Couplet plan has Palmer residents tied in knots

PALMER — The second meeting in a series scheduled to explain to Palmer residents plans for changing access to the city went much the same as the first, with engineers explaining to worried and frustrated residents why the plan makes sense.

Tuesday at the Palmer Train Depot, representatives from the Alaska Department of Transportation came to discuss exactly how the state settled on a one-way couplet.

With a couplet in place, traffic running into Palmer would follow the current route on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway, which morphs into Evergreen Avenue at the Glenn Highway. Traffic running out of the city would take a yet-to-be-built route on Dogwood Avenue linking back up with the Palmer-Wasilla Highway west of town.

The engineers came to explain, with a Power Point presentation, why the option of a two-way couplet and of widening the existing roads wasn’t the right way to go. But they had trouble getting through the presentation.

Audience members, most of whom represented downtown Palmer businesses, seemed more concerned with the specifics.

Janet Kincaid, who owns the Colony Inn, asked about parking. Palmer, she said, has a critical shortage of parking. Street parking and even some parking lots appear to be threatened by some of the drawings presented.

“You’re asking for a level of detail that we don’t have yet,” said Jim Amundsen with the Department of Transportation. “I don’t want to give out bad information on something as critical as that.”

Homeowners in the subdivisions on the couplet’s western edges raised a number of concerns. How will fire trucks be accommodated? How will homeowners south of the couplet go about driving west? Why was the couplet designed to go as far west as it is in the drawings?

Amundsen and the other presenters said there are a number of ways to deal with emergency vehicles and left turns out of subdivisions. As for pushing the road west, they said the plan is not just to alleviate congestion in Palmer but also to help do something about traffic on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway, which is one of the busiest and most dangerous in the state.

And then there was the Wal-Mart question. Wal-Mart owns one of the few tracts of land in Palmer that could hold a big box store. And the couplet seems to wrap right around where the store would go. Some in the audience wondered if a couplet wasn’t in the works just to please the mega-retailer.

First of all, the site is in a substantial dip in the road, which makes access to the site tough and which has caused the Department of Transportation to put a number of stringent requirements on the big-box retailer, DOT representatives said at the meeting.

As to whether the couplet is serving Wal-Mart better, Amundsen said that, given their druthers, the retailer would rather not see a couplet go in at all.

“Their preference is to keep all the traffic on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway and build their store facing the Palmer-Wasilla Highway,” Amundsen said.

Denise Statz, owner of Nonessentials in Palmer, said she thinks business owners scared over a potential loss of business due to the couplet should take their concerns to the Palmer City Council, which has the power to stop such a project, instead of haranguing the engineers who came to explain it.

“I think that we can hammer you to death on this issue,” Statz said. But, “I’m not going to be able to hear you because I am worried sick at what you’re going to do here.”

The problem, as has been stated at most of these meetings, is that if the project changes, the money goes back to the state.

State Rep. Carl Gatto, R-Palmer, said at the meeting that he wasn’t so sure that was the case and wanted to see some discussion take place on what exactly the money was appropriated for. Was it generally allotted to calm traffic or specifically allotted to build a one-way couplet?

“We’re not in granite here. None of the work’s been started,” he said. Gatto was in the state legislature when the money was allocated.

When asked about the subject of Fairbanks, where a one-way road is likely to revert to a two-way, Amundsen took the opportunity to make a point.

“There’s a number of business people in (Fairbanks) right now that are worried their business is going to be affected by changing from a one-way to a two-way,” he said.

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