The City of Kenai is looking at moving the South Spruce Street fee shack for the North Beach dipnet fishery before the 2015 fishery.
City Manager Rick Koch said the shack would be moved towards the highway and rather than having a single lane to enter, there would be two lanes going in.
Koch: “One is it’s much easier on the top of the hill for motor homes for motor homes and/or vehicles with trailers to turn around in the event that there’s no parking available.”
In that event large vehicles would be able to use the little league parking lot to turn around.
Another benefit would include…
Koch: “By having two lanes it will move traffic much quicker, we do lose some lineal distance, we lose some storage in a single lane but by creating two lanes we recover that storage. But we found that a two lane set up was very efficient over on the south shore this year when we did it on Dunes Road.”
One concern brought up during the dipnet work session was that the usual length of the wait line currently usually extends all the way to the highway and that moving the fee shack up the hill would further extend that.
Koch had said that hopefully with other implementations increasing the speed in which fee shack operators get vehicles through and the convenient turn around spaces in the event of full parking, the city hopes that would eliminate the queue stretching into traffic.