A new Mat-Su road would cross the ground its drinking water comes from

The Mat-Su drinks only groundwater — and keeps building over it. A new road would cross two drinking-water zones near a creek with a known PFAS problem.

Everyone in the Mat-Su Borough drinks groundwater. Every glass, every tap, pumped from beneath the same ground the borough keeps building over as it grows. That's why a fairly ordinary road project is drawing a closer look.

The state has opened public comment on Seldon Road Extension Phase II, a 2.25-mile stretch near Wasilla that would finish an earlier phase and link Palmer to the Meadow Lakes area. The hitch: the route runs through the protection zones of two public drinking water systems, which forces a state review of whether the work meets Alaska's water quality standards before crews can break ground.

What makes residents pay attention is the address. The road would replace a culvert with a bridge at Cottonwood Creek. And it was in groundwater near Cottonwood Creek Elementary School that the state already detected PFAS — the so-called forever chemicals — an issue the borough and the school district are still monitoring and working to address. The borough's own planning documents, meanwhile, warn that standard stormwater controls may not fully shield local aquifers near public water systems.

None of that means this road will poison anyone's water. The review is a routine box to check, not a finding of contamination, and the state transportation department — the one building the road — has pledged the usual safeguards: erosion controls, a stormwater plan, careful practices during construction. Once comment closes, regulators can approve the certification, reject it, or waive it.

But in a borough with no backup to its groundwater, "routine" is the kind of word residents near those two water systems tend to read closely. They can submit comments through the state's public notice site.