Last Modified: October 25, 2005 at 01:48 PM
The Anchorage Assembly surprised a lot of people with its well-planned editing of the city's draft long-range transportation plan Monday night. At a special meeting first announced just before the weekend, the dominant conservative faction on the assembly overturned years of broad-based community work with a raft of changes, big and small, in the document that will guide more than $2 billion of transportation investment over the next 20 years.
The draft plan, which already relied on building ever more roads at the expense of trails, public transit and neighborhood concerns, is now even further out of whack. Along the way, the assembly majority made some mindless changes, apparently aimed at punishing Mayor Begich.
The most mystifying of those moves was the decision to delay the widening of the Lake Otis and Tudor intersection for five to seven years. The project is a modestly priced interim step that can bring some relatively quick relief to the city's most congested intersection. Instead, the assembly delayed the work until after two new links that will help bypass the intersection are built. That's a crazy decision, especially since the city has already bought and cleared the properties needed to expand the jammed intersection.
The run-amok assembly majority again dissed the mayor by moving to strip out the south extension of the coastal trail. Mayor Begich has been working diligently to shape a compromise that significantly cuts the cost and reduces its impact on the tiny handful of NIMBY residents that have long blocked the popular project. This vote is a good example of how the conservative majority took a plan that was already light on trails and transit investments and made it worse.
Another head-scratcher was the decision to add a highway connecting East Anchorage to International Airport Road. That project was so expensive and so destructive to neighborhoods that it didn't even make the draft plan's extensive road-building wish list.
The $110 million price tag on the controversial new road is way low, according to Mayor Begich, since some 70 homes and 30 businesses stand in the way. The draft plan already includes a new east-west connecting link, building upon Dowling Road and Raspberry Road, just a mile to the south of International Airport Road. Nonetheless, the conservative majority agreed to add the costly and invasive Airport Road project. It was pushed by assemblyman Paul Bauer, who commutes from the east side to a job at the airport.
Some of the assembly's changes were downright petty. One amendment removed the words "visually appealing" from a policy statement on all transportation improvements. With the change, the city will be free to build them as ugly as it wants. In the minds of the assembly's conservative majority, that's progress.
And the assembly isn't done yet. Even more harmful amendments may come tonight, before the vote on final passage at tonight's regular assembly meeting.
Only three members consistently opposed the moves that picked apart the draft plan: Allan Tesche, Pamela Jennings and Janice Shamberg. Dick Traini at least had the good sense to vote against the new eastside highway that would slice through neighborhoods in his district.
Mayor Begich could veto this distorted plan, but the voting pattern so far indicates he may have trouble getting the four assembly members he needs to uphold a veto. May he find that elusive fourth vote and force the assembly to restore some sense of sanity and balance to the city's transportation blueprint.
BOTTOM LINE: The Anchorage Assembly has taken a compromise plan for the city's future transportation needs and rushed through ill-considered changes that will make it worse.