Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly Updates[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Marc Van Dongen has been director of Port MacKenzie in the Mat-Su Borough since the 14-square-mile port district was nothing but a hand-drawn line on a borough map.
One of his first projects as port director was to carve a new 1.2-mile road from the end of Point MacKenzie Road, through the wilderness, to the water's edge.
By watercraft, it takes just minutes to cross the 1.5 miles of water that separate the Port of Anchorage from Port MacKenzie.
But in April 2000 when Van Dongen became port director, the "port" on the northwest shore was mostly an 8,940-acre "field of dreams."
"We've made tremendous progress in the past seven years," he said. "Everything you see out here we've done since then."
Besides that access road, now there's electric, water and phone service, a deep-draft dock, a barge dock, a ferry terminal building and three private businesses.
Van Dongen said it will take him six more years to finish his list of five goals:
* Natural gas line extension from Burma Road wellhead.
* Deep-draft dock completion.
* Upgrade and pave the last 14.4 miles of Point MacKenzie Road.
* Initiate ferry operations between Anchorage and Port MacKenzie.
* Complete a 43-mile rail line to the port from the Parks Highway.
TREMENDOUS POTENTIAL
The newly completed Mat-Su Borough Ferry System terminal is the first link in a ferry system that will provide transportation between Anchorage and the southeast corner of the neighboring Mat-Su Borough by 2009.
"There's tremendous potential for something big out here," Van Dongen said on a tour of the Port MacKenzie area Aug. 9. "If the Knik Arm Crossing is built, that's one of the keys. The other keys being the rail line and the gas line."
Since 2003, when the Alaska Statute 19.75.011 created the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority, the Knik bridge project has had a question mark attached to its name.
After more than 20 years of talking about the idea, the time has come to erase the question mark, according to KABATA spokesperson Mary Ann Pease.
"Right now, we're looking at construction taking place between 2009 and 2010 and being operational by 2011," she said.
Legislators put a huge piece of the project puzzle in place in June 2006 when it passed House Bill 471, which gave KABATA the authority to enter into public/private partnerships.
The toll bridge will be the state of Alaska's first such public/private partnership, though such funding mechanisms are plentiful elsewhere, Pease said.
"It's extremely common in the Lower 48," she said. "It happens with bridges, tunnels and everything else."
The funding method has become a popular way for states to leverage diminishing federal transportation funds to construct major infrastructure projects, Pease said.
By partnering with the public sector, the bridge authority expects to fund the project using $100 million in federal funds and $500 million from private investors, she said.
Last year, two international consortiums of companies replied when KABATA issued its request for qualifications to design, build, finance and construct the Knik Arm Bridge, Pease said.
The consortiums are:
* Bougyues Travaux--a French company that has partnered with companies such as URS and USKH, to name a few.
* MacQuarie--one of the world's largest infrastructure financing firms.
By December, Pease said KABATA will decide which consortium to partner with in developing the project.
When the bridge connects Port MacKenzie and Anchorage, Van Dongen said he'll have businesses lined up waiting to locate at the port.
IMAGINE ALASKA IN 2057
Anchorage was a cash-poor territory town 50 years ago when oil was discovered at Swanson River on the Kenai Peninsula. Back then, the Mat-Su area was a quiet agriculture region connected to Anchorage by a one-lane dirt road.
"Anchorage was built in 50 years," Van Dongen said. "I see it happening faster over here."
Now, Anchorage is home to some 278,700 people and the Mat-Su is home to another 80,480 and the two regions are connected by the Glenn Highway.
But jump ahead to 2057 and imagine another 300,000 people living in the Anchorage-Mat-Su area and all needing houses, jobs, roads, etc.
In that light, Van Dongen said it's easier to imagine the benefits of a second overland route linking land-hungry Anchorage with the largely undeveloped, land-rich Port MacKenzie region of the Mat-Su Borough.
While Van Dongen's professional credentials are impressive--an engineering degree, a master's in business administration, CEO of two Alaska Native corporations and 24 years for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers--his particular genius is for seeing a swath of land and crafting a vision for what it could be in 10, 20 or 50 years.
