Petersburg trades a sliver of land for a place to put its 911 gear

A 0.23-acre parcel buys the borough room on someone else's towers — and spares it the cost of building its own.

Petersburg has agreed to give up a small piece of public land for something it decided it needed more: somewhere to mount the equipment that keeps its emergency radios working.

The borough assembly voted 6-0 Monday to sell a 0.23-acre parcel to Tidal Network, the communications venture of the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, reversing a 2-4 defeat earlier this month.

In exchange, the borough gets long-term access to mount public-safety gear on Tidal Network's towers on Mitkof Island — instead of building and maintaining a tower of its own.

That trade is the whole point. Police Chief James Kerr told the assembly that reliable communication is the backbone of police, fire, EMS, search and rescue, and 911 dispatch, and that the deal gives the borough a home for its equipment without the cost of new infrastructure.

It wasn't an easy yes. Residents pushed back hard — one cited a 300-signature petition — asking the assembly to slow down and study other sites first. They raised worries about ground stability, fire and icefall risk, falling property values, and how close the towers would sit to the hospital, childcare centers, and assisted living facilities.

In the end, members judged the site the least troublesome of the options on the table — far enough from sensitive spots, with a clear public-safety payoff. It also lands amid a wave of towers going up around the borough with no borough involvement at all. As Assembly Member Martin put it, this was a better site than the ones "sprouting up organically without borough involvement."