KABATA offers borough financial help

PALMER — The group set up to facilitate construction of a bridge from Anchorage to Point MacKenzie has offered the Mat-Su Borough $270,000 to help defray costs to the borough from the project.

The money from the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority is on the table, but the borough assembly hasn’t decided whether to accept it, or how to spend it. The body had a chance to do that this past week, but put the matter off until the end of the month.

“I think the concern from KABATA is we’re going to need quite a bit of help,” said borough manager John Moosey.

The money would help establish a one-stop permitting center at the borough. The bridge is going to need a lot of those permits. The money will also help take a serious look at what the Valley needs to do to get its roads ready to handle that traffic.

The money will pay $100,000 a year for two years for a permitting services manager who would set up and run that permitting center and $70,000 to develop a corridor study and access management plan for the bridge to help shed some light on traffic concerns.

“The primary objectives are to plan for an efficient truck route, improve safety, preserve function and mobility, protect the public’s financial investment in roadway infrastructure and manage existing and future access in a regular and consistent manner, and thereby encouraging growth and development,” according to a memo Moosey presented to the assembly.

That study is crucial enough, Moosey said, that there is some question as to whether $70,000 is adequate.

“One of the questions I know from one of the assembly people is why isn’t all of the money going to a study for a corridor for what effect KABATA is going to bring,” Moosey said.

The bridge project has been in the news recently as KABATA has said it expects the state to cover shortfalls if tolls generated by bridge users are insufficient to reimburse the costs of private developers partnering on the public project.

That idea has been around awhile; Sen. Linda Menard, R-Wasilla, introduced legislation that would have created a reserve fund of $150 million. The idea was that toll money would eventually put back in the fund whatever the state had to take out to pay investors.

“It will only be used in the initial years after the bridge is open,” Menard said in an email at the time she proposed the legislation. “Once toll revenue becomes sufficient enough the money will be paid back and then no longer needed.”

She re-iterates those points in an opinion piece published in today’s Frontiersman.

“Any major road project in any state has a newness about it that takes motorists time to get used to,” she writes. “Traffic projections show a steady increase in users for the crossing in the years following its opening. The reserve fund solves the shortfall, while not using any more state money than what’s been appropriated for the fund.”

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