Point Mac townsite plans move ahead

WASILLA — Mat-Su Borough planners have unveiled draft planned development codes for the borough’s future Point MacKenzie townsite.

At a sparsely attended public meeting on the topic Wednesday, Mat-Su Borough Planner Josh Allen said that although the project might just look like a PowerPoint presentation and 128 pages of administrative codes, for planners, it is actually pretty exciting.

“It’s not often that you get asked to come up with a foundation to a new city,” he said.

The plan’s goal is to create a downtown rather than urban sprawl; a place with mixed residential and commercial uses, a walk-able city center.

He said the existing Point MacKenzie community has set as priorities protecting farmland and expanding commercial and public services.

With those goals in mind, the borough settled on a planning model that doesn’t deal too much with the uses of a building so much as its size and footprint. If a person wants to gut a building and change it from commercial to residential, that’s fine. But if the same person wants to change the footprint of the building and how it fits into the neighborhood, he will need a permit.

The resulting models looked a lot like small towns you’d see in the Lower 48. Businesses were set right up against the sidewalks, with parking in the rear or in parking lots or garages. The lower floors were commercial business or restaurants with the upper floors for offices or apartments.

“You’re getting a walk-able community and you have character,” he said.

So why is the borough spending this time and money planning a townsite in an area that is, right now, just forested land bordering a prison, farmland and a small, rural port?

Allen said the plan was created in response to the long-proposed Knik Arm bridge. The bridge, if built, would put Anchorage just 2 miles from Point MacKenzie.

“There’s going to be a very big development pressure from Anchorage once it opens up,” he said.

The borough’s chief of planning, Lauren Driscoll, said, actually, the bridge is just one input there — residential development in Mat-Su has been crawling down Knik-Goose Bay Road for years. The growth is headed toward Point MacKenzie already, a bridge would just drastically increase the rate of change.

Driscoll also pointed out that the community is planned on one small part of Point MacKenzie — a parcel of borough-owned land adjacent to the Goose Creek Correctional Center.

And, even within that townsite there are different districts, everything from natural — undeveloped— to rural — pretty close to how it looks now — to residential — a subdivision with small lots — and finally the mixed-use — denser than residential with more commercial uses — and finally the town core, which will have two-to-four story buildings.

The Point Mac townsite is one of six townsites penciled on a planned known as the Mat-Su Borough’s Southwest Borough 2060 Futures project, which was based on research by consultant Shannon Bingham. The scope of the project tasked the team with creating a market-driven vision for the year 2060 that forecasts denser populations than might otherwise exist if a bridge were not constructed.

To look at the codes yourself, visit bit.ly/1mDBoG2.

Allen said the plan is months and months from approval.

“It’s probably at least a year before the borough assembly even gets to see it,” he said.

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