Clapp Street Ribbon Cutting

Mayor Bert Caudill. We have a wonderful guest here, the daughter of a homesteader, Judith Clapp-Michael.

Borough Mayor Vern Halter. DOT Project Manager Eric Miyashiro. Alaska Representative Jim Culver is on his way. And we have Alaska Representative Lynn Gaddis with two N's. So, uh, and, uh, so our first speaker, uh, Steve Culligan.

Come on up, and we're going to hand off the mic because it might blow over otherwise. I'll be quick with this weather. I just wanted to welcome everybody, and I'm sure that others will get up and speak to details, but this has been, I think, a vision for a long time to be able to connect the sports complex, the airport, and the two parallel highways for a long time. And I think it's one project that's hopefully an example of many more to come to be able to connect in some parallel roads between K'nit Goose Bay and the Parks Highway and have more of a connected grid. And I wanted to thank Everybody involved from the state legislators to the people that have been on the assembly to the mayors of Wasilla, Wasilla City Council, Archie Giddings, who has been in the public works department pushing this for a long time.

I don't think anybody's gone unpunished in a successful project like this. But with that being said, and the weather, thank you all for coming out. And this is a great day. Thank you. And I forgot to say our great new mayor that came out in this wind.

Wasilla Mayor Bert Caudill.

I wasn't going to say anything about our end of the road is going to be open, but your end's not. I was— I wasn't going to say anything about that, but you started it.

He left, you know, and if we go real fast, we'll get this done before Representative Culver gets here and it'll just drive him nuts. So, you know, being in government, you catch all the bad things when all the bad things happen. With this is one time we can actually maybe toot our own horns and say, you know, it's a cooperation between the State of Alaska, the Mat-Su Borough, and the City of Wasilla. Without the three government agencies cooperating today, this would have never happened. So this is a good thing, and hopefully this is not the end of projects that we all do together, but the start, especially considering the fiscal the challenges we have coming.

We have to do more projects like this and not be able to stand on our own. So this is a good thing. This is going to help everybody. It's going to help on the safety aspect, getting people across the roads, and it'll give us a new corridor. So I just want to thank the state legislature, you know, the Mat-Su Borough, the state of Alaska, and Archie and his people for making sure today happened.

So thank you.

Thank you. And Judith Klapp-Michael.

Hi everyone. My name is Judy Klapp-Michael, and I'm delighted to be able to be here on behalf of the family of Joe Klapp, for whom this street is named. In 1961, my dad packed up his wife and two daughters and most of his earthly possessions and drove from Texas to Alaska, where he and my mother accepted teaching jobs in Anchorage. They planned to stay about 3 years. And then returned to Texas.

However, it didn't take long for this beautiful state to become their real home. By 1965, Dad had become a homesteader in Wasilla on property just off Kinnick Road. So while holding down his teaching job to make ends meet, he spent all his other time proving up on the land and fulfilling requirements for the homestead patent. Dad was a real— is a real Renaissance man. He made a tidy dugout for working and eating, and he slept in a tent.

He rigged a system for catching rainwater and chopped wood for a barrel stove, put in a garden, an outhouse, and later a small cabin. No power tools included. He sowed the required harvestable crop, and after all the requirements and paperwork were completed, he did receive the homestead patent. We would drive from Anchorage, stopping at Teeland's at the corner for supplies, and then turn west on K'nik Road and drive to where Mr. Levan allowed us to park on his property. And hiked into the homestead from there.

In 1967, Dad hired Ed Beach to clear some land in preparation for putting in a pioneer road to access the homestead. The homestead's headquarters site was located about a mile and a quarter from Kanik Road, now KGB Road. The site was bordered on the east by a section line that was surveyed by the Geological Survey in 1916. The area was covered with dense trees and underbrush over some very rough ground. It was tough going to survey, but Dad and a friend procured the equipment to give it their best shot.

After a lot of long days and hacking through brush and fighting mosquitoes, and by using the geological survey markers, a line was determined. So Beech was hired to clear and bulldoze along the section line for some basic access to the homestead property. We used to direct people to turn at Teelands and then take Kinnick Road to the first turn to the right past mile 4. After Donovan Estates was built, Clapp Street was paved from KGB Road to Vicarious. For the rest of his years living on the homestead and later on the headquarters site, Dad and Mother maintained Clapp Street from Vicarious north to their place.

It was a dicey drive at times, especially during freeze-thaw episodes, and even Copperwood once almost lost a grader and a driver when it slid off toward the ravine. Hopefully those times are past now. Dad sent me an email a few days ago when I told him about today's event. He says, I'll quote, "We hired Ed Beach to cut a road into my homestead and had 81 truckloads of pit-run gravel put on it so the road was passable when it rained." and I had a plow on my pickup for when it snowed. Seems like we always had some kind of problem with the road, especially on that challenging hill.

