Tears, cheers, growing pains

2005:

A year to remember

January 1, 2006

Frontiersman staff

One of Palmer's native sons died for his country in a war thousands of miles from home. Mat-Su attracted thousands of new residents, but voters decided, nevertheless, to reject ballot questions calling for new schools to accommodate them. Plans for a ski area at Hatcher Pass inched closer to being realized.

Those events were just a sampling of the many and varied things we covered in 2005.

Mat-Su residents celebrated, and they mourned.

Some Valley students earned accolades, while others threatened to shoot their peers, vandalized school buses and, in an example of Potato Bowl hijinks, freed chickens in Palmer High's cafeteria.

One of our state senators in Juneau declined to take action last session to quell the borough's raging meth epidemic, while our representatives on the borough assembly tried, unsuccessfully, on the Oct. 4 ballot to get the power to take meth's active ingredient out of the hands of people who &#8220cook” the drug.

Wal-Mart stirred the ire of people in the Palmer area when it bought a lot adjacent to the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. Mat-Su residents kept the tobacco tax, rid themselves of a much-loathed real estate transfer fee and struggled with the Matanuska River's destructive tendencies. Former state Sen. Scott Ogan landed a job with the Department of Natural Resources, sans the education and experience required of other applicants. The city of Wasilla offered a home to a Junior A hockey team and kept Dianne Keller in the mayor's office. Construction of a state veterans home began and the besieged Palmer courthouse in one year saw a nearly four-times-the-state-average increase in its felony caseload.

Here, by month, is a look back at other stories that unfolded this year in 2005 :

January

€ The average value of a single-family home in the Valley jumped to $187,000 in 2005, an increase of 15 percent over the previous year. While many residents expressed shock over their new property assessments, Mat-Su Borough Assessor Alan Black said his office was just doing a job mandated by state statute. The law requires the borough, each year, to reassess all properties by Jan. 1. Black said this year's assessments, while substantially higher, were just a reflection of the market.

&#8220My office mimics the market,” he said. &#8220Really it is the property owners that dictate what I do. It's a hot market out there and a lot of people are moving here to buy reasonably priced homes.”

Black said properties may also have been undervalued in past years but the greatest influence on rising property values, he said, is the market. In the past two years with people moving from Anchorage and elsewhere, the demand for land and homes has increased. The less land available, the more valuable it becomes.

€ MEA-contracted crews voluntarily halted a brush-clearing project Jan. 7 after being handed a temporary retraining order filed by the Mat-Su Borough.

€ After listening to a full hour of public testimony, with hundreds of emotionally charged Valley residents watching, the Mat-Su School Board in January unanimously voted to reject all but one school boundary change for next year. The only boundary change approved will send 41 Indian Hills area students from Larson Elementary to Iditarod Elementary - all other boundary lines will remain the same.

The proposed boundary changes would have moved nearly 500 students into different schools in 2006. It was a proposal school administrators said was necessary as already-overcrowded Mat-Su schools continue to take in more and more students each year. Roughly 600 students are expected to join the district in 2006 alone.

February

€ After a week-and-a-half stay in Homer, waiting for more favorable ice conditions and safer tides in Knik Arm, the South Korean ship Keoyang Majesty returned to Port MacKenzie in late February, where its wood-chip on-loading process was quickly completed before the bulk commodities carrier returned to South Korea. Icy conditions and swift tidal currents - which occurred when the ship was first docked at Port MacKenzie - not only delayed the loading process by 10 days, but prompted port director Marc Van Dongen and an NPI financier to examine ways to avoid such problems in the future. They came up with a solution that works with, not against, Alaska's long, temperamental winters. Essentially, ships would come into Port MacKenzie from April through December.

Harvesting and hauling wood chips would be done during the first three months of the year - taking a hiatus during spring breakup.

€ The city of Palmer revealed plans to punch Dogwood Avenue through to the Glenn Highway and beyond, looping it around to the Palmer-Wasilla Highway and creating the beginning of a new east-west corridor for the growing area.

&#8220We want to (build this road) to facilitate good traffic flow,” Sara Jansen, Palmer's community development coordinator, said Thursday. &#8220Right now, the main east-to-west thoroughfare is E. Evergreen, which becomes congested. There's no more right of ways to expand that road without seriously impacting business, so we're looking at Dogwood Avenue as another east-to-west road that would facilitate entry into the downtown Palmer area.”

