Skagway planners weigh where to claim the borough's last 118 acres of state land

Skagway has 118 acres of state land left to claim, and its Planning and Zoning Commission will discuss Tuesday where the borough should take them.

One option is land the state has held for Skagway since 1997: 55 acres between the Skagway River and the Klondike Highway. The borough could take those and select 63 more acres elsewhere. Or it could give up the highway land and pick the full 118 somewhere else, according to a memo from Borough Manager Emily Deach. Her memo doesn't say which option staff favors.

The work session is meant to shape a recommendation to the Borough Assembly.

The acres come from Skagway's municipal land entitlement, the amount of state land a borough can claim inside its boundaries under state law. Skagway's entitlement is 7,977 acres. The state has conveyed 7,846 and approved 13 more.

The highway acres date to 1997. Skagway dropped an application for land in Dyea in February 1997 and selected 62 acres along the highway instead. The state approved and later deeded 7.32 of those acres and put the rest in conditional approval. The state has indicated it held them aside "to be drawn from when the Municipality was very close to reaching its full entitlement, so that the Municipality would not go over its allotted acreage," Deach wrote. A 2011 state note said the remaining acres would be surveyed last and "may not be enough acres" to fulfill the entitlement.

"The CA acres are not counted as part of your remaining entitlement, unless you choose to have them adjudicated," Mary Hermon of the state's Municipal Entitlement Unit wrote in a letter to the borough. Surveying them would give the borough a better idea of how much entitlement is actually left, Deach wrote.

The borough can choose from almost any state land inside its boundaries. State law excludes federal land and land held for schools, the University of Alaska and the Alaska Mental Health Trust.

Commissioners first took up the question Sept. 10, and didn't decide. One said land suited to housing should come first, because the borough's 2030 Comprehensive Plan "has said we need housing over and over." Another said some of the highway land looked unbuildable and hard to reach. Earlier this month, Skagway voters approved borrowing up to $6.5 million to turn the Garden City RV Park into housing lots.

"I don't see a deadline," Borough Clerk Steve Burnham said at the September meeting.