Kodiak can't sell four lots it has owned since 1986 because they can't get a permit

The Kodiak Island Borough bought 16 acres in 1986 for a hospital it never built. Forty years on, it still can't sell four lots on the property, because nobody can get a building permit for them. The Lands Committee takes the problem up again Tuesday, Sept. 8.

Borough code won't allow a permit in that zone unless a lot is served by a certificated utility or a municipal system, which rules out a well and septic tank. Until that service exists, Community Development Director Chris French wrote in a memo to the committee, the borough can't dispose of the lots.

Reaching them would take about 500 feet of sewer line running downhill on gravity to a manhole at Rezanof Drive. A water main is already there, but service lines are not, and public works staff say a full survey would show whether every lot can run on gravity or whether some buildings need pumps. The memo carries no cost estimate and doesn't say who would pay.

There is another possible route, and it runs through a swamp. Kodiak's public works department believes the Murphy Way stub on the west side of the property has water and sewer mains that could be tapped, though reaching them means crossing wetlands. The city also believes the four lots have no water main access at all. A 2015 survey found 2.62 acres of possible federally regulated wetlands on the site, about 16 percent of the tract.

The state put $416,900 toward site work for the hospital that never came. In 1993 the borough spent about $29,000 from its land sale fund to build two little league fields, now run under a joint-use agreement among the borough, the city and the school district. A 2015 subdivision never got final approval. A master plan started after a 2017 vote to declare the land surplus was never finished; the draft would have kept the ballfields, which cover more than half the tract, and developed what was left.

Killarney Hills is the only thing on the September agenda, with no motion attached. Public comment opens the meeting.