"Nothing Simple About This 'Home Sweet Home'"

 

NOTHING SIMPLE ABOUT THIS 'HOME SWEET HOME'

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2012

In November 1969 at 148 N. Binkley Street, which was then just a gravel-covered Soldotna back road, construction on the new administration building for the five-year-old Kenai Peninsula Borough was moving forward again when another setback occurred.

On Nov. 29, a page-one headline in the Cheechako News alerted the public: “Borough Building Panels Lost in Storm at Sea.” Although this was certainly the most dramatic event in the borough’s multi-year effort to establish its sense of place, it was far from being the only twist or turn in a tale that dipped at least one tentative toe back into the stream of the late 1940s.

The Scar on the City

In 1947, Howard and Maxine Lee read a Saturday Evening Post article about the homesteading opportunities for military veterans willing to move to the Kenai Peninsula. It sounded simple enough: Go to the Anchorage Land Office, file on a suitable parcel, build a habitable abode, live on the land at least six months and a day out of the year, and clear one-tenth of the total acreage.

Howard and Maxine Lee in Soldotna in happier times.

Stationed with the Navy in Florida at the time, the Lees headed north in March of 1948. Then leaving Maxine and their 16-month-old daughter, Karen, in Seattle, Howard arrived in Anchorage only to discover that all the land abutting the new Sterling Highway had already been claimed.

Dispirited at first, Howard then learned of a couple who had gone to the area the year before, spent the winter, and wanted out. The couple had hauled a 60-by-30-foot Quonset hut over the frozen highway, and Howard was told that for $1,000 they would relinquish to him their land and the Quonset.

Thus, when Maxine and Karen joined him at their new home in June, the Lees became residents of the fledgling community of Soldotna. Their homestead encompassed the current sites of the Borough Building, Soldotna Elementary School, Soldotna City Hall, Dr. Tom Kobylarz’s dental office, and Cad-re Feed west of the Kenai Spur, and to the east much of the low area around the Cottonwood Health Center and Blakeley’s Auction Company.

The Lees, like many homesteaders in those days, led a hardscrabble existence but eventually began to prosper. In 1949, Maxine became Soldotna’s first postmaster and served in that capacity for two years when, abruptly, she decided she had had enough.

Maxine turned her postmaster duties over to Mickey Faa, and she then took her two children to the Lower 48, where she filed for divorce. In the settlement, she and Howard split the homestead, with Howard retaining all of the property west of the Spur Highway.

By 1954, however, Howard, too, wanted a change. He left Alaska and returned to the Navy, for which he had been a pilot during World War II. While he was gone, according to long-time Soldotna resident Al Hershberger, Howard sent a letter to his friend, Joe Faa, announcing that he wanted to buy a new car—a four-door sedan called the Chrysler Royal—and he needed $4,000. Howard offered Faa his share of the homestead for $4,000 (approximately $32,000 in today’s money).

Faa brought the letter to Hershberger because he lacked the funds himself to make the deal. “I would have bought it, except for the fact that at that time I had a hard time coming up with $40,” Hershberger said. “It didn’t take long for Joe to come up with the money. It turned out to be a good investment.”

This was particularly true because the land contained a rich lode of gravel, necessary for road-building and, later, for paving.

In 1956, the Alaska Road Commission, which built the Sterling and Kenai Spur highways, was merged into the federal Bureau of Public Roads, an agency which, in those territorial days, was in charge of all the roads in Alaska. Then, at some point prior to 1958, when the Sterling Highway was resurfaced and paved, the BPR acquired the gravel pit on Faa’s property.

After Alaska statehood in 1959, all BPR assets, as well as all road building and maintenance responsibilities, were turned over to the state’s new Department of Highways (later renamed the Department of Transportation). For nearly another decade, the Department of Highways controlled the pit, which featured holes in some cases 20-25 feet lower than street level, and was often viewed by residents as a scar in the center of the city.

The large gravel pit in the center of the city was considered an eyesore.

In fact, when the borough administration began shopping in earnest for a piece of land on which to erect an administrative headquarters, Borough Chairman (the term used before “Mayor” was established in the 1970s) George Navarre made his disdain for its appearance plain, even as he sensed its potential: “The Soldotna Gravel Pit is an eyesore to the city,” he said, according to the minutes of the May 2, 1967, assembly meeting. “The site is in the middle of town and is not screened, and the land can be put to a better use as a borough office site or school site.”

The City of Soldotna administration concurred, and Department of Highways officials began to discuss the possibility of ceding the land to the borough—with strings attached. More than a year later, in exchange for the Soldotna pit, the department would request unrestricted access to a new site for gravel on borough land either north or south of the city.

In the meantime, other properties were examined as potential building sites for borough headquarters.

On June 6, 1967, Soldotna businessman John Ingram attended the assembly meeting and made a presentation on behalf of a citizens committee interested in furthering the building efforts. Ingram said that he represented people with good ideas who were willing to help find a suitable location. He told the assembly that the borough should seek a site no smaller than five acres “in order that ample space may be provided for the building, service driveways, vehicle parking and landscaping.”

Assembly president Earl Simonds responded by naming a four-person committee (Bob Ross, Dolly Farnsworth, Irwin Metcalf and Harold Jackson) “to discuss with Mr. Ingram and his committee the most feasible sites for the borough administration building,” according to the minutes of the meeting. Chairman Navarre also urged the two committees to consult with the Soldotna Planning Commission to be certain that the borough adhered to all relevant city planning and zoning regulations.

