Palmer Arts Council eyes spot for bandstand

PALMER — A group is hoping to put up a bandstand in the middle of town.

For those who don’t know, a bandstand is the sort of thing you find in a lot of Mid-West farming communities — kind of like a really big, fancy gazebo.

“It’s an octagon held up by eight posts,” said Howard Bess with the Palmer Arts Council, which is spearheading the proposal. “We want a bandstand that will accommodate a 50-piece band.”

Which means something on the order of a 32-foot diameter structure.

“We believe that it can even be used for certain theatrical productions,” Bess said.

The spot for the bandstand is one you might not know about if you don’t spend a lot of time downtown. It’s a green space that Bess refers to as “The Greens” in a rectangle formed by Rusty’s at Dahlia Street, the Colony Inn, the Mat-Su Borough headquarters in the Dorothy Swanda Jones building and the Palmer Library.

“Palmer is short of venues for the use of the artistic communities. We are dedicated to creating additional venues for the use of the entire Palmer community,” reads a letter outlining the plan from the arts council.

The council plans to finance the construction through a partnership with the city.

The way Bess sees it working is that the city will approve the design, the arts council will build it, the city will own it and it will go at a spot on the greens of the city’s choosing. The council is willing to contract with the city to operate and maintain it.

Bess said he’s talked to various groups around town and most seem supportive. The people in charge of Friday Flings in Palmer are eyeing the greens as a possible place better able to accommodate the growth their event is seeing. Friday Flings often include an entertainment component.

A presentation to the city’s planning commission last week was also well-received, Bess said, and ended with the commission passing a resolution requesting that the city council get the ball rolling. There’s talk that maybe building something like a bandstand on the greens could jumpstart a plan for what to do with the space.

As for specifics, Bess said he’s talked to a local architect but doesn’t have anything like a drawing of what it might look like. And he doesn’t have a price. Palmer has some pretty strong winds and some pretty unique requirements in its building codes. Trying to see how much it has cost other communities to do something like this doesn’t really help.

“You don’t know that until the architect and the engineer has done their work,” Bess said of how much it all might cost.

But he thinks the arts council can get the project done inexpensively. He thinks there might be a group of local students, perhaps like the ones at Alaska Job Corps, who could take on the construction as a school project.

“The people we’ve talked to (at Job Corps) think this would be a great project for them to build,” Bess said.

Given that the wheels of government turn somewhat slowly, Bess said putting the bandstand up in 2012 is likely out of the question, but he thinks it could be installed as early as the spring of 2013.

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