Wasilla to hold bypass meetings this week

WASILLA — The Parks Highway Alternate Corridor project — known colloquially as the Wasilla Bypass — has taken a few small steps forward, enough at least to update a couple of city bodies next week.

“We’ve got the alternatives narrowed down a little bit,” said Murph O’Brien of HDR Alaska, the firm working as a consultant for the state on the project.

Probably because it’s still in the planning stages, the bypass is probably the lesser-known of the large transportation projects that seek to return a degree of sanity to traffic in Wasilla. Also on that list are the Parks Highway expansion that would bring the road up to four lanes from Lucus Road to Big Lake Road, a couplet of one-way streets proposed for downtown Wasilla and an expansion of Knik-Goose Bay Road.

The bypass would give motorists a route around the city to the south. HDR and the state Department of Transportation are looking at the impacts of the project and mulling routes.

O’Brien said the route that seems the most favorable on the west side of the project is Route B, which would connect to the Parks just past Pittman Road, swing around housing developments there and head east.

In the eastern portion of the project, the route that seems most favorable is Route A, which starts in a spot between Seward Meridian Parkway and the Parks Highway/Palmer-Wasilla Highway intersection, heads south threading through a subdivision and then shoots west.

The two routes cross in the middle, providing an obvious point where they could link up. But both continue on to different points. On the western end, A connects to the Parks near Big Lake Road. On the eastern end, B connects closer to Seward Meridian than A does.

Alternatives C-F are less desirable, O’Brien said, but are not off the table.

“We’ve been asked to continue to look at the D and C,” O’Brien said. “The other ones — the Ds and the Es and the Fs — are starting to fall out of consideration.”

If all this seems confusing, O’Brien will have maps at the meetings he’s appearing at this week.

“It would be a lot easier to look at a map,” he said.

Those events are the Wasilla City Council meeting that starts at 6 p.m., Monday and the Wasilla Planning Commission at 7 p.m., Tuesday. Both meetings will be at Wasilla City Hall in Council Chambers.

As far as timelines go, the project’s website says it won’t begin design until 2014 and is still planned to be in design in 2016 when the project timeline ends. Construction would presumably begin sometime after that.

O’Brien said the immediate next step involves more study.

“We’re still working on the break-even analysis, comparing the cost of doing a bypass to the cost in savings of continuing to improve the existing Parks Highway, and that probably won’t be out until the end of January,” he said.

Once that analysis is complete, he’ll likely be back to update the city.

“We want to nail down the corridor and make sure that we have the support of the city, and we’ll be working with the borough as well,” O’Brien said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.