South Big Lake Road gets new alignment

PALMER — The story of how the Mat-Su Borough wound up in charge of replacing a segment of South Big Lake Road is about as windy as the roadway itself.

The segment in question runs from just east of Jade Lake to the road’s intersection with Burma Road and Susitna Parkway. This chunk of curvy, hilly and shoulderless road was built in 1961, according to the project’s website.

As early as 1980 the Mat-Su Borough Assembly was looking to realign it, going so far as to pick a route and buy up right-of-way for the new road bed.

“That’s where the project ended, it ended at right of way acquisition,” said the borough’s project manager for the current realignment, Mike Campfield.

The project kind of stalled then. Nothing happened until it was paved and guardrails were added in a state project in 1998.

In 2010 the state revisited the borough’s plans and found that same alignment from 1980 still made sense. They did a reconnaissance project to make sure.

“There wasn’t in the ’80s maybe as rigorous a route selection process as they use now,” Campfield said.

So now the state had a route picked out. It also set aside money to build it but not enough. They gave the same treatment to the even windier, even bumpier Burma Road — handing some money to DOT to fix it but not enough money.

In 2012, Campfield said, the borough stepped in and got the state to agree to combine those two pots of money into one and put it all toward South Big Lake Road.

“I don’t think there was enough money in either pot of money to do either project so they had to be combined,” Campfield said.

And that’s the $9 million that the borough wound up with. Campfield’s boss, the borough’s Capital Projects Director Mike Brown, said that the plan is to have the road finished this season.

“It looks like we’re going to finish it up in the fall with the paving and stuff. There may be some erosion control and seeding and stuff that takes place in the spring,” Brown said.

Campfield said that the borough actually got a pretty good deal on the project.

“We’re fortunate this year was a good competitive year for construction contracts,” Campfield said. “The low bid was more than a million below our engineer’s estimate so that’s pretty unusual.”

That savings, he said, can go toward adding things into the project. Since it’s a new road segment with what transportation planners call “controlled access” — not a lot in the way of driveways and intersections — the borough wants to put in a connector to the old Big Lake Road. That would save people using the road from having to drive to one end or the other to switch onto the old road, which will stay in place as access for private properties there.

“We’re fortunate that the state of Alaska owns that piece of land that this road would run through,” Campfield said. “We’re hopeful that we’ll be able to build it but we’re still in the design on that.”

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