Palmer negotiates utility expansion

PALMER -- Palmer's planned utility extension to the new Mat-Su hospital, at the junction of the Parks and Glenn highways, is going to be a long and complicated process.

One of the issues that needs to be taken into account is the fact that some developers planning water and sewer lines might want to build them within an area currently designated as Palmer's utility-provision area.

Just one such case came before the Palmer City Council at its July 27 regular meeting.

Clearwater Utilities LLC has asked to be allowed to provide water-utility service to the Silver Creek Springs subdivision currently being built north of Colony High School.

This area falls into Palmer's current utility-service area when the city's expansion to the hospital is taken into account. The new service area extends from Palmer to the west and southwest, terminating just past Trunk Road. Wasilla's public works gained the service area extending toward Trunk from their own city center.

The proposed provision is therefore a concern to Palmer, which may find itself hooking the pipes and hardware employed by Clearwater into its own system at some point in the future.

City Manager Tom Healy said Palmer would likely see more cases like this one as time goes by and the city's utility-provision grid expands.

"The underlying issue here is public service," he said. "What's the most cost-effective way to provide service to that area?"

Healy said in an interview Friday that Palmer's water and sewer utilities should be able to handle the increased load demanded by a larger system in the foreseeable future, but that at the rate the Valley's developing, the matter could start to require increasingly convoluted guesswork.

"It basically depends on what time frame you're looking at," he said. "But we have more than enough capacity to expand to the southwest."

Palmer's eventual plans call for expansion along Trunk Road and, eventually, the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. However, these plans have yet to solidify, and Healy said they probably wouldn't do so until about 10 to 20 years from now.

The Trunk Road expansion, Healy said, will probably require a new reservoir built off the popular thoroughfare due to requirements for storing a certain amount of water to supplement production abilities and provide contingency relief.

Healy said one of the city's primary concerns was maintaining its good fire coverage, which results in low fire insurance payments for residents of the city.

"It would be best for everybody if the pipes were wide enough to allow for fire hydrant flow," Healy said.

He said the city would pay developers putting in systems that would be connecting to the new line an incremental cost to build those systems to Palmer's required width for hydrants.

"It's all a matter of utility planning," Healy said.

The greatest concern of the Palmer City Council at its Tuesday meeting was the possibility of the city taking over the pipes and hardware installed by Clearwater once the city's utilities reached that area. Palmer's plans for future water-and-sewer extension include progress along the Glenn Highway and, potentially, up Trunk Road.

Palmer City Council Member Tony Pippel said he would favor the city taking control of external water systems upon utility expansion, provided those water systems were built to city standards.

Council Member John Combs said he also wasn't adverse to any such arrangements, but that he would like to have the city make its intentions known to Clearwater, and other potential connectors, beforehand.

"We need to let them know what they're looking at up front," he said.

Contact Daniel Spoth at daniel.spoth@frontiersman.com.