The latest sign of development at Point MacKenzie is not the hiring of former Anchorage Mayor Rick Mystrom as economic advisor (read: industrial development cheerleader) for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, boosting the borough’s deep-water port and its plans for a rail link to Point Mac. No, the big change at Point Mac—and likely a semaphore of future changes—is actually quite humble and more immediately useful.

It’s dumpster service.

Not to malign Mystrom, but people need a place to drop their trash, and a place that’s not 34 miles away is helpful. So the borough struck a deal with the neighborhood’s only store in response to demand from the Point Mac community council. “For some, this ends a 68-mile drive just to take out the trash,” a borough press release reads. The Point MacKenzie General Store is a familiar landmark for people who drive to the public boat landing on the Little Susitna River in summer months. It’s the bright red building near the corner where Point MacKenzie Road takes a right-angle turn to the south, and intersects with Burma and Ayshire Roads. Jeff and Julie Wendt are the owners. Jeff told us over the phone the business is mostly a general store, but it serves “the best burgers in Alaska” and has a storage yard that’s home to vehicles of all types.

Wendt says people who live off the road system ride snowmachines to the store and switch to wheeled vehicles to get to town. They come from properties in the Susitna Valley, but also from homes as far away as Tyonek on Cook Inlet’s west side. “They’re taking a 90-mile snowmachine ride to avoid a $400 airplane ticket,” Wendt says of his Tyonek customers. He says more than half the storage yard customers are full time residents, not weekenders.

The state of Alaska reports 279 Point Mac residents, an estimate made in 2008. Those are the folks spread up and down Point MacKenzie Road and adjacent roads. Wendt’s estimate is about 100 families (he calls them “quasi local”) who live in the area and might take advantage of the new service.

The next big change at Point Mac will be the opening of a new state prison, built by the borough to spawn economic development. The prison is under construction and could open in 2012. It would house about 1,400 prisoners and could bring about 300 new state jobs to the area.

Some of those folks can be expected to move to the area (the nearest school is about 20 miles from Wendt’s store). Both Wendt and borough solid waste division manager Greg Goodale say they have no idea how fast the garbage service might grow. “It’s going to start out with one dumpster and we are just going to track it,” Goodale says.

The arrangement is not unique. Goodale says he has two other contractors in the borough, one near the Parks Highway community of Trapper Creek and one at Long Rifle Lodge on the Glenn Highway.

“Each of the agreements is a little bit different, but in each case the contractor collects a fee,” Goodale says. “They are effectively collecting those fees for the borough.” The fee for a cubic yard or less is $5, or $1 per trash bag, Goodale says. The contractors are set up to accept household trash, not demolition or construction waste. They have relatively small, 40-yard containers, not the mammoth 120-cubic yard containers you’d see at a borough-owned transfer site, Goodale says.

If Point Mac is getting garbage service, can a bridge be far behind?

Wendt says he and most of his neighbors hope not. They’re excited about the prospects of the rail link, with the goal of bringing more heavy industry to Port MacKenzie.

In the short term, the talk of the neighborhood is the prison, and how many families might move to Point Mac. Wendt says he’s researched other prison developments in rural areas, and he expects things to happen pretty fast, but he declined to make any predictions. “You can’t predict how many of the 325 or 350 employees would move out here,” he says, but added he expects other businesses to spring up.

Wendt doesn’t know how long his new relationship with the borough will last. That could depend on how many people decide to drop trash at the new transfer site. “I’m not against keeping it, as long as it don’t become an eyesore to me. That’s kind of been the agreement across the board. People out here pretty much take care of their own,” Wendt says.

Wendt says locals are talking about schools, road planning and other needs that may arise when the prison opens. “The community council here is actually in the process of creating a development plan to address all of that,” he says. “If you don’t consider it now, you won’t get to later.”

As for the afore-mentioned Mystrom, he’s been making the rounds to chamber of commerce-types, promoting the planned rail link as way to get heavy loads of resources—zinc, copper and molybdenum—to Port MacKenzie. He even floats the idea of a cement-plant to take advantage of limestone deposits in Interior Alaska and make industrial cement for export. Audio excerpts from his January presentation to the Anchorage Chamber meeting are available online at the borough’s web site, www.matsugov.us.

The lecture is worth downloading just to hear Mystrom’s deep-as-a-well radio voice. (His “welcome to the graffiti hotline” message was sampled in a local rap track, back in his mayoral days.) And while you’re listening you can decide whether the Mat-Su Borough is getting their money’s worth. Mystrom signed on last October. His contract pays up to $85,000 for six months work.

scott@anchoragepress.com