LaFrance proposes sale of unbuilt prefab structure once intended for homeless services to Port of Alaska

A municipality-owned $2.39 million, metal-framed tent once intended to be a mass homeless shelter may instead end up as a storage facility at the Don Young Port of Alaska in Anchorage.

Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s administration on Tuesday proposed a deal to sell the prefabricated, tensioned-fabric Sprung Structures facility to the port. The Anchorage Assembly at its Tuesday evening meeting declined to hold a last-minute vote and instead will likely vote on the sale later this month.

The municipality funded the purchase of the structure in late 2021 for a large homeless shelter in East Anchorage under a now-dead proposal from former Mayor Dave Bronson.

The Assembly halted the controversial project after learning that Bronson officials pushed ahead with millions in site preparation work without first getting the required Assembly approval.

The sale would give the city a few million extra dollars in this year’s budget, and the administration plans to put most of it toward its emergency homeless sheltering plan, Municipal Manager Becky Windt Pearson said in an interview Monday.

Most of the materials for the facility have been in storage in Utah and Alberta, Canada. Storage fees have been costing the city about $5,000 a month since May 2023, Windt Pearson said.

The port is in the midst of an estimated $2 billion modernization project that’s expected to last at least until 2032. The Sprung structure would serve as warm storage for equipment and sand that the port uses on roads, docks and trestles in the winter, and for port maintenance offices, Windt Pearson said.

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Though LaFrance, a former Assembly member and chair, had voted to advance the shelter project, she voted with eight other members to halt it in 2022. They cited the violation of city code, a lack of a detailed plan for funding and operations, and ballooning costs.

In a statement Tuesday, LaFrance said the administration is “happy to see an inherited problem turn into a triple win for the community.”

“Turning an expensive logistical issue into an elegant solution which serves multiple community users and accomplishes the original goal of addressing homelessness is a perfect example of the power of approaching government as a team,” LaFrance said.

It will cost an estimated $11 million to $13 million to ship and construct the Sprung structure — a cost that would be paid by the Port of Alaska from its large chunk of state grant funding for the modernization project, Windt Pearson said.

After LaFrance took office this summer, the administration put out a call to city departments and agencies for proposals to put the Sprung structure to use.

The fire department, police department and port put forward ideas. A team of city executives — Windt Pearson, Chief Administrative Officer Bill Falsey, Economic Development Director Lance Wilber, and Maintenance and Operations Director Shay Throop — evaluated the proposals in a cost-benefit analysis, Windt Pearson said.

“Our overall goal was really to find a use for the structure that aligned with the strategic goals of the municipality as they already exist,” she said. “Not to create a need for it and to create a new expense somewhere, but really to find a place where we could plug it in and solve a problem that we already had identified as a priority, and ideally where we already had funding allocated.”

The fire department proposed to use the building for fire apparatus storage and maintenance, she said. The police department would’ve used it for storage of their specialty vehicles for crime scenes, SWAT, fatality and collision responses, and possibly as a boarding facility for police dogs.

The police would have used it at the site of the formerly proposed homeless shelter, behind the former Anchorage Police Department headquarters near Elmore and Tudor roads. That area was already partially prepared to erect the Sprung structure by Roger Hickel Contracting, a local company that later sued the city for payment of the work it did.

Despite the sunk costs on that construction work, it makes more sense for the city to use it at the port, Windt Pearson said. The port already planned to build facilities to serve its storage needs, and neither the fire nor police department had a plan or budget to build and operate the structure. Those costs likely would have wound up on city taxpayers, she said.

It’s likely the city will turn the site at Tudor and Elmore into a parking lot, she said.