Contractors donate work for Willow

WILLOW — Big machines rumbled all around the Willow Community Center Saturday.

While front-end loaders and dump trucks belonging to contractors are hardly uncommon in the days of go-go development in the Mat-Su, motivation set these particular earth-movers apart. To a man, woman, or chainsaw, the machines were working without expectation of remuneration.

About lunchtime, Jim Huston worked a cell phone and wove in between trucks and the front-end loader to grab pizza and sodas for some of the workers.

Huston helped borough officials win funding from the state legislature to improve the Willow Community Center. The center’s parking lot turns into something of a swamp when it rains. Water damage was visible in ceiling tiles, and Saturday’s rain dripped through onto an electric organ on sale for $20 (before a tub was placed over it). The Community Center was vandalized over the summer, and windows had been shot out, Huston said. Bullet holes lingered in at least two windows, though all the eastward-facing windows had been boarded up, which Huston did himself.

“I went to the state legislature to get a $65,000 grant to do a lot of work here,” he said.

However, during the engineering phase of the project borough officials told him it would take $50,000 to hire contractors just to remove top soil in the parking lot shared between the community center and the library. That didn’t sit well with Huston, who operates Huston Services.

“That would take most of our funds,” he said.

So Huston, along with contractors Newmans Hilltop, Western Construction, JA Spain & Sons, Little Willow Equipment, and Genuine Services — all of Willow — and Just Right Trucking of Houston, decided to take matters into their own hands. After filing the appropriate paperwork (single page insurance waivers), contractors, community-minded employees, and local citizens with truck driving skills went to work Saturday about 9 a.m.

The overall goal for the parking lot was to remove topsoil, exposing gravel underneath. Using that gravel, Huston and his supporters will level out a steep slope from the community center to the library building in an adjoining lot. The lots are needed to provide overflow parking for, among other things, the Iditarod, as well as the Fourth of July and Winter Carnival festivals every year, Huston said. They’re hoping to obtain the necessary permits from the Department of Environmental Conservation to level out a small wetlands near the library

“It would be a firm dry surface,” Huston added. “The water would leech out, and eventually, with grass, it would turn into a recreation area.”

Nor was the fill simply discarded. The Willow Area Community Organization (WACO) obtained a 40-acre slice of land from the borough at a discounted price earlier this year, and officials with the organization aim to turn the land into a community park, replete with a half-pipe for skateboards, a baseball diamond, a dog park, and hiking trails off of Willow Creek Parkway. Truck by truck, the fill made its way to that parcel, where it was deposited to fill in areas that had previously been excavated.

The eventual plan for the community center — constructed just three years into Alaska Statehood, and Willow’s unofficial center for decades — is to turn it into a museum of wildlife and the history of the community, Huston said.

At the other end of the trucks’ circuitous route, Derral Godbee waved trucks down a narrow one-lane road onto and off of the property. He was serving as flag man in order to help out his community, he said, while he munched on pizza.

“Somebody’s got to do it,” he said.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269 or brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com