Work continues on Mat River issues

PALMER — With the ice going out and snowpack melting, right about now is often the time people living along the Matanuska River start panicking.

But — knock on wood — this spring is turning out to be a mild one where rivers are concerned.

“Nope. I haven’t heard of any,” Mat-Su Borough Emergency Manager Casey Cook said, when asked if the river was causing any trouble.

Just in case, though, the borough had people over at the Butte fire station to fill sandbags recently.

Meanwhile, Cook said, he’s working on mitigation of troubled spots that periodically see flooding and erosion.

“We’re looking at seeing if that area is eligible for a community development block grant, and then we’re also looking at the (Federal Emergency Management Agency) flood plain management property acquisition,” Cook said.

He said the block grant is specifically to help relocate residents in disaster-stricken areas.

“When this was brought up last week I thought, ‘hey, that might be an option,’ so they’re looking to see if we would qualify and if we would even have the justification to apply for it,” Cook said. “It’s just kind of a shot in the dark, but we’re just kind of looking at any possibilities.”

As for the property acquisition, the borough bought a handful of stricken properties in the past. But the area the Matanuska River is eroding now is much bigger.

Meanwhile, the borough is still trying to figure out what to do with $2.5 million the state Legislature granted it in the 2013 legislative

session.

A half-million of that was already spent on a project in the Talkeetna area. The borough had put out requests for proposals to use the other $2 million addressing erosion issues along the Matanuska River — either through armor rock or channelization or building dikes.

“All the RFPs came out as exponentially more expensive than the money we had given to us,” Cook said.

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