Borough still seeks ferry buyer

WASILLA — It’s been awhile since last we checked in — so has the Mat-Su Borough managed to sell its ferry yet?

Nope.

“We were expecting a high-price offer last week,” Borough Manager John Moosey said Monday at a meeting of the borough’s port commission.

He said he used that term — high-price offer — to refer to an offer that would allow the borough to use the proceeds to pay back the federal grants it received to start a ferry service.

There are other potential buyers on the West Coast that are doing their due diligence as they explore the possibility of buying the vessel, Moosey said. There are a number of low-price offers on the table. The grant money would have to be paid back to the Federal Transit Authority, which seems to have a different view of those low-cost offers than Moosey does.

“They say, ‘take the offer and then go to Washington (D.C.) and see what you can get,’” Moosey said.

The ferry was initially designed as a military prototype of a landing ship capable of offloading troops and tanks in a beach landing. It’s a scaled-down prototype, though — it can only carry one tank or a few cars. The plan had been to use it to shuttle commuters between Point MacKenzie and Anchorage. But with no money to build a landing in Anchorage and the money to build one at Point Mac frozen, the borough is currently looking to offload the vessel in a way that would avoid repaying millions to the FTA. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of dollars are being spent each month to keep the vessel docked and manned in Ketchikan where it was built.

He said the borough also has looked at a couple of other options short of selling it. There was an idea that maybe the borough could put it into a nonprofit that would run the ship.

“We’re having a tough time seeing how we’d break even on costs,” Moosey said. “I just don’t want to transfer a bad situation to someone else.”

He said the borough also looked into a pretty substantial contract the state had sought bids for to clean up debris from the Japanese tsunami.

“The state at the last minute took that project and cut it down to 10 percent,” Moosey said.

That reduction made it no longer enticing.

Meanwhile, the borough has increased the commission it is offering to ship brokers that can drum up potential buyers.

“We are trying to do every doggone thing with that boat until we can have a going away party,” Moosey told the commission.

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