It was called Clap Road because I built it. This new road from KGB to the parks is something I never expected to see or hear in my lifetime. I'm nearly 96 years old, and I'm glad now that a new and better road has been built and just sorry I can't be there to enjoy it. At least for the Clapp family, this is definitely a historical day. My parents called Alaska home for nearly 50 years, and 3 generations of Joe and Irene Clapp's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are still a part of the valley.

So from all the Clapp family, thank you to the voters who saw the need and approved the bonds, to the legislators who appropriated the state funds. We salute the Mat-Su Borough and the City of Wasilla, Bristol Construction, HDL, and all the agencies responsible for completing this project. Special thanks to Project Manager Bob Walden from the Mat-Su Borough for keeping us in the loop. Joe Clapp would love to have been here today. We've been sending him updates and pictures throughout the construction, and this street has been a long time coming.

It's going to play a big part in the continued growth here in the valley. Thank you. Very nice. Thank you very much. And our Mayor Vern Halter.

Thank you. Welcome, everybody. And it's a pleasure to be here. I kind of agree with some of my colleagues on this is a great project for the Mat-Su Borough to team up with the city of Wasilla and the state of Alaska. Thank you all, you state folks, for the funding.

It was one part of our road bonds back in 2011. Of course, our portion on the borough is the road, and so our 2011 road bonds, we had Hawk Lane north-south, we had Vine north-south, we've got this north-south down to KGB, and our final road bond project, I think, is Trunk Road south. And so we're completed, so we're very proud of them. And I did drive down to the end of this and turned around at the Kanick Road and then came on back. Just a beautiful view.

It's going to be really easy to travel into Wasilla now for the folks and take a little pressure off some of the other roads. So it's a great project. We're very proud of it. Want to thank the borough staff, HDL. I got a new brand new hat coming here today, so I want to thank them.

And, and so I'll just be brief because it's a little chilly out here today. And thank you very much from the borough standpoint to everybody else. It's great to be a partnership with City of Wasilla and the state of Alaska on these roads. It's Bogart Road. We're partners with the state.

It's just, it's just, it seems like it's working out very well. We kind of manage them and put out the contracts and things like that, and the roads seem to get built. And so let's do some more of them. So thank you for having me.

And up next, Eric Miyashiro, DOT project manager. Thank you. Of course, as a project manager for the We ended the project where the department was in charge of realigning the road and creating a new intersection. Just like to reiterate our, you know, how well the partnership worked between the city and the borough and us. We couldn't be more pleased about how this turned out, except the light's not on yet.

Our part was really designing the road, and the borough constructed the project. The city actually bought the right-of-way for us. So, came together, we got this thing pretty much done here. And had we not been able to do that, we would probably be another year out before we could construct the end of the road, and it wouldn't go through. This is obviously a badly needed project.

There's not enough north-south arterials or collector streets in the borough here. And that's something that we noted and we need to work on, I think, in the future. Hopefully, again, we'll be able to complete future projects just like this in the future. And that's it. Thank you for inviting.

And looky here, Representative Jim Culver pulled up right in time.

There's no wind today, is there? This project kind of got started when we were putting the road bond package together. Mayor Halter, Assemblymember, former Assemblymember Arvin and myself, we didn't have a Wasilla project, and we wanted to have a regionally represented bond package for the voters. And so I gave Archie Giddings a call, Public Works Director of the city, say, "Archie, what do you need over there?" He said, "Well, if the borough would fund the CLAP/MAC extension on their part, then we can do a joint project, and that would be helpful." So we put that in, and here we are today. And what's the beauty of it is we would go north here at this intersection at the parks, we'd go down Church, then we'd hit Selden, We did another one of our road bond projects.

We'd go to Beverly Lakes. We could go all the way to Palmer through the new roundabout at Lucille, continue on, hit the Bogart extension, go all the way to Palmer. So what we did actually is it was a well-designed package that created a transportation network. And any of you live out KGB, I'm sure you'll be very happy to be able to use another access. But I think, Mayor Caudle, that'll be our next priority then is getting KGB finished right, 4-lane.

Yeah, so I think, yeah, we got more to do. The partnership worked good with the $65 million package. We seem to get a lot of work for half borough and half state. So good job, and good job to the contractor and engineers that built this, and happy Christmas and Merry New Year.

And our last speaker— hello, Representative Lynn— I won't say Cardin. And thank you. I'm Representative Lynn Gaddis, and I'm proud to say this is in my district. Um, I ran on infrastructure, roads. It's one of the things that folks that live out here know that we're growing so fast that we've not been able to keep up.

So this is one of the ways that it shows that we put our money where our mouth is, is the Matsu with the Legislature at the time in the road bond. And if I could invite really quickly my hand-holding partner, Representative Kathy Tilton, because this is phase 1 of a phase 2 project in which I'll be holding hands with her as this road continues on through Fairview Loop. She represents Fairview Loop. So there's nothing more that I can say that my colleagues already haven't said, except we're looking forward to hold hands as phase 2 gets built. So thank you all.