FAIRBANKS — School buses in Fairbanks are traveling down a deteriorating, pot-hole filled stretch of road that both the state and the Fairbanks North Star Borough say they don’t have the ability to repair.
Two Rivers Road is a dirt path that heads north from 18 Mile Chena Hot Springs Road and leads to Two Rivers School, which educates students in kindergarten through eighth grade, The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported.
Incoming borough Mayor Karl Kassel said he had not been informed of the specific issues the school has been faced with, but that the borough does not have the “power” or “authority” to repair and maintain roads.
The borough is authorized to create and support institutions that can perform maintenance on small roads in rural parts of the borough known as road service areas, but Two Rivers Road is not one of those areas.
The Department of Transportation handles all maintenance on borough roads, besides in rural road service areas. According to northern region spokeswoman Meadow Bailey, Two Rivers Road also falls outside the state department’s responsibility.
Bailey said the road was “dedicated to the public by the Skarland Heights Subdivision,” and therefore ownership falls to the public.
“There is no other information as to who maintains this road,” Bailey wrote in an email. “Technically, the public owns Two Rivers Road.”
Regardless of who owns the road, the school’s head teacher, Teresa Tomlinson, said the 100 students at Two River School still need to get to class. She is planning to purchase a truckload of gravel and gather a group of students to help fix the crumbling road.
“(I) was hoping to just turn it into a math/science lesson,” Tomlinson said.
In addition to the school, Two Rivers Road also provides access to commercial logging and personal-use woodcutting on state land. The Skarland subdivision lies off the road as well as another subdivision being built by the borough.
