Purchase push raises conflict concern

PALMER — A Mat-Su Borough assemblyman whose family trust once owned a parcel of land is hoping his colleagues will vote to purchase the site for a school in Palmer.

Noel Woods said he views the borough purchasing the parcel from Kevin Sorenson as a way to clean up a mess a previous administration left for the current assembly.

“The ordinance said that they were going to pick a school site for the south Palmer school and then they went ahead and built Machetanz (Elementary) School down there in south Wasilla,” he said.

Five years later, Palmer schools are still crowded and Sorenson is still willing to sell, Woods said.

As for his interest in the land, Woods said he doesn’t see that as a conflict. Sorenson is making payments to Woods’ family trust, of which Woods is the trustee.

“He has a fee-simple title,” Woods said. “I think the trust has some partial payments due yet, but that’s up to him.“

Mat-Su Borough Attorney Nick Spiropoulos said that conflicts of interest are not the kind of thing he feels comfortable prognosticating upon without having been asked to. Woods hasn’t yet, but still can ask the borough attorney for an opinion. And if he does, Spiropoulos said, he’s entitled to confidentiality.

In general terms, he said, the ethics rules at the borough say that conflicts of interest are things a person has to declare, so it would be up to Woods to declare it.

If he doesn’t?

“The remedies are either an ethics complaint can be filed or in a larger sense I guess a lawsuit could be filed,” Spiropoulos said.

It’s not clear a conflict exists, however. The borough code has exemptions, Spiropoulos pointed out, for financial interests that are remote or speculative. That could potentially exempt Woods.

But, again, Spiropoulos didn’t want to get into offering an opinion. It’s kind of a tricky section of the code, and it’s understood that assembly members are likely to have interest in the issues they discuss.

“Assembly members cannot be and should not be without interest in the community,” Spiropoulos said, referring to language in the codes.

As for whether the site, which is in the Springer Loop area, is a good place for a school, the argument seems to be less about that — though there are some who disagree with using farmland to build schools — than it is about the process.

The borough has a committee that evaluates new school sites. The Sorenson property was one that was evaluated during the Machetanz selection process. Negotiations fell apart over the price.

And while the borough is aware that eventually it will need a school in south Palmer, the Mat-Su Borough School District is currently undergoing something of a construction boom that includes building five new schools. South Palmer is not on that list.

So the borough needs sites for the five schools it intends to sell bonds to build sooner than it needs sites for a future South Palmer school. That the south Palmer site has somehow come to the front of the list has caused some officials, including members of the borough’s site selection committee, to express concern.

The Sorensons, meanwhile, have stated in various public forums that the borough still has an outstanding resolution to buy their property. They want the borough to move ahead with that.

Woods’ latest ordinance wouldn’t purchase the property as much as direct the manager to look into the possibility of buying it. It’s up for discussion at the assembly meeting on Tuesday.

“The school is an asset to the community around it,” Deena Sorenson said in a joint meeting of the school board and the assembly in September 2012. “If it’s OK to build a site on farmland then we need to move forward and actually do it instead of finding excuses to move on to different areas.”

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