About two weeks later, Farnsworth reported that the City of Soldotna had offered eight possible sites, and the borough committee had reviewed them all. Committee members said that they favored an 80-acre site between the Catholic church and the Kenai River because the site offered nearby sewer and water services, mostly level topography, good drainage, and a solid gravel foundation, and it also seemed to comply with the city’s zoning laws. Furthermore, the committee believed that having so much land at the borough’s disposal would create numerous options for the area not directly affected by the construction of an administration building.

Farnsworth made a motion for Resolution 67-31, to accept the city’s proposal for the 80-acre site. Her motion was seconded by Ross. But Navarre thought the resolution was too hasty. He said he wanted the borough planning commission to review the committee’s top three choices and make its own recommendation to the assembly. A vote to table the resolution until after this review occurred failed, and then a vote on Farnsworth’s original resolution failed, too.

In the end, all eight sites were sent to the borough planning commission.

Over the succeeding weeks, the borough assembly pressed ahead with an attempt to fund an administration building before it actually had an official place to put it, and in an October election borough voters readily slapped down that idea.

Then, even though no site had been chosen and no funding was available, the assembly focused on what type of building to construct.

Then on Dec. 5, 1967, in the midst of this conjecture, a familiar possibility resurfaced: the Department of Highways’ offer to exchange the Soldotna Gravel Pit for a gravel site of equal value outside the city limits. The Soldotna pit lay within a 15.11-acre lot and was valued at $23,000. Department officials knew that some of the lands being selected from the state by borough were rich in gravel reserves, and Navarre encouraged the assembly to consider selecting these lands so that the trade with the Department of Highways could be done. The assembly’s reaction was mixed, as some members were still pushing for the 80-acre parcel.

Seven months later, on July 2, 1968, Navarre arrived at the assembly meeting to speak about a letter he had received from Charles S. Matlock, a district highway engineer for the Department of Highways, concerning the department’s “immediate relinquishment” of the Soldotna Gravel Pit to the borough, in exchange for unrestricted gravel access from one of the previously mentioned sites. Navarre recommended that the assembly make the deal, and the members did so—unanimously.

At long last, the administration for the borough government and its school district had a home, even if it was, at the moment, a wide and ugly gash in the heart of the city.

Contentious Baby Steps

On March 31, 1962, at a public meeting of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Study Group—held nearly two years before the borough officially existed—former Kenai marshal and Alaska territorial legislator Allan Petersen offered to donate five acres of “choice” homestead land in the Kasilof area to provide a location for the construction of borough offices.

On April 13, in a letter to the editor of the Cheechako News, Kasilof resident Homer Browning wrote to offer five of his own acres for the same purpose: “I read your paper with interest, and take the citizen’s viewpoint that the borough should be easily accessible to everyone, and my land is on the main highway, two miles north of the Kasilof River bridge.”

The generosity of these two men resulted from the conclusions of the study group, which at that four-hour March 31 meeting had established the following tenets: (1) Legislative election districts 9 and 10 will comprise the new borough. (2) The borough will seek first-class status. (3) The borough will be called the Kenai Peninsula Borough. (4) The borough seat will be established within a three-mile radius of Tustumena.

The decision to locate the borough seat in Tustumena was termed by the Cheechako as “perhaps one of the most surprising incidents at the meeting.” Although Kenai, Soldotna and the Sports Lake area were also mentioned as possible sites, Tustumena was selected because the group voted to place the borough seat on “neutral ground,” near the Tustumena School.

Members of the study group explained that the chosen location would help unify the entire peninsula, thus avoiding the differences that might arise between neighboring communities if one of the larger towns were selected.

Ultimately, however, the choice of largely undeveloped Tustumena would prove unsatisfactory, and several larger peninsula communities would battle over where to place the seat of government—just as they would battle over many aspects of the borough for the next three and a half years.

*****

In October 1961, two and a half years into statehood, the Alaska State Legislature passed the Borough Act, essentially transforming Alaska into one giant Unorganized Borough. Then the residents of the state were given until July 1963 to form their own organized boroughs, thereby establishing the sizes, boundaries, government seats and tax bases for those entities. Areas not formed into organized boroughs would remain—and still do remain—part of the state’s Unorganized Borough.

The first borough to incorporate was the Bristol Bay Borough. Today the state contains 18 organized boroughs, while the rest, comprising the Unorganized Borough of Alaska, encompasses more than half of the state and has a population of more than 80,000. Included in this borough are Dillingham, Valdez, Cordova, and its largest city, Bethel.

But after the passage of the Borough Act of 1961, communities around the state began to scramble to meet the July 1963 deadline. The Kenai Peninsula Borough Study Group formed on Jan. 27, 1962, and quickly took action, facing adversity and divisiveness from the start.

The March 30, 1962, edition of the Cheechako urged peninsula citizens to attend the next day’s study group meeting, to be held after a noon luncheon at the Riverside House restaurant in Soldotna.

The Cheechako’s headline promised verbal “fireworks,” and for good reason.

For one thing, the city of Homer was not yet advocating a peninsula-wide borough. There was talk of the peninsula containing at least two boroughs and possibly more.

Peninsula residents also disagreed over whether the new borough should have first-class status or second-class, and even over what the new borough should be called.

The Kenai Chamber of Commerce, for instance, said that it favored a first-class borough named “Kenaitze,” with its seat in Kenai.

