Seward Highway Plans Put Off for Lack of Funding

Seward Highway Plans put off off for lack of funding

By Soren Wuerth

TNews Editor

Proposals to reconstruct the Seward Highway between Girdwood and Anchorage and a project to build an overpass into Girdwood are in peril due to a lack of funding and after a Statewide plan was rejected by federal regulators.

The so-called "Safer Seward Highway" project, which would cost as much as $1 billion, has been put on hold after federal transportation officials declined to fund a broader $5.6 billion statewide plan. The State must come up with a revision to its three-year Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan (STIP)before reapplying for funding. 

Seward Highway south of Girdwood (Photo by Anneliese Kupfrian)

The main problem is that the Alaska Department of Transportation failed to involve local governments as required by regulations. 

In the case of the Seward Highway project, a plan for reconstruction and realignment from milepost 98 to 115, the DOT did not get approval from an Anchorage planning group.

Under federal regulations, projects under a STIP need to be consistent with the transportation goals of a nearby city. For the Seward Highway, that organization is the Anchorage Metropolitan Area Transportation Solutions, or AMATS. 

"There was no coordination with AMATS prior to the draft document being released for the 45-day public comment period," AMATS director Aaron Jongenelen wrote in an August letter. 

Jongenelen said the Seward Highway reconstruction "should be removed" from DOT's 2024-2027 STIP since it wasn't included in AMATS's plan.

He added that there is "missing information" and, so far as the Seward Highway plan is concerned, DOT got the region wrong.

"Seward Highway 98.5 to 110 should be all in the Municipality of Anchorage not Kenai. Also this project is missing from the interactive map," stated Jongenelen.

Federal investigators largely agreed, saying projects need to go through a local planning process and be included in a "Metropolitan Planning Organization's" plan before being listed on a STIP.

Meanwhile, an idea for a half-cloverleaf overpass heading in Girdwood, called a "trumpet" by highway planners, is bogged down for lack of funding, a DOT director said during a November meeting.

Though the Girdwood Board of Supervisors urged DOT to include an interchange in a 2018 resolution, the size of the department's proposalcaused acrimony. 

"It's out-of-scale with Girdwood but also overly environmentally impactful to a pretty treasured area," GBOS co-Chair Jennifer Wingard said during a meeting last November.

Seward Highway photo between Girdwood and Anchorage. (Photo by Jon Scudder)

The recommendation for a trumpet-style project is unlikely to gain funding, Sean Holland, DOT's regional director, said during the November meeting.

"We have a lot of projects right now that are really sucking up a lot of funding and to be able to fund the project in the $70 million range is going to be really challenging to do in the next few years," Holland said.

Holland said the he's told his agency's planners to come up with a smaller, less expensive
"bite-sized" project for the interchange that might reduce crashes."We have way more needs than we do funding," he said.