SITKA, ALASKA
The FAA is about to expand the runway at Sitka’s airport, and add a taxiway. Doing that will push the land further out into the sea. But things live down there, like kelp, and so federal rules say if that area is going to be covered up by the construction, then another area needs to be set aside to make up for it.

“No net loss” is how government officials refer to it. The United States has X amount of wetlands and navigable waterways, and so if some is destroyed, some must be created or preserved.

The part that’s going to be preserved is about five acres of tidelands between Crescent Harbor and the Sitka National Historical Park. The deal to set that land aside has been in the works for more than four years, and is now in its final stages.

The Southeast Alaska Land Trust will pay the city about $240-thousand dollars for what’s called a conservation easement – the right, basically, to protect the land from damage. It’ll also use another $600-thousand dollars to buy Lot 8 of the Sheldon Jackson College campus property, which it will THEN give back to the city, which it can then use for a proposed sea-walk from the Centennial Building to the Historical Park.

As it turns out, the deal sets aside more land than the city needs to in order to make up for the airport project. Linda Speerstra, with the Army Corps of Engineers, says it’s a good, proactive move.

“You will have projects that will impact waters of the U.S.,” Speerstra said. “You will have to mitigate. It’s bottom line. So being able to preserve that area for you, as a mitigation bank is really giving a lot of foresight to future projects.”

At Tuesday night’s Assembly meeting, discussion of the deal took about an hour. Assembly member Terry Blake had some doubts, including about the idea that the deal is for the indefinite future.

“I just have a hard time saying that we are going to negotiate this property away with these types of restrictions and our exposure from any litigation in the future,” Blake said. “It’s not just that piece. There’s more here as well. I think there’s 15 pages of this.”

Blake’s concerns included the possibility that commercial fishing could be restricted in that area, near the mouth of the Indian River. The Assembly changed the document to allow for commercial fishing.

Other restrictions in the deal include dropping anchor on the tidelands, and the use of motorized, wheeled vehicles on the tide flats when they’re exposed. Assembly member Larry Crews asked if the conservation status of the lands would also preclude people – or students – from walking out onto the flats.

“In fact, on the contrary,” said Diane Mayer, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Land Trust.

Mayer says part of the reason for setting the land aside in the first place is so that it can be used for educational or interpretive purposes. In other words, so people can access it, or so students can learn about it, for example, with programs from the nearby Sitka Sound Science Center.

“Now if the science center did it at such intensity that you were seeing trails carved through the eelgrass, then we would probably tell them to lighten up on their program and try to do more from the seawalk,” she said. “But that’s the purpose of setting it aside. It’s an excellent educational facility.”

Assembly member Phyllis Hackett said city has to find some land to set aside, and that this area fits the bill nicely.

“I could understand the concerns if we were talking about a piece of property in the channel, or in an area where we possibly would want to do some future development,” Hackett said. “This piece of property, I believe, is pretty ideal for this situation. It adjoins the National Park, which is going to be a National Park forever.”

The changes the Assembly made will be taken back to the land trust board for consideration, and then the document goes on to be reviewed by the trust, and numerous federal and state agencies, including the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the state Department of Transportation.
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