Other names suggested for the new borough included Tustumena, Cook Inlet, and Progress.

After what the newspaper called “a lengthy and somewhat turbulent session” on March 31, the dust settled briefly. The tenets set forth that day by the study group were non-binding; they were considered preliminary steps in the process of filing an application for a borough with the state’s Local Boundaries Commission and Local Affairs Agency.

Still, there remained some sense of urgency. Although the KPB Study Group was the largest group studying borough organization, there were other active groups, in the Homer and Fritz Creek areas, with different agendas. There was talk of a Homer Borough or South Peninsula Borough, but many opponents of the idea wondered aloud what the southern peninsula hoped to use for an adequate tax base.

Besides, some noted, the southern peninsula itself wasn’t unified; the residents of nearby Ninilchik, for instance, favored a whole-peninsula plan.

And then there was the Anchorage problem. Many residents feared that the entire peninsula, despite the recent discovery of commercial quantities of oil and natural gas, lacked the tax base to survive as a borough on its own. They worried that a larger borough, say one centered in Anchorage, might “swallow up” the peninsula.

By June 1962, the study group had decided by a 6-5 vote to petition for second-class borough status. About a week later, the group nixed its whole plan, said it needed more study, and went back to the drawing board.

As the deadline approached, and the Bristol Bay Borough remained the only organized borough in the state, the pressure increased on areas still in the planning process. The State Legislature then passed the Mandatory Borough Act, which was signed into law by Gov. William A. Egan in April 1963 and required all state election districts over a certain population threshold to incorporate as boroughs by Jan. 1, 1964.

The regions thus required to form boroughs were in or near Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Ketchikan, Sitka, Kodiak Island, the Matanuska-Susitna valleys, and the Kenai Peninsula.

On April 20, 1963, residents from across the peninsula met at a heavily attended meeting in Soldotna to determine the exact boundaries of the borough. At the meeting, after considerable discussion and no real progress—Homer again raised the idea of its own borough, and the idea of a Seward Meridian Borough was posed—Frank Mullen made a motion to let the state decide the borough’s boundaries.

Discussion was apparently heated. A motion was made to table Mullen’s motion, but the tabling motion was voted down. A vote was then taken on Mullen’s motion, which passed 31-24.

About a week later, at another meeting at the Riverside House in Soldotna, it was announced that the state had refused to do the peninsula’s work. The onus was back on peninsula citizenry.

In May, a group of Kenai citizens filed a petition for a first-class borough that included only Kenai, Nikiski, Soldotna, Sterling, Kasilof and Tustumena areas. Later that same month, the Homer Borough petition was rejected by the state’s Local Boundary Commission because it lacked sufficient signatures, and so the pieces fell together, at last, for a united front. The Kenai Peninsula Borough would be a peninsula-wide entity with an elected executive officer called a chairman.

An election was held on Dec. 3, 1963, to elect the first chairman, the first members of the Borough Assembly, and the first members of the KPB School District board. Peninsula voters also would determine whether the borough would attain first-class or second-class status.

Harold Pomeroy, first borough administrator.

Harold Pomeroy, of Bear Cove, was elected chairman. The choice of second-class borough was overwhelmingly selected, 2,037 votes to 252.

But, even after all the contentiousness concerning the seat of borough power, that issue remained unresolved.

The seeds of such a resolution, however, had perhaps already been sown. Most of the study group’s important meetings had been held in Soldotna because of its central location, and on Jan. 4, 1964—three days after the borough was officially incorporated—the first meeting of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly was held in Elks Hall (now the VFW building) in Soldotna.

The fight wasn’t even close to being over, but a barely visible line had been drawn in the sand.

Battle for the Seat of Power

It didn’t take long for the sparks to fly.

On Jan. 10, near the end of a page-one article in the Cheechako News, Kenai mayor James G. “Bud” Dye suggested that, despite its initial activities in Soldotna, the borough could move to Kenai and use a classroom in the Kenai School as a headquarters until the end of present school term, when a suitable new location, preferably still in Kenai, could be found.

A week later, at the behest of the Greater Soldotna Chamber of Commerce, Beulah Grange submitted to the newspaper a long and detailed list of all the services available in the Soldotna area. The Cheechako printed the list on page 11 under the headline “Soldotna to Make Bid for Borough Seat.” The dozens of services were listed under eight main headings: housing and food, consumer services, utilities, transportation, business and professional services, medical services, government institutions, and religion, entertainment and education.

The very next day in the Kenai School, at a special meeting of the borough assembly, Kenai countered.

When Agenda Item #10, “Location of Borough Seat,” was called, Assemblyman Dick Morgan, representing the Kenai City Council, announced that space was available in the brand-new Kenai Central High School until the end of August, when the facility was scheduled to open to students.

Morgan added that some room might soon be available at the Kenai Airport, and then he made a motion to introduce a resolution to bring the borough seat to Kenai. But no one seconded his motion. Instead, Assemblyman Morris Coursen made a motion to introduce a resolution to locate the borough seat in Soldotna. After Coursen’s motion was seconded, a vote was taken and the motion passed 6-1. Only Morgan dissented.

In retaliation, Morgan requested that Coursen’s resolution be made temporary until the borough completed its first master plan, and his request was granted. Consequently, no borough headquarters could be constructed until this “temporary” solution was made permanent, but the banner headline on page one of the next Cheechako blared “BOROUGH SEAT CHOSEN."