The Department of Transportation and Public Facilities is handling the construction and utilities portion of the Glenn-Dogwood intersection project, which is expected to cost $2.4 million, according to Judy Dougherty, design section project manager.

€ Former state senator Scott Ogan accepted a position as a natural resource manager II for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources' Division of Mining Lands and Water in late February. Minimum qualifications for the NRM II position were a doctorate in a natural resources field, a master's degree and two years' experience in journey-level, resource-related work or four years of such experience. Ogan has no such professional or educational background, according to information noted in his biographical sketch from an Alaska Legislature Web site. Becky Hultberg, spokesman for Gov. Frank Murkowski's administration, said the job was a classified position, not an appointment.

€ The borough held an open house late in February, allowing residents to review findings and look at maps depicting the different routes possible for MEA's planned power lines, which would supplement power for the new Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, which is now set to open Jan. 27.

March

€ Attorneys representing the borough and MEA agreed March 1 on one power route to the hospital: a 2.5-mile route that would take lines down through a gully at Crevasse-Moraine park - a route avoiding the borough's landfill property and privately owned land.

The power lines would still extend across land owned by the University of Alaska, but university officials said the arrangement was fine with them - MEA would consolidate lines there on existing poles.

The cost for the power-lines project was expected to be $800,000 per mile, MEA spokesman Tuckerman Babcock said March 2.

€ A project designed to transform the Seward Meridian Parkway into a five-lane highway will most likely involve purchasing rights of way from property and business owners and relocating residents along the roadway, an Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities official said at a scoping meeting in March.

Kim Rice, preliminary design and environmental chief with DOT, said the road's final design remains in the planning phase. &#8220The new road is much wider than the old road that we can't avoid taking property,” said Rice, adding that the property that would be at stake depends on which design is adopted.

Three variations of a 200-foot-wide corridor for the Seward Meridian Parkway project, as well as traffic analysis reports and a map with sticky-notes for public comment, were some of the ways information was presented to Valley residents during a March 9 open house at Teeland Middle School.

A GARVEE bond will fund the studies and right-of-way acquisitions. The total bond amount is $7.5 million, with $1.5 million spent on a traffic light. Eighty-five percent of the bond must be used by April 2006.

€ Spring 2005 saw more prime Mat-Su farmland transformed into high-density subdivisions. Construction crews and dirt movers quickly transformed farm fields in the Springer Loop area outside Palmer into bustling family neighborhoods, with kids bicycling quiet streets and neighbors painting new homes and landscaping fresh planted lawns.

A former owner of a Springer Loop farm, Noel Woods, remembers harvesting vegetables from the field with his father back in the 1940s. It's a tradition the 75-year-old Woods wanted to continue and pass down, but times changed and economic hardships caused him to sell the field to local developer Jess Hall, of Hall's Quality Homes. In the last couple of years, Woods sold an additional 80 acres to developers.

&#8220It's all gone now,” Woods said.

Similar stories continued to play out over the summer across many of the most fertile farm fields in the Mat-Su. That land is considered by many to be Alaska's breadbasket.

&#8220The best farmland is being developed,” said Joe Moore, state soil scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

According to Moore, the same properties that make Mat-Su land good for farming also make it prime land for housing developments. The land around Palmer, he said, is flat, drains quickly and has a thick layer of wind-blown silt, which makes for both fertile soil and great landscape material.

April

€ More than 100 Catholics silently filed into Sacred Heart Catholic Church in April to mourn the loss of their leader, Pope John Paul II, 84, who died April 2, 2005, in his residence at the Vatican.

News of his death flooded radio, television and Internet outlets around the world as more than a billion Catholics mourned their leader of 26 years, who had the third-longest stint as pope in the history of the Catholic church, which includes 264 popes. Throughout his papacy, John Paul II was known for reaching out to other faiths and Christian denominations. He prayed for unity with Orthodox Christians and even asked the Muslim world for forgiveness for the Crusades.

A few weeks after John Paul's death, Mat-Su Catholics joined millions around the world in welcoming Pope Benedict XVI as the 265th pope.

In Palmer, St. Michael's priest, Father Leo Desso said he hoped Benedict would continue the tradition of John Paul II in reaching out to young people.

&#8220He is a conservative and he is going to really heed to the doctrines,” Desso said of Benedict, adding that he hoped the new pope continues to dialogue with Christians both inside and outside the Catholic Church.

