Voters green-light road projects

PALMER — When the dust had settled in Tuesday’s election, Mat-Su Borough voters had agreed to do something they’d never done before — raise property taxes to build roads.

The $15-million bond package voters approved includes a slate of eight road projects, all of which have been awaiting construction for sometime, said the borough’s planning transportation manager Brad Sworts.

“Most of them have been on the waiting list for quite awhile,” Sworts said. “They’re in that middle range of projects that are either too big for the local RSAs, the road service areas to handle, funding-wise, or they’re too small for the much larger [state Department of Transportation] to take on.”

The way the bonds were structured, Sworts said, the borough will not move forward on any one project unless the state first agrees to cover 70 percent of the project’s cost.

A number of the projects, he said, are geared toward pulling traffic out of trouble spots along the major thoroughfares in the Valley — the Glenn, Parks, and Palmer-Wasilla highways.

Sworts said he’s heard, for example, a number of comments from residents of the Beverly Lakes area who love the idea of shorter commutes if the Seldon Road extension goes through.

And Wasilla, he said, has had as a priority for a number of years the extension of Hermon Road to serve as a connector between the Palmer-Wasilla and Parks Highways.

“By connecting the Parks and the Palmer-Wasilla you’re going to be able to take a lot of traffic off of the Parks Highway, Palmer-Wasilla Highway intersection,” he said.

In 2007, the borough conducted a long-range transportation plan, which showed something in the neighborhood of $1.2 billion in road construction need in the borough, Sworts said. By contrast, $15 million in projects might actually seem somewhat small.

“You would think of this as kind of a drop in the bucket but you’ve got to start somewhere,” Sworts said.

He sees this as part of a larger trend, of the borough taking more of a driving role in moving road projects forward.

“For years we’ve in the Valley here we’ve relied on DOT to kind of run the show as far as these collector roads and higher functional classifications,” he said, noting that such a relationship is bound to change. “The federal money that DOT relies on has been drying up.”

The money the state ponies up for these projects, he said, will come from the general fund and, fingers crossed, surpluses in the budget this year and last will give the state the ability to fund some of the Valley’s needs.

And, Sworts said, with any luck the borough will be able to get the projects done faster. Generally, he said, the strings attached to federal money slow DOT projects down, and they take seven to 10 years to be completed.

State money, he said, has fewer strings, allowing for projects to be completed in five to six years.

“The borough may be able to do it even quicker than that,” he said.

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