Mayor favors bypass idea

WASILLA — So what’s the mayor’s take on the idea of routing a highway to bypass Wasilla?

“I’m 100 percent in favor of the southern bypass south of town,” Mayor Verne Rupright said.

In fact, he intends to help lobby for the money to build it.

It’s not the only project ongoing to alleviate the kind of east-west traffic jams that seem to plague the city at rush hour, Rupright said, and a couple of those projects are farther along than the bypass.

First is the project to extend Bogard Road/Seldon Road farther west. Currently, Seldon ends at Church Road.

“The last piece of that is about a mile and a half through the woods to Beverly Lakes (Road) to Pittman (Road),” the mayor said.

He said the Mat-Su Borough already has money lined up to start work constructing that last chunk of road. The borough also is working on a connector on the eastern end that would link Bogard to Arctic Avenue in Palmer. Which means when the project is complete, people will be able to drive from Butte to Meadow Lakes without changing roads.

The city, Rupright said, is working on its own project south of town that would connect Mack Road, which runs south from the Parks Highway past the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center, with Knik-Goose Bay Road.

It might not seem like much, Rupright said, but the stretch of the highway just before the light at Church Road/Mack Road is something of a bottleneck. The road narrows there from two lanes to one.

“That traffic backs up for two miles,” Rupright said.

The Mack connection will let folks essentially jump the line.

“Once we open that up we figure 2,000 cars a day will go through there,” Rupright said.

As for current traffic patterns, Rupright said that when he was working as a lawyer and sometimes commuting into Anchorage, he’d always exit at Trunk Road and take Bogard Road.

“I’d be sitting in my house up on Spruce (Avenue) while people were still sitting on the highway by Black Lake,” he said.

He rattled off four alternative east-west routes a person could use north of the city.

“I’ve been using those things for years. When all that traffic is jammed up on the highway I just scoot around,” Rupright said.

That by no means should be taken as anything less than an endorsement of the southern bypass route, he said.

“I was working on that when I was chair of the planning commission in ’99 and it all went up the flue,” Rupright said.

He said one possibility is to connect the southern bypass to the Palmer-Wasilla Highway Extension, which has a well-built bridge over the Alaska Railroad, and continue it across Knik-Goose Bay Road. Currently, the extension turns into Riley Avenue and ends just past the Wasilla Senior Center.

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