New power line route will cost more, avoid Wasilla

WASILLA — While jockeying for pole position along the Parks Highway, Matanuska Electric Association has decided to make a lane change.

Having gone through the Mat-Su Borough’s public comment process for upgrading its power lines in preparation for bringing its Eklutna power plant online by the end of 2014, MEA met with some resistance from the city of Wasilla. The sticking point, mayor Verne Rupright said, is that the new power poles tower would have been 80-feet tall, almost double the height of the 45-foot poles there now.

That reluctance from Wasilla has prompted MEA to withdraw its request for a conditional use permit to upgrade its power lines from its new Eklutna plant to the Herning Substation down Knik-Goose Bay Road, spokesman Kevin Brown said.

“It’s clear the planning staff and mayor oppose the plan,” Brown said.

Instead of stringing the lines along the Parks Highway as originally planned, MEA decided Monday to pursue a route that bypasses Wasilla altogether, Brown said. That change will cost more and will route power to another yet-to-be-determined substation.

MEA’s proposal to Wasilla, which Brown called “the least-cost option,” would be large, steel eyesores that would destroy the city’s viewscape, Rupright said.

“That’s essentially it,” he said. “Christ, almighty, that’s just not acceptable. That will ruin the property values. This beautiful viewscape will be ruined by these 80-foot towers.”

With MEA’s new Eklutna power generation plant expected to come online in 2014, the utility also needs to upgrade its distribution capacity through Wasilla and north through Talkeetna, Brown said.

“It is vital to build these transmission lines before the (plant) comes online,” Brown said.

MEA’s original plan included replacing existing poles through the city along the Parks Highway until just east of Creekside Town Square, when they’ll run south of the Parks to the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. The proposal to upgrade those 40- to 45-foot poles with 75- to 80-foot poles was discussed last October during a public meeting at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center.

At that time, Rupright and several area property owners lobbied MEA to bury the transmission lines through the city.

MEA considered that, Brown said, but the cost of burying the lines is just too prohibitive.

“Unfortunately, burying the lines results in a bare minimum of quadrupling the costs,” he said. In subsequent meetings with city officials, “they understood that undergrounding wasn’t a practical option.”

Rupright agrees that burying the lines probably isn’t practical and said he’s disappointed that after meetings between the entities that more of a compromise couldn’t be reached. If the tall poles have to be installed, he said would like to see the route of those lines moved away from the highway and out of the viewshed.

“As a member of the co-op and not just a resident of the city and its mayor, I don’t want to see that mess,” Rupright said. “They agreed (to move the route), and now they come up with this. Our understanding was that yeah, OK, we’re going to look at it and get it out of the viewscape.”

Brown said MEA met with Rupright and city staff numerous times and changed its plan to accommodate vegetation and other improvements the city said the lines would interfere with. But in the end, it became evident the utility’s least-cost option wouldn’t pass muster with the city.

“Obviously, we are very disappointed,” Brown said, adding a different route that bypasses Wasilla will be more expensive than the original proposal. How much more isn’t yet known.

“We had proposed the least-cost option,” he said. “This will increase the price of the project for everyone.”

Rupright said MEA’s decision to withdraw its conditional use permit “is probably good, because it gets us back to the discussion phase, and there will be more complete due diligence.”

To try and get a feel for what the taller poles would look like, the city digitally added poles to photos of the areas affected. Rupright said that although those photographs are just crude renderings, the impact the poles will have is clear.

“We certainly have a say in this. This is a public utility that’s a co-op,” he said. “That’s just the way I’m seeing it, because … just visualize what that’s going to look like.”

MEA had planned on meeting with the Wasilla Planning Commission about its proposal tonight, but that likely won’t happen now that the co-op intends to withdraw its application.

“We’ve already held two public hearings on this project (already), and we look forward to a continued positive dialogue with the community as we work to develop a plan which meets our mutual needs for safe, reliable, sustainable and economical electrical power,” Brown said.

Mat-Su Borough regulations don’t require MEA get a conditional use permit to put in its poles, Brown said. Borough rules require MEA to provide public notice for the project and hold two public meetings within 30 days for everyone within 600 feet of the project.

Contact reporter Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.