Unending Potential in the Mat-Su

Complementary Trends

Recently retired state economist Neal Fried, for years a regular presenter at Mat-Su meetings where he discussed the linked Anchorage and Mat-Su economies, says Mat-Su has been the locus for most of the state’s growth in recent decades.

“Between 2010 and 2022, the borough gained 22,757 residents as Anchorage lost a little more than 2,000 and the state as a whole grew by 26,325,” Fried wrote in a June 2023 snapshot of Mat-Su in Alaska Economic Trends.

A July 2024 publication by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development’s Research and Analysis section, Alaska Population Projections, 2023 to 2050, notes that Mat-Su is helping keep Southcentral’s population relatively flat, seeing growth while Anchorage’s population dips. The publication estimates Mat-Su’s July 2025 population at 115,481 and projects that it will reach 146,262 by July 2050. Anchorage’s July 2025 estimated population is 288,754 and is projected to shrink by 2050 to 260,093. The line of growth until then tracked mostly on a steady incline. In the 1980 census, Mat-Su had a population of just 17,816 residents; Anchorage had 174,431.

Still, population projections don’t always hold out. Mat-Su Borough Mayor Edna DeVries says she sometimes gives planners a hard time for their population optimism.

“In 1985 we anticipated that in a few years we would be over 100,000, and we just now crossed that,” she says.

But the change has been notable. In 1985, DeVries was a newly elected state senator. At that time the senate district for Mat-Su was dubbed the “donut district,” lumped in with South Anchorage, Whittier, Hope, Nikiski, Seward, Cordova, and Valdez.

“It was really challenging, in regard to trying to get things done for the borough,” DeVries says. Now, Mat-Su has three state senators and six house members.

A More Independent Economy

The business environment has also changed, according to the mayor.

“We didn’t have as many of the cottage industries that we have right now—you just see oodles of creativity,” DeVries says, adding that while one could get groceries and basics in Mat-Su in 1985, a trip to Anchorage was a regular necessity. Now, most of those stores have Valley locations.

Residents still travel out of Mat-Su for other reasons. Fried has often said Mat-Su’s chief export is its workforce. Around 41 percent of its workforce commutes to jobs outside the borough, mostly to Anchorage and the North Slope, where 2022 numbers peg average wages at $67,704 and $115,152 respectively, compared to an average wage in Mat-Su of $52,152.

Fried notes that the borough provides its own services more than it did forty years ago. The healthcare sector in Mat-Su grew by 74 percent in the last decade. Numerous companies have chosen Mat-Su as a base of operations from which they serve other parts of the state. He mentions Goose Creek Correctional Center, the state’s largest prison, as well as Cruz Construction, Inc., which performs oilfield, heavy civil, and infrastructure construction work all over Alaska, and Talkeetna-based Denali Brewing, an employee-owned venture and one of the largest breweries in the state, with more than seventy employees and two related companies, Denali Spirits and Alaska Ciderworks, both also based in Talkeetna.

The economic change was beginning in earnest in 1984–1985, with the opening of two key locations. Cottonwood Creek Mall in Wasilla, anchored by Lamonts, Safeway, and Pay ‘n Save, was one. The mall had space for fifty-four businesses, making it the largest shopping center between Anchorage and Fairbanks. Pioneer Square Mall in Palmer, where the Carrs supermarket was the anchor tenant, was the second.

Both shopping centers have since been razed in favor of more modern shopping options. Wasilla welcomed Alaska’s second Target store in 2008, replacing Cottonwood Creek Mall in a development that is also home to Fly Trampoline Park, Famous Footwear, Michaels, GameStop, and others, with satellite buildings housing Walgreens, Wells Fargo, Taco Bell, Starbucks, and more. In Palmer, Pioneer Square was torn down in favor of a new Fred Meyer grocery store, after demand outgrew a smaller downtown Fred Meyer store, and Carrs-Safeway built a new store across the Palmer-Wasilla Highway from its previous spot.

People Have Needs

Other changes have accompanied the growing economy and population. In 1985, community leaders grappled with how to address rapidly growing schools to accommodate the near-doubling of school population from 4,384 in 1980 to 8,051 in 1985. They settled, briefly, on running double shifts at two of the district’s then twenty-two schools while awaiting construction of three new elementary schools, a junior high, Houston Junior/Senior High School, and additions to two more schools.

As of June 2024, 19,372 students were enrolled in Mat-Su schools, making it the second-largest district in the state. The district now operates forty-nine schools, including Mat-Su Central School, a hybrid school where homeschooled students can take in-person classes such as science labs, which is under construction. Voters in November approved a $58 million bond to expand three existing charter schools: Academy Charter School, Birchtree Charter School, and American Charter Academy.

All four projects will replace existing facilities, so the school count will not increase. But the community support for charter and non-traditional schools is notable. Fifteen of the forty-nine schools the district operates are charter or non-traditional. Mat-Su Borough Manager Mike Brown says choice is attractive.

“For folks who are considering moving here or building a business here, that might be an important consideration. When we look at it from a growth and economic standpoint, [a quality school system] is an important part of the consideration—and part of that is school choice,” Brown says.

