Kenai parks commission to weigh dropping park status from Ahlstrom Park lot

Kenai's Parks & Recreation Commission will vote Nov. 5 on whether to drop the park designation from a city lot, a step the city says could help encourage new housing.

The 2.32-acre lot, known as Carl F. Ahlstrom Park, sits between Iliamna Road and Spur Drive. The city has kept it for parks and recreation since 2004. Dropping that designation would clear the way for the city to sell or lease it, according to a city memo.

The lot is part of the Carl F. Ahlstrom Subdivision, platted in 1955 with 398 lots. Except for a short stretch of Spur Drive, its interior roads hadn't been built as of 2022, and most of its lots were treed and undeveloped, according to the city's 2022 land management plan.

Freeing up the city's parcel could help reconfigure the subdivision's lots into a "more cohesive and marketable format," encouraging residential development, Planning Director Kevin Buettner wrote in the Oct. 26 memo.

The city's new parks master plan, adopted in June, didn't recommend a park in that area, the memo says.

The 2022 plan had already recommended disposing of the lot, which the city got in 2001 after a Kenai Peninsula Borough foreclosure over 1999 property taxes.

The memo names another city parcel, 4.24 acres between the Mommsens and Kenai Meadows subdivisions, as a potential park site that would be more central to the neighborhoods along the Redoubt Avenue corridor.

That land was first meant for a community well, but it's now served by water and wastewater mains, Buettner's presentation says.

The 2022 plan said a 1991 ordinance had set the parcel aside for a future park, that it was no longer needed for one and that part of it should be disposed of.

In August, the City Council removed the same kind of designation from six other city parcels. "We just completed the city's Parks and Rec master plan, and it did not denote those parcels as needed for a public park," City Manager Terry Eubank said then.

The commission's vote is a recommendation. The council is scheduled to introduce the ordinance Nov. 4 and vote Nov. 18, after a Planning & Zoning Commission hearing Nov. 17.

The commission will also weigh an update to the land management plan that counts 376 city-owned parcels, up from 369.