DNR, Mental Health Trust finalize MEA easements for Wasilla utility corridor

Two Alaska land agencies have separately signed off on the same small piece of utility business: easements letting Matanuska Electric Association run and maintain power infrastructure along Church Road and Shampine Lane in Wasilla.

The Department of Natural Resources issued its decision for easement ADL 234630 on June 10 through the state's online notice system. The DNR notice doesn't name MEA or the streets by name — that connection comes from a parallel decision by the Alaska Mental Health Trust Land Office, which approved a term non-exclusive easement across Trust parcels along the same corridor. Together, the two formalize the cooperative's legal right to build and service electrical equipment there.

The arrangement is routine but not nothing for the people who live along the line. An easement, in MEA's own words, lets the utility "utilize and have unobstructed access to a portion of the property" — landowners keep title, but grant the co-op ongoing entry to install, maintain, and repair lines, including trimming or removing trees and limiting what can be built inside the corridor. MEA works on a seven-year clearing cycle. For some owners, that permanent access and vegetation-clearing authority reads as a real encumbrance, even when the paperwork is unremarkable.

What gives the deal a second dimension is the landlord on one side of it. Because the Trust Land Office manages its holdings to generate revenue for the Alaska Mental Health Trust — which funds services for Alaskans with mental illness, developmental disabilities, and related conditions — the rent MEA pays for crossing those parcels flows, in a small way, toward that mission.