Brown, at the helm of a borough that is showing strains from growth, says keeping up can be challenging.

Emergency medical services, for example, were once strictly on-call, but with the population has come a steady demand for services, along with increased training requirements. A 2021 Department of Emergency Services report reflects a full-time department of more than seventy people responding to medical emergencies, staffing between six and eight ambulances daily and going out on more than 11,000 calls each year. Around 300 additional personnel are involved in fire, rescue, and hazardous materials responses, as well as fleet maintenance and emergency management. About 60 percent of the total in both departments are paid, on-call responders who also hold jobs outside of emergency services. The blend of paid positions and paid, on-call responders varies for each community in which the responders are based.

“That’s part of that flexibility—you recognize that there’s no one-size fits all out here. There are different communities, and they don’t always need the same things,” Brown says. “Our piece is just to adjust; not to come up with a cookie cutter and try to apply it everywhere.”

As borough officials often point out, their jurisdiction spans an area the size of West Virginia, only far more sparsely settled.

Power to the People

For many years, the Knik-Goose Bay Road was recognized as the fastest-growing area in the borough. The unincorporated census area called Knik-Fairview boasts a greater population than the cities of Palmer or Wasilla combined, with nearly 20,000 residents.

Lately, the spot with the fastest growth has shifted to what some call the “golden triangle,” bordered by Wasilla-Fishhook and Palmer-Fishhook roads, with the apex near Hatcher Pass.

“Where your population grows, it grows in different communities at different rates. Trying to keep up with the funding for that, it’s a different challenge,” Brown says.

Matanuska Electric Association (MEA) is planning a Fishhook to Pittman Transmission Line project that will build two new substations and a new transmission line between the communities of Fishhook and Meadow Lakes (population 5,048 and 7,570, respectively) to create redundancy and reliability in this fast-growing area. MEA will release the first phase of the transmission line construction bid package this spring, with work from Sylvan Road to Church Road starting this summer. Construction of the new Meadow Lakes Substation is scheduled for 2026, and the Fishhook to Pittman power improvement project is expected to be operational by 2029. The first substation bid package should be posted in the spring, with transmission line construction expected to follow in the summer. The project is expected to wrap up with the second substation’s construction in 2026.

While the early ‘80s saw big growth for MEA, nearly doubling the co-op’s consumer base between 1979 and 1985, the growth has continued. From 23,629 consumers in 1984 to 57,010 members and just more than 72,000 meters serving Mat-Su and Eagle River/Chugiak today, the utility sees more than 1,000 new connections each year.

It has also gone from a power buyer to a power provider. In May 2015 the cooperative flipped the switch on its 171-MW Eklutna Generation Station, a $324 million project that it says is one of the most efficient thermal generation power plants in the Railbelt. Now it regularly sells power to neighboring electrical utilities.

Veins of the Valley

Where there are houses, there are drivers who need roads. Because most Mat-Su development has been piecemeal, with smaller subdivisions tucked beside each other and without a requirement for every developer to contribute to a fund for road development, collector and arterial roads in growth areas have seen increasing traffic with no clear way to pay for upgrades.

The method the borough has used, Strawn says, is road bonds. Mat-Su voters passed several transportation improvement packages in recent years, including a $76 million package in 2023 and another $33.8 million in package 2024.

“We’ve been trying to find a way to get traffic out of the Fishhook triangle,” Strawn says. Voters approved one new access point, moving traffic from bustling collector Engstrom Road to Tex-Al Drive and then to arterial Palmer-Fishhook Road. But it’s not a perfect solution; it would require drivers to travel north to go south to Palmer, Wasilla, or Anchorage, which some drivers balk at.

A public-private partnership might provide the key. The 2021 transportation improvement package included a project to connect Engstrom Road to Trunk Road, but a plan to create a subdivision there interfered. The project, the fifteen-lot Phase 7 of Hall Quality Homes’ Stone Creek Subdivision, with 186 lots so far, stood in the way. But the borough worked with the developer, who reconfigured the development to allow for Trunk Road access. The borough purchased right-of-way to compensate, allowing both projects to move forward.

“Stone Creek is a good example of where the public and private were able to get together and create solutions,” Strawn says.

But the overriding problem still exists; the borough has used its planning powers lightly, often resulting in locked-in subdivisions that lead to overstressed roads, poorly planned intersections, and costly problems for future residents to solve. For example, the busy Midtown Estates and Golden Hills Estates subdivisions abut Palmer-Wasilla Highway, but the access streets don’t line up. Drivers encounter two traffic signals, one serving each subdivision, within 200 feet. Were the subdivisions developed today, the access streets would have had to line up, Strawn says, but it wasn’t the case during their development.

Borough leaders recently revamped subdivision regulations. Fifty-foot road rights-of-way, enough space for the paved route and not much more, was the previous standard. New regulations call for a sixty-foot right-of-way, enough for roads, shoulders, and drainage ditches. Not sidewalks, though; space for those will not be required in new subdivisions yet.

