Anchorage Daily News

WASILLA -- Settlement is in sight on a 9-year-old court battle over land on which Wasilla's Multi-Use Sports Complex is built.

Anchorage Superior Court Judge Peter Michalski on Monday signed an order giving developer Gary Lundgren $314,739 in attorney fees and court costs in an eminent domain case the city filed against Lundgren's land in December 2002. In eminent domain cases, the plaintiff typically pays the defendants' court fees.

Combined with $837,000 that the city paid last year for the raw land and another $362,000 in interest payments paid in December 2007, the total price tag for the 80 acres comes to $1.5 million.

City attorney Tom Klinkner, with Birch, Horton, Bittner and Cherot, last year estimated that the city paid his firm about $250,000 more to litigate the case.

That's not a bad deal. Lundgren had valued the property at about $2.4 million, said Greg Miller, the attorney with Birch, Horton, Bittner and Cherot who has been arguing the case on behalf of the City of Wasilla since 2005.

Still it's a lot more than the roughly $125,000 the city would have paid in 1998 if it had closed a deal to buy the property outright.

But the briefs and motions aren't being permanently filed just yet. Miller said the case has one hurdle left to clear, a hearing in the state's highest court. Miller said an opening brief in Lundgren's appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court is due in mid-August.

"This is very close to the end, and I'd love to see it end," Miller said.

The land would be worth much more than $837,000 today, but the values are frozen at the date the city took the land. Lundgren disputes that date and asked the Alaska Supreme Court to change it. Doing so would recalculate the value of his land and could add another $5 million to the land value, he estimated.

"They never really took the property and never had a final design until many years later, after the condemnation was started," Lundgren said.

The court battle launched in August 1999 when both Lundgren and the city sought to purchase the same land from national charitable organization The Nature Conservancy. The city sued Lundgren and the Conservancy to be declared the rightful owner.

Lundgren is a former Fairbanks resident who owns business parks and mini-storage warehouses in Alaska, Idaho, Washington and the U.S Virgin Islands, Panama and Columbia. He said he wanted to build an industrial park on the land, which is adjacent to the city airport.

City leaders wanted the land to build a sport complex, a trail head and parking. City leaders envisioned starting the Iditarod from the complex. Early designs included racers taking off through the building while onlookers cheered from stands around its indoor ice rink. That concept was later cut.

Lundgren was declared the rightful owner in 2002 and the city immediately sued to take the land by eminent domain. By that time city residents had already approved, narrowly, a half-percent increase in the city sales tax to pay for the $14.7 million facility. Construction on the sports complex was already under way.

While the eminent domain case nears its seventh year of litigation, the complex has been up and running since 2004. The city owes about $7.6 million on the sports complex construction debt and plans to make an extra payment on it this year.

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

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