Borough bummed with low ferry offer

PALMER — Clearly it’s not the best moneymaker, but the Mat-Su Borough now has one offer to buy its ice-breaking, catamaran-hulled military prototype ferry.

“A sealed bid was opened today from a Dutch marine company for $751,000 to buy the Susitna Ferry,” according to a press release from the borough issued Friday afternoon.

The offer came from Workships Contractors BV based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, whose broker has told the borough the vessel would be used to transport crews for offshore wind energy companies.

“We’re disappointed with the results,” Borough Manager John Moosey says in the same release. “But this shows the market demand. We’ll continue to work with eligible agencies and the FTA (Federal Transit Administration) to come to a reasonable conclusion to this story.”’

Although the borough assembly is eager to get rid of the ferry as soon a possible — wharfage, docking and upkeep costs in Ketchikan cost $75,000 a month or more — it is it is very unlikely to accept this particular offer.

Moosey has said numerous times in the past that accepting an offer from a private party will mean the borough has to repay to the federal government money it has already spent to build a ferry terminal building and outfit the vessel for civilian use. If the borough accepted the $751,000 offer it would have repay an estimated $12 million in deferral monies.

A cheaper option, it seems, would be to transfer the vessel, free of charge, to another eligible government entity. In that case, the Federal Transit Administration has told the borough, there’s a possibility the borough would be let out of all or some of that debt.

The borough has in the past discussed a few of those options. A college that trains Merchant Marines in Seattle has proposed using the ship as a training vessel for its students.

Los Angeles County is eyeing the vessel as a possible vessel to move people and materials between the mainland and Catalina Island. It could also be used to respond to emergencies on the island and as “a sea-based mobile command center” according to the borough’s press release.

Another offer also came in relatively recently from the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“We are in dire need of reliable inter-island travel at this time and our current situation makes this need particularly acute. The ferry providing service between St. Thomas and St. Croix was severely damaged in an accident at sea in July 2011. Since that time, we have not had regular service between these islands despite the fact this it is desperately needed,” U.S. Virgin Islands Senate President Shawn-Michael Malone wrote in a letter to the borough.

The vessel was built as a military prototype of a landing craft, which is why it’s designed with a deck that can raise or lower for offloading military equipment at beach landings.

The borough intended to use it as a ferry between Point MacKenzie and Anchorage, making two-mile daily runs across Knik Arm. Those plans foundered when the borough failed both to find funding to build an Anchorage landing and failed to get approval for a site to build the landing. Money to build a Point MacKenzie landing was put on hold in light of that.

Critics of the vessel have said that a ferry might not be a bad idea, but this one is too costly to run and too small to do much good. During the life of the project the size of the prototype was scaled down to the point where now it can carry 129 passengers and 20 cars or one big-rig.

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