Borough cell-ebrates

PALMER — It’s been seven years in the making but by the time it cut the prison-patterned cake, the Mat-Su Borough’s prison project was off the ground.

Borough Manager John Duffy said Tuesday that he’d been working on building a prison in the Valley since 2001. When the borough Assembly voted unanimously to distribute the $216 million in bond money to its contractor, he breathed a theatrical sigh of relief.

“I was actually going to object, just to see their faces,” Assemblywoman Michelle Church joked just after the vote.

The borough would host a contract-signing ceremony on February 4, spokeswoman Patty Sullivan said.

“But we’ll have the contracts starting to move tomorrow,” he said Tuesday.

The 1,536-bed Goose Creek Correctional Complex will be built with bond money the borough secured last month. The state will then lease and operate the facility, paying the borough back and owning the prison after 25 years.

The borough predicts the prison will create between 600 and 700 jobs during its construction and bring in an additional 350 permanent jobs once the facility is up and running.

Included in the legislation was a measure to pay the borough $225,000 from the $239 million bond sale.

“Right now, leading up until tonight, we’ve been borrowing from ourselves on this project,” borough purchasing officer Russ Krafft said.

The $225,000 was to repay the borough for work it had done up to Tuesday.

Assemblyman Mark Ewing asked about efforts to bring on board a contractor willing to operate a water treatment facility for the prison to built on a parcel of land near the end of Alsop Road. The road is three miles off Point MacKenzie Road and about 30 miles south of Fairvew Loop’s intersection with Knik-Goose Bay Road.

“We need to engage with Neeser Construction,” the contractor the borough selected to build the facility, Kraft said.

Once that happened, Krafft said, the borough could move to select a contractor to build and run the facility. The contractor would recoup its costs through water and sewage treatment fees paid by the prison.

Krafft spoke highly of Neeser, saying they went out on a limb taking the project on before the borough had funding in hand.

At the end of the year, with the nation’s economy tanking, bringing the municipal bond market down with it, the project almost seemed in jeopardy. But borough predictions proved accurate when the bonds were sold the week of Christmas.

The borough expects to start moving dirt for the facility this summer.

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