Anchorage to decide Girdwood’s future in Land Plan Vote

Recent Version of Plan Yields 500 Acres to Development, Assembly Could Add More

By Soren Wuerth

TNews Editor

A sweeping land plan that could determine Girdwood's future as either a sprawling resort town or a mountain community with an intact rainforest is scheduled for a vote in a little more than a week.

Should the Anchorage Assembly adopt the city's changes to Girdwood's comprehensive plan, the town could see hundreds of acres of Girdwood's old-growth rainforest habitat cleared for subdivisions, roads, businesses and resort expansion.

Besides 500 acres included for development in the plan, hundreds of additional acres of public lands could be added, including remote lands sought by Alyeska Resort for development as well as forests and wetlands along Virgin Creek, where a group, decades ago, hoped to build a golf course.

An excerpt Land Use Map from the draft Girdwood Comprehensive Map.

The plan comes with few conditions on the size of homes in most areas and even whether anyone lives in them, a trend facing many Western mountain towns with ski resorts, said Mike Edgington co-chair of the Girdwood Board of Supervisors   

"We're not here to sell things in strip malls," Edgington said Wednesday during a meeting. "There's places that do that very well. That's not what Girdwood is for. Girdwood exists and this economy exists because of the environment. There's always going to be a point where additional development starts cannibalizing the whole essence, purpose and economic value of the community." 

Ninety percent of homes built in the last three years are so-called "dark homes" or homes that go most of the year unoccupied, according to Edgington, who is also chair of a local group, Imagine!Girdwood.

Imagine!Girdwood was authorized in 2021 by the Anchorage Assembly to update a 30-year-old Girdwood Area Plan. A survey conducted in January 2019 shows that people like Girdwood mostly for its outdoor recreation, its sense of community and its small town feel. 

The comprehensive plan already incorporates vast tracts of land allowable for development, but puts aside areas residents hoped to preserve for recreation as "open space" and park land. 

The “mitten”, the forested area between Glacier Creek and the Alyeska Hotel, as seen from the North Face Trail.

Earlier this year, however, the city's planning department added huge swaths of land to the map for housing, arguing there is a "shortage of land for development" in Anchorage.

One of those controversial areas is undisturbed land beyond the airport between Glacier Creek and the Alyeska Hotel called the "mitten" area by planners for its shape. That location has been targeted for subdivisions by Alyeska Resort despite an overwhelming number of comments calling for the forest to be preserved as open space. The Girdwood Trails Committee has spent years planning trails there. 

"The community doesn't agree with a land use designation of mixed use [housing] for the mitten," Holly Spoth-Torres of Huddle AK told assembly members during a November work session on the plan. When an earlier version of the comprehensive plan came out showing housing in the mitten area, planners received "hundreds of comments" against the designation.

"It was probably the most comments we received," she said. "It was important for the community to retain that as open space."

Anchorage Assembly chair Chris Constant interrupted Spoth-Torres at that point to clarify, "that's one place that the respondents to the plan don't agree with. It's hard to say broadly that the community does or doesn't agree."

A representative for Pomeroy, the Canadian lodging company that owns Alyeska Resort, told the city's planning commission in June that the upper valley held "the most developable lands" in Girdwood and that its current projects near the hotel depend on money it would make building homes, many of which would be single-family residences, in the area.

During an Imagine!Girdwood meeting this week, Edgington and others said they've heard Anchorage officials refer to Alyeska basin as the "town center" rather than a more locally referenced town square near the post office.

"It's hard to hear that [misrepresentation] and think people paying attention and reading the maps have much understanding of the community," Edgington said.

This forest overlooks land slated for development under the comprehensive plan. (Photo by Soren Wuerth)

Another location, along Virgin Creek, was designated by the city for "mixed density" housing despite the area being stripped from earlier draft maps following "many, many comments indicating that wasn't the preferred land use," Spoth-Torres said during the Assembly work session.

She said the Virgin Creek forest and floodplain was designated "commercial-recreation" in 1995 with the intention of becoming a golf course. An idea to clearcut, fill and convert the watershed to a golf course led to a drawn-out and contentious debate in Girdwood in the late 90s. 

"This plan is proposing an open space designation and [the Anchorage planning office's] recommendation is housing," she said.

Several assembly members complained the plan's land designations are out of sync with the rest of Anchorage and definitions for terms like "housing density" are not qualified.

"This feels like a very bespoke comprehensive plan that doesn't utilize any of the development principles that we utilize elsewhere," said assembly member Meg Zaletel, "and I understand it's different but you also have 10 members who don't represent this area of town.

"It is really hard to get that baseline understanding and be able to talk about how we're addressing what is a housing concern in Girdwood when we can't talk about the designation for the land uses to its development potential the way we can in more concrete terms in the rest of town," she said.

Planners recognized that locations of potential housing don't necessarily match utility and other constraints to make building most affordable to developers, said Huddle's Spoth-Torres.

"We understand where development costs may or may not be higher. However, this [comprehensive plan] was the opportunity for Girdwood to express where they want housing and the character of their community so we tried to weigh all of that," Spoth-Torres said.

Another assembly member indicated Girdwood enjoys privilege over other areas of Anchorage.

"The word 'equity' is used and I found we spent $50,000 per child for [Girdwood's] daycare center. That's the muni's investment and we continue to hear arguments about equitable treatment and, when I try to go to Mountain View, it's a fight to get $100 per kid," said Constant. "I would like to explore the findings of the economics of individuals seeking housing in the marketplace, the detail, not just the pretty pictures."

Reached Thursday, Zac Johnson, who represents Girdwood on the Assembly, said he plans to meet with assembly member Randy Sulte and representatives from the city, Huddle and Imagine!Girdwood to hash out a substitute ordinance that compromises some of the plan's features with the planning department's version. 

"I don't want to plant my flag on where we're going to land," Johnson said when asked how concessions could be made for development in the upper valley. 

Edgington said at the Imagine!Girdwood meeting Girdwood comprehensive plan offers 500 acres of land for housing though the group projected the community will need, at most, 100 acres for future housing.

The plan includes a long swath of land classified "residential" in the western side of the valley that borders the Beaver Pond Trail and California Creek and runs besides Crow Creek Road for another mile. 

A development for a subdivision called "Holtan Hills" that drew outrage and near universal opposition from Girdwood residents and local government was nevertheless approved by the Assembly in January. That land is in the plan, designated as "mixed-density" residential. 

For his part, Kirk Hoessle, who owns Alaska Wildland Adventures, said the area plan is one "put together by those who had a lot of voice at meetings"  and that nuanced discussion of low-density versus mixed-density housing distract from more compelling matters. 

"We should be spending time, in my opinion, working on that mitten area and Virgin Creek area. Those are the sacred areas and this is our last chance to speak up for those places." Hoessle said.