Committee members air grievances on school sites

PALMER — The hubbub over the committee that selects school sites in the Mat-Su Borough got further airing last week.

At a joint meeting of the Mat-Su Borough School Board and Assembly Sept. 11, the main complainant, Ole Larson, a school board delegate to the committee, read a written statement.

He said it took a year of back-and-forth to buy a site in Wasilla for a replacement for Iditarod Elementary and then the committee moved on to sites for a future junior/senior high school on Knik-Goose Bay Road. Larson said he got word that the committee was due to vote on Proposed Site N.

“It is unknown to this school site selection committee member why A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L and M were not selected,” Larson said. “Not a clue.”

Borough manager John Moosey said that the selection process wasn’t structured so that “Site A” refers to the most preferred site. The letters assigned are not a ranking.

“On the top choice we had, it was a good site where you didn’t have to build road or sewer,” Moosey said. “It was an elderly lady who was approached. She was very offended that the broker would not say who he was working for.”

The borough had been attempting to use a broker to avoid a situation where a seller jacks up the price knowing that it’s the borough that’s looking to buy.

“I don’t want us to pay two or three times as much because they think they’ve got us right where they want us,” Moosey said.

Moosey said he tried to explain that to the property owner, but the conversation deteriorated.

“I don’t want to damage that relationship. I just want to walk away and see if we can heal it at a later time,” Moosey said.

At the start of the meeting, a Valley resident testified regarding her own issues with the site selection process. Dina Sorensen said she owns a hayfield in the Palmer area that she submitted as a possible site for the school that became Machetanz Elementary.

At the time, she said, the assembly decided it wanted to buy both the site on which the school wound up being built and the Sorensen’s hayfield.

“There is an outstanding resolution to purchase our site,” Sorensen said.

She said she’s not a farmer, neither is her husband. They bought the land to develop and make a profit.

“If it’s OK to build a site on farmland then we need to move forward and actually do it instead of finding excuses to move on to different areas,” she said.

Moosey said that it wasn’t the farmland issue so much as it was that he didn’t feel comfortable executing a resolution that was so old. Machetanz opened in 2009.

“This school site selection was put into place by a different assembly,” he said. “To go ahead and do that on my own — I did not feel comfortable with that.”

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