The Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly postponed an ordinance which would have swapped property on Karluk Avenue for property belonging to the Keohanes on K-Beach.
The property the ordinance would have acquired had been deemed by the borough as an ideal area to manage drainage water from the high groundwater of the K-Beach area flooding.
Borough Chief of Staff Paul Ostrander detailed why the ordinance was postponed until the January 20, 2015 meeting.
Ostrander: “Part of that agreement was that basically the southern half of that 1.8 acre parcel would be reserved for a drainage easement and the question was not only the needs that we have right now but into the foreseeable future, the next 20 years or so, and that wasn’t a question that we were comfortable answering right now, so we want to hire a consulting engineer to look at that parcel and determine whether or not the southern half of it is sufficient to provide drainage in that area and if it’s not sufficient we would want to look at alternatives for the Keohanes and the exchange.”
The Keohane property is nicknamed the Karluk basin due to the way the waters from the 2013 K-Beach flooding flowed through the property and into a ditch.
Ostrander said neighbors have expressed concern that the Keohane parcel on the bluff is not large enough to deal with the amount of water that would flow into it if made into a drainage management system and it would further erode the bluff.