Town hall meeting covers broad array of concerns

MAT-SU — A wide-ranging meeting Saturday organized by Sen. Linda Menard, R-Wasilla, to hear from her constituents included talk of prison jobs, too-bright headlights and the potential for logging to return to the Mat-Su Valley.

About the prison jobs, Goose Creek Correctional Center is set to slowly ramp up operations over the coming months. That means millions of dollars flowing into the Mat-Su Borough. It also means 373 jobs when the place is fully staffed, including 250 guards.

“We will instantly become one of the largest employers in the Mat-Su Valley,” Deputy Commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Corrections Sam Edwards said.

And, Edwards pointed out, those are long-term, stable jobs.

“We are, unfortunately, a long-term business,” he said. “We hope not to grow, but odds are we will be there for a long time.”

Guards and prisoners will come to the prison in phases, with the first group arriving in July. Anyone interested in a job in the prison system should visit the department’s website at alaskacorrections.com.

As for logging, Menard invited Rick Jandreau from the state Division of Forestry to talk about the potential of a Susitna State Forest. Creating the forest is one of Menard’s legislative priorities this year.

Jandreau said the idea is to take 763,000 acres of state land, divide it into parcels as small as 300 acres and as large as 200,000 acres, and designate them as lands whose primary function is forestry.

Everything else — mining, trapping, hunting, recreation — would be allowed. But trees would be the primary focus. They’d be available for firewood cutters and sawmills, and the state would work to manage the trees, to plant new ones and make the operations sustainable.

Without a state forest designation, Forestry goes in and plants trees, but “10 years later, those trees that we planted are bulldozed over for a subdivision,” Jandreau said. Nothing against subdivisions, he said, but “that makes us really reluctant to invest in those kinds of projects.”

Making the designation would alleviate that and, Jandreau said, isn’t anticipated to cost anything. Jandreau said the project would only affect a fraction of the 9.5 million acres the state owns in the Mat-Su Borough.

Menard said she likes the idea of giving a boost to logging and the wood-products industry in the state.

“In the ’60s when we came up here it was the fifth largest industry,” she said. She described logging in the state now as a “dying industry.”

Lynn Gattis, a Mat-Su Borough School Board member and candidate for the state House of Representative this year, asked Jandreau if the change would make it harder to build roads or railroads across state land.

“It wouldn’t make it any harder,” Jandreau said, noting that the designation doesn’t prohibit any of those uses.

As for too-bright headlights — that was a question for the meeting’s third guest, Capt. Hans Brinke of the Alaska State Troopers. Bill Butler noted that blue lights on non-emergency vehicles are prohibited, but a lot of big, bright lights on large, tall trucks look blue to him.

“Someday when every car on the road is blue we’ll get used to it,” Butler said.

Brinke said there’s really no good answer to the super-bright or off-color headlights quandary.

He said there’s some debate about whether the light coming from those bulbs is technically blue or white. Whether or not it’s legal is a gray area, but proving they’re not would probably require inspecting the bulbs themselves. And not a lot of motorists are going to take lightly an officer’s request to pop the hood.

About the brightness, Brinke said the laws on the books are pretty old. They have a minimum candlepower that headlights must be, but no maximum number for what’s too powerful.

“We don’t drive around with a light meter in the car,” he said. “It’s a real difficult enforcement problem that we have.”

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