Veterans get their way on road project

PALMER — Yukon Don Tanner said he knew going in that the wheels of government turn slowly, but never did he think his entirely uncontroversial idea to honor veterans would take 10 years.

When Tanner started his quest, the Bogard Road extension project, which will push the road through to Palmer, was still only theoretical. He sat on the Mat-Su Borough’s Transportation Advisory Committee at the time. Now that project is essentially shovel-ready, just awaiting construction funds.

Noticing that the borough intended to create a road that had four names — Seldon, Bogard, Colony Schools and Arctic — he proposed calling the whole thing Veterans Way. Tanner is former military. Honoring veterans is a cause he’s championed for years.

“My family has served in every conflict since the Revolutionary War,” he said.

Soon after Tanner put his idea on the table, the project ran into its first of what would be a series of snags. He started looking into the idea and found out that he’d have to go to Juneau — a place he’s familiar with, having spent a number of years working for politicians there.

“It takes a piece of legislation to do it,” he said. “The borough commission can’t do it.”

A few notes about that legislation, which passed over the weekend: Nobody is going to have to change their address. Homes on that stretch of Bogard Road — or Seldon Road or Colony Schools Drive — will still get mail at a Bogard Road address. It will be more of a memorial corridor, like the first nine miles of the Glenn Highway, which long ago were dubbed the Veterans Memorial Parkway. The borough could choose to try to get rid of the old names, Tanner said, but that would take quite a bit of public process.

Not long after he’d discovered it would take the legislature to create Veterans Way, two of Tanner’s sons returned from serving in the Navy. He handed the project off to them and a third recently discharged Navy veteran. Those three men and a team of volunteers began circulating petitions.

The veterans community stepped up, Tanner said. And that’s a very large group.

“There’s 10,000 veterans registered with the veteran’s center over in Wasilla,” he said.

Eventually, the plan was ready to go to Juneau. But the legislator they’d tapped to carry it through let them down. It languished for a few years until Rep. Wes Keller of Wasilla agreed to pick up the flag.

Last year Keller and his staff wrote the legislation and put it into the hopper, but the session ended without the bill ever making it to the floor. But Keller kept at it, Tanner said, picking it back up this year and pushing it through until it hit a snag in the House Transportation Committee.

“I asked them how much veteran attention they wanted before they would move that bill out of Transportation,” he said.

Apparently they wanted very little. The bill was out of committee the next day. It sailed through the House Finance Committee, got a waiver to bypass the Senate Transportation Committee, then wound up in the Senate Finance Committee.

Tanner said he was on the edge of his seat as the legislative session drew to a close last weekend. Saturday at 4 p.m., the bill still wasn’t out of the committee. He said he called one of the bill’s champions in Juneau, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and gave him a good-natured prodding.

“I said, ‘You Marines can’t handle your business. Us Navy boys are going to go down there and take care of it,’” Tanner said.

One of the more remarkable parts of the story is that at no point did anyone object to the merits of creating the corridor. Tanner said he realized as the session drew to a close that his biggest enemy was the clock.

“This thing might go through the crack because of time, not because of opposition,” he remembered saying.

On Sunday, he tuned in to Gavel to Gavel to watch the Senate floor session live. Eventually, at 2:30 p.m., with less than 10 hours to go in this year’s legislative session, the bill passed.

Mission accomplished.

“We want everyone to know, specifically the veterans community, that there was a lot of people that worked on this,” Tanner said.

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