The Soldotna Bookkeeping building became the first home of the Kenai Peninsula Borough.

The assembly had agreed unanimously to accept an offer from Jack and Dolly Farnsworth for the free use of a single 10x10-foot room in the Farnsworth Building, located near the intersection of the Spur and Sterling highways, where Dolly ran her Soldotna Bookkeeping business. The arrangement seemed adequate, especially in light of the fact that the borough initially had only one employee, Chairman Pomeroy.

But government has a tendency to grow. Soon a clerk was hired, and then an assessor and three appraisers, and so on.

By April 1965, the borough was occupying 818 square feet in the Farnsworth Building, and the owners were now charging a monthly rate for the space—22 cents a square foot (including utilities). In mid-May, Chairman Pomeroy predicted that by July the borough would require about 1,600 square feet of space for all its employees and materials.

On June 1, the City of Kenai tried again to come to the rescue. The city offered to lease the borough space for the dirt-cheap price of 10 cents per square foot—based upon a long-term lease agreement, preferably something in the 30-year range—in the newly approved Kenai Airport terminal. Mayor Dye estimated that the space would be available to the borough by Jan. 1, 1966.

From the Soldotna Chamber, Burton Carver offered a rebuttal. Carver told the assembly that the borough seat had already been placed in Soldotna after a lengthy discussion and a vote of assembly members; that decision, he asserted, should not be rashly altered. Carver said further that the Soldotna location was the most central for the most peninsula residents and, consequently, the most economical.

Most assembly members concurred and stated that any change should occur, if at all, only after more public hearings. Assembly members voted 5-2 to keep the borough headquarters right where it was, and then, later in the same meeting, voted unanimously to lay the issue of a permanent borough seat to rest once and for all with a borough-wide election on Oct. 5.

Resolution #52 was drafted to request applications for the borough seat referendum. Communities interested had to submit an application to the borough office by Sept. 10 in order to be placed on the general election ballot.

As the deadline neared, three cities filed applications—Seward first, then Soldotna and Kenai. Then a pair of surprises appeared.

First, the assembly received a letter signed by two individuals—probably homesteader Paul Costa and surveyor F.J. “Francis” Malone—in the Gruening Subdivision north of Kenai, asking that the community of Gruening be considered for application on the ballot. This request left assembly members somewhat befuddled as they questioned whether a letter signed by only two people could be the equivalent of an application from a city or a community organization or group.

Tiny Gruening, more a dream than an actual community, had been named after U.S. Sen. Ernest Gruening and was the brainchild of Costa and Malone, with financial support from Nikiski resident Ron Mika. At its peak, Gruening comprised fewer than half a dozen buildings in a cleared area near the intersection of the North Road and Lamplight Road.

About a week after the arrival of the Gruening letter, Kenai city manager Bill Harrison drove north to speak at a meeting of the North Kenai Community Club and urged Gruening supporters to support Kenai’s bid, instead. The Gruening bid, he said, might disrupt the “harmony” and the “unity” between Kenai and North Kenai, and the community club members agreed. The Gruening request was withdrawn.

But a second surprise arrived on the last day of the application process: Clam Gulch, supported by the Tustumena Chamber of Commerce, applied to become the borough seat. Chamber president Arlyn “Speedy” Thomack reminded the public that the original Kenai Peninsula Borough Study Group had recommended that the borough seat be in the Tustumena area.

At its Sept. 14 meeting, the assembly announced that all four communities would go on the ballot. The winning site would be chosen by plurality.

During the next 19 days, the rhetoric and the action intensified without getting ugly. In the final week, the Tustumena Chamber met to listen to promotional presentations from representatives of both Kenai and Soldotna, and then decided to drop Clam Gulch from the race without officially endorsing any other community.

In the Friday, Oct. 1 edition of the Cheechako, however, the Tustumena explanation seemed to favor Soldotna. “CLAM GULCH STEPS OUT” read the all-caps headline atop page one, and chamber president Thomack stated that Tustumena was “in favor of a centrally located place on the Sterling Highway.”

In the same newspaper, Kenai ran a full-page ad promoting a dozen good reasons why it should be selected as borough seat. City officials emphasized that Kenai was in the heart of the oil industry, had fine air-transport facilities, was the headquarters for a high-volume recording district, and was adjacent to “the best dock accommodations on Cook Inlet, namely Arness Terminal.”

Soldotna ran its own full-page ad, featuring a large map illustrating that it was the crossroads of the peninsula. It called itself “The Hub” and reminded readers that moving the borough seat out of Soldotna would involve unnecessary expense.

Not to be outdone, Seward ran an ad spanning two full pages and providing 15 good reasons why it deserved to be the borough seat. Seward emphasized its available office space, in addition to an “All-America” city designation, and many modern conveniences.

The Cheechako, which in those days rarely ran an issue larger than 16 pages, on this day filled 24, mostly with advertising and election-related stories. One of its most important such stories, sharing the front page with the Clam Gulch article, was entitled “Homer Endorses Soldotna,” and it made official the stance of the southern peninsula.

On election day, Tuesday, Oct. 5, voters came out in record numbers.

Because Clam Gulch had dropped out so near the election, there had been no time to reprint the ballots; consequently, Clam Gulch received 16 votes (0.5 percent). Kenai finished third, barely, with 805 votes (25.7 percent), while Seward finished in second with 809 votes (25.8 percent). And Soldotna won easily with 1,499 votes (47.9 percent).