Mat-Su Borough Public Affairs Manager Patty Sullivan is part of a team of people, including the borough mayor, borough manager and the port commission, who are working together to plan and develop the port district. She described the port director as a person who offers solutions and doesn't stop at problems.
"Marc is everything you'd want in a port director," Sullivan said. "He's a visionary who can see the region built up 30 years from now. He's also a can-do engineer, who knows the framework for Corps' permitting and how to get it done."
He's spent the past seven years as port director building the infrastructure at the Port MacKenzie from scratch and traveling Alaska making his pitch for the port as a young economic engine that will provide new jobs and opportunities for the region.
The first business to locate within the port district was AMC, since purchased by Aluttiq, which also was the first to use the Port MacKenzie dock when it shipped a barge stacked with modular houses from the port in July 2001.
Next came NPI Inc., a timber and wood-chip-harvesting business with a chipping plant, storage facilities and conveyor belt to move the raw materials from the storage pile to a barge more than a half-mile away.
Klondike Concrete became the third business when it completed a 23,000-square-foot warehouse in preparation for a cement shipment next month.
If ongoing negotiations with VECO Corp. are successful, the company plans to build a prefab plant at the port.
"Companies are beginning to see the potential," Van Dongen said.
The port is designed to export natural resources such as woodchips, coal, sand, gravel, limestone and fuel. He said the port will complement the thriving container-shipping business at the Port of Anchorage.
FERRY TO OPEN FIRST
The Mat-Su Borough's Cook Inlet Ferry is expected to be operational by fall 2009. It will be the first direct access Anchorage residents will have to the Port MacKenzie area, Van Dongen said.
The $45 million vessel under construction in Ketchikan at the Alaska Ship and Dry Dock was funded by the Office of Naval Research and should be complete by fall 2008.
The federal agency views the vessel's ability to shift between catamaran and barge modes as a possible design for new naval technologies, Van Dongen said.
Design work on the ferry landings should be complete this fall in time for the project to be bid in October.
Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers construction permit has been approved for the ferry landing at Port MacKenzie for the past 6.5 years, the landing site on the Anchorage site has yet to be finalized, Van Dongen said.
The Anchorage landing was planned for a site between the North Star Stevedoring and Flint Hills Resources sites, north of the mouth of Ship Creek, but Van Dongen said it has significant navigation and dredging problems.
"We've done everything we can to make North Star work," he said.
Now he's pursuing a second Ship Creek site to the southside of the south dike.
"I still don't know after six-and-a-half years of back and forth where it's going to go on the Anchorage side," Van Dongen said.
Port MacKenzie Project Timeline
Every new improvement to Port MacKenzie represents countless hours of preparation. Through careful planning several years in advance, Port Director Marc Van Dongen said the port has steadily chipped away at its long to-do list of infrastructure upgrades. He said he has another six years of projects to complete and then he plans to retire.
* 2000--A 1.2-mile road was built to open vehicle access to the waterfront.
* 2003--A 500-foot by 850-foot-long barge dock was completed.
* 2003--Extend three-phase electric service to the port.
* 2004--Extend telephone and Internet service.
* 2004--A 1,200-foot deep-draft dock was completed.
* 2004--Knik Goose Bay Road between Wasilla and Point MacKenzie Road was improved.
* 2007--Gas line extension design was planned to be completed by press time.
* 2007--The Legislature and Governor approved $10 million to complete an Environmental Impact Study and preliminary engineering for a 43-mile rail line, road and utility corridor from the Parks Highway, just north of Willow, to Port MacKenzie. The current cost estimate for the railroad and bridges is $300 million.
* 2007--The Legislature authorized the Alaska Railroad Corp. to sell up to $300 million in tax-free bonds to construct the rail line.
* 2007--Design the road improvements into the port to reduce the improvement to Port MacKenzie represents countless hours grade from 10 percent to 5 percent and reduce the slope on the hillside from 2:1 to 3:1.
* 2007--AIC is applied to begin mining gravel from the port district in 2008.
FEED