School access to cost $8.4M

PALMER — An expensive access plan for a new south Palmer elementary school is generating debate among members of the Mat-Su Borough Assembly.

Collins Construction Inc. was awarded a contract of a just over $14 million to build the school last week, but what to do about access to the new site is eliciting a lot of sour faces from assembly members. Building access to the site is estimated to cost about $8.4 million.

The site is near The Ranch, a subdivision between the Parks Highway and Palmer Hay Flats filling with homes. The land for the school was donated to the Borough by Rex Turner, who is building the subdivision.

Without new access, most parents and school buses bringing kids to school would take Abby Boulevard through the Garden Terrace subdivision. Borough Public Works Director Keith Rountree said that route is OK as a temporary solution for about three to five years. His department plans to hold a public meeting with area residents who have voiced concerns about school traffic running through their neighborhood.

A permanent route designed to handle higher volumes of traffic needs to be built, Rountree said. But that’s where the debate begins. Very close to where one of the proposed access roads hits Fairview Loop it also crosses the railroad. For safety reasons, connecting the road to Fairview Loop would necessitate pushing Fairview Loop farther from the tracks, increasing the cost of the road.

“We hit a roadblock when the state and the railroad said, ‘Nope, you’ve got to move [Fairview Loop],’” Borough Manager John Duffy said.

Turner has paid or promised to pay $6.4 million to help build the access roads, but the Borough is still left with a hefty price tag. To build the eastern access road to what it needs to be will cost $5.4 million, Rountree said. On the west side, it’s another $3 million.

On the east road, Rountree said most of that expense is relating to paving the road, which Turner has promised to build as a gravel route, and installing a bridge over Wasilla Creek, estimated to cost $2.3 million.

Turner’s money would have been sufficient, Rountree said, except that the Assembly last summer passed a long-range transportation plan that required the road be wider. Without the plan’s requirements, he said, the borough would only have to pay for the bridge.

To delay building the school would also be expensive.

Borough Finance Director Tammy Clayton said it could cost more than $900,000 to get out of the bonds issued for the school. The state could ask for $700,000 it contributed to the project back, and that’s money already spent.

Rountree said that to change the school’s design to fit a different parcel would be costly. Collins Construction’s $14 million bid is due to expire this month and, considering the state of the economy, can only go up — possibly drastically — if put back out for bid, he said.

The issue of the costly access has drawn the ire of the assembly.

“We’re at 50 percent of the cost of the school just to do road modifications to get to it,” Assemblyman Tom Kluberton said.

“We have botched two land donations in two and a half years,” Assemblywoman Cindy Bettine said, referencing the process to site a new school on Knik-Goose Bay Road, which ran into trouble in 2006. “I think somebody within this staff needs to be responsible for it.”

Rountree said that Knik-Goose Bay Road school was eventually built on Borough land, but encountered access problems when the Borough had to pay to upgrade Hollywood Road, which is owned by the state, at a cost of more than $3 million.

That school was built alongside an existing school on the same parcel of land. Rountree said in an interview it was access to the existing school where staff and others had requested the access be fixed that drove the need to upgrade Hollywood Road. The new school was not creating the problems.

“I think we did some pretty incredible things especially on Knik-Goose Bay,” Rountree said in an interview, noting that the school was built and the road upgraded in 13 months where schools that size generally take two years to build.

“I’ll take responsibility for botching anything,” Duffy said, adding the Palmer school site was approved with Abby Boulevard assumed to be providing primary access to the site. “All this other talk was about improving access.”

Bettine asked why the assembly hadn’t been informed of this in March 2007 when the state and the railroad told the Borough to move Fairview Loop.

“We thought we could work it out in a financially reasonable manner,” Duffy said.

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