The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) Board of Directors voted to accept $8.5 million from the State of Alaska this week. The money is intended to support a feasibility study of the West Susitna Access Road. But AIDEA ‘s Board expressed some reservations about the project at their regularly scheduled meeting.
AIDEA’s Executive Director, Alan Weitzner, urged his Board of Directors to accept $8.5 million dollars of state appropriated money. The funds will allow AIDEA to proceed to Phase 3 in the development process for the West Susitna Access Road.
Weitzner claims that building the road from Port MacKenzie to the Yetna Mining District will bring hundreds of jobs to the Mat-Su Borough and broaden its tax base. He says that engineers have identified a proposed route and that private investors will pay for it through an undetermined usage formula. He also says that portions of the road will be exclusively private but there will be some public access points as well.
The AIDEA board pressed Weitzner to describe what this type of shared road would look like and Weitzner acknowledged that he doesn’t quite know.
“At this particular stage, because of the desire to have public access for portions of the road, that does need to be defined on how that access is going to be arranged.”
Board Chair, J. Dana Pruhs, pushed harder on the responsibilities required to allow the public to share a road built for industrial use.
“If the public’s going to be on it, or a portion of it, then you have to build to what I would call Federal Highway Standards, which then brings D.O.T. in the middle of it, which then brings Public Safety in it. You can’t put the public on any road, without having minimum design requirements and then obviously enforcement and maintenance to community standards and I think that needs to be addressed cause there’s going to be confusion.”
The questions raised by Mr. Pruhs mimic the concerns that the Mat-Su Borough Assembly expressed when they last discussed the issue. However, Weitzner maintains that Phase 3 is needed to answer those questions.
AIDEA ’s Board also questioned Weitzner why he hadn’t gone to the Mat-Su Borough Assembly for their support of Phase 3, before proposing to accept the money for the project from the State.
“Do you think we should hold off on accepting the money until we have clarity from the Borough? We can’t do anything without the government entity that oversees it, their buy in. So the Mat-Su Borough has to have buy in in order for us to promote a project in that public area.”
The Mat-Su Brough Assembly has so far been lukewarm to the project. AIDEA asked for $100,000 from the Borough to support Phase 3 and the Assembly only allocated half that amount in this year’s budget. The $50,000 contributed by the Borough only amounts to one half of one percent of proposed Phase 3 costs, leading some to wonder if AIDEA will take Borough needs seriously.
The Assembly has already expressed concerns about the maintenance costs of the hundred mile road. In addition, Weitzner told the Assembly last year that improvements to Port MacKenzie would be necessary, which could perhaps translate to an even larger investment by the Mat-Su Borough.
Despite their skepticism, AIDEA ’s Board voted unanimously to accept the State funds. Weitzner plans to present Phase 3 to the Mat-Su Brough Assembly in December, hoping for their approval, moving towards a private road with undetermined public access in the heart of Alaska.
