A planned Anchorage road would cut into a Hillside couple's yard — so the commission hit pause

The state's design for the Mountain Air Drive extension would cut roughly 45 feet into Brett McKinnon's Hillside parcel, he told the Anchorage Planning and Zoning Commission on Monday — enough, he said, to force relocation of the couple's well and to "take away the only usable yard on our property."

After hearing from McKinnon and his wife, Chelsea Bailey, the commission postponed approving the design and sent it back to the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities for an update. The project is a short piece of road — less than a mile connecting Sandpiper Drive to Rabbit Creek Road — meant to give secondary access to Fire Station 10, Bear Valley Elementary and nearby homes.

The couple, who own the home at 15985 Mountainaire Drive, said they had met with the design team two weeks earlier and left unconvinced anything would change. Bailey said the plan applies one standard road cross-section along the whole corridor, with no alternatives tailored to hillside lots where the ground drops away at grades of 10% to 30%. McKinnon asked that no approval move forward until a new survey plots where the existing structures actually sit.

That survey is the crux. DOT project manager Connor Eshelman said the properties along the corridor haven't been surveyed since 2017, and that roughly four more homes have gone up since. Surveyors are now refining the cut-and-fill limits, he said, and options to ease the impact — like tightening the buffer between the planned pathway and the road, or steepening slopes — depend on that new survey, which he hopes to have before snow falls.

An 8-foot multi-use path runs along the couple's side of the road in the design, and it isn't optional: Stephanie Mormillo of HDL Engineering Consultants told the commission that city code requires a non-motorized facility on at least one side of a road like this, and that the team never considered dropping it. The community, she noted, once petitioned for a path on both sides.

Not everyone's objection was about the yard. James Michael, who said he supports building the road, questioned what the federal money actually buys — a connection to a single neighborhood, he argued, with no real progress toward a Jamie Avenue link into Bear Valley, where Clark's Road remains the only way out in a wildfire.

The extension is estimated at $15.25 million, more than 90% of it federal highway money. Eshelman said right-of-way acquisition will take about two years, putting construction in 2029 or 2030. If the revised design brings new documents, the public hearing will reopen.