KABATA to update public on plans today

WASILLA — With permit applications pending and right of way acquisition in Anchorage almost wrapped up, the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority has scheduled an open house meeting for tonight.

The meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. in a conference rooms at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center in Wasilla. It will be informal with KABATA employees on hand to answer questions.

KABATA spokeswoman Shannon McCarthy said that on the permit front, the U.S. Coast Guard has finished taking comment on KABATA’s application. That permit is mostly looking at navigability issues, she said.

“We feel like that one is close, that we can see something by the end of the year,” she said of the permit.

Navigability is kind of an interesting conundrum for the bridge, which, McCarthy said, has to be “high enough so boats can pass under it, yet low enough that planes can land at the Air Force base.”

The subject actually came up at recent discussions of moving a squadron of fighter jets to the base from Fairbanks. McCarthy said KABATA has had to talk with the military at various times about flight paths, but also about permission to step onto military land.

As far as right of way goes, McCarthy said KABATA has bought three private parcels and reached an agreement on a fourth. There are also two Alaska Railroad properties for which KABATA is looking to relocate lessees and three vacant properties KABATA is planning to buy from the railroad.

The Mat-Su side, McCarthy said, is much less complicated. The only landowners in the area are the state, the Mat-Su Borough and the University of Alaska. She noted that one of the main criticisms of the project is that it makes landfall in a sparsely populated section of the borough.

“Really, that’s an ideal situation when you’re building a piece of infrastructure,” she said.

Relocating private landholders, after all, can be costly, time-consuming and create bad feelings.

Mat-Su is complicated in other ways, though. The bridge project’s boundaries end where Burma Road connects to Point MacKenzie Road. But traffic coming off of a Knik Arm Bridge will feed into either Knik-Goose Bay Road — already one of the most dangerous in the state — or onto Burma, a rough dirt road by no means capable of handling truck traffic.

“I think that KGB should have already been improved,” McCarthy said of the situation.

She said that big projects, such as the Knik Arm bridge, can focus attention on local needs. KABATA Legislative Liaison Michael Rovito noted that growth in the Valley is predicted to continue regardless of what KABATA does, and Valley residents have said before that, given their druthers, housing those new arrivals in the Knik area would be preferable to furthering density in Wasilla or Palmer.

Also, he noted, a lot of the traffic in the area will be headed the other way. Knik-Fairview has plenty of commuters to Anchorage who would likely be bridge customers, he said.

As far as project timelines go, McCarthy mentioned in passing 2014 and 2015 as years during which the bridge could conceivably get underway, but a lot will depend on what the state Legislature manages to do with the project in next year’s session. Once construction begins, she said it will take an estimated four years to complete.

At the end of last year, Rovito said, a big piece of legislation was left stalled in the Senate Finance Committee. The piece most critical for KABATA is the part that would create a $150 million reserve fund to cover toll short falls.

Rovito said that would help with the bridge’s credit rating and bring overall costs down, both for the private company that would build and operate the bridge and for the state that would allow the company to take in toll revenue to pay back its costs.

“We as an agency, we’re not going to go forward with the project until it’s the best possible value to the state,” he said.

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