Upper Susitna Valley residents are uniting to send a clear message to the Alaska State Legislature. Earlier this year, all five area community councils signed a letter, asking the state to support the return of a local trooper post.
Joe Pride, who sits on the Sustina Community Council, says residents have approached the council, complaining about rising crime rates and a lack of troopers to investigate those crimes.
“We had heard from a lot of members in the community that they were having problems in their neighborhoods. We’re calling the troopers and we’re not getting responded to. Sometimes a trooper will be in the area, you’ll get a response within minutes. But when they’re not in the area, it’ll take hours or days.”
Until 2015, state troopers maintained a post close to the junction of the Parks Highway and the Talkeetna Spur Road.
At the time, the state maintained that closing the Talkeetna post would save the state about $80,000 per year. The Alaska Department of Public Safety, working with a tight budget, made the decision to move the five law enforcement officers to Meadow Lakes. This move placed them closer to the core area of the Borough but almost an hour’s drive south of Talkeetna.
The area that local state troopers serve is vast. The Mat-Su Borough is over 25,000 square miles, roughly the size of West Virginia. The larger population centers keep troopers busy, leaving little time to make the drive up north. Pride says neighborhood watch programs have helped with property crimes, but dealing with domestic violence and drivers under the influence of alcohol, requires a quick response by troopers to be effective. Pride says residents have told him they’ve stopped reporting some crimes.
“With our trooper situation now, people are disheartened by calling the police. In our area, because people have told ‘we don’t have the time or resources to investigate the crime’, people have stopped calling.”
With pandemic funding available and oil prices headed higher, Pride thinks now is the time to press the legislature to reinstate a Talkeetna trooper presence. He says conversations with State Senator, Mike Shower, have been productive. But he also maintains that legislators need to hear from residents if they want more troopers.
Pride says the letter of support from the combined upper valley community councils is just the beginning. The Susitna Community Council is also using social media to encourage people to email their thoughts on the matter to Mike Shower, David Eastman and other Alaska legislators.
