Anchorage weighs rezoning 12.5 acres to heavy industrial, including former home lots

Anchorage's planning commission is set to rezone about 12.5 acres to heavy industrial Monday — including a piece of vacant land that would jump straight from single-family residential to a district that allows uses like scrap processing and waste handling.

The bigger of the two rezonings belongs to Chugach Electric, which wants to move about nine acres near East 3rd and 4th avenues from general business to heavy industrial — a reclassification of land the utility already holds in an industrial-leaning part of town.

The one more likely to matter to neighbors is smaller and privately filed. A company called Laona LLC wants to rezone about 3.2 acres of vacant land near C Street and West 100th Avenue from single-family residential to heavy industrial, or I-2 — the city's most permissive industrial category. Under the land-use code, I-2 allows heavy manufacturing, warehousing, freight terminals, materials and vehicle storage, resource processing, and waste and salvage operations, a category that includes composting, scrap processing and facilities that take in hazardous waste from others. A rezone only changes what's allowed on the land, not what gets built — no development plan for the parcel is on file — but it opens the door to that full range of heavy uses on land currently zoned for houses.

A third Chugach item on the agenda seeks approval for a small utility substation on residential-zoned land off Southport Drive, with minor requests to shrink some landscaping and raise a fence slightly.

All three items are on the commission's consent agenda, where they'd pass in a single vote unless a commissioner pulls one for discussion. They had public hearings in early August; Monday's vote formalizes the decisions. The commission's staff recommendations and case files for the rezonings aren't posted on the city's planning portal, so what planners advised isn't part of the public record. The commission meets at 6:30 p.m.