The Kenai Peninsula Borough’s District 1 will not vote on whether or not to become an economic service area in November.
Assembly Member Kelly Wolf introduced the ordinance in July as a way for his District 1 constituents to have more of a voice on issues like annexation and flooding mitigation.
In Tuesday night’s borough assembly meeting, he said he tabled the proposed service area indefinitely with the intent to let it expire after a large group of K-Beach residents expressed concerns.
Asmb. Wolf: “My district covers a broad area. I reach across the river over to Ridgeway. I cover, as I call it, K-Beach South, K-Beach North, K-Beach North being the flood area, the area which was impacted by the flooding in 2013. I felt that I needed to be able to bring all of the parties together, and if one of the parties, groups was not in favor of this, ya know as an elected official you’re supposed to listen to your constituency.”
Brian Olson has been outspoken about opposing Soldotna’s proposed annexation of the K-Beach area and his group Borough Residents Against Annexation originally supported the service area idea.
Olson stated the anti-annexation group no longer supported the service area since the borough administration stepped in to talk annexation with the City of Soldotna and other District 1 residents opposed it.
Olson: “First of all I want to congratulate and thank Assembly Member Wolf for bringing this forward. There was a large group of people who were looking for solutions to give us a voice in the borough. We had invited other folks to our meetings to help us with some ideas and Mr. Wolf attended our meetings and we discussed quite a few things. So it was a grassroots movement to start with, to look at this as an approach to a possibility to ward off annexation.”
Wolf said with that change in support the overwhelming response from his constituents opposed the service area and he would not waste their time by having them vote in a special election in November.