Wasilla eyes ATV ban in city limits

WASILLA — The city of Wasilla has had it with all-terrain vehicles in city limits and is recommending a change to its trails plan that would get rid of them altogether.

“There’s no way that you can justify it being safe trying to get through the city anywhere,” said city public works director Archie Giddings.

The city’s planning commission is set to discuss at its July 8 meeting a recommendation that the city council change the trails plan to ban ATVs.

“Fifteen years after the 1999 Trails Plan was adopted, motorized uses have become a safety hazard throughout the city to both vehicles and pedestrians; using a significant amount of resources from the police department to maintain enforcement and a safe environment,” that ordinance says.

All-terrain or, probably more accurately, off-highway vehicles, as that term encompasses snowmachines, have a spotted history in the more developed areas of the Valley. The city of Palmer wrote an ordinance in 1993 banning them outright.

That 1999 Wasilla trails plan confined them to specific corridors running up Lucille Street, Knik-Goose Bay Road and the Parks Highway. In 2006 the city council looked at banning them. A lot of people spoke up in favor of ATVs in the city then. Giddings said that with all the development the city has experienced in the interim, he thinks that public sentiment has changed.

“There’s not so many, I think, that are advocating it that think that it’s necessary,” he said.

As for whether a ban is necessary, whether enforcement of the rules could accomplish the same goal, Giddings said that the current mayor has tried to work to clamp down on problem riders, people driving their machines unsafely or down the middle of city streets or outside of those designated corridors.

“We’ve done city-wide enforcement, two big pushes when the mayor first was elected (in 2011), and that was a pretty good cure for a few years. And then it starts escalating and ramping up again, and the police have been doing it again this year,” Giddings said.

Giddings said those were essentially ways for people to pass through the city and get out of town, but even that is too much. The city is getting too densely populated.

ATVs would still be legal outside of city limits so, at least in theory, a rider could just go around the city using trails along Bogard Road.

“It’s just getting too dense in here,” Giddings said.

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