newsminer.com

FAIRBANKS — Landowners are seeing more and more options as they look to maintain their respective neighborhood roads.

Commissioners for road service areas — neighborhood-level tax districts used to fix and maintain roads — are in line for grants from the Fairbanks North Star Borough, an option only recently available. Eight service areas are prepared to share more than $1.4 million in grants next summer.

That matching grant program, created last year with $6 million in federal aid, could be due for an expansion. The borough received word this spring that another $10 million in assistance is coming for help with neighborhood roads, this time from the state’s capital budget.

Each of the community’s 100-plus road service areas carries the responsibility of maintaining its roads and levies an individual tax rate in its neighborhood to cover costs.

Commissioners in the Chena Hills service area, who manage 16 miles of roadway for roughly 400 landowners, used a borough grant this summer to re-pave heavily driven Roland Road west of Fairbanks. The group was required under the grant program’s rules to chip in a local match equivalent to 10 percent of the grant.

Susan Hoover, the commission’s chairwoman, said the poorly maintained road was becoming more dangerous each winter for drivers who use it to reach Chena Pump Road.

“We don’t have a surplus of money, so we really have to budget to make our money last all year,” she said. “There’s no way we could ever have afforded to do this (without the grant).”

Some service area leaders are looking into another relatively-new option to adjust their respective service areas’ boundaries to incorporate property owners who rely solely on service-area roads but are reluctant to pay the area’s tax rate. The rule, allowed under a recent change in state law, applies in a case where a neighbor can only legally reach his or her property from one of the service area’s road.

Traditionally, neighbors on both sides of a service area’s boundary have had to agree to shift the area’s boundary. The Borough Assembly, in separate actions Thursday night, paved the way to let close to two-dozen service areas shift their boundaries this winter, some of them under the new rule.

The rule caused heartburn for a handful of landowners who attended Thursday’s regular assembly meeting. Jason Theis, whose property borders the Tungsten neighborhood near Chena Hot Springs Road, said he’d like to join his neighbors’ service area — he’d just like to retain the right to have a say on the matter.

“I have no problem being part of the road service area. My problem is I’m being assessed a tax with no ability to vote” first, he said.

Assembly members also voted Thursday to formally accept the $10 million in road-related assistance from the state.

Randy Frank, an outgoing assembly member with experience on service area issues, said the recent combination of federal and state aid for road work is fairly unprecedented for the borough, a government with limited road powers outside of the ability to support service areas. Frank said borough officials pursued the money to help service areas that had grown somewhat overwhelmed with maintenance problems.

“In some places you couldn’t drive through a service area in the wintertime. It was pretty bad,” he said.

Second round

The Borough Assembly on Thursday took the final step toward sending out a second round of grants under the year-old grant program.

Among the eight grant-funded projects will be an upgrade on Gold Mine Trail, which connects to the Steese Expressway just south of Fox. Ted Baker, a road commissioner for the neighborhood, said the work will help re-surface a stretch of road, make the road safer for drivers and reduce dust.

“It would take us several years to do this” without the grant, Baker said.

Several neighborhoods around Fairbanks are lined up for road grants next summer:

• An upgrade of Chena Point Avenue in the Chena Point neighborhood;

• Work on Juniper Drive near Chena Hot Springs Road;

• An upgrade of Hoonah Drive near North Pole;

• Work on Woodland Avenue northeast of Fairbanks;

• Work in the Chena Spur, Vista Gold and Fairfields service areas.

Those projects scored well on a list of $50 million in proposed service-area road projects, a list that Randy Johnson, deputy director of the borough’s Public Works Department, said is reviewed each year under a scoring system that gives weight to those that would improve drivers’ safety, for example, or would help fix heavily-driven roads.

The committee tasked with reviewing proposed projects meets Monday to start work on what could become the third round of grants under the program, Johnson said.

Public officials also deposited money last year in a revolving-loan program for interested service area leaders, a fund Public Works Director Scott Johnson said has drawn some activity.

Nadine Winters, the assembly’s presiding officer, said she expects road advisors and public officials could look to deposit a noteworthy chunk of the $10 million in state assistance into the loan program.

“In the end, we want that money to last as long as possible,” she said.