No home in Anchorage for borough’s new ferry

PALMER — The borough has withdrawn its application for a permit to build a ferry landing in Anchorage but said it plans to forge ahead with plans for a different landing in the same place.

Marc Van Dongen, the director of the borough’s Port MacKenzie, said the landing as initially designed for a small spot of land at the end of Ship Creek had the potential to cause problems with its neighbors.

He said the Coast Guard evaluated the design and found there was too big a risk that a barge or tugboat leaving the neighboring Cook Inlet Tug and Barge Company could hit one of the landing’s pilings. Likewise, the spot of land planned for the landing is very close to Anchorage’s small-boat launch at the end of Ship Creek and the landing, as designed, might present a hazard to those crafts.

“We’re trying to come up with a design right now that minimizes any impact to Cook Inlet Tug and Barge and any small-boat users,” he said.

The borough has already come up with two such designs, both of which he’s showed to Cook Inlet Tug and Barge. One, he said, they seemed to like. The other they’re still looking at.

“The design we’re recommending right now is actually a design that the former Mayor Mark Begich said he could live with but we didn’t think we could do it,” he said.

Back when the landing was first designed, Van Dongen said, the borough thought it needed both north and south landings on the Anchorage side. Having done a little more research into ice floes in the Inlet, Van Dongen said the borough has since learned that having just one landing will be fine.

That’s good because that allows them to put fewer pilings on the side closest to Cook Inlet Tug and Barge.

The process to find a proper ferry landing on the Anchorage side has been long and, at times, frustrating, Van Dongen said.

The Coast Guard was instrumental in pushing the dock to Ship Creek in the first place, Van Dongen said, since it believed that landing the ship at the Port of Anchorage was unsafe. The Port of Anchorage spot proposed was so close to where fuel tankers dock, he said, that if a tanker got loose it would be only a matter of seconds before it collided with the ferry dock.

Added to the Coast Guard’s objections are those of the Alaska Pilots Association, which was also concerned with fuel tankers, and it didn’t look like the port was a reasonable alternative, or at least one the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would sign off on.

“I was in the Corps for 24 years I can tell you they wouldn’t approve an application,” like that, Van Dongen said.

Still, given that then-Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich seemed to prefer the port alternative, “we tried for two years that would come up with a design that would work,” Van Dongen said.

What this means in the long-term, though, is that the ferry won’t have an Anchorage landing to receive it in time for its expected delivery date in late summer of 2010.

“If you handed me a permit today, I couldn’t get a landing built by 2010,” Van Dongen said.

But the borough is hoping to have a Port MacKenzie landing in place to accommodate the ferry. The Navy, which is building the craft as an experimental design, will still be able to do the research it needs if there is a place to land the ship at Port MacKenzie, Van Dongen said.

In the short-term, Van Dongen said, the borough is hoping for a meeting with Dan Sullivan once he’s sworn in as Anchorage’s mayor.

“It’s a long tough process; it’s been frustrating, but a lot will depend on the municipality,” he said.

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