Opinion: Road dispute highlights politics, public process

Ginger Longiny’s family has owned land off Echo Lake Road in Big Lake since the 1960s. They subdivided the 160 acres into 22 saleable lots over the last 10 years. During that same time, Echo Lake Road, substandard according to Mat-Su Borough specs, made its way up the annual road-upgrade project list.

“There’s a lot of building going on out here,” Longiny said.

Some of it is likely fueled by the promise of a much-anticipated paved road. But for the second year in a row, Longiny and other longtime Echo Lake residents have been frustrated by their road being removed from the top of the Big Lake Road Service Area priority list and replaced by other roads.

The changes were made by Borough Assemblyman Mokie Tew, who has represented Big Lake since 2020. The actual heavy lifting in the process of prioritizing annual road projects is done by a Road Service Area board. There are 16 of them around the borough, each a three-member volunteer operation.

Before finalizing their lists, the RSA boards spend considerable time studying problem roads and facilitating public input. Cost-benefit analysis is done. Traffic is counted. Residency counts are compared.

The issue of which list to use in Big Lake will be revisited Tuesday evening, during the Borough Assembly’s regular biweekly meeting. Interested folks should contact their assembly member to weigh in, or sign up to testify in person.

Bill Haller, primary supervisor of the Big Lake Road Service Area board, said his board’s road projects list had always been adopted as written until Tew was elected. He said additional delays on the Echo Lake Road project, which the borough has already spent $200,000 on to get the design work 95 percent completed, could end up being even more costly if the work has to be redone.

Haller is also critical of dust remediation measures demanded by Tew because they divert funds from needed road work.

“Eighty percent of Big Lake roads are not up to borough specs,” he said. “Our priority has always been to fix roads, not do dust control.”

Mike Shields has been involved with RSA boards for 25 years. He is a longtime member of the Greater Butte RSA and currently serves as its primary supervisor.

He’s also on the Local Road Service Area Advisory Board. The LRSAAB – or “big board”, as it is known – brings together reps from each of the 16 individual RSAs.

Shields echoed Haller’s concerns about board decisions being discarded by Tew without any meaningful public input. He said the big board “fully supports the publicly approved list in Big Lake.”

“That’s the first time I’ve seen it happen so blatantly,” Shields said. “Ever since Tew has been on the assembly, we’ve been ignored.”

Back in the Echo Lake Road neighborhood, Longiny was equally direct in characterizing Tew.

“He’s just a bully. He does not represent the community at all,” she said. “I just feel that there’s some back-door politics going on.”

She may be right.

The Big Lake Road Service Area board met in January to approve its annual long-studied, well-vetted list of prioritized road projects in the area, before submitting it to the Borough Assembly. That’s when Assemblyman Tew showed up and presented his alternate list for the first time. And he came with a buddy – Rep. Kevin McCabe, a first-term legislator and longtime Big Lake resident.

About an hour into the meeting, McCabe spoke for the first time. He quickly attempted to establish his neutrality.

“I don’t really have a dog in the fight. I just came to listen tonight,” he said, before launching into a defense of Tew’s list and its prioritizing of “impassable roads” in the area. One of those roads – Papoose Twins – is an almost uninhabited, substandard roadway that McCabe has driven for years to get to his 39-acre parcel on Linn Marie Circle, a private road three miles or so up Papoose Twins.

“Everybody in this RSA deserves a passable road. That’s all I have to say,” he said in closing, before noting again that he had no dog in the fight.

I suspect Ginger Longiny and her neighbors on Echo Lake Road agree that everyone deserves a passable road. But they probably also agree that someone who chooses to live on a substandard road, knowing its low priority, has no standing to complain afterward.

“People made that choice when they bought that property,” Longiny said.

She defended the original road projects list, and the process followed to put it together that factors in benefiting the most people.

RSA data shows that Echo Lake Road serves 85 homes and 40 new view lots. Papoose Twins serves 16 year-round homes.

In addition to disrupting plans on Echo Lake and other roads removed from the RSA board list, the changes Tew made to the roads list will also cost more than the projects on the original list. But, he explained at the January RSA board meeting, $180,000 in grant money for another unfinished local project could be diverted to pay the difference.

McCabe backed him up. “There is a way to move money around,” the legislator said.

He went on to discuss his efforts to find out about transferring money already allocated to the Burma Road bypass, a project he called “a fool’s errand.”

“We’re not going to spend $180,000 on a goat path that goes nowhere,” he said.

McCabe instead advocated again for “impassable roads”, declaring them a “better, smarter” way to spend the money.

Bear in mind that McCabe, as an elected member of the Alaska House of Representatives, spends his days working on serious fiscal issues. He’s also the guy who says he has “no dog in the fight” over the Big Lake roads issue.

Yet he has no problem insisting, without explanation, that it’s “better” and “smarter” to move money previously allocated to a well-vetted project that had extensive public input, and spend some of it instead, without any public input, on a sparsely populated three-mile stretch of substandard road that he has to drive to get home.

I’d ask him about this, but he’s made it clear to me on several occasions – and not especially charmingly – that he owes me no explanation about anything because I’m not his constituent.

Perhaps. But the residents of Echo Lake Road certainly deserve an explanation.

Mark Kelsey is a retired journalist who lives in Wasilla. He can be reached at mkelseyak@yahoo.com.