PALMER -- The Knik-Fairview area is now officially a dog-friendly zone.

Last week, the Assembly passed a land-use plan for the area called the Knik Sled Dog and Recreation Use District. The district is the first of its kind explicitly aimed at protecting dog kennels and other rural uses from encroaching growth.

The area it covers stretches from Point MacKenzie Road north to Carmel Road and Sunset Avenue, and includes prominent dog lots such as that of Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race founder Joe Redington Sr., now run by his descendants.

Retired musher and Knik resident Dan Huttunen said, in a nutshell, preservation is the goal of the new district.

"This really makes it a matter of record and explicitly states that it is a lifestyle in this area. Be warned, if you don't like it, maybe you shouldn't move here. Don't come here, en masse, and squeeze out the lifestyle that many people came here for," he said.

Residents said they hope the district will preserve their lifestyle, so they don't get pushed out when new neighbors complain about having 50 dogs next door, musher Kelley Griffin said.

"My neighborhood is full of kennels that have been chased from Anchorage and Chugiak. There are fewer and fewer places to go. Why should these users have to go?" Griffin told the Mat-Su Assembly on Dec. 16.

Living in one of the borough's fastest growing areas, Griffin said mushers are already finding ways to be proactive. Griffin lives near Settlers Bay. Huttunen's home is near Knik Lake. Both neighborhoods have signs posted near the road listing the dog kennels tucked away in the trees.

"That's what we want to do, to let people know we're here so we don't get run off," Griffin said.

Community members spent five years creating the special land-use district, which aims not to tell people what to do. Other plans forbid certain types of activities such as industrial development. The Knik plan, in contrast, specifically states that dog lots and homesteads are allowed.

"Usually when you make SPUDs (special land-use districts) they're exclusive. This one is inclusive, which blew everybody's mind," Huttunen said.

Griffin said the group wanted to preserve a way of life that has carried on in the Knik area in some fashion for centuries.

Knik was the Southcentral area's first seaport and a shipping gateway to gold mining claims at the turn of the 1900s, according to information in a Mat-Su Borough publication, "Knik Matanuska Susitna." Several Alaska Native villages were built in the area, and the Dena'ina Athabascans gathered there to fish for salmon in the summer. Griffin said the Herning trail that heads north from Knik was like the pre-auto Parks Highway. Now, duplexes and four-plexes line the Knik-Goose Bay Road and more and more subdivisions are popping up.

The rules aim to protect mushers, homesteaders and others who value the rural lifestyle there. But residents still have to comply with borough laws regarding noise, junk or other nuisances. Residents must still abide by subdivision covenants and restrictions.

This "no rules" package of regulations does carry a few requirements, however. One is that mushers or dog caretakers must live on or directly adjacent to the dog lot they care for. Huttunen said absentee dog lots have cropped up as a recent problem there.

"If you get a loose dog, the whole dog lot erupts and you're not there to hear it. You're sleeping happy as a clam in your bed in Eagle River or Wasilla," Huttunen said.

The district also seeks to preserve trails, an issue that turned into a legal bramble. Knik residents initially sought to require developers to set aside trails crossing their property. But the borough attorney's office said the borough could be on the hook for buying that property.

"If you put this before the Platting Board and require people to list (trails crossing their property), that may be an involuntary taking," said borough attorney Nick Spiropoulos.

The Assembly amended language in the ordinance to apply only to dedicated trails, or trails that have been legally reserved. Huttunen said a few trails in the area, mostly in the more densely developed area north of the sled dog district, have been lost due to development. While this measure would not prohibit a landowner from blocking a trail crossing private property, Huttunen said it might keep trails in use over the long term.

When development encroaches, trails are often pushed to the nearest section-line easement, he said. He hopes this would ensure that section-line trails don't one day turn into a road.

Find Daily News reporter Rindi White online at adn.com/contact/rwhite or call 352-6709.

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