"Ranch" developer objects to state's highway plans

MAT-SU — Developer Rex Turner, owner of the Turner Co., has a map covering his desk and he's using five spread fingers to point at it as if he were striking chords on a piano.

"It's totally dysfunctional, not only for our project but for this entire geography," he said, moving his hand west across the map from the Glenn Highway to Knik-Goose Bay Road.

What he's describing as dysfunctional is the traffic plan for the area, which is currently a hodgepodge of mostly empty subdivisions served by Fairview Loop Road. There doesn't seem to be much of a plan in place, and Turner said high-density developments are on their way a lot sooner than roads that can handle the traffic that will come with them.

"This is the closest developable real estate to Anchorage but DOT [The Alaska Department of Transportation] is proposing that it all be bottled up," Turner said. "If you want to see what this is gonna look like in 10 years, look at the north side of the Parks Highway. That's what's going to happen here."

Turner's role in the future of that 7,000 acres is to develop a 1,600-acre subdivision he has named "The Ranch." Turner is miffed because he had hoped the Ranch and other new neighborhoods to the west would have direct access to the Glenn Highway via Nelson Road, which is just south of the Alaska Railroad crossing on the northern edge of the Palmer Hay Flats. DOT's current plans for a Glenn and Parks Highway interchange project don't include access to the highway directly from Nelson Road.

DOT has hired the design and engineering firm HDR Alaska, a division of HDR Inc., to engineer and build the project. Right-of-way issues were resolved in 1996 when the state purchased the last piece of property it needed for the interchange. The project is expected to be engineered this winter, under construction next summer, and completed by 2005. The interchange is expected to cost between $35 and $85 million.

DOT engineer Tom Dougherty takes issue with Turner's view that access to the highway at Nelson is necessary, or even warranted at this point. The plan calls for a frontage road north to the existing ramps at Trunk Road.

"We have done a design study," Dougherty said. "Our frontage road will be able to handle the volume of traffic which he has planned for the first two phases of the Ranch."

Nelson Road's current access is the spot commuters know as the Espresso Exit, another Turner brainchild which might be the most active coffee wagon in the state.

Turner didn't want to say how much coffee he sells from that location, but did say it takes about a dozen workers to keep the place running. He also said he didn't realize the coffee stop's potential when he first built it. Barristas work two or three at a time at Espresso Exit, and during peak traffic hours a half dozen cars can be found lined up at either of the two drive-up windows. Turner's office is also adjacent to the Nelson-Glenn intersection and he has one tenant, an ATM owned and operated by Northrim Bank.

Turner knows that the first day contractors change the traffic pattern on the Glenn, activity at the Espresso Exit will stop. That doesn't bother him.

What bothers him is that the DOT interchange project, which he says he has been watching for years, was suddenly speeded up when the federal government injected $50 million directly into it.

While the interchange project doesn't mesh exactly with Turner's development plans, that's probably because Turner's plans were leapfrogged by the DOT plans when a $50-million appropriation showed up in the federal government's 2001 fiscal year budget.

"What he's got to understand is that those federal funds came as a surprise to us too," DOT spokesperson Murph O' Brien said.

"They moved this up on the capital improvements list by five years," said Richard Besse, an engineer and surveyor who is under contract to Turner. "They said, ‘We've got all this money coming from Sen. Stevens, and this one is planned. This is the one we can build.' But they're using 11-year-old data."

The 11-year-old data Besse mentioned is an environmental impact statement for the Glenn and Parks highways that encompasses projects from Eklutna to Hyer Road.

Turner is familiar with the DOT plans. He even built up Nelson Road to make it into a haul road for gravel trucked to earlier phases of the project. He said the gravel extraction was designed to benefit the Ranch, as well, because he rebuilt Nelson Road to accommodate cars in the future along the route used by the gravel trucks in the past.

Despite its bucolic name, the Ranch will be a suburban community with about 800 single-family homes, 200 to 250 duplex or zero lot line units, and strips of commercial buildings and schools, he said.

"It'll be $156 million plus the commercial when it's built out," Turner said. "That's the size or the scope of what we're talking about."

Turner doesn't plan to build all this himself. He said there will be enclaves where houses and stores are built by other contractors. The school district might want to build inside or adjacent to the Ranch, and Turner's drawings of the Ranch show a large tract of land left blank, where he said public and commercial buildings will be.

It's an ambitious plan, a community the size of Palmer, but closer to Anchorage.

The Ranch, where bluff lots provide views of the lights of Anchorage, Knik Glacier, or Mount Susitna and the Alaska Range, is designed with commuters in mind, Turner said. Anchorage's tightening housing market only adds to the Ranch's draw, he said, as it does to the rest of the Valley's real estate.

Turner said he was prepared to develop with or without access to the Glenn at Nelson Road, and has tried to lobby DOT for a ramp for Nelson Road. He wouldn't speculate on how much it would cost his company if DOT continues with its current plans.

"To be honest with you, I haven't even considered that aspect," Turner said. "I haven't factored in the down side."

He does believe DOT would likely have to come back to Nelson Road in the future in order to accommodate the people who move into the Ranch and its neighboring developments to the west, he said.

"If they don't give Nelson Road a ramp it's gonna be a huge bottleneck and the state's gonna have to come back and build another intersection on wetlands. We just think that's terribly short-sighted."