Anchorage programs Fairview Bypass into 2052 plan at $220M

Anchorage's Fairview Bypass — a project conceived as part of a federal push to undo the harm done to neighborhoods by 20th-century highway construction — has moved into the short-term programming list of the 2052 Metropolitan Transportation Plan, with four phases penciled in at a combined $220.5 million.

The bypass traces directly to the federal Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program. In February 2023, the Fairview Community Council and NeighborWorks Alaska won a $537,660 planning grant from the program — one of 45 awards in the first-ever round of Reconnecting Communities funding, which distributed $185 million through 6 Capital Construction Grants and 39 Planning Grants.

The program is dedicated to projects that remove, retrofit, or mitigate transportation facilities that create barriers to community connectivity, including barriers to mobility, access, or economic development.

The proposed design tries to answer that mandate.

The $96 million showpiece, Stage 3, would depress the parkway through Fairview along 15th Avenue, with neighborhood bridges at Karluk and Medfra, a non-motorized bridge at Latouche, and a landscaped "park lid" covering the road at Nelchina Street — a capping-with-parks approach the U.S. Department of Transportation has flagged as one of the program's signature interventions, alongside filling in sunken highways to reclaim the land for housing and converting inhospitable transportation facilities to tree-lined Complete Streets. The other stages: $60 million for a new arterial parkway from Sitka to Penland, $45 million for a grade-separated interchange under Airport Heights Drive feeding the Glenn Highway, and $19.5 million for environmental analysis, design, and right-of-way.

Whether any of it gets built is the open question. The 2052 MTP is fiscally constrained, and Alaska DOT&PF faces a projected $150 million short-term and $119 million long-term budget deficit in 2026 dollars. Project manager Luke Mullen said the department will combine the bypass work into a single solicitation — a procurement efficiency that does not change the underlying math.