Thousands of acres go into trust

PALMER — If you’re the kind of person who admires the view to your left as you drive to Anchorage over the Knik River Bridge, rest assured you’re going to have that view forever.

According to a deal struck this week between the Eklutna Native Corp. and Great Land Trust, no one will ever be able to build anything there.

“It’s a terrific way for Eklutna to be able to retain their own land, but also be able to get some revenue for protecting it, and it’s a unique arrangement,” said the trust’s conservation director, David Mitchell.

Mitchell said that prior to the deal, Eklutna could have decided to build a hotel or whatever else there if it had wanted.

But for $1.95 million, the corporation agreed to sell Great Land Trust the development rights through what’s called a conservation easement.

The uses still allowed are “traditional uses, such as hunting and fishing, and they can issue permits for the public to use the property as well,” Mitchell said. “There’s no development that will be allowed on the property.”

The money actually originates at the Port of Anchorage where the municipality, to complete its expansion project, wound up filling in 135 acres of wetlands.

“To do that they had to get a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers,” Mitchell said. “That permit required that they put money into a fund to offset those impacts.”

Mitchell said that the trust applied for funding from that pool of money for the Eklutna project and the corps agreed.

He said there are a few small areas where development isn’t completely off limits and they’re all near exist rights of way for the Glenn Highway and Alaska Railroad, both of which might need to be improved or upgraded in the future.

“We didn’t want to get in the way of that,” Mitchell said.

The conservation easement, which is the trust’s largest, includes 4,800 acres, most at the mouth of the Knik and Matanuska rivers.

“It’s not all of the lands between the Old Glenn Highway bridge and the new Glenn Highway bridge, but it’s most of those,” Mitchell said.

While this is the most land put into trust at one time for the organization, it’s not the most the trust has spent to do an easement.

“We just completed a project in Anchorage that was nearly a $7 million deal,” Mitchell said.

That easement put part of the Campbell Creek estuary into a trust, which will eventually become a city park at the mouth of the creek.

Other deals the trust has done in the Valley include land adjacent to the Palmer Hayflats that include a piece of Spring Creek, 32 acres of moose and bear habitat north of Wasilla, 80 acres in the Numbered Lakes area of Talkeetna, 800 acres of borough land set aside for as wetlands south of Big Lake and a Trapper Creek-area crane sanctuary.

Eklutna CEO Curtis McQueen said in a press release that developing its lands to help Anchorage grow is one of the corporation’s priorities.

“At the same time, we are honored to work the Great Land Trust to protect key habitat for our shareholders and the community. We anticipate doing more transactions of this kind in the future,” McQueen said in the release.

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