&#8220The conservatives, the liberals and particularly our young people, what we call the X-generation, people between 20 and 40 that have not been faithful to their faith,” Desso said. &#8220Hopefully he can reach those people.”

€ Peter Burchell garnered the majority of votes April 2 at MEA's annual election to win one of two three-year-term seats on the utility's board of directors, where he was joined by the next-highest vote-getter, incumbent and board president Lee Jordan. Jordan was running about 250 votes behind Burchell after preliminary election results were revealed during MEA's annual meeting April 2 at Colony High School.

The total number of ballots cast was 8,846.

€ The Mat-Su Borough and its public works department broke ground for the new Wasilla elementary school on April 13.

The school was part of the 2004 Mat-Su Borough school bonds package, and the design phase of the project was completed early in the fourth quarter of 2004. Construction began in the first half of 2005 and was expected to be complete in July. The amount bonded for the elementary school was $12 million.

The school, located at Mile 3.9 Wasilla-Fishhook Road, near Paradise Lake, will consist of a 54,400-square-foot structure on a 20-acre site. Three acres will be left wooded for wind mitigation and watershed. There will be 22 traditional classrooms, four special education classrooms, music room, library, computer room and a multi-purpose room. The building is designed to house 488 K-4 students.

McCool, Carlson Green Architects completed the design, and Collins Construction from the Mat-Su was awarded the construction contract in April 2005.

Other schools-related projects at the borough include the new student nutrition center, a vocational-technical high school and career center, new fire sprinklers at Palmer Junior Middle School, renovations at Palmer High School and fire alarm upgrades at three Valley schools. The total cost for those projects is expected to be less than $45 million.

€ On April 17, the assembly repealed a real-estate transfer fee, after noting problems involving individuals who wanted to add a new spouse to a property's deed and other property transactions involving the same owner. The fee was originally enacted in May 2004. Borough Finance Director Tammy Clayton reported that $530,000 in fees had been deposited in the areawide general fund. Refunds were mailed out to property owners following the vote.

€ When a 17-year-old Palmer High School student allegedly made threats to bring a gun to school in April to shoot fellow students, the small town of Palmer was shocked.

No one interviewed could recall a scare of this magnitude ever happening in the Mat-Su - not the chief of police, not school officials, parents or former students. The disbelief was heard in coffee shops, banks and businesses around town as word of the threat spread through a matrix of e-mails, phone calls and endless conversations.

Police arrested the Palmer teen at his home, after receiving an anonymous phone call warning them of the student's alleged plans. The student was jailed at the Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer and faced charges of third degree assault and making terrorist threats.

May

€ Mat-Su School Board members were largely pleased with the state and borough funding levels they received for the fiscal year 2006 school year, which amounted to a $165 million budget.

Chief School Administrator Bob Doyle described the budget as a &#8220best-case scenario” and said the district is appreciative of funding levels from both the borough and the state. The new budget is $16 million more than last year but still about $1 million shy of what the district initially planned for.

€ Borough Clerk Michelle McGehee announced to the assembly during its May 5 meeting that a six-month project undertaken by her office was complete and that residents would be able to take advantage of the new online service being offered by the borough, which makes the entire assembly information packet available online at www.matsugov.us/Assembly. The assembly packet contains more than the ordinances and resolutions on which the Assembly is scheduled to take action. It also contains background information, maps, studies and impact statements on topics set for assembly action. Installation of a new combination printer/scanner in the clerk's office was a key element to getting the packet online.

€ After a long period of public comment and a 20-minute debate, members of the Mat-Su Borough Assembly voted 4-3 on May 17 to implement an excise tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products.

The tax, which went into effect July 1, added a $1-per-pack tax on cigarettes and a 45-percent tax on other tobacco. The decision came eight months after the Anchorage Assembly passed a similar measure.

Borough officials estimated that the new tax would generate $4.5 million and provide property-tax payers with a little relief.

Borough Clerk Michelle McGehee announced July 6 that she had started distributing petitions calling for a repeal of the tobacco tax.

Sponsors of the repeal petition managed to collect enough signatures to get the repeal question on the Oct. 4 ballot, but the proposition failed by a vote of 7,472 to 5646.

The borough had collected $1,413,700 from the tobacco tax as of Dec. 11.

