One rough winter tore up Hillside roads, and self-funded neighborhoods are footing the bill

One winter of ice and spring runoff did enough damage to a small Hillside neighborhood's roads that its maintenance budget would have to nearly quintuple to keep up, under a proposal before the Anchorage Assembly. It isn't the only Hillside area asking, and the money comes not from the city at large but from the neighborhood itself.

The Hillside is dotted with limited road service areas, small districts the Assembly created so pockets of rural Hillside roads could be maintained locally. Each is its own service area with an elected board, each levies a property tax only on the parcels inside it, and each keeps a separate fund that pays a private contractor for basic maintenance, grading, ditching, snow and ice control, pothole patching. Unspent money rolls over year to year. The districts have no authority to build new roads or bank money for capital projects; they exist to maintain what's there.

That structure is why the amendment isn't a draw on general city funds. The roughly $77,500 would come from the neighborhood's own dedicated road fund, on top of the request from its elected board. Mayor Suzanne LaFrance's administration is forwarding it to the Assembly, attributing the increase to "significant road erosion caused by an unanticipated level of ice accumulation" and the runoff that followed.

It's part of a run of similar requests. Other Hillside road areas are seeking their own increases this cycle, one around $75,000 and another more than $200,000, a sign last winter hit the whole hillside's roads and not just one street.

These small road districts are separate from the Anchorage Roads and Drainage Service Area, the much larger service area that funds maintenance for most of urban Anchorage's roads through its own property tax. Each is a distinct taxing area under the municipal budget, with its own levy on the property inside it.

The Assembly takes up the requests Tuesday.