Kenai had received nearly all of its support from Kenai and Nikiski area voters, while Seward’s support was limited to its two precincts and Moose Pass. Soldotna, on the other hand, received the lion’s share of the votes in nearly every other precinct.

In his editorial in the Oct. 8 edition of the Cheechako, publisher Loren Stewart offered the following words as closure: “The election is over. The most controversial borough issue—the location of the borough seat—has been conclusively decided. The contenders, Seward and Kenai, have accepted this decision and announced their desire to now get on with the serious business of building a good borough government. All three cities are to be complimented on carrying on honest, straightforward, mature campaigns for the borough seat. Campaigns which left little or no ill will and bitterness in their wake. Campaigns which in fact drew the several communities of the peninsula closer together.”

Business of the Borough

In early 1964, in his 10x10-foot office in the Farnsworth Building, Borough Chairman Pomeroy kept regular business hours: 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., five days a week.

Because the borough’s first full fiscal year was set to begin on July 1, Pomeroy had worked initially under a six-month contract, paying him $5,500 (the equivalent of about $39,000 in today’s money), and he handled all the work himself until Aug. 3, when he hired Frances Brymer to  be the borough’s first non-elected employee. As borough clerk, Brymer

Frances Brymer, first borough clerk.

shared the tiny headquarters with Pomeroy, but neither complained much because the rent was free and the situation, they assumed, was temporary.

Meanwhile, the school district functions for the borough were being carried out 11 miles away, in the basement offices of the Kenai School (current home of Aurora Borealis Charter School). To the surprise of officials in both locations, this separation of the two halves of borough government would continue for nearly seven more years.

In the Farnsworth Building, Dolly Farnsworth ran her Soldotna Bookkeeping business in the much larger portion of the building, where she had a nice desk and several other women working with her. Because Jack Farnsworth was a member of the borough assembly, it was an easy thing for him to offer free lodging to the borough administration. But the free space was limited, and the accommodations on the borough side were spartan.

According to a narrative written by Brymer in January 1974—10 years after the borough incorporated—when she came on the job she had to supply her own carbon paper and onionskin paper, and her own pens, pencils, and notebooks. She also had to bring a typewriter and stand from home and use cardboard boxes for filing.

The borough telephone was actually the Soldotna Bookkeeping telephone, which could be passed back and forth through a small cutout in the wall.

“There wasn’t any money to buy anything,” Brymer said recently. The entire borough operating budget for the first six months was about $13,000, paid for by a “transitional grant” from the state. After Brymer was hired came the hiring of the first borough assessor, Gerald D. Heier, and three appraisers, who immediately got busy assessing borough properties for the purpose of taxation.

The pace of the clerk’s job quickly became frantic, Brymer said: “But it was so exciting. It was so challenging. You had all these people wanting all these services, and you had to keep trying to find a way to provide them. People were mad, though. They were all upset because they were having to pay taxes they’d never had to pay before. They come to Alaska to get away from taxation, and look what’s happening to them!”

Brymer’s duties in the early days included working with the assembly, helping to prepare budgets and subdivision plats, assisting with assessing and planning, doing payroll, working on elections, handling all the public correspondence of the chairman, registering residents for sales taxes, and taking care of all accounts receivable and payable.

Dolly Farnsworth in 2008.

The bookkeeping aspects of the job were particularly difficult for her at first. “I had some help through the little window from Dolly at her bookkeeping service because I didn’t have knowledge of bookkeeping, and I’d have to keep asking all kinds of questions,” she said.

Meanwhile, although the school board was meeting fairly regularly in Kenai, the assembly shuffled its meeting sites. After meeting for the first time on Jan. 4, 1964, in the Elks Hall in Soldotna, a special meeting, held two weeks later, convened in the Kenai School, followed by a second regular meeting in March in the Homer Electric Association building in Soldotna, a special meeting in a theater in Homer, and another special meeting in the HEA building.

Before the new assembly chambers opened in the Borough Administration Building in 1971, special meetings were held in a number of locations around the peninsula, and regular meetings, depending upon the year, were held in the HEA building, the Soldotna Community Hall, and Thompson’s Log (a filling station and gift store with a large available room).

The site of the first meeting on sales taxes was the basement of the Village Inn shopping center (on another piece of Farnsworth land, across from the current location of Fred Meyer) in Soldotna. According to Dolly Farnsworth, the basement was “pretty big and all cement.” For the sales tax meeting, “it was full of people—had to be at least a hundred people—and there was room for everybody.”

By 1967, the borough’s need for space intensified as individual departments were formed—assessing, legal, finance, planning, etc. Eventually, Farnsworth moved her bookkeeping business into her own home, and the borough assumed control of the entire Farnsworth Building. But soon even that was not enough. A portable was hauled in and placed adjacent to the main building.

Harold Pomeroy during an unsuccessful reelection campaign.

On Feb. 3, 1967, Chairman George Navarre, who had defeated Pomeroy in the 1966 election by 87 votes, announced that although the borough could get by for another year in its present quarters, “there will be problems” because of the lack of space.

With no specific blueprints in his hand, and with no specific piece of property on which to construct a permanent building that would jointly house borough and school district administrations, Navarre began trying to convince the assembly to help him fund the project.

