Growing steps

MAT-SU — Between barge docks, cement shipments and rail spurs, it’s a heady time for the Mat-Su Borough’s fledgling Port MacKenzie.

“They’ve been working on developing it for many years. Now, all of a sudden, things have started coming together in the last few years,” said Dave Hanson, the borough’s director of Economic Development.

Hanson said the $3 million in economic recovery money the federal Economic Development Administration announced last week will tack nearly 8 acres onto the borough’s existing 6-acre dock. The borough has to come up with $1 million to match that money, Hanson said, but it plans to do that mostly through in-kind contributions; namely, gravel. There’s a lot of gravel on borough land near the port.

To some, the barge dock might look like just a gravel pad jutting out into the water. But, Hanson said, that gravel pad is a major piece of the port that allows a number of other things to happen.

“You have to have this or you can’t do the next step,” he said.

More space on the barge dock means more room for companies who use the port area to assemble big modules for use on the North Slope and elsewhere. The bigger pad also gives the borough a place to land a second trestle going out to its deepwater dock, which means more efficient loading and unloading of vessels since trucks won’t have to turn around on the deepwater dock as they do now.

And then there’s the rail loop. Well, it’s not a rail loop. Not yet at least.

Right now the borough is constructing a stretch of road leading out to where the loop will be built. Eventually, it will build the loop as well. But borough officials are building it as a road, with the railroad in mind for later.

Still, Hanson said, even having a gravel road through the borough’s land is significant.

“You open up a huge amount of territory for industrial use,” he said.

And once the rails are in place, the port will be in business. Hanson said that shipping by trucks — as port customers do now — is three to four times more expensive than shipping by rail.

Brad Sworts, transportation planner at the borough, said having a railroad so much closer to the Interior than the ports of Whittier and Seward could help spur development of natural resources and reduce shipping costs for companies sending fuel and other bulk commodities to those areas.

“It’s the distance to tidewater that makes the difference,” he said.

But that’s not to say the borough is leaving trucks out of the equation. An ongoing port project is working to reduce the grade of the road heading down to the port.

“This summer we had a project that pushed through the last hill,” Sworts said.

Next summer they’ll bring in big scrapers. The road leading from the top of the bluffs down to the dock will wind up being longer but significantly less steep.

And even with all these projects yet to be completed, Sworts said, companies are already using the port. Still, the projects on deck and underway are a big deal, Hanson said.

“Frankly, right now we are right on schedule, we are doing real well and it’s quite exciting,” he said.

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