Wasilla tweaks comprehensive plan

WASILLA — Designing a new comprehensive plan for the city is like driving a supertanker in unpredictable seas.

“You have a very complex job,” USKH design engineer Sara Doyle told members of the Wasilla City Council and Wasilla Planning Commission during a joint meeting Tuesday at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center. “We’re here together to have everyone on deck so we can take full advantage of your knowledge and concerns and get some work done to create a document you can use to chart your course.”

USKH’s preliminary draft of goals, objectives and actions for Wasilla’s transportation, land use guidelines, downtown design, community assets, economic vitality and intergovernmental coordination were discussed and tweaked as city officials went through the document with Doyle and City Planner Tina Crawford.

USKH used the city’s previous comprehensive plans from 1986 and 1996, past meetings with city officials and public workshops over the last year to create the draft document.

Doyle told council members and planning commissioners Tuesday that she hoped to come out of the meeting with enough input to be able to develop a final draft and begin the formal review process next month.

She said their input is necessary to ensure that Wasilla’s comprehensive plan is valuable to the community in two ways:

• As a cohesive vision for decision-making specific to the community, based on its unique challenges and opportunities.

• As a road map for ensuring cost-effective community investment that is well-timed and coordinated to meet growth needs and resources.

“Once adopted, the goals, objectives, policies and actions recommended in Wasilla’s new comprehensive plan will serve as the legal foundation for Wasilla’s Land Development Code, help justify community investment in capital improvements and municipal systems development, help bring residents together around important future issues and ideas, and be useful in securing grant funding and partnerships,” Doyle’s memorandum states.

Doyle pointed out that she’d seen a lot of interesting ideas and information in the previous comp plans, but there weren’t implementation plans for any of it.

Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright told her he had chaired the Planning Commission when the 1996 plan was published and agreed with Doyle that it didn’t have much of an impact.

“Very little even moved because of it. Everything just stayed status quo,” Rupright said. “All the plans for a retail market and widening of the roads ended up in the dust bin of history.”

Planning Commissioner Dan Kelly said there was too much resistance to zoning regulations then.

“Nobody wanted zoning, period,” Kelly said.

City Councilman Steve Menard agreed that development was a bit out of control in the past.

“We had a Wild West mentality in Wasilla for so many years, it’s hard to change that mentality,” Menard said. “When a big business comes in, it’s easy to just put the comprehensive plan aside. But you have to later live with what you’ve decided. We wanted traffic to go through Wasilla and we got it. Now what do we do with it? It’s going to be a long, drawn-out debate.”

Seeking alternatives to expanding and widening the Parks Highway through downtown, negotiating right-of-way acquisition needed to speed up work on critical linkages and working toward completing the region’s perimeter roads that allow residents north and south of the city to avoid major road networks were all deemed important action items during Tuesday’s work session.

Councilwoman Colleen Sullivan-Leonard said she’d also like to see city sidewalks improved to allow easier access and mobility for those in wheelchairs and walkers.

Planning Commissioner Doug Miller said he’d like to see more explicit language about connecting streets between the city’s commercial centers so residents aren’t forced back onto the Parks Highway while shopping or doing business.

Coming up with a way to gain infrastructure support from developers and not scare them away also is key, they agreed.

Doing away with the railroad tracks through town doesn’t appear to be an option, they realized.

“It’s so funny,” Menard said. “Palmer wants their railroad tracks through the city and we can’t get it out of our city fast enough.”

Better defining “rural residential” areas and preventing more farming-oriented neighborhoods from having commercial warehouses pop up at the end of their streets also needs to be a priority, some of them said.

When it comes to economic vitality, the city’s Recreation and Cultural Services Manager James Hastings said he’s working hard to make the Menard Sports Center more of a moneymaker.

“I’m trying to get this facility out of the two-sport mentality,” Hastings said. “For 2012, I already have six bids for conventions we’ve never seen here before. We’ve got to attract more weekend shows and conventions or we might as well call it quits.”

When Kelly said he didn’t think Menard conventions were very well attended, Hastings said that sometimes it’s the positive affects on peripheral businesses that really matter.

“When there’s a volleyball or wrestling tournament here, we’re not making a lot of money at the door, but when you talk to a manager at McDonald’s and find out they’re running out of to-go bags because they’re getting so much business, that’s money that’s directly impacting the community.”

To view the latest draft of the Wasilla Comprehensive Plan and USKH maps that accompany it, go to the city of Wasilla website at cityofwasilla.com and follow the links or call City Planner Tina Crawford at 373-9020.

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.