Strawn says, “It’s an interesting experiment that we are participating in right now. We’re doing it differently than most places in the nation. In some ways it’s wonderful, the freedom and property rights that people have here in the borough.”

Fun at Its Peak

While the Mat-Su Convention and Visitors Bureau didn’t have a building in 1985—it formed in 1986—the Valley’s nonprofit tourism promoter is now going strong. Executive Director Casey Ressler, who grew up in Mat-Su, is looking forward to having an office in the new, $6.5 million Gateway Visitor Center that just broke ground. It’s due to open in March 2026.

Looking back at the ‘80s, Ressler says the economic draw of tourism wasn’t in the forefront of people’s minds. “Nature was always here, but I think we didn’t really invest in it,” he says.

Now, Mat-Su has an abundance of recreational opportunities, from steady development to improve Hatcher Pass State Recreation Area and improvements to popular fishing spots along the Parks Highway to borough-managed facilities such as Government Peak Recreation Area, Talkeetna Lakes Ski Trails, and the Haessler-Norris trail system in Willow. The newest addition is Settlers Bay Coastal Park, a trail system that saw its first trail built in 2019.

That project, says Mat-Su Borough Community Development Director Jillian Morrissey, illustrates how Mat-Su does recreational development. The 295-acre park was purchased by Great Land Trust, a Southcentral Alaska-based conservation-oriented nonprofit that aims to preserve land for community benefit. Great Land Trust donated the land to the borough as a conservation easement. Trail development and maintenance is happening through borough trail funding grants, Morrissey says.

In 2024, the Mat-Su Assembly approved about $200,000 in winter trail grooming grants, distributed to more than a dozen nonprofit groups that groom and improve around 1,000 miles of trails from Lazy Mountain in Palmer to Skwentna and Denali State Park.

“Partnerships with organizations are critical to the maintenance and development of our parks and trails,” Morrissey says.

Settlers Bay Coastal Park is unique because, while people often talk about Mat-Su having glaciers or access to mountains, the park in the Knik-Fairview area celebrates something different. “We’re coastal! There are spots here where you can go to see beluga and the waterfowl. So many people forget that that’s also us, and this really rounds out those opportunities,” she says.

Adds Brown, “Years ago, people would not have seen much of a need out there for that type of facility, but now it makes perfect sense.”

There’s also, at long last, a downhill ski area in Hatcher Pass. The ski area has been a dream for more than forty years. The Mat-Su Borough tried several times to attract national and international development firms to build one, and some would-be builders presented dazzling plans for ski resorts with hotels, shopping, and restaurants. But those plans ultimately fizzled when the numbers didn’t add up. Finally, the nonprofit Hatcher Alpine Xperience incorporated in 2015 and began work on a multi-phased plan to build a regional alpine recreation facility—Skeetawk, a name derived from the Dena’ina word “Shk’ituk’t” which means “where we slide down”—on leased Borough land. It opened in 2020.

The recreational opportunities translate to dollars; exactly how much, though, is hard to calculate. Without a border or airport, Ressler says, it’s difficult to gauge just how much visitor traffic Mat-Su sees on a year-by-year basis. Zartico, a business intelligence platform that pulls data from credit card companies (spend $10 in Mat-Su with a credit card linked to an Anchorage zip code, for example, and it’s tracked) shows about 21 percent of all spending in Mat-Su came from zip codes outside borough boundaries, whether from elsewhere in Alaska or out of state.

Host with the Most

The most visible evidence of how recreational development has helped Mat-Su was last year’s Arctic Winter Games, which the Valley hosted.

About 2,100 athletes, coaches, and support staff attended the games from elsewhere in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and the Sápmi region, which stretches across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. More than 2,000 volunteers worked to make the event a success. The event could not have been held in Mat-Su forty years ago.

Although athletes were housed at the athlete villages, the Valley saw a distinct bump in Airbnb and Vrbo rentals—the numbers are tracked through AirDNA, a software platform that tracks short-term rentals, Ressler says. In March 2024, when the Games occurred, there were 8,569 room nights booked, as compared to March 2023, when 6,771 room nights were booked. That’s up more than 25 percent, he notes.

Revenue generated by short-term rentals also jumped, from $1.25 million in March 2023 to $1.7 million in March 2024, a 36 percent jump, Ressler says.

“We used schools as athlete villages and staging areas. The main feeding area was Colony High School, and it didn’t exist yet [in 1985]—likewise Colony Middle School,” notes Morrissey. Neither did Skeetawk, the Government Peak Recreation Area, or the MTA Events Center, which is now twenty years old.

The Games did rely on assistance from Eagle River and Anchorage for a few events. Lacking enough sheets of ice, the Harry J. McDonald Memorial Center in Eagle River hosted speed skating and figure skating competitions. Kincaid Park hosted the biathlon. But Mat-Su shouldered most of the hosting duties. Almost as amazing, Brown notes, was monumental volunteer involvement.

“Having an international multicultural sporting event really shows how all of that works together,” Brown says. “I was astonished at the amount of community support in the number of volunteers. You saw all three communities working together. It was a great illustration of what community looks like.”