MECCA’ is Mat-Su’s chance to try on big boy pants

It’s not the sexiest $5 million loan the Mat-Su Borough could spend.

It’s not likely to splash as would a shiny new road, a slick new building, and the ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate the fruits of this investment will likely last about as short as humanly possible.

Tuesday night the Mat-Su Borough Assembly voted unanimously to approve a $5 million loan from the the Alaska State Department of Environmental Conservation Clean Water Fund to begin construction on a septage and leachate facility at the landfill on 49th State Street. In doing so, the Assembly not only took a big first step in finally addressing perhaps the biggest calamity set to befall the Mat-Su, it sent a much-needed message to the rest of the state that the Valley is ready to put on its big boy pants and take care of its own… well… crap.

Assembly member Steve Colligan joked at Tuesday’s meeting that the new facility, the completion of which is likely to total more than $20 million when all is said and done, should be called MECCA, or, Munoz Effluent Consolidation Coordination Area.

This quip was made as an homage to 85-year-old Lazy Mountain resident Helen Munoz, who for years has been sounding the alarm on this issue.

She’s vowed to remain immortal until she sees borough-wide sewage — a luxury that currently only exists for the 15 percent of borough residents who live in Wasilla and Palmer proper — a reality throughout the Mat-Su. That may be asking a bit too much, but as Munoz said during comments at Tuesday’s meeting, the completion of an independent septic receptacle would suffice.

“I’m going to be mean enough to live to see (the septage and leachate facility) the day it opens. Then you can bury me if you like, because my work’ll be done for what’s coming after me,” Munoz said. “Five million dollars is better than nothing.”

Facing a virtually sudden $5.7 million budget hole for the coming year, this probably wasn’t the ideal time for the borough to take out new credit to fix a long known-about crisis. But the status quo of loading 80,000 borough residents’ waste onto septic trucks and driving them to Anchorage simply can’t stand any longer.

“We have just sort of reached that critical mass of population to where we’re flushing money down the toilet, so to speak, if we keep doing what we’re doing,” said Mike Campfield, a member of the borough’s advisory board on the issue. “I’m not saying this will make the prices go down, necessarily, but if it’s a competitive market, you might see prices go down. We won’t be at the mercy of Anchorage who continues to raise their rates, and we won’t be at the mercy of fuel prices, which will probably go up again eventually.”

In making that point, Campfield touches on another maybe under-considered benefit to this, which is the spiritual maturity that comes with taking care of one’s own crap.

Now, I’ve only been here a couple of months, so everything I’m learning about Alaska, in general, and the Valley, in particular, I’m learning as would a five-year-old.

But one constant theme that resonates clearly in nearly every fact of life I hear about is that Anchorage is like the bigger, older brother who does what he can to make sure his little brother Mat-Su doesn’t get too big for his britches. He knows one day soon his little brother is going to eclipse him.

After all, Anchorage is a city of 300,000 with no freeway system and nowhere left to grow. It’s blocked in on one side by the inlet, on another by a mountain pass, and there’s only one way in and one way out.

The Valley is nothing like that. Space and opportunity for growth here is boundless. Meanwhile, the real estate bubble in Anchorage isn’t just going to burst, it’s in the process of bursting, and all this against the backdrop of the city’s worst year for murders and violent crime in its history.

We all hope Helen Munoz will stick around long enough to make her pilgrimage to MECCA, though how history will remember that cesspool of progress, is as a lynchpin that made the Mat-Su the largest borough in the state.

All throughout this century, people will be flocking north to Alaska.

Anchorage can’t take any more.

The Mat-Su can.