Landfill work closes trail

PALMER — Work at the Mat-Su Borough Landfill has closed a trail in the Crevasse Moraine Trail System.

The borough said in a June Frontiersman article that the trails wouldn’t be closed, so the closure came as a surprise to some users who found trees blocking their path with signs saying: “Landfill Expansion in Progress.”

Apparently, that sign wasn’t quite accurate, because the borough says the closure wasn’t to expand the landfill, but to do work on the existing site.

“It was actually a surprise to us because we’ve been talking about landfill expansion and the closure of the loop wasn’t really due to landfill expansion, it was due to their need to get in there and mine gravel,” said Mat-Su Borough Community Development Director Eric Phillips, who oversees the trail system.

The borough explained in more detail on its Facebook page: “Gravel is being extracted below to cover a layer in the nearby cell. This operation below makes the Landfill Loop up above very unsafe. So the loop had to be closed.”

Borough Manager John Moosey said that the land was set aside and planned for use as a landfill for quite some time.

“The property was originally purchased and really should only be used for the landfill,” Moosey said. But it’s a conundrum because “they’re great trials.”

The trail system has been something of a sore spot recently. Alarm bells about their pending disappearance started ringing after signs went up this summer declaring they would be closed soon to make way for a landfill expansion.

Borough officials quickly clarified that eventually some trails will be erased to create a new “cell” in the landfill. But that won’t be until 2014, and anything the borough takes it will replace with trials on a nearby plot off of France Road.

Phillips said that couldn’t happen this fall with the currently blocked trail because the borough is still working to get management authority over that France Road site. The plot is formerly state land and currently belongs to the borough. But the entity currently in control of it is actually the city of Palmer, which has management authority on it through a decades-old agreement it signed with the state at a time when the city was considering building a landfill there.

“That agreement between the city and the state became an agreement between the borough and the city,” Phillips said.

He said the borough is working on getting that management agreement problem worked out with the city. He hopes that effort will be concluded soon.

“Starting next year as trails are impacted we can react accordingly,” Phillips said. “We certainly want to maintain that trial system. It’s the most popular trail system in the core (area of the borough).”

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