LETTER: Consider carefully whether to vote for Prop B-4

To the editor:

Before you vote on Oct. 4 or earlier, carefully consider Prop B-4, the Recreation Maintenance Bond, isn’t giving you the full story. It will increase your property taxes for at least 20 years, and will pay for deferred maintenance for pools and ice arena from which original funds, if they had been appropriated at all may well have been diverted to failing development projects.

Per informed public comment, maintenance, a cost of operations, should never be bonded anyway. Maybe worse, the proposition doesn’t name the ‘Nine Trails’ to be built or state their individual costs - not in the borough ordinance, the election pamphlet, nor on the ballot meaning we can’t be sure what they are, or if passed, how they might change without voter recourse.

Too, we’re told the ‘Nine Trails’ were proposed or supported by the communities where they’ll be - but a Butte Flood group Facebook interview of District 1 Assemblyman Jim Sykes indicates that far from support, there’s neighborhood concern with increased and unknown traffic already generated by at least one of these proposed ‘trails’. So how did each project in this bond package make it, or not, to the official capital improvement program (CIP) list?

A vote for your particular favorite commits you to the whole package. Without assurance of operating and maintenance expenses for these new and replaced assets, worst case scenario may be a series of bonds to pay borough operating expenses leaving property taxes to fly out the door for more failed development projects like port, rail, and the ferry loan for which we still owe the feds $12 million.

Bond ratings can change, increasing the already high cost of borrowing. And like this year, the state could refuse to pay on more outstanding construction debt it was never committed to, for which the MSB never planned contingencies. Can we pay for increasing borough septage, trash, crime, river erosion, and drug crises by building more roads and subdivisions? How far do we want to step out on that long term debt limb already bending beneath us?

Thinking we need more specific commitment for the $22 million to pay for recreation maintenance when half of that amount could pay down existing debt instead of incur more. As it is written, vote NO on Mat Su Borough Prop. B-4 on October 4.

— Patty Rosnel

Palmer