The fate of Montana Creek’s winter usage for the next decade is currently open to public comment as steps toward a cohesive master plan of the area are currently underway.
The Montana Creek master plan draft was released by its planning committee at a public Zoom meeting on Aug. 10 and depicts a wide range of proposed projects including the construction of new public-use cabins, parking areas, improvements and the creation of hike/bike/ski trails and motorized/multi-use trails among other suggestions.
The project still has a long way to go before boots hit the ground, said Michele Elfers, the deputy director of City and Borough of Juneau’s Parks and Recreation Department, and said public input is an important step and serves as a chance for the residents of Juneau to express their concerns or approval of the current plan.
“I think one of the values of a master plan that goes through community process is when we hear from the community we can put it on the plan and be better lined up for grant funding for those types of projects,” she said in the public Zoom meeting.
She said from the comments the project organizers will use them to help aid any revisions of the draft before it heads to committee review and its eventual completion is expected in late May 2023.
In recent years there has been a lot of public discourse among residents of Juneau around how the Montana Creek area should be used for recreation. Just last summer, more than 280 comments were submitted in response to the Juneau Off-Road Association’s application to build a hardened trail and campground in the area to make it easier for people to operate all-terrain vehicles.
Of the public comments — which generated almost 500 pages worth of opinion on the topic — 71 voiced support for the proposal and 201 opposed it according to a review of the material conducted by the Empire in 2021. In the end, the Juneau Off-Road Association decided to pull its request to build the hardened trail just one month after submitting the application, and on the same day, CBJ issued a news release about it’s intentions to send out an informal survey to residents to look at the current recreational uses, ideas for improvements and future projects.
The following month, the process to create the master plan came shortly after and the survey has since been used to develop and guide the master plan. The plan has now been in the works for more than a year with the idea to create a holistic plan for what the future of the area will look like in the next 10 years, Elfers said. The Juneau Off-Road Association has also since proposed an off road vehicle park at the 35 Mile Marker Glacier Valley Highway and currently are awaiting permission from the Assembly to move forward with the project.
This image shows the plan currently released to the public and is open for comments until Sept. 10. So far, the plan has not generated many comments, but Montana Creek is a popular recreation. (Courtesy / CBJ Parks and Recreation)
“This is just the first step in the process and I don’t think things are resolved or finished but there were good questions and I think there is more public engagement to do and more work on the plan to do,” Elfers said in regard to the current status of the master plan.
The project planning committee is made up of members of CBJ Parks and Recreation, United States Forest Service, Department of Natural Resources, Department of Transportation and Trail Mix staff, all of which contribute to the management of the area.
Elfers said with the plan being worked on in collaboration with the multiple management agencies that work within the park, she thinks it will create more access to land for people and help the community to understand how they can recreate across all the area.
This image shows the plan currently released to the public and is open for comments until Sept. 10. It depicts a wide range of proposed projects including the construction of new public-use cabins, parking areas, improvements and the creation of hike/bike/ski trails and motorized/multi-use trails among other suggestions.(Courtesy / CBJ Parks and Recreation)
Elfers said so far there have been around three to five comments from the public on the master plan, but she expects and hopes as time grows closer to the public comment period’s close that there will be an increase in comments.
“I think there is a lot of confusion from the public on the use of the land because there are so many managing agencies — people don’t know regulations, don’t know what they can do or where they can do it and there’s not a lot of sense of connection with the area,” she said. “The master plan process is an effort to get the land management agencies together —which have been meeting for over a year now — to start working together collaboratively to understand what the public wants from that area and have an intelligent plan that works moving forward.”
Roman Motyka, the head of the trail subcommittee for the Juneau Nordic Ski Club, said he personally thinks the currently released plan is more of a concept and said he thinks it the projects need more explanation.
“It’s basically just a map, without any narrative,” he said. “ How do we go about commenting on a map?”
He said the JNSC looks at the plan as a long process that will take a lot of time and work to create, and said it’s important to the club to go through the process of being involved in the planning so that they can “give the community the best opportunities to explore nature.”
He said that he and other club members are working to draft comments on the plan, but said there are many factors, some of which they agree with and others that they don’t, that will take time to decide how to comment on.
“There’s vagueness to certain features we need to figure out — we’re in the stage of investigating this and making sure it fits our views,” he said. “It will take a while to see what direction it will be driven in.”
Ryan O’Shaughnessy, the executive director at Trail Mix Inc, said it’s a typical practice to first share comprehensive recreation plans as a visual map rather than a written plan — especially early on in a planning process — because it is easier to understand the entirety of the plan when it’s all laid out in a visual aid.
“I think comprehensive recreation plans are better visualized on maps and I imagine that some written narrative will come later in some form but at this stage it’s a lot easier to have a dialog around a visual plan like a map,” he said.
He said he’s excited for the public to engage in the planning process, and said he’s personally most excited for the plan’s goals to build more trails and more public-access cabins in the recreation area.
“These areas are such a recreation asset to Juneau and right now some of it has pretty limited access points,” he said. “We’re really excited for the opportunity for collaborative community-based solutions to create more recreation opportunities there — we are really excited to see what’s to comes.”
Once the public comment period closes, the plan will still need to go through a revision process and a committee review before it is completed, which is estimated to be around late May 2023. Elfers said from there the managing agencies can start looking at ways to fund the projects outlined in the plan, and many steps still need to be taken before boots can hit the ground.
As for what projects will get priority first once the master plan is completed, Pete Schneider, a U.S. Forest Service Natural Resource Specialist a part of the committee, said it depends on where the funding comes from and what projects are most urgent or most advocated for by the public.
“We put in for a number of things every year and not all of it gets funded,” he said. “When you look at the master plan and all the things that could take place, it would take a number of years and funding requests before a lot of that can take place, and a lot of that is going to be based off of public comment and what people want to see first.”
• Contact reporter Clarise Larson at clarise.larson@juneauempire.com or (651)-528-1807. Follow her on Twitter at @clariselarson.
