Wasilla High parking lot upgrade to include new bases for light poles

WASILLA — You know those cement pillars that light poles in parking lots sit on? Turns out they’re pretty pricey.

This summer and fall the Mat-Su Borough has been working to upgrade access to Wasilla High School and install fire hydrants. Access is also being upgraded at Cottonwood Creek Elementary and the combined project carries a $4.1 million price tag.

About three weeks ago, that got bumped up to $4.4 million.

Borough public works director Shaune O’Neil said that, essentially, when the borough’s contractor, Granite Construction, started doing excavation work at the high school, they found a whole lot of problems with 24 of those light pole bases.

“There were several issues. They were multiple sizes, they were constructed during multiple phases of different projects,” O’Neil said.

But really the biggest problem was what amounted to a safety issue.

“The anchor bolts were fairly corroded and we did not have confidence that they would support the new light poles in any kind of wind, let alone the high winds the Valley gets,” she said.

Looking a little deeper, she said, the borough found a few more problems.

“The conduit leading up to them was also very old and of various sizes and varying states of decomposition,” she said.

So they decided to replace it. But there was a problem. The work was going to cost $300,000. Anything more than than a $100,000 change order has to get approval from the borough assembly.

“Because of the short window we had to do the work it would not have made it onto an assembly agenda for approval before freeze-up and before the hot plants for paving were shut down,” O’Neil said Monday. “We would have had to actually wait until now to be doing the work instead of doing it three weeks ago

Waiting that long would have meant the parking lot would be dark for a longer time than the borough had planned. She said Granite had been good about putting out temporary lighting when there was an event going on at the school after hours. But if there wasn’t anything going on there wouldn’t be any lights out there. It’s just not a safe situation for a high school parking lot, she said.

“There’s still the potential for something bad to happen in a dark parking lot,” O’Neil said.

They’d have to pull up paving they’d just laid down, meaning the resulting parking lot would not be as good as it could be. And then there was the cost factor – doing this kind of work after freeze-up would have tacked $100,000 onto the price.

So the borough manager, Elizabeth Gray, made an executive decision. She called the two assembly members she could without running afoul of open meetings laws and then decided to go ahead and approve the change order.

Between that and having to continue the work after the school year started, which required working at night and covering trenches during the day to provide a parking lot for staff and students, O’Neill said the borough has been lucky to have such an accommodating contractor.

“It’s been a lot more work for the contractor but we felt that it was necessary in order to give the school a parking lot,” she said.

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