€ During the May 23 Wasilla City Council meeting, council member Mark Ewing called attention to the fact that one of his fellow councilors was no longer residing within the city limits. Ewing was concerned that council member Noel Lowe had not resided in the city since November 2004 and no longer met the criteria to serve as a council member. His participation in meetings, Ewing said, violated city code. City attorney Thomas Klinkner pointed out that under the state statutes covering voter qualification, the city and council could allow Lowe to serve as long as his intent was to return to living within the city limits.

After a month of debating his residency, Lowe offered his resignation during the June 27 meeting of the council. Lowe and his family have moved back into the city, purchasing a home in August.

June

€ Beginning in January, many Mat-Su College students won't have to drive into Anchorage to take upper-level courses for the University of Alaska nursing program.

Mat-Su College will host University of Alaska Anchorage faculty members who will come out to teach the courses. The curriculum, though, will remain UAA's.

MSC Director Paul Dauphinais said he expects the move to increase college enrollment numbers for Valley residents.

While course fees for the nursing classes will go to UAA in Anchorage, Dauphinais said he expects MSC to see increased revenue though tuition fees and lower-level course fees, which nursing students must take before moving on to the more advanced classes.

&#8220Nurses have to take anatomy and physiology, chemistry and several biology courses,” Dauphinais said. &#8220We offer all of those here.”

Part of the reason for offering the nursing program in the Valley is that the University of Alaska is trying to increase the number of nursing graduates.

€ This summer, longtime Big Lake resident Bud Beech was out mowing his grass. Surrounded by tiny ponds and marshlands that connect with Big Lake, Beech's yard teems with tiny Alaska wood frogs. Moving the mower up and down the lawn, the frogs began jumping out of the way. It was nothing unusual until Beech caught sight of something strange.

&#8220I looked down and saw one that didn't have any back legs,” he recalled last week. &#8220I thought I ran over it or something. I stopped to take a closer look and I couldn't find the crazy thing.”

Then a few days later a visiting friend noticed other frogs around the yard with missing legs and stump feet. Beech investigated the curiosity further and started picking up all kinds of malformed frogs.

&#8220I picked up a dozen of them and three were missing the right rear leg,” he said. Others limped along on shriveled hind legs or tiny nubs.

In nearly 50 years living near Big Lake, Beech has never seen anything like it before. State scientists, however, say deformed frog sightings are on the rise, both statewide and nationally.

&#8220Deformities are starting to show up on the radar,” said David Tessler, a Division of Wildlife Conservation non-game biologist with the Department of Alaska Fish and Game.

Since amphibians spend much of their life in water and breathe through their skin, they are often the first species to develop deformities when changes occur in their eco-system. Scientists are concerned that the recent frog reports could be early indicators of much broader environmental concerns.

This summer, a pilot program began to study amphibians in Southeast Alaska, where the highest concentration of Alaskan amphibians live. The data collected from this and other programs will later be pooled to determine environmental trends.

€ Parks Highway road construction crews worked on the highway over the spring and summer, necessitating detours and traffic delays.

July

€ The Greater Wasilla Chamber of Commerce was the first to officially welcome the Wasilla Spirit Junior A hockey team to town on July 5, ending several months of negotiation, rumors and anticipation. The Chamber took time out during its weekly luncheon to welcome the leadership group from the team, putting an end to the talk and realizing a dream. Team owner Jack Tragis, general manager Corey Millen and head coach Dean Larsen were on hand representing the Spirit. Local hockey fans got their first taste of Spirit hockey Aug. 6 when the team held a Purple/White intersquad scrimmage at the Wasilla Multi-Use Sports Complex. The Purple team defeated the White squad, 6-3.

€ July 11 After three months of answering allegations of improper campaign disclosure, Peter Burchell stepped into his three-year-term seat on MEA's board of directors July 11. Both Burchell and incumbent Lee Jordan were sworn in during the monthly board meeting at MEA headquarters in Palmer.

First, board members voted 4-2 to reprimand Burchell for breaking the board's campaign disclosure bylaws. The approved resolution will require findings of the investigation into the Burchell's campaign reports to be made available to co-op members. Also, if Burchell chooses to run for a second term, co-op voters will be provided with information about his past discrepancies.

&#8220The reprimand is a formal statement that the board believes [Burchell] was not in compliance with the rules,” MEA spokesperson Mike Pauley said July 13.

€ With one third of U.S. children now living in single-parent homes and the number of homes with two working parents continuing to increase, more children than ever spend large portions of their waking hours raised by professionally trained day-care providers. Alaska and the Mat-Su area are no exception.

