Intrigued by incorporation

Incorporation talks have been swirling through the Big Lake area.

Incorporation is what a community does to organize as a city. In the Valley, that hasn’t happened in at least 30 years. According to their respective websites, the city of Palmer was incorporated in 1951, the Mat-Su Borough in 1966, the city of Houston in 1966, and city of Wasilla in 1974.

There was a meeting in Big Lake last week to gauge the community’s interest in making that kind of move. We haven’t checked in with the community council since then, to see if they are still considering pursuing this option.

But, for what it’s worth, we think the idea warrants careful consideration.

When we take a mental inventory of the borough, we can’t come up with a better candidate. Big Lake has what amounts to a downtown center, complete with a grocery store, post office, fire station, school and library.

Big Lake also seems to be a cohesive community — residents seem to identify with the area, seeing themselves as residents of Big Lake first and the Valley and state second.

There are, of course, other similar communities. Sutton and Talkeetna come to mind. Neither, though, has the population that Big Lake does. Knik-Fairview has a bigger population but lacks an sort of city center.

Big Lake is also unique in that it is currently staring down a pair of large, transformative projects. No other community in this Valley has to worry about both a rail line and a major road carving new thoroughfares through its backyard.

In the case of the road, the potential is for the route from Port MacKenzie to the Parks Highway to bring highway traffic straight through downtown Big Lake — past the school, fire station, grocery store and library. This would mean extensive and significant changes to Big Lake, few of them good.

As many have noted, these projects have the potential to transform the quiet community of Big Lake into another Wasilla. While we are not immune to Wasilla’s charms and, in hindsight, there are lessons Big Lake can learn from the choices Wasilla made early on. In hindsight, perhaps Wasilla’s city leaders would rethink their wish to have Parks Highway traffic bifurcate the city’s core.

The Knik Arm Bridge, which would put even more traffic onto Big Lake and Wasilla roads, is in a way, an attempt to avoid driving trucks through Wasilla. However, it makes no sense to reroute this heavy truck traffic out of Wasilla and through the downtown of a sister Mat-Su Borough community.

Incorporation would give the Big Lake community an amplified voice to speak its concerns more loudly and influence these projects in ways that would lessen their impacts and enhance opportunities for that community.

We must note, however, that borough residents are a wary lot when it comes to drawing new lines of jurisdiction. Just the mention of potential annexation in Palmer and Wasilla draws crowds of worried, sometimes angry, residents.

Taxes are already too high, they say. Permitting is already too onerous. We understand the sentiment, but think it might be misplaced in the sense that, while these are often the results, becoming part of a city doesn’t necessarily have to mean more onerous permits and higher taxes.

So, essentially, we’re hoping that Big Lake proceeds deliberately and considers all ramifications of incorporation.

And, if they become a city, we wish them well and hope they can do so without increasing taxes for Big Lake residents.