Sen. Lisa Murkowski and her staff are scheduled to be traveling around the Kenai Peninsula today.
We spoke with Borough Mayor Mike Navarre who said he plans to sit down with the Senator to discuss some solutions for the borough, one of those issues being funding for a “North Road Extension Plan.”
Mayor Navarre: “There’s been a grant from the federal government since 1998 but the language says North Road Extension so we can’t really use it for anything except for extending the North Road which requires an environmental impact statement which would use up most of those funds so what we’re going to try and do is get some language changed that requires federal legislative action as an earmark which has sort of been out of favor since 2008.”
Navarre said there are a few other things they plan to bring to the Senator as well.
Mayor Navarre: “We’re going to talk about the payment in lieu of taxes because we have a lot of federal lands on the Kenai Peninsula and if they don’t fund that, it impacts us because we have to provide all of the services from visitors that come down here but no revenue from those lands because they aren’t taxable. And then looking at a variety of other issues at the federal level the FEMA funding, mitigation funding particular in the Seward area so its very nice of Sen. Murkowski to make her time available while shes here to sit and listen to us and interact with us and provide some feedback.”