Wasilla City Council will consider ATV task force

WASILLA — The Wasilla City Council plans to discuss the possibility of creating a task force to examine all-terrain vehicle regulations.

Discussion at Monday’s council meeting focused around using the task force to develop recommendations for revising ATV use ordinances going forward. A potential ban on ATV use within city limits has been under discussion by first the city planning commission and now the city council since July. Ban opponents and proponents have spilled ink and raised voices for and against, though neither side attended Monday’s meeting in force.

With a resolution moved by councilwoman Gretchen O’Barr, the task force’s creation now moves to consideration before the city council at 6 p.m., Sept. 22.

Among potential issues for the task force to consider: whether ATV use is acceptable on certain trails and whether or not trails currently being used by ATV drivers were really trails at all. In the past, property owners have tried to block off ATV trails, only to find that the trail was in fact part of a utility easement, or that what they had thought was private property was actually in the right-of-way.

Ban proponents and opponents have both claimed high stakes on either side. Proponents say the central issue is safety, particularly in light of fatal ATV vs. vehicle collisions and continued development and population growth in the Valley. Opponents say personal freedom and economic concerns trump safety concerns.

Existing ordinances represent a fiscal risk for the city, Mayor Verne Rupright told the council.

“My biggest concern was the liability to the city,” he said. “You’ve got kids riding under the age of 16. If you let ‘em go and there’s an accident, boom, liability.”

At the same time, Rupright distributed a series of proposed revisions to existing ordinances for discussion, which, if enacted as written, would make the following changes to municipal ordinance:

• ATV operators would be required to have a valid driver’s license

• Police officers would be empowered to detain juvenile ATV users in protective custody until a parent or adult took them into custody

• ATV users found to be operating without a valid license would have the vehicle towed immediately at the operator’s expense

• Adults in violation of the ordinance once would be warned, a second warning would result in the ATV being towed and impounded at the owner’s expense, and issued warnings would be tracked using the Wasilla Police Department’s Computer-Assisted Dispatching system.

“What I’m essentially saying to the police department is: stop with the warnings,” Rupright said. “That has been the problem.”

“Now they can log that warning and the next time they stop them, we can impound the vehicle,” the mayor added.

Passions have run high, primarily outside of formal meetings, though public interest in potential regulation changes has at times drawn unusually high numbers of public speakers for the meetings, O’Barr said. She claims to have received numerous comments from both sides, too many to determine which side has the majority.

“Some of the people who were at the meeting made the assumption ‘we know we’re in the majority because we had more people there,’” she said. “I believe, from what I was told, is that they (the pro-ban people) were somewhat intimidated to come to the meeting.”

“Some of them had run-ins where they had very negative experience with the ATV riders,” O’Barr added.

O’Barr said she’s been inaccurately characterized as both pro-ATV and anti-ATV, or even as supporting both sides, because of her willingness to listen.

“I’ve been accused of speaking out of both sides of my mouth because I’m willing to listen to both sides,” she said.

The real issue is enforcement, according to O’Barr.

“One of the questions I’ve had for the chief of police is, how the blank are we going to be able to enforce this if we have not been able to enforce this so far?” she said.

The issue has also spawned at least one mayoral candidacy from planning commission member Loren Means, who cast the lone dissenting vote against an ATV ban at a planning commission meeting in mid-July. Prior to Means’s candidacy, deputy administrator Bert Cottle had faced no opposition in his bid for the mayor’s chair.

The proposed changes were not an attempt at compromise from an outright ban, Rupright said.

“You know me: I’m a centrist,” he quipped.

The ordinance simply needed to be modernized,

“The bottom line is that the ordinance has been on the books forever, and everyone feigns ignorance, which is never going to fly in a court of law,” said the mayor, who was an attorney in private practice before taking office. “I’ve tried to plead clients that way.”

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269 or brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com