Lands of Local Importance Community Outreach: KPB Municipal Entitlement Comments Tool

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2014

In an effort to finalize the Kenai Peninsula Borough’s municipal land grant from the State of Alaska, the Borough sought to capture locale-specific comments from 27 communities distributed throughout 2.5 million acres of Alaskan landscape within a municipality that spans an area larger than West Virginia. An inter-departmental Borough team developed the KPB Municipal Entitlement Comments Tool to capture public input in the selection process. The overwhelming public participation garnered from the easy-to-use public interface helped Borough planners and public land managers determine which 28,000 acres would be most important to transfer from state ownership to the municipality, and why.