KABATA seeks new numbers, clarity on old ones

By ANDREW WELLNER

Frontiersman.com

MAT-SU — The Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority is seeking proposals for a review and update of its traffic and revenue projections.

The idea is to review and update numbers already gathered.

“We’re asking a professional economist to take a look at those studies and see if they’re still valid and where tweaks can be made,” said KABATA spokeswoman Shannon McCarthy. “Because we are delayed for a year we know that for sure the numbers should be updated at this point.”

These numbers were at the heart of a dramatic chapter in KABATA’s history this year when legislators, reacting to an audit commissioned of the toll authority’s traffic and toll revenue projections that called them optimistic and inflated, considered folding KABATA into the Alaska Housing Finance Corp.

McCarthy said that one part of the new study is a reaction to that audit.

“The peer review is absolutely we need to take a look at those numbers, have a professional take a look at them and that’s in reaction to the fact that the audit called those numbers into question,” McCarthy said.

Peer review is a term generally used in academic circles where scientific findings are given to other scientists to make sure the methodology was correct. McCarthy said that KABATA will hire a professional economist to take a look at numbers generated in studies from the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, Insight Research Corporation, Northern Economics and also data from the U.S. Census and the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

“It’s pretty common in business settings that you take something that’s up for question out to peer review,” McCarthy said.

The second half of the project will be to update those numbers. The last time KABATA updated its projections was in 2007.

“We want them to develop their own numbers, their own forecast based on current information — price of gasoline population trends new employers that have come online that sort of thing,” McCarthy said.

Proposals are due by 4 p.m., June 6 and KABATA hopes to have the peer review and updated numbers in hand by this fall. Which, of course, will give some time to study them before the January start of the legislative session. The legislation that would have brought KABATA under the aegis of AHFC was left in the Senate when this year’s session ended. It will still be alive in the 2014 session.

“We are moving forward with the review and update as quickly as possible,” said KABATA Chief Executive Officer Andrew Niemiec in a press release. “It is important to provide the Legislature and policymakers with accurate information to move this project into construction.

The bridge, which projections say will take four years to build, is buying up land in Anchorage. The proposed 1.74-mile span would carry traffic from downtown Anchorage, under Government Hill, and landing at Point MacKenzie.

Backers see it as an alternative route for highway traffic from Anchorage to Fairbanks, a back-up in case a disaster blocks the Glenn Highway, and a way to open up Point MacKenzie to residential development, alleviating pressure on the Anchorage housing market.

Critics say it’s expensive, that the infrastructure in Mat-Su isn’t ready to accommodate that traffic, and that it won’t reduce commute times between Valley communities and jobs in Anchorage.

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