A recent Anchorage Daily News article on a significant project in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough -- the Goose Creek Correctional Center--portrayed the borough as bumbling a big project while hiring friends and excluding the real professionals ("Cell block blues," April 17).
Dear reader, look deeper and do not forsake the facts.
At issue is a water and wastewater treatment plant for the Goose Creek Correctional Center at Point MacKenzie. The prison is on track to be completed by 2011. It is the state's largest vertical, public construction project, and it would not have come to be without the Mat-Su driving it. The prison means 600 construction jobs with a payroll of $100 million, as well as some 350 permanent Corrections jobs, all while our nation and state are mired in an economic tailspin. It means returning the tens of millions of Alaska dollars now circulating in another state, where our male inmates are presently housed.
The Mat-Su Borough's request-for-proposal process for this wastewater project was ethical and is forward-looking for taxpayers.
Here are the facts:
Evaluators found that Valley Utilities had a superior water and wastewater solution over the "losing" proposer, JL Properties. The proposals were evaluated and ranked by Mat-Su Borough employee Charles Braun, Alaska Department of Corrections Deputy Commissioner Dwayne Peeples, and Steve Nuss, with Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility.
The Valley Utilities proposal had a better quality of water and lower capital and operating costs and was just as sophisticated as JL's. Both proposers offered similar financing methods. Borough code does not allow detailed information of the proposals to be disclosed until a contract is signed. We did not leave JL Properties wondering however, and did relate what we could by phone.
Perhaps most damaging is that the article claimed that a member of the Valley Utilities' team helped the borough prepare the water-and-sewer bid package and was also privy to inside information: Ted Trueblood of Tryck, Nyman, Hayes.
No. A third party engineering firm, Hattenburg, Dilley, and Linnel, prepared the request-for-proposals.
Tryck, Nyman, Hayes Mr. Trueblood's former firm, was involved in the site selection process. Mr. Trueblood had access to the geotechnical information developed, but so did the rest of the world. In fact, the geotechnical data was posted on the Borough web site two years ago during the public process for the site selection.
Surprisingly, the ADN article fails to mention that the "losing" JL Properties proposal team includes Neeser Construction Inc., the actual design/builder of the prison, which of course also had this information.
The article also suggests that the interest rate on the sale was abnormally high and tens of millions were lost because of the borough's bad timing.
First, the bond interest rate is not high. Also, had the bonds been sold later, any interest rate savings