Houston eyes highway upgrades

HOUSTON — Residents of Big Lake and Houston got a look Wednesday at the first stages of plans to expand the Parks Highway in their neck of the Valley.

Jim Amundsen with the state’ Department of Transportation is the man in charge of the project. He said the state put together its environmental document in 2010 and immediately went to work designing Phase I — Lucus Road to Church Road — and Phase II — Church Road to Pittman Road.

But it wasn’t until this summer that the state was able to start design work on the third phase, from Pittman Road to Big Lake Road.

“This is the first time we’ve showed anything other than what was in the environmental document,” Amundsen said Wednesday during an open house at Houston High School.

There were plenty of questions. First of the night for Amundsen involved a well that appeared to be right on the edge of the right of way the state intends to buy.

“I can’t take your water well and not resolve it,” Amundsen said, meaning he’d have to either pay to put in a new one or find some other source of water.

If he doesn’t have to take the well, Amundsen said, Department of Environmental Conservation rules might come into play for it being so close to a road but, Amundsen said, usually there’s a waiver process.

Newly added to the maps, he said, is a pair of stoplights.

“We have a light at Big Lake Road, which was one of the comments we’ve been hearing all along from Houston,” he said.

Houston Mayor Virgie Thompson said Thursday that she was happy DOT had decided to put a light in there.

“There have been no complaints from the city so far,” she said of the department’s process.

The other light everyone had been asking for — at Johnson Road — is also on the map.

Amundsen said he had to wait for traffic analyses before putting them on the map.

The state is also going to move where the road goes over Fish Creek just past Big Lake Road. Which is to say, DOT is going to move the creek. Turns out, it’s something the department has done already and in that same spot.

“We’re going to put it back into its original course,” Amundsen said.

Some folks at the meeting voiced concerns about their own residential or commercial properties. Others expressed a desire to see the highway upgrades built already. The Big Lake Community Council, for instance, is solidly in favor.

So far, the expansion has mostly drawn fire from the city of Wasilla, which passed a resolution Monday favoring a five-lane road with a center turn lane instead of four lanes with a center divider. The city has cited impacts on local business as the reasoning behind its preferred design.

Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright said that five-lane design is just within the city limits.

“We’ve never taken the position we want the whole 10 miles,” Rupright said.

Amundsen said Wasilla’s position is hard to understand — the plan from the start has been five lanes through Wasilla up to Church Road, where the road widens and splits into four lanes with a center divider.

But Rupright said Church isn’t the northern edge of Wasilla. He said the boundaries of city extend a mile farther up the Parks, and he considers that area to be room for the city’s commercial strip to grow.

“From Church actually out to the current city limits is almost a mile and it’s all zoned commercial and industrial on both sides,” he said.

City maps bear that out, sort of. City limits do extend at least a mile further west. But the highway leaves city limits a half mile past Church, comes back in briefly a short while later, then leaves again. Rupright said annexation plans currently before the state would extend those lines.

At any rate, he said, what he really wants is a five-lane road to the area of Museum Drive and the bridge over the Alaska Railroad.

“From that point out to Houston or Fairbanks we have no dog in the fight and don’t care.” Rupright said.

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