Statewide, the number of licensed child-care providers jumped from 534 in 2004 to 744 in 2005 - an increase of nearly 40 percent in a single year. Most of those facilities serve Anchorage and Mat-Su children.

In addition to licensed providers, more than 600 alternative child-care operations also provide service in Anchorage and Mat-Su.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly half of all U.S. children attend non-parental child care facilities before their first birthday, with the average child under 3 years old spending more than 30 hours a week at their first facility.

Mat-Su resident Natalie Ray owns one of the largest child-care operations in the Valley. With two centers under the banner of Ray's Child Care, she serves approximately 400 kids a month. After working in the field for more than 30 years, Ray said she's noticed several factors leading to the increased demand for child care.

&#8220The fact that we have so many single parents contributes to it,” she explained. &#8220The dual-parent family is not as prevalent as it used to be.”

Ray said families with two parents are also using child-care more than they used to.

&#8220It's a financial thing,” she said. &#8220They have to make tough choices and a lot of people don't want to stay home.”

€ The raging waters of the Matanuska River chewed away prime shoreline real estate in Circle View subdivision in July, taking a nearly 100-foot bite out of several properties there in early July. Life along the river has been scary since 1991, when the wandering water began to eat away at the shore. Residents on the banks of the Matanuska are helpless, only able to listen and watch as their property washes away. In addition to the danger to property owners, electrical transmission lines were removed by Matanuska Electric Association before falling to the eroding river.

The borough sought assistance from the state to remedy the erosion of banks along the river.

€ The Wasilla City Council filled a vacancy during its July 29 meeting, but the right candidate may not have been appointed to the seat.

Verdie Bowen was sworn into office after the council appeared to have selected him to fill a vacancy left by the resignation of Noel Lowe the preceding month.

A day later, however, confusion and controversy erupted over the balloting process and how they were scored.

An examination of the ballots by the Frontiersman showed that council member Diana Straub had marked her ballot incorrectly, placing her first choice as her fourth and vice-versa.

Straub's confusion resulted in Bowen being selected to fill the vacant seat.

€ The Wasilla City Council's vote via a secret ballot July 29 to fill a vacant seat was a violation of the public's right to know how each member voted, as indicated in the Alaska Open Meetings Act (OMA), according to attorney John McKay.

Council members used the anonymous secret ballot during their regular meeting, to rate the applicants to fill the vacancy, and failed to disclose the results of the vote during the meeting.

City Clerk Kristie Smithers initially refused a request for copies of the ballots, stating that copies of the ballots would not be released. After the Frontiersman questioned the legality of keeping the records secret, they were released later the next day.

&#8220The law is clear,” McKay said. &#8220It states that all votes must be conducted in such a manner the public may know how each member of the body voted.”

Once the ballots were reviewed, it was clear that there was no way of knowing which ballot was cast by which council member.

The Open Meetings Act requires that all deliberations of a governing body be open to the public. The act also requires that the vote shall be conducted in such a manner that the public may know the vote of each person entitled to vote.

August

€ A group of determined Mat-Su Borough residents fought for four years to get a tax-cap initiative on the ballot for voter approval. After fighting in court and collecting nearly 4,500 signatures, its efforts finally succeeded this year.

But before the measure could be placed on the ballot for Valley residents to consider in the October election, the borough assembly voted 4-3 during its Aug. 2 meeting to approve a version of the tax-cap ordinance written by assembly member Jim Colver. The assembly's version of the cap included one change to the original tax-cap initiative. An exemption for service areas to set their own mill rates with the approval of service area voters is where the two cap proposals differed.

Penny Nixon, the driving force behind the Mat-Su Taxpayers Association, which organized the petition drive, said, &#8220It's a political maneuver geared toward blocking the public's right to vote. But this is an enormous victory for the people of the borough. I'm not disappointed, having advocated for 14 months, and am happy that there is finally resolution to the debate.”

€ Former Gov. Jay Hammond passed away in August, leaving behind an record of public service that shaped the contours of Alaska's politics, economy and culture. Regarded by many as an &#8220Alaskan giant,” Hammond's public record spokes for itself.

His political service began in 1959 as a member of the first through third Alaska State Legislatures in the House of Representatives. In 1966, he headed to the state Senate, serving another six years and becoming the Senate president in 1971-72.

Hammond served as state governor from 1974 to 1982, overseeing the biggest economic boom in Alaska's history, the construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. His administration is noted for conservation efforts, creation of the popular Alaska Permanent Fund in 1976 and the passage of a constitutional amendment in 1982 to limit state spending.

