More than $7,000 worth of damage to brand new recreation equipment and landscaping at Tanana Lakes Recreation Area prompted Fairbanks North Star Borough Assemblyman Guy Sattley to ask fellow assembly members to approve $26,000 in additional of funding for the Parks and Recreation Department during the budgeting process this spring.
"We have a tremendous investment out there, and it’s going to get heavier and heavier usage and we need to have folks out there in the night time to keep an eye on it, unfortunately," Sattley said.
The money will fund two summer-season Ranger positions. They will patrol the area between 3 p.m. and 6 a.m. from July through the beginning of September.
Tanana Lakes has been known as one of seedier places in the Borough, but the Parks and Recreation Department is trying to revamp roughly 750 acres for boating, hiking, and picnicking.
When the Army Corps of engineers completed construction of the Tanana River levee back in 1981, the diversion of water left a series of shallow lakes at the end of South Cushman Road, on the south of Fairbanks. The occasional birder brings a pair of binoculars here, but Steve Taylor says there are other things that happen in this part of town. “Four-wheeling, partying, and lots of other things--car burning, that sort of thing, a lot of uses that are generally frowned upon in a civilized urban area," he said.
Taylor is the Project Coordinator for the Borough Department of Parks and Recreation. In 2008 he took over what has become a decades long effort to rehabilitate the Tanana Lakes Recreation Area. Taylor says the area has been in some stage of planning and development since 1992. "This broader area has been used for gravel extraction for the landfill for many years," he said.
The plan was to reclaim the area for recreation once the Borough had enough gravel. Last summer, a contractor spent roughly two weeks pulling old car bodies and other things from a small drained lake.
"We’re not sure exactly what happened here, it was either a bank stabilization or a dump, or maybe both. But the whole river bank was lined with cars that were kind of just poking out of the silt, car frames, car bodies, there was a few ovens...a lot of junk," Taylor said.
More than 1,600 tons of twisted, rusty metal, car parts and other junk was pulled from the muck and hauled away with funding help from the military and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Fairbanks resident Jane Sellen started coming here five years ago, at a time when she didn’t have enough money to pay for an out-of-state vacation. "So, I decided I needed to take a vacation here in town, and I was just driving around and discovered this place and started coming more often," Sellen said.
Sellen eventually brought a kayak to one of the smaller lakes. "Kayaking over all these broken car parts in the water was kind of spooky. It’s sort of like crashed spaceships or something in there" she said.
She says most people squirm when she tells them she hangs out on the south side of Fairbanks.
"There’s almost nobody else down here, just me and there’s an eagle that lives here that flies overhead, and over on that lake there’s a beaver that lives, and I know there are moose down here. I’ve never run into one, but there’s lots of things to do down here and it’s just a really pleasant place," Sellen said.
Sellen works as a therapist at the Boys and Girls Home of Alaska. Last fall, she brought a group out to help with a bank stabilization project.
"They got to come out here and do something real," she said. "Sometimes they are kids who don’t always feel good about themselves and so they had a genuine experience that was really positive. Initially these guys were doing it in the morning, and most of the boys were so excited about being here that they wanted to come back in the afternoon and so they came back in the afternoon."
Steve Taylor says he hopes that kind of enthusiasm can continue at Tanana Lakes.
"I think it’s an issue we have to overcome as a community. It certainly has been used for so long and it’s been in the headlines in a negative way for so many years that it’s going to take a while to change the perception of this area," he said.
The Department of Parks and Recreation is spreading sand for a swim beach at a larger lake nearby where a new boat launch is also under construction. The long term plan includes nature trails, an archery range, and a Frisbee golf park. But old habits die hard. Vandals damaged a new picnic pavilion, tore up fresh landscaping and shot up an outhouse earlier this year. In response, the Borough Assembly approved funding for two night-time rangers to patrol the area through the beginning of September. A grand opening celebration is planned for the middle of June.