City signs to buy new snow plow; controversy simmers over Palmer Museum website

Palmer’s city council okayed the purchase of a new loaded snow blower at its meeting Tuesday, Jan. 24, that will replace a 42-year old loader in the city’s aged equipment fleet. The purchase, not to exceed $206,460, will be made from BSI Equipment LLC.

The city now has three snow blowers, all decades old, as well as access to one at the city-owned Palmer airport. All are aged hand-me-downs from the state and during the late December and windstorm two of the blowers broke down under the strain.

Some local residents, stranded by deep drifts of hard-packed snow, were very worried. The replacement of the oldest snow blower will help the city deal with future snow emergencies.

Equipment replacement is a spendy proposition these days, City manager John Moosey told the council that a purchase of a new fire engine or $867,000 finalized two months ago would cost over $1 million if the purchase was finalized today, two months later. The lead-line is long, too. The new engine won’t be delivered until 2024.

In other matters, Moosey told the council that the next phase of Glenn Highway reconstruction near Palmer will be underway next summer, this year south of the city toward Anchorage. This will have implications for summer visitors, such as to the State Fair as well as local resident and Palmer businesses, he said.

City Mayor Steve Carrington said representatives from the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities will be invited to a future meeting to discuss the project and its schedule.

On more upbeat notes, the council passed a resolution recognizing the Valley Frontiersman for 75 years of publishing, making information on local events available to the public.

Also, Linda Combs, president of the Palmer senior citizens’ center announced that the City of Palmer and Valley Transit are partnering to offer free transportation for seniors from the senior center on Fridays.

This is important because the center is located adjacent to a 55-unit complex of seniors’ apartments where residents have long been challenged with transportation to meet routine shopping needs and to attend to medical appointments. “We have not been able to provide this before, but now we have an answers,” Combs said.

In another development, Mary Jo Parks, president of the Palmer Museum of History and Art, a nonprofit that manages the Palmer Museum and Visitor Center, announced the selection of a new museum director, long-time local resident Amber Lindstrom.

The museum is operated by a nonprofit operating under a contract with the city. Lindstrom has a background in facility management along with a long history of local volunteer work, Parks said. The museum is responsible for the care of 2,500 historical objects and 14,000 photos donated by local residents, and makes a big contribution as a local attraction for visitors and source of information about the community, Parks said.

The museum has also been resilient in dealing with adversity like the pandemic, the windstorm early last year and the snow and blizzard in December, she said.

In 2022 the museum hosted 327 tour bus stops with 6,931 passengers and a total of 10,800 visitors from out of state and and additional 10,600 from within Alaska, Parks said.

The museum has recently become a focus of criticism from some local residents, however, not because of its operations but because of two items on the website maintained by the museum nonprofit.

One criticism is over the depiction on part of the website of a Pride symbol, no doubt an effort to demonstrate efforts to be inclusive. Some are objecting to the symbol and several people showed up at the Jan. 24 meeting to speak to the council during the audience participation part of the agenda.

The objection is mainly that it is felt inappropriate to feature a symbol identified with an alternative lifestyle that may offend some in the Palmer community. A second objection that may reflect a deep ambivalence in the community toward Alaska Natives is the inclusion of words on the site recognizing that some lands in the Palmer area are “unceded,” meaning that the original indigenous people of the area never formally ceded the lands through a sale or, as in the Lower 48, military conquest.

Jackie Ivie, one resident who spoke, said she is unhappy that the wording implies that current Palmer residents do not rightfully own the lands.

“My grandfather was among the original colonists who came to the (Matanuska) Valley in the 1930s to farm. I am sure the federal government (which sponsored the original colony) would have have supported this if there was any doubt as to its ownership of land,” which subsequently became private lands owned by farmers,” she told the council.

It’s unclear what ‘unceded’ land means, she said. “Is the end game here some kind of acknowlegment of guilt? Is this the ‘camel’s nose under the tent,’ for future legal action,” she asked.

Basically, the term is inappropriate “to be on a city website,” she said, although the website at issue is a private site owned by the museum nonprofit, not the city of Palmer.

In fact, any question about legal ownership of lands was resolved by Congress in the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, or ANCSA, which extinguished aboriginal land claims in Alaska in a settlement that transferred 44 million acres of Alaska along with $962 million to private Native corporations formed under the act.

While some spoke at the council meeting there has apparently been a vigorous, private discussion underway in social media among a small group of critics.

It’s not clear that there is any connection, but council member Richard Best made a motion, which was adopted, that a Request for Proposals for a new museum contract be developed.