Palmer plan worries business owners

PALMER — With the state’s Department of Transportation moving ahead with plans to change routes in and out of Palmer, a group of concerned business owners came to a city council meeting Tuesday to express concerns.

“A number of cities in the U.S. have endorsed and implemented plans like this and are now working to undo them,” said Sally Koppenburg, who spoke representing the Palmer Downtown Business Association. “We urge you not to pass a transportation plan that will undermine the community.”

The plan at issue has traffic into and out of the city being split between two one-way roads. The route into the city would remain Evergreen Avenue that extends from the end of the Palmer-Wasilla Highway at its intersection with the Glenn Highway. The route out would likely, according to the project’s Web site — palmercouplet.com — be an extension of Dogwood Avenue that runs on the other side of Fred Meyer and Carrs from Evergreen.

The point of the project is to “calm” traffic on Evergreen while still allowing easy access to local businesses and keeping Palmer a pedestrian-friendly community City Manager Bill Allen said.

“We’ve talked about calming Evergreen. I don’t know quite how you calm a one-way,” said Janet Kincaid, who runs the Colony Inn and Valley Hotel.

Ron Bailey, of the Bailey’s Furniture chain, said he’s got a few stores in Anchorage that are on streets akin to what Evergreen is planned to look like.

“Almost all of the properties I own on one-way streets I get the most complaints on.”

The operator of the Palmer Chevron station and Bill Tull of William F. Tull and Associates also expressed concern.

The project is set to be discussed from 5 to 6:30 p.m. on April 28 at the Palmer Depot in a meeting sponsored by the Palmer Chamber of Commerce.

City council members seemed to agree it would be a good idea to go back to September of 2007 when the council last visited the issue and show attendees what projects DOT asked them to choose from.

Councilman Brad Hanson said the couplet was the best option facing the council at the time. They were given four options and a couplet seemed to have the lest impact on its neighbors.

“There still is a considerable amount of public process left,” Hanson said.

Councilman Kevin Brown asked Allen what kind of impact the city council could have on the project.

“Politically, this body has the option of stopping the project altogether,” Allen said.

Earlier in the meeting Allen had said that if the city decided to try and stop the project, they would be looking at five to seven years as a conservative estimate for when DOT would revisit the issue.

He also threw out a couple of figures. DOT has so far spent $120,000 on the traffic study leading up to the project and appropriated but not yet spent $11 million more for design and acquiring right of way.

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