Tower rules hit another obstruction

PALMER — Though an end was briefly in sight, the circuitous process of figuring out how the Mat-Su Borough plans to regulate tall structures appears headed back to the drawing board — again.

“I don’t think this would serve either the private sector or the public sector,” Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman Matthew Beck said at an April 1 meeting. “This would be a little too light and we would want to add something more.”

The story of tower regulations in the Valley is a long one. The borough has studied the issue for years. In November 2011, a raft of regulations on towers arrived at the assembly. Instead of passing it, the assembly threw out all tower regulations. Since then there have been numerous attempts to implement new rules, but eventually the assembly put back in place the rules it had thrown out.

Mat-Su Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss pushed for and won a new tower advisory committee — a previous committee had formed that initial legislation that died in 2011 — and tasked it with bringing a minimal ordinance to the assembly.

That’s what the committee came up with — an ordinance that simply requires people constructing tall towers notify neighbors and hold a meeting. After it was drafted, the first stop for the ordinance was the borough’s planning commission.

“The planning commission did have a public hearing on this, they talked at length about it and finally decided they weren’t going to work on tweaks and whatnot,” said Alex Strawn, the borough’s development services manager, who has been working on the tower rules for years. “They voted unanimously to not recommend approval of the ordinance, but to essentially go back to the drawing board and keep working on it.”

The planning commission’s recommendation is only that — a recommendation — so the ordinance still wound up at the assembly April 1, where it was set for introduction. In assembly parlance, an ordinance’s introduction is when it is brought to the assembly in order to be scheduled for a vote. In this case, it was to be scheduled for an April 15 vote.

But the assembly decided instead to kill the ordinance, a move assemblyman Steve Colligan opposed.

“The bottom line is it has been out in the public and I think it’s worthy of a discussion,” Colligan said. “If we need to, postpone it to several other meetings.”

Assemblyman Vern Halter said he thought the planning commission should take another crack at it.

“I think they should have plenty of time to really walk through this ordinance,” he said.

Colligan disagreed.

“If the planning commission hasn’t commented on it thus far after having had it, I don’t think they’re going to in the future,” Colligan said.

Halter said he thinks the borough needs at least some new tower rules.

“I have always thought that we should have a public process to this so people, neighbors, can have their say about a tower that’s going to go into their neighborhood,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.