Anchorage Assembly takes up rewritten Chugach access board plan Tuesday

The Anchorage Assembly resumes its public hearing Tuesday, Oct. 20, on a proposed board to advise the city on Chugach State Park access projects, a plan its sponsors rewrote this fall to reserve two seats for people with experience on neighborhood road boards next to the park.

The ordinance, from Assembly Chair Anna Brawley, who represents West Anchorage, and Vice Chair Daniel Volland, who represents North Anchorage, would create a seven-member board appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the Assembly. It would advise on projects for the Chugach State Park Access Service Area, known as CASA, which voters created in April 2023 to pay for roads, trailheads and parking leading into the park. Property owners across the Anchorage Bowl and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson pay into it. The board would have no land use authority.

The question has been who sits on it. An informal working group has shaped CASA spending so far, Alaska News reported in July. When the Assembly took testimony in August, residents, road service areas and community councils split over whether the people shaping park access projects should be recreation advocates or the neighborhoods beside the trailheads, and the Assembly voted 12-0 to put off a decision, Alaska News reported. "The underlying conflict that this is going to surface will not go away until we resolve it," Volland said then.

The rewrite, which Alaska News first reported Oct. 3, narrows two of the board's four resident seats. The original version opened them to anyone living in a limited or rural road service area, the neighborhood districts that maintain their own roads. The new one requires people who serve, or have served within the last 10 years, on the board of a road service area bordering the park, and the two can't sit on the same road board at the same time. The other two resident seats go to residents of the Anchorage Roads and Drainage Service Area. All four must show Chugach recreation experience over the past five years and firsthand knowledge of multiple access points.

The other three seats go to specialists: one in designing and building trails and related recreation amenities, one in project management, transportation or civil engineering, and one in outdoor recreation in Chugach State Park or on other Alaska public lands. The park superintendent would sit on the board without a vote.

The change answers one request from the Basher Community Council, which voted 23-0 on Sept. 10 for a resolution opposing the ordinance and asking for a member with direct road service area board experience. It does not include the council's other requests: three more seats, a seat for a community council president and agreements with road boards.

Those agreements were part of the August debate. The board ordinance would drop an earlier requirement for cooperative agreements with road service areas, which could let a single neighborhood block or shrink projects that all CASA property owners pay for, Alaska News reported. Road board members themselves split on it. A Glen Alps Road Service Area board member backed dropping the requirement: "We do not believe a small number of people should be able to leverage a large number of people by withholding entering into cooperative agreements." An Upper O'Malley Road Service Area board member called taking out the approval "a bait and switch."

The revision also requires the city to give affected road boards an estimate of each project's lifetime maintenance cost, and it bars CASA money from replacing funding other service areas already provide. Who pays for what was still unsettled in September. An Assembly work session that month asked whether money flows both ways between CASA and the neighborhoods' road service areas and didn't answer it, Alaska News reported. The sponsors' list of unresolved issues then included who pays to upgrade local roads and who plows parking lots.

The city plans to adopt the CASA project list with its 2027 budget on Nov. 17. Bond projects for the April 2027 ballot are due Jan. 26.