As the population had burgeoned all around the borough, its schools were bursting at the seams. More money was needed for expansion and new construction, and Navarre hoped to include a borough administration building among the many school projects already on the table. On Aug. 2, the assembly crafted Resolution 67-34, which provided that at the next general election, to be held Oct. 3, borough voters would decide whether to support bond propositions for up to $10 million for school construction and up to $300,000 for an administration building.

On election day, the voters resoundingly defeated both propositions. The borough administration building proposition failed by a 981-419 vote.

Three days after the election, Cheechako News publisher Loren Stewart wrote a biting editorial about the election: “The borough asked for a ‘blank check’ to build schools, over an indeterminate period. The voters refused to go along…. This is one more instance in a long line of problems where the borough administration failed to offer proper planning, guidance and information to enable the assembly to make decisions on adequate information rather than in the dark.

“The borough proposition went down to defeat for the same reason, no specific program. This building is also badly needed and would result in a savings to the taxpayers, if properly planned and constructed. Every month that passes sees a decrease in available desirable sites and an increase in the costs of building.”

The minutes for the Nov. 7 assembly meeting stated that borough office space was “becoming a critical item now, and we must make some plans for additional space.”

Without waiting for a parcel of land to come through as a permanent site for the new borough building, Navarre hired an architect to begin developing preliminary plans for the structure. He called the borough building “an urgent need” and continued to press for funding.

At the meeting on July 2, 1968, assembly members unanimously approved accepting the 15.11-acre Soldotna Gravel Pit parcel from the state, finally giving them land on which they could build.

Later in the same meeting, they approved a $200 expenditure for an additional partition to create another room inside the portable at the Farnsworth Building. By November 1968, Navarre was considering the purchase of trailers to house the employees of the overcrowded school district.

Space was tight everywhere, but more hurdles were still in the way of progress, and KPB and KPBSD employees would not move into the new Borough Building for more than two years.

Rising Costs and Concerns

The first price tag attached to the construction of the Borough Administration Building—after $20,000 had been set aside for planning and architectural purposes—was the $300,000 that Borough Chairman Navarre had included in a 1967 bond proposition that was crushed by borough voters.

An architect was hired, anyway, and a preliminary design was created. In December 1968, another price tag, based on that design, was floated before the public: $507,000 for a two-story structure (a basement and main floor) or $657,000 for a three-story structure (including the basement).

After the design was finalized and the project had been posted for prospective contractors, bids were opened in June 1969, with the lowest offer coming in at nearly $860,000.

When borough and school district employees finally moved into the completed building on Binkley Street in Soldotna in late January 1971, the final price tag was announced as $1.36 million, not including furnishings. (According to a Dec. 17, 1970, editorial in the Peninsula Clarion, the furnishings were part of an additional $70,000 expenditure.)

Time and money are always tricky ingredients in the mix of government projects. In this case, the time involved was seven years, from the first borough assembly meeting in an Elks Hall in January 1964 until first formal meeting in the new Borough Building chambers in January 1971. And the growing costs bothered an anxious public already beset with huge bills for several brand-new schools and some intensive school renovation across the peninsula.

So it was no great surprise to many when on Jan. 14, 1971, John Nelson, editor of the fledgling Clarion, sank his sharp editorial teeth firmly into the flanks of borough government: “There seems to be prevalent here on the Peninsula a never-ending spending of dollars by the Borough and School administration, who tell us that it is for the betterment of everyone living here.

“The ‘Taj Mahal’ they call the Borough building is large and grand enough to administer a population twice or three times the size of this Borough. I also understand that this White Elephant was built on a flood plain and therefore is difficult to obtain insurance on. (This is wise spending of our tax dollars?)”

Nelson was making an oblique reference to the assertions of Homer-based newspaperman James McDowell, who generated the Cook Inlet Courier (nee the Inlet Courier) from August 1959 until the mid-1970s. McDowell claimed that the site of the Borough Building was subject to flooding from the Kenai River at least once every 200 years, on average.

It is likely that McDowell was responding to claims from insurance executives, who in those days were making it exceedingly difficult for builders and home owners to get flood insurance. A long history of property damage and loss of life due to flooding across the United States had motivated many insurance executive to determine the existence of potential flood plains where scientific evidence had failed to substantiate (or, in many cases, had failed to even investigate) those claims.

After the 1965 destruction caused by the Hurricane Betsy flood surge in Florida and Louisiana, however, Congress itself became motivated, passing the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, which led to the creation of the National Flood Insurance Program. The program identified the levels of flood risk, established flood insurance rates, and provided flood insurance for structures and contents in communities that adopted and enforced an ordinance that outlined minimal floodplain management standards.

According to Dan Nelson, a planning assistant at the borough’s River Center, the national program was not firmly established across the country until at least the early 1970s, and the borough did not join the program until 1981. Consequently, flood plain determination locally in the late 1960s was a nebulous act at best.

The borough now has its floodplain lands broken down into four main categories: those considered to have a one percent chance of flooding each year, those that have a 0.2 percent chance of flooding each year, those that are considered at minimal risk, and those that have not been investigated and so have an unidentified risk potential. The Borough Administration Building sits on one of those uninvestigated pieces of land.

But logic would dictate that the Borough Building is in unlikely danger, barring a cataclysm. According to Nelson, the bed of the Kenai River as it passes through Soldotna lies roughly at an elevation of nine feet. The Borough Building, on the other hand, sits at approximately 92 feet. If the river, at high water, stood 20 feet deep, it would still be more than 70 feet below the level of the administration building.

