Big Lake Doesn't Wait for the Borough to Build Its Parks
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
A hand-lettered donation sign sat at the edge of Jordan Lake Park last year, planted in front of a stand of cottonwood and alder that had been quietly reclaiming five acres next to the public library for two decades. The sign was asking neighbors for money. Not the borough. Neighbors.
That's the detail that explains more about how Big Lake actually runs than any lake-life brochure ever will. This is a town where the people who use a park or a rec center tend to build it themselves first, then hand it to the Matanuska-Susitna Borough once the volunteer math stops working. Two stories from the last couple of years show the same pattern from different angles, and once you see it, you'll notice it everywhere else in town too.
Jordan Lake Park was first developed in 2002, and a master plan approved in 2004 called for three phases of construction running through 2010, including extended boardwalks and a community center next to the library modeled on the one in Willow. Borough spending priorities shifted before the plan was finished, and progress stalled. The southeast corner of the 44-acre park, previously a gravel pit and covered by young cottonwood, birch, and alder that had been growing for roughly two decades, turned into a magnet for standing water and mosquitoes, according to Big Lake resident Larry McKinstry, who has helped lead the effort to fix it.
In early 2025, a community group set out to raise $20,000 to clear and level that five-acre section themselves rather than wait on the borough's budget cycle, which wasn't expected to release matching funds until at least July of that year and would have pushed the actual dirt work into the following spring. By June 2026, the same group had cleared 4.5 acres, added new grass, flowering trees, a fence, and pickleball courts, and had spent about $70,000 total, all of it from grants and donations rather than borough funding. The committee that started with five members had grown enough that McKinstry said, "At our last meeting we had 15 people there, so it's getting a little bit bigger."
Cathi Kramer, who led an earlier round of park upgrades about a decade ago alongside her husband Bill when he was council president, put the park's long invisibility simply: "Nobody even knew this was a park." That earlier push cost the council about $96,000 to improve visibility and access. The current committee's next ambition, a fitness course, additional sports courts, and an amphitheater, could run as high as $500,000, and organizers are still looking for public support to get there.
The Big Lake Lions Recreation Center tells the same story with a different amenity. The Big Lake Lions Club built the 26,000-square-foot facility in 2010 and ran it for fifteen years using an air-cooled ice system that depends on cold outdoor air rather than powered refrigeration, which meant hard ice was only possible four to five months a year. Volunteers kept costs down enough that the center could stay open on limited hours while hosting weddings, funerals, community council meetings, craft fairs, pickleball, and wrestling tournaments for roughly 33,000 visits annually.
The arrangement worked until it didn't. Bill Haller, the center's longtime manager and its one paid employee, needed to move out of state to care for a sick family member, and the Lions Club offered to sell the facility to the borough for $400,000, a fraction of its estimated $3.8 million value. The Matanuska-Susitna Borough completed the purchase in July 2025 and reopened the center on September 12, 2025, with expanded hours that more than doubled, from about 18 hours a week to at least 40, plus new security cameras and other safety upgrades. The tradeoff came in fees: recreational ice skating went from free to $5, and putt-putt golf doubled from $5 to $10 per visit. A $1.5 million refrigeration upgrade that would extend the ice season past its current four to five months is still waiting on grant funding.
Neither of these is a story about a park or a rink. They're the same story about how things get built in this town. Someone identifies a need, a small group of neighbors raises money and does the physical work, and the borough eventually steps in once the volunteer model runs out of room to keep operating at that scale. If you're waiting on an assembly agenda to see something change around Big Lake, you're watching the wrong stage of the process. The first stage happens at a folding table with a donation jar.
You can see a version of this at the handful of small, owner-run food spots that keep Big Lake's dining scene running without a single chain in sight:
None of these are part of a regional chain, and most are small enough that you'll recognize the owner behind the register more often than not. It's the same DIY thread running through the park committee and the rec center handoff: things here tend to get built and run by the people who actually use them.
Big Lake's daily rhythm has its own logic once you know what to watch for. The lake is one of Alaska's busiest floatplane bases, so watching takeoffs and landings from shore is its own low-key entertainment most summer mornings. Boat traffic follows a predictable curve too. Anglers who want quiet water fish early, before the afternoon wave of jet skis and pontoons picks up.
The Big Lake South boat launch, managed by Alaska State Parks, tells its own small story about the same fix-it-yourself pattern at a bigger scale. The original single-lane concrete ramp had deteriorated so badly by the late 1990s that boats and trailers risked damage just launching. A late-1990s rebuild replaced it with a double-wide ramp, added a mooring beach for staging during peak hours, and reorganized parking to hold 25 vehicles with trailers, including three accessible spots. It's a small infrastructure story, but it rhymes with the rest: a problem got identified, then fixed with a specific, funded project rather than left to worsen.
None of these are guaranteed. All three depend on the same thing that got the park and the rec center this far: a handful of neighbors deciding to act before anyone official does.
If you're thinking about what Big Lake will look like a few years from now, the pattern here is the best predictor available. It won't be a borough press release that tells you first. It'll be a fundraiser sign at the edge of a cleared lot, or a folding table at the next community meeting.
If you're weighing a move to Big Lake, or trying to understand how a lakeside community actually functions day to day before you commit to it, that's exactly the kind of local read Tristan Smith Realty Group builds into every conversation. Start with a confidential consultation.
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