Who controls Chugach access spending: trail advocates or the neighborhoods next door?

The Anchorage Assembly put off a decision on who gets to advise it on spending for Chugach State Park access, after residents, road service areas and community councils split over a question underneath it: whether the people who shape those projects should be recreation advocates or the neighborhoods that live beside the trailheads. Members voted 12-0 Tuesday to continue the public hearing to Oct. 6.

Voters created the Chugach State Park Access Service Area in April 2023, to fund road, parking and trailhead projects that support park access while addressing neighborhood effects. It still has no standing advisory body.

The proposed ordinance, co-sponsored by Assembly Chair Anna Brawley and Vice Chair Daniel Volland, would create a seven-member board appointed by the mayor. Three seats would go to experts in trail design, civil engineering and outdoor recreation; four to community-at-large members. It would also drop cooperative-agreement requirements that let a single neighborhood block or shrink projects funded by all CASA property owners, while keeping the requirement that the board consult affected community councils and road service area boards before recommending projects.

That trade sits at the center of the split. A member of the Glen Alps Road Service Area board, which manages the roads to the park's two busiest trailheads, backed the board but asked the Assembly to seat an actual road service area member as a voting seat. He defended dropping the cooperative-agreement rule: "We do not believe a small number of people should be able to leverage a large number of people by withholding entering into cooperative agreements."

A longtime Upper O'Malley Road Service Area board member disagreed. The original ordinance required consultation with and approval by road service areas, he said, and taking the approval out is "a bait and switch."

A resident testifying for the BASHER neighborhood said the administration's existing ad hoc working group "are all trails and parks advocates," and called it biased rather than balanced. The neighborhood supports CASA and doesn't object to a board, the testifier said, but "in order to succeed and continue, it needs to be balanced and fair." That neighborhood was at the center of an earlier fight over the Basher Trailhead parking lot, where Assembly members clashed over cutting the planned capacity from 80-to-100 spaces down to 45. A Rabbit Creek Community Council representative asked that most board members be required to have firsthand experience with park access conditions.

said the dispute outlasts the ordinance. "The underlying conflict that this is going to surface will not go away until we resolve it," he said. A work session is planned before Oct. 6, and residents can still testify when the Assembly takes the matter back up.