No roadblock for veto

PALMER — Saying he didn’t like where the money was headed, Mat-Su Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss successfully vetoed an amendment to next year’s budget that changes how the borough spends revenue from vehicle taxes.

The money in question was an increase in revenue for the borough as it used to be money the borough shared with the cities of Houston, Palmer and Wasilla.

Assemblyman Vern Halter successfully moved during budget deliberations to apply that money to road service area budgets. The idea was to bring down the rate at which residents were taxed for road services by replacing some of that money with the vehicle tax revenue.

But, DeVilbiss said, he didn’t like the idea of using the money to play for general maintenance.

“Most of our road service areas have major infrastructure improvement needs — not least of which are the service areas affected by this motion,” DeVilbiss wrote in his memo regarding the veto. “I would like this ‘new’ revenue to be targeted primarily toward those infrastructure needs and I would like to use those vehicle tax revenues to attract matching state money to get our substandard roads fixed and extend our maintenance services to more of the citizens within the road service areas.”

In a nutshell, the mayor wants to spend the money to fix roads, not plow them.

“Our new revenue is an opportunity to start fixing roads instead of just propping up existing maintenance contracts,” he said further on in the veto letter.

In his regular podcast, DeVilbiss said he took the step of vetoing the amendment after talking to some of the people who serve on the various boards of supervisors for the road service areas.

“I know at least all of the road service area supervisors that I had talked to were thankful for that too, because that’s what they were looking for was more money to fix roads not to subsidized the ongoing maintenance,” he said.

At Tuesday’s assembly meeting, Halter had a chance to try to overturn that veto, but decided against it.

“I said in an email to everybody, mayors and assemblymen that I’m not going to move to override the veto. Very simple,” he said.

In his podcast, DeVilbiss chalked that up as a victory

“The assembly actually agreed with me and did not even attempt to override my veto, so I thank them for that,” he said.

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