In any regard, borough officials and planners in the late 1960s were not particularly fazed by the possibility of flooding, and so the process marched forward.

*****

Even after the pounding his bond proposition had taken in the polls, Chairman Navarre remained undeterred in his efforts to finance and construct a new administration building. He came to the assembly meeting on Nov. 7, 1967, with a request: The assembly should consider a prefabricated style of building.

He said that some of the prefab structures he was investigating cost about $21 per square foot to build and had a life expectancy of at least 40 years. When assembly members expressed interest, he promised to bring them more information.

Chairman George Navarre.

In April 1968, Navarre announced that he had contacted Anchorage-based architect, Mike Pendergrast, who was already at work designing new peninsula schools, and enlisted him to create a “basic layout” for a borough building. In May, Pendergrast submitted some ideas to the assembly for “study and recommendations.” In June, the assembly voted unanimously to select Pendergrast as the official architect for the project, despite the lack of funding and voter support.

Throughout the summer and into the fall, ideas and plans were bandied back and forth until on Sept. 17 Pendergrast presented to the assembly a schematic design that he said should cost about $20 per square foot. The prefabricated building would be insulated with Styrofoam and covered with paneling on the interior. The outside walls would be large steel-reinforced concrete panels that would be fitted into place on site, while many of the interior walls, he said, would be movable. Assembly approval was again unanimous.

With firmer costs now available, Navarre contemplated another bond proposition, and then decided against it. Instead, he inserted the cost of construction of the administration building into the 1969-70 borough operating budget.

After several work sessions and a review of plans by the Construction Advisory Board, the borough decided to allocate $800,000 for a two-story building with a full basement. Each floor would contain approximately 14,000 square feet and give the borough plenty of space to grow into.

Bidding on the project concluded on June 20, 1969, at 10 a.m. in the borough office when the four bids received were opened officially. All of the bids came from Anchorage firms and were higher than anticipated. The low bidder was Firor-Janssen Contracting at $858,900. The high bid was nearly $100,000 more.

Then, as Pendergrast examined the bids to look for cost-cutting possibilities, the borough lease at the Farnsworth Building expired, forcing the borough to decide whether to renew the lease for another year at $700 a month (with a six-month cancellation advance) or to rent on a monthly basis at $1,032 per month. Assembly members voted unanimously for the full-year deal.

Pendergrast returned to the assembly with his report: The only way to substantially reduce the cost of construction would be the elimination of the upper floor. However, adding an upper floor at a later date, he said, would cost substantially more.

With all expenditures figured in, Navarre told the assembly, he expected that the total cost for construction would be about $950,000. To make up the difference, he recommended pulling $75,000 from the Seward School contingency fund and another $75,000 from surplus revenue from the 1968-69 fiscal year budget. The assembly concurred, and by a 12-1 vote on July 15 awarded the bid to Firor-Janssen.

At this same meeting, Pendergrast introduced Jack McCloud of the Concrete Technical Company (Tacoma, Washington), who showed the assembly members samples of the prefab concrete slabs to be used in construction. According to McCloud, the first concrete panels were slated for shipment from Tacoma on Sept. 20, and completion of the project was expected no later than March 1, 1970.

But big government projects rarely fall together without a hitch. And so, while it must have seemed initially that all the planning and hard work were about to bear fruit, and that the dream of having a Borough Administration Building was mere months from becoming a reality, a different story was about to unfold.

The Last Major Hurdle

The good start to the construction lasted only a few weeks before disaster struck. On Nov. 29, 1969—with the work estimated to be approximately 35 percent complete—a dire headline appeared on page one of the Cheechako News: “Borough Building Panels Lost in Storm at Sea.”

A few days earlier, according to the article, the tugboat Patricia Foss, owned by Seattle-based Foss Tug & Barge Company, had pulled into the dock at the Ketchikan Pulp Company after its barge, No. 250, had hit bad seas about 40 miles north of Ketchikan. Foss officials announced that two-thirds of a shipment of prefabricated concrete panels designated for the borough construction project had been on board, and that storm waters had cleared the decks of most of the cargo and damaged much of the remainder.

Borough construction coordinator Don Gallagher said that the borough had “suffered a major setback in its building program.” Gallagher said that the steel-reinforced concrete panels, weighing eight to 12 tons apiece, had originally been due on the peninsula on Nov. 20, but bad weather had caused delays. Now the delay would be more substantial: “I presume it will be necessary to contact the manufacturer of the panels and have the order repoured,” Gallagher said. “This will probably mean a delay of three to four months in our building schedule.”

At an assembly meeting about three weeks after the storm, Chairman Navarre reported that he expected replacement panels to be shipped north on Feb. 15, and assembly members expressed hope that they might be able to move into the new facility by July 1, when the latest lease expired on their temporary quarters.

That optimism soon appeared unfounded. At the assembly’s March 30 meeting, architect Pendergrast reported that the panels should be shipped by about April 15 and arrive in Kenai about two weeks later. He said he still hoped that the building could be completed by July 1.

But in early June the assembly learned that the panels—and only a partial shipment of them—had not been sent until May 29. The rest, it was hoped, would be sent on June 20.

Meanwhile, the school district’s administration was then operating out of classrooms in the new Kenai Junior High School. Navarre announced that he wanted the district out of the junior high by the first day of classes, Sept. 1, to free up more classroom space.

