Department of Fish and Game to raise the level of the lake, it’s no longer a question of if the rotting wooden dam is going to fail, but when.

The dam could break “as we’re speaking and it could be next year,” Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright said. “It’s up in the air. I’m just praying there’s no earthquake, and most of all that somebody doesn’t hit it with a boat.”

The city has been monitoring the condition of the dam for more than a decade and has been pushing Fish and Game to replace it. Although it built the dam and has monitored and worked on it over the decades, the state agency says it doesn’t own the dam. If it had its druthers, Fish and Game would breach the dam and allow the lake to drop to its natural level.

But there’s a problem — those pesky 200-some property owners who live around the lake and along Lucille Creek. While they weren’t there in the mid- to late-1960s when the dam was built, they are now. They have lakefront property with docks extending out into the water. Breaching the dam would lower the lake level 2 feet or more and leave many properties high and dry, while homeowners downstream could be left treading water in their living rooms.

For years, the city of Wasilla has tried to get the dam replaced, and has even offered to take ownership of it and take over future monitoring and maintenance on the dam. As of now, however, the city legally can’t touch it.

Rupright hasn’t been content to sit and watch as a group of residents could find themselves up Lucille Creek without a paddle. On Friday, the mayor and members of the city’s police department hand-delivered letters explaining the situation to residents. It was an extraordinary effort for a local official. He could have had city staff simply mail the letters to residents, but a crumbling dam is too important to not deliver the message personally, Rupright said.

The city is frustrated because it wants the state to build a new dam (cost estimates come in at about $150,000). Fish and Game says it would rather the dam be breached, a position the state Department of Natural Resources’ Dam Safety Construction Unit also took at first, but is now recommending the dam be replaced.

But neither state department wants to take ownership of the dam and fork out the money to build a new one. We question, however, how the agency that built the thing, has been involved with the dam for more than four decades and is even spending department resources to build gabions to mitigate potential flooding can argue it has no responsibility for the aging spillway.

Ultimately, the solution should be simple to see. The potential legal challenges from homeowners alone could cost the state much more than simply replacing the dam. This isn’t a difficult fix.

• Both the state and city want the dam replaced.

• The city is willing to assume responsibility for it once it is replaced.

• The property owner, Harlan Wold, said he would welcome either entity onto his land to replace it.

With those factors already in place, there’s only one thing left to do — just build the dam thing.