Borough holds off on prison bonds

PALMER — Mat-Su Borough officials say they plan to wait until next year to sell bonds for the planned Goose Creek Correctional Facility.

Tammy Clayton, the borough’s finance director, said she and other borough officials went to a bond sale last week hoping to sell $250 million in bonds to build the prison. By Thursday they had pulled out.

“There was an entity that jumped ahead of us, they went in the day before us and they wanted to sell their bonds no matter what the interest rate was,” Clayton said.

The borough has constraints on what interest rates it can accept, Clayton said, and could not accept the rates that were offered after those bonds were sold.

“We looked at it that following day hoping things would change and it didn’t,” Clayton said.

She said the borough managed to find buyers for about $100 million of the bonds.

“We chose not to do that, because we can’t we can’t build half a building,” she said.

Clayton said the plan for now is to monitor the market and hopefully jump back in with a bond sale sometime in the first week of January.

“I truly don’t believe it will go in December,” Clayton said, noting that the bond market all but shuts down in the period between Christmas and New Year’s.

After that, though, she’s hoping entities that needed to get projects underway before the first of the year will have cleared out of the market and left some room for the borough.

Though the delay changes the project, Clayton said the borough has spoken with the contractor, Neeser Construction, which was selected to design and build the facility in October. Neeser has agreed to hold the prices quoted until the end of January.

“Obviously, we’d like to hit that target,” she said.

The borough plans to construct the facility and then lease it to the state Department of Corrections, which, over 25 years, will repay the cost and eventually own the facility.

The prison will be built in the Point MacKenzie area at end of Alsop Road.

Borough estimates put the number of jobs created by the 1,536-bed, medium-security facility at 600 to 700 during construction and 350 to staff the completed prison.

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