Kenai planning commission to vote on recommending end of park status for Ahlstrom lot

The Kenai Planning and Zoning Commission will vote Tuesday, Nov. 17, on whether to recommend that the Kenai City Council remove the park designation from Carl F. Ahlstrom Park, a 2.32-acre city lot between Iliamna Road and Spur Drive. The lot has never been developed as a park. Removing the designation would let the city move toward selling or leasing it, and city planners say that could help reshape the surrounding lots for housing.

The proposal went first to the Kenai Parks and Recreation Commission, which voted 5-0 on Nov. 5 to recommend dropping the park status. The council introduced the ordinance Nov. 4 and is scheduled to take up final enactment Nov. 18. The planning commission's vote is a recommendation; the council makes the final decision.

The city acquired the lot through tax and special assessment foreclosure, and a 2004 ordinance set it aside for parks and recreation. The city's 2022 Land Management Plan, its inventory of city-owned land, recommended disposal of the lot. Planning Director Kevin Buettner wrote in an Oct. 26 memo that a public purpose designation is not compatible with that recommendation.

Buettner wrote that the city's first Parks and Recreation Master Plan, adopted in June, did not recommend a park in the area. He pointed instead to a city parcel between the Mommsen and Kenai Meadows subdivisions along the Redoubt Avenue corridor, which was originally meant for a community well. Water and sewer mains now serve that area. He wrote that the Ahlstrom lot could serve as a catalyst for reworking the subdivision's existing lots into a more marketable layout for housing.

Buettner made the same case to the parks commission, saying the subdivision was platted in the 1950s and sold to many owners. "We haven't been able to develop because we don't have like one single developer going in, putting in roads, water, sewer, that sort of thing," he said. Any sale or lease would still have to go through the city's disposal process, he said. "We just think a park is a better fit closer into the middle of those larger subdivisions."

Tuesday's meeting starts at 7 pm in the Kenai City Council Chambers.