The Kenai City Council enacted an ordinance that would accept and appropriate funding from the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, Division of Forestry to support spruce bark beetle mitigation and hazard fuel reduction. The city participated in a Borough-wide Community Wildfire Protection Plan, adopted by resolution in May.
One component of the plan includes the establishment of a slash disposal site. The city was notified of approval for reimbursement of up to $150,000 for three years from the Division of Forestry to complete the project. Accepting the funding to support a slash disposal site will satisfy one of the city’s goals included in the Community Wildfire Protection Plan.
City Manager Paul Ostrander tells the city council:
“A part of the grant agreement with the state required that we track the amount of acres that had been mitigated by people that are dumping at the slash disposal site. When they come into the facility, we ask them, how many acres have you mitigated with the materials that you’re going to be bringing into the site. They’ll tell us, I cleared two acres or whatever, and we account for that. At the end of this, we can tell the state that the slash that was disposed at this site was the result of 150 acres that have been mitigated by folks. That’s how we’re tracking it.
The city opened its slash disposal site on Thursday, June 2, with a weekly operating schedule of Thursday to Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The city will continuously consolidate the slash throughout the year, but due to uncertainty surrounding difficulty, cost, and time it will take to burn the slash pile at the end of the year, if the pile reaches 1.5 acres prior to the end of September, it will be closed for the year. The facility is not available for commercial operators.
The slash dump site is located at mile 13 of the Kenai Spur Highway, just past the Kenai Soccer Fields on the way towards Nikiski and it is open to both Kenai residents and nonresidents.