Then, as summer began, the economic politics surrounding the borough intensified. First, construction costs continued to rise for the Borough Building project and all of the borough’s school-construction projects. Second, Dolly Farnsworth, who leased space to the borough administration, was requesting a payment of $1,082 per month for that space if the lease were to continue on a monthly basis. Third, a small fire at the construction site scarred a portion of the building exterior.

Furthermore, the assembly learned at its June 28 meeting that the construction foreman believed that interior work on the Borough Building was progressing slowly because the borough administration had not submitted to the architect plans for partitions and telephones, among other items. Navarre promised to have those items clarified later that week.

By early August, Navarre was forced to ask the assembly to approve a $42,201 change order to cover the cost of some of those interior alterations.

The exterior paneling was completed by mid-August, but more delays ensued during the pouring of the concrete second deck and because of vandalism at the job site in November.

There were also arguments over the cost and quality of furniture. Assemblyman Earl Cooper said the furnishings in the assembly room were “too elaborate.”Assemblyman James Hornaday called the furnishings “too plush”; he said that the Borough Building should never have been built.

Deadlines came. Deadlines went. Costs escalated.

Then in mid-November, school district superintendent Walter Hartenberger submitted to the school board a detailed but rough-draft plan recommending that the new building not be used for borough administration at all, but instead to fill a need he believed was much more pressing: a high school for Soldotna.

Hartenberger’s plan went nowhere, and Hartenberger himself lasted less than a year on the job. A new Soldotna High School did not open for another decade.

Finally—on Jan. 5, 1971—the Borough Administration Building had real signs of life not directly related to construction activity: On that night, the new assembly chambers were opened for the first time for a public meeting. Three weeks later, despite problems with the building’s 7,000-gallon septic tank, the borough and school district administrations and staffs moved in.

Borough clerk Frances Brymer remembered her first impressions: “Once it was finished, it was beautiful, I thought. You looked around and it looked so huge, when you’re used to just a little bitty spot. You couldn’t even imagine! It was just overwhelming.”

Walter Ward, who had a long history as assistant superintendent of the school district, was also pleased: “It was the best buy they ever made. They would never have gotten it cheaper. It would have probably cost twice as much a year or two later. George Navarre did a good job negotiating and planning for the building.”

Stan Thompson, who was elected borough mayor in 1972, said that the Borough Building was “a heck of a good investment. I have to compliment Navarre for that. He’s the one that fought that through.”

The borough at last had space to spare—the entire upstairs was at first left vacant—and it owned its own administration building. No more leases. No more cramped quarters—at least not for many, many more years.

But there were a few other headaches, including two that many people (but not everyone) found fairly funny….

In the months after the building was finished and the moving-in was complete, a few little brown bats discovered a small gap where the roof beams met the top of the wall panels, and decided to make themselves at home.

When Ward’s college fencing class met upstairs in the big open space, he said, sometimes it was “just bats and us—that’s all that was up there.” He chuckled as he recalled that occasionally a bat would find its way downstairs to “give the secretaries a little problem.”

Brymer, whose office was downstairs, found less humor in the situation: “I had one come into my office. I was running around trying to hit it, and I couldn’t hit it. I think someone came in there and got it, probably one of the guys who was taller and could reach up there.”

Mayor Thompson, on the other hand, liked the bats: “I enjoyed them,” he said, adding that he didn’t even mind the jokes in the public about the borough having bats in its belfry. Because Thompson was in no hurry to eliminate the flying rodents, the bats were removed during a later administration, causing some controversy over their eradication.

Thompson also liked the presence of the other creatures living at the Borough Building—swallows, which nested in great numbers under the eaves. “I enjoyed having the swallows there,” he said. “I’m sorry we got rid of them. Most people didn’t give a hoot, but some people thought they should be cleaned out of there. Some felt as I did: ‘So what? It doesn’t really hurt anything.’”

But the swallows were a source of aggravation to many. Long-time school district secretary Barbara Jewell wanted them gone. “The swallows would make me so darn mad because they would put their excretions on the cars. I had a silver car—not that it was a good car or anything like that—but all the droppings ruined the paint.”

Jewell also had an office with two windows, the sills of which the swallows used frequently as a toilet. “Oh sure, I can laugh about it now,” she said, “but you had to have your car repainted and everything else at the time. It was a pain in the neck.”

Eventually, the swallows’ nests were removed and the eaves were filled with a smooth, curved metal that prevented future habitation. “That’s human nature at work,” Thompson rued.

Epilogue

Today, the Kenai Peninsula Borough encompasses 16,075 square miles of land—an area roughly the size of Massachusetts and New Jersey combined—or 25,600 total square miles (the size of West Virginia) when ocean acreage is included. The borough and its school district serve approximately 55,000 residents and coordinate efforts with five first-class and/or home-rule cites and several other locally controlled communities. There are more than 9,000 students in 44 schools, and each day school buses rack up more than 7,700 miles in delivering many of those students to and from those schools.

As a consequence of these numbers and the growth behind them, borough government has also grown.

These days, the value of the 42,269-square-foot Borough Administration Building is nearly $16.5 million, according to borough assessors. For the 10.31 acres remaining from the original 15.11-acre parcel, the value is $422,800. And the borough and school district have filled to overflowing the many rooms of the Borough Building, forcing the relocation of several borough agencies—to Kalifornsky Beach Road, to Funny River Road, and elsewhere—and prompting occasional talk of adding on to the original building.

An ugly gravel pit no longer, this is an aerial of the 21st century Borough Administration Building.