Bathroom use major component in Point McKenzie prison plan

PALMER — There are going to be more than 1,500 prisoners at the Goose Creek Correctional Center currently under construction in an area far away from city amenities. What are they going to do for water and sewer service?

Tuesday, the Mat-Su Borough assembly settled on a plan for the prison being built in the Point MacKenzie area. And, no, it doesn’t involve an enormous septic tank.

What it does involve is an unusual, though not unheard of, mix of public and private organizations. In the end, borough officials say, the prison will have its own dedicated wastewater treatment plant and its own field of five to seven water wells.

Once it is complete, the state’s Department of Corrections will lease the prison from the borough and eventually purchase it. The borough and DOC are working with Valley Utilities LLC, which has signed on to design, build, finance and operate the facilities, said borough purchasing officer Russ Krafft. The company will bill the Department of Corrections and thus recoup its costs over the lifetime of the prison.

“The rates that will eventually be passed onto DOC for this service will be audited every year,” Krafft said. “The rates are designed to have a small profit component, but the majority of the cost is for debt service.”

But it’s a lot of debt service. Krafft pointed out that DOC will be paying about $5.35 per day per inmate. Which, to give some perspective, he compared to the Hiland Mountain Correctional Facility’s rate of 53 cents per inmate per day.

But Hiland, he pointed out, hooks directly into the Anchorage Waste Water Utility system. Which, aside from being an existing facility built for a city rather than for just the facility, doesn’t really have much of a debt load to speak of.

“It was subsidized by the federal government who basically built AWWU’s system for them,” Krafft said.

He said the borough’s role is essentially to coordinate the whole thing but also to help Valley Utilities find financing. But the company has already spent hundreds of thousands of its own money.

“We have pushed them through this project to their limit, to where they’re saying, ‘No more money,’” Krafft said.

But what they’ve come up with so far, he said, is a design for a state-of-the-art facility that is easy to maintain and which treats water in an enclosed building. The water coming out the other end is essentially as clean as drinking water. And the whole thing takes just five employees to run.

On the drinking water side, he said, the plan calls for an ability to expand, using 25 percent of the facility’s capacity to bring on additional customers.

“The project will benefit the borough with additional development opportunities, added jobs, and at zero cost to the taxpayers,” he said.

The assembly was mostly onboard with the idea. But some wanted to wait. Assemblyman Jim Colver said he didn’t like the idea that the plan came in on the consent agenda; a portion of the assembly’s agenda that doesn’t require a public hearing.

“I think it’s something we need to calendar for public hearing. I’m not comfortable acting on a consent item for a project of this magnitude,” he said.

To that, Krafft answered that the contractor building the prison needs water to do some of the things it needs to do this fall. Trees need to be taken off the land for the water facilities before migrating birds arrive and such work has to halt.

Colver said he’d heard that before and didn’t buy it.

“They’re giving us the bum’s rush that we have to do this,” he said, but, “we owe our public a lot more than this.”

Assemblyman Mark Ewing backed him up, asking Krafft why he didn’t come before the assembly two months ago.

Krafft noted that borough staff had gotten the green light from the assembly from the outset of the prison project to handle the utility work this way. Others on the assembly backed him up. Pete Houston said that he, for one, had been well aware for months that this was to be the plan.

“I disagree that this is a rush deal. It’s clear to me that delay on this is a greater risk to the public,” he said.

In the end, the assembly decided to go ahead with the plan, with Ewing and Colver voting against it.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.