Neighbors beware — a cautionary tale

This could happen to you.

We (residents of Cottrell-Campus Drive) have been eagerly anticipating the straightening of Trunk Road for well over 10 years. Some of us have lived here more than 35 years. We have attended community council meetings, responded to state Department of Transportation requests for input and felt we knew what was being planned for the New Trunk Road.

When construction actually began this past fall, we received notification from our community council president of a meeting, held by DOT, to inform us and show maps of the latest new Trunk Road modifications.

We attended and were stunned. We will no longer have southwest egress or southeast entrance to our subdivision. We will no longer have two access roads to our subdivision (more than 55 homes, six apartment buildings with six units each and a church) but will all share one egress. The only way to return to our homes will be through a busy roundabout at the Parks/Trunk intersection. We may continue to use the dangerous, curvy Old Trunk Road for our access to the Parks Highway. At no time did DOT contact residents personally (by U.S. mail) to notify us of the proposed changes. When we finally did learn about them it was too late to respond.

DOT improvements should first and foremost prioritize the needs of the people who will use the road daily, people who live off the road or travel the road to work.

Sadly, DOTs priority, as described at our council meeting on Oct. 9, 2009, clearly was to create a speedy spoke for Valley traffic. Speedy? Three miles of speed, with a stop light at the college, leading to the Palmer-Wasilla Highway (which itself is no speedy highway, having multiple stop lights) eventually funneling to two lanes connecting to Palmer-Fishhook Road — which is not planned for improvement. All we needed was a straighter, safer road, not speedier.

We requested either to have a turn (north and south) lane added (requiring lowering the speed to 45 mph) or a continuation of the new frontage road to connect Cottrell to the Mat-Su College road. There is another subdivision closer to the Palmer-Wasilla Highway that has been granted left and right turn access to the new Trunk Road. Our requests were denied. This is an inequity, as our subdivision is the only one that was not provided with either an access north and south to the new Trunk, or access to the new College light.

DOT feels that its public relations attempts are adequate. Yet even when we collected signatures from every available resident, mailed letters of concern and were granted a meeting with DOT, we were told that we were just “afraid of the new roundabout” or that we “didn’t like progress” and “it’s just the way it was going to be.” Our concerns were taken back to DOT and addressed in the sense that we were told nothing could or would change.

Even in today’s high-tech world, if an important change is going to be made that will impact residents in our community, a U.S. mail notification or a card on the door needs to be delivered to all residents to inform. DOT cannot/should not rely on a change to a website or a posting in a newspaper of a meeting, because these are easily missed or overlooked.

The Mat-Su Borough tells us that it’s the state’s issue and is out of its hands. The state tells us that the University of Alaska (Mat-Su) is difficult to work with, hence the state cannot extend the frontage road and cannot help us.

Our state senator and state representative have told us that they also can do nothing to help. Yet here we are, property-tax-paying residents of the Mat-Su Borough and we are the losers.

You could be next!

Kathi Baldwin and Shannon Keene, longtime Alaskan residents, live off Trunk Road in the Cottrell-Campus subdivision.