After retirement from public office, Hammond wrote newspaper articles and continued as an advocate for environmental conservation and state fiscal responsibility.

€ Statewide, 41 percent of schools (203 of 495) did not meet federal standards for the 2005 Adequate Yearly Progress, with nearly 50 percent of Mat-Su Schools (18 of 38) missing the mark.

State and local education officials, however, cautioned residents to look at the &#8220big picture” before labeling schools that missed AYP as failing institutions.

&#8220There is a bigger picture and that includes the daily classroom assessments that we are doing with each and every child,” said Kim Floyd, information specialist for Mat-Su Schools. &#8220This single measure cannot be used as a indicator of school or student performance. A sole measure is not adequate in doing that.”

Test compliance is closely tied to Title 1, a voluntary federal program that provides billions of dollars to participating states to help educate low-income children. Part of the agreement under Title 1 is that states work towards yearly academic progress.

In the past, states were free to define academic progress as they saw fit, which resulted in widespread abuse and lax standards by many.

In 2001, the federal government stepped in and clearly defined what would pass as adequate yearly progress.

Under the new system, each school must pass 31 different categories. If even one category is missed, AYP cannot be obtained.

In order to keep certain student groups from being academically left behind, federal law states that schools must show progress for all the different types of students, not just overall school results.

Sub-groups include students with: limited English proficiency, disabilities, economic disadvantage and different races.

This year, according to Alaska state law, 71.48 percent of students had to be proficient in reading, writing and 57.61 percent had to be proficient in math in order for the school as a whole to pass AYP. In addition, federal law required that at least 95 percent of students in every category participate in the exam before the school meets AYP.

€ A long wait ended for Alaska's veterans Aug. 29 when Gov. Frank Murkowski was joined by several state and national officials for the ground-breaking ceremony of the Alaska Veteran and Pioneer Home renovation project in Palmer. The groundbreaking marked the beginning of plans to renovate the Palmer Pioneer Home and establish the first Veterans Home in Alaska. Plans call for modernizing the facility to meet Veterans Affairs standards, enhancing physical therapy areas and improving handicapped access. When the $4.15 million renovation is complete, the facility will feature an energy-efficient heating system and covered entryway. It will also have 79 beds serving both veterans and those who qualify for admission for the Pioneer Home System. Renovation is expected to be complete this summer.

September

€ A highly destructive microorganism plagued Mat-Su potato fields this fall, raising fears among pest management officials and farmers that the disease, which caused the notorious Irish potato famine in the 1800s, could decimate the bulk of Mat-Su potato crops during winter storage.

Spread by wind and water, the late blight disease contaminated crops for five out of seven commercial potato growers.

Caused by a water-mold microorganism, the blight first showed up in Mat-Su fields in early August. It can travel as far as 80 miles through microscopic wind-blown spores. When they land on wet potato leaves, they initiate a takeover of the plant, rotting the leaves, stems and, ultimately, the underground potatoes.

Cool, rainy weather in August and September only exacerbated the problem, said Bill Campbell, disease control specialist for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources .

The total damage won't be known until after winter, when farmers can assess how their potatoes stored in winter cellars.

October

€ Political newcomer Greg Koskela and incumbent assembly member Mary Kvalheim waited three weeks for a final count of votes after the Oct. 4 election. Voters in the Wasilla and Big Lake areas went to the ballot box Oct. 4 to select their representatives on the Mat-Su Borough Assembly. After the votes were counted, the winner of one race was clear but the other still hung in the balance. Cindy Bettine held a two-to-one margin over former assembly member Jay Nolfi and filled assembly seat 5. But it took a little longer to determine who would sit next to her in seat 4, with just 11 votes separating Kvalheim and Koskela after the initial tally. The borough canvass board began reviewed the 540 absentee and questioned ballots from the precincts represented by seat 4 and eventually declared Kvalheim the winner by 25 votes after three weeks of reviewing and counting the ballots.

€ Incumbent Wasilla mayor Dianne M. Keller resoundingly defeated a bid for the mayoral job by Wasilla City Council member Diana Straub and Steve Stoll. Marty Metiva and Steve Menard won seats on the council.

€ Larry Hill earned a seat on the Palmer City Council, while Brad Hanson and Tony Pippel kept their seats on that body. John Combs won a full-time salary for the mayor's job.

€ Link Fannon and Steve Frost won seats on Houston's city council. Fannon unseated incumbent Carol Johnston and Frost unseated Dannie O'Brien.

€ Cheryl Turner returned to the Mat-Su School Board, unseating incumbent Mike Chmielewski. Pat Purcell defeated Mary Anderson for the other open position on the school board.

€ Mat-Su taxpayers opposed financing three proposed elementary schools. Total cost for the schools was listed at slightly more than $40 million, but the state agreed to reimburse $24 million of that. Even so, many residents opposed the bonds.

&#8220People are just tired of seeing their taxes go up,” said Dennis Oakland, co-founder of the Mat-Su Taxpayers Association.

While not opposed to public education, Oakland said he thought the school district, which accounts for approximately 80 percent of the borough's annual budget, needed to be more efficient with its funds.

&#8220They have plenty of money and they better start working more efficiently before getting any more,” he said.

School district officials, however, said rising enrollment, commitment to smaller class sizes, increased numbers of special-needs students and vocational education programs all put added strain on school enrollment capacities.

Now with nearly 15,500 students - 800 more than the previous year - the school district added enough students this fall to more than fill another new school. If the growth continues and new schools aren't approved soon, Chief School Administrator Bob Doyle said class sizes will likely increase.

€ There's gold in them there hills - or, to be more precise, plans for a $41-million ski resort complex that might finally turn Hatcher Pass into an economic engine for the Mat-Su.

The Mat-Su Borough Assembly, during its Oct. 18 meeting, authorized Borough Manager John Duffy to begin negotiations with John Rubini, chief executive officer of JL Properties, to build a ski area down the road from Independence Mine and across from the Little Susitna River.

The $41.25 million project will include a residential area, with room for 450 homes near the ski slope. Commercial development will take place, and cross-country ski trails will wind throughout the community.

This is the latest plan presented to the assembly in more than 20 years of work seeking to develop a ski area in Hatcher Pass.

Geologists with the U.S. Geological Survey have forecast that Alaska's next major earthquake is likely to occur on the Castle Mountain fault at the base of the Talkeetna Mountains. The fault runs directly through the site proposed ski area. The study demonstrated that an earthquake of at least magnitude 7.0 may occur along this fault in the near future.

November

€ After adding a couple of last-minute amendments, the borough assembly adopted an ordinance that will expand the regulations in place on adult-oriented businesses in the core area to include the entirety of lands within the borough's boundaries. The amendments were added to allow existing businesses time to conform to the new regulations without having to close their doors and, hopefully, fend off any potential lawsuits.

€ At the conclusion of the Alaska Municipal League's meeting in Anchorage Nov. 10, Matanuska-Susitna Borough Mayor Tim Anderson signed on with Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage and Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor John Williams to form the &#8220Tri-Borough Commission.”

Designed to provide a forum for the three regional governments to plan and coordinate common action, leverage resources, and aggressively pursue solutions to common problems on a regional level, with a focus on economic development.

The Commission will meet at least three times a year - once in each community - and will focus on regional planning, policy coordination, and advocacy in the areas of economic development, tourism support and development, transportation, disaster preparedness and other key issues.

€ After taking their challenge of the tobacco tax to the voters without success, a pair of local residents took their fight to the courts. Attorney Ken Jacobus filed the lawsuit on behalf of Wasilla's Nola Bragg and Link Fannon of Houston, in Palmer Superior Court. The lawsuit hopes to repeal the $1-a-pack tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products approved by the assembly in May.

Jacobus stated that the borough doesn't have the authority to levy an excise tax. But Mat-Su officials say no statutes specifically prohibit the tax because voter approval is not required.

December

€ Alaska State Troopers arrested four teenage boys at their Mat-Su homes in December, after they were charged with vandalizing 44 Mat-Su school buses - an incident that forced the Mat-Su Borough School District to close schools for a day on Nov. 29.

Deryck Harris, 18, and the other three boys - ages 16, 17 and 17 - were each charged with third-degree criminal mischief, first-degree criminal trespass and conspiracy to commit criminal mischief, troopers said. The 16-year-old was also charged with fourth-degree theft and furnishing alcohol to a minor, for allegedly stealing a bottle of vodka from the liquor store at Tesoro 2-Go in Wasilla.

The boys were suspected of deflating tires in 44 First Student buses, breaking mirrors and unplugging 110 buses from their engine-block heaters, which caused the buses not to start in subzero weather.