Seward Meridian extension still years from construction

WASILLA — Local residents eager to set eyes on a planned $31.3 million expansion of the Seward Meridian Parkway could end up waiting a while.

Officials with the project — dubbed Seward Meridian Parkway Expansion Road Improvements, Phase II — say the design phase of the roadway is no more than 35 percent complete.

Plans to expand the parkway from two lanes to four in an existing corridor between the Palmer-Wasilla Highway and Bogard Road, and then extend the road from Bogard to Seldon, have been in place since at least the mid-2000s. In 2012, the existing two-lane connector between the Parks Highway and the Palmer-Wasilla Highway was widened to four lanes.

The project briefly became the subject of negotiations between the borough and state in 2013, when the borough agreed to take on maintenance of the existing four-lane parkway, as well as any potential parkway surface constructed in the future, according to Frontiersman articles at the time.

In the intervening years, the demand for a north-south connector of some kind in the area has only grown, said borough capital projects director Mike Brown, who said construction could potentially affect traffic to five local schools: including Cottonwood Creek Elementary, the Mat-Su Day School, the newly expanded Mat-Su Career and Technical High School, and Teeland Middle School, as well as the planned location of the Fronteras Spanish Immersion Charter School.

“There are concerns about school access,” he said. “When you consider the career and technical high school addition, when you consider the new Fronteras school, it just adds to an existing problem.”

Traffic pressures on the area are so great that drivers frequently make use of nearby Tait Road to access the schools from the south, sending heavy traffic through both an uncontrolled intersection on Bogard Road and a surrounding residential neighborhood, Brown said.

The project design is very preliminary, due in part to the fact that the tug-of-war over maintenance pushed design and construction back, according to 2013 Frontiersman articles.

Designers were still figuring out what to use to build the road, said Cynthia Ferguson, a planner with the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

“We’re pretty early along in the process,” she said. “What we have completed is our materials investigation. We’re probably about 30 percent to 35 percent along in the design. We’re re-evaluating some of our intersection treatments.”

While no public meetings are currently scheduled on the project, officials anticipate putting some portion of the project on display this fall, said Anne Brooks, the project’s public outreach coordinator.

Plans for presenting a design to the public are still fluid, Brooks added.

“We’ll probably have the Seward Meridian info at the Mat-Su Transportation Fair in the fall, but that all depends,” she said. “We might have the transportation fair first and then the public meeting. It’ll just depend where we’re at in the process.”

For more information, visit brooks-alaska.com/sewardmeridian.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.