Work at new prison begins

WASILLA — Construction has begun on a prison at Point MacKenzie.

An official groundbreaking ceremony is set for Wednesday but, according to the borough’s purchasing officer Russ Krafft, Neeser Construction has already begun work at the site.

“They held off on doing the official groundbreaking until the weather was a little was a bit more conducive,” he said. “Right now it’s easy to tell it’s a construction site.”

He said the site has been cleared and the plan is to have three buildings framed and enclosed by the time the snow comes so workers can do the interior work over the winter. Those three buildings will likely be an administration building, a service building and the warehouse.

The same process will be used for the remaining buildings next summer.

“They’re anticipating that Department of Corrections will start putting inmates in there by February or March of 2012,” Krafft said.

The prison is planned as a 430,000-square-foot, 1,536-bed facility housing exclusively men. The borough sold $240 million in bonds to pay for the project and will sell the facility to the state in installments, eventually signing the whole thing over 25 years from now. The borough estimates that the prison will provide between 600 and 700 jobs during its construction and 350 permanent jobs once the facility is up and running.

It’s been a long process for the borough, which started shopping for a site in 2006, touching off what became a somewhat contentious process, wrapping up with the selection of the parcel of borough land at Point MacKenzie. The next hurdle came early this year when a tanking national economy had borough officials briefly worried about whether it would be able to sell the bonds needed to build the prison.

The project is now in the construction phase and Krafft said Neeser is handling most everything going on at the site itself. Still, the borough has a bit more work to get done. It is negotiating with utilities to bring service to the site, which sits on a 330-acre tract at the intersection of Point MacKenzie and Alsop roads, nine miles from Port MacKenzie.

He said it looks like the Matanuska Electric Association and the Matanuska Telephone Association have agreed to bring temporary service to the site and they’re hammering out the final details with MEA for permanent service.

On the natural gas front, there are some rights-of-way issues to be worked out in the coming weeks to bring Enstar service down Point MacKenzie Road but Krafft expects those will be worked out soon.

And there’s yet another contract out there for which three firms are competing, Krafft said. That contract is to design, build and operate a water and wastewater treatment facility on site for the prison.

“In August we should have a firm selected and they will go ahead with their design and permitting process over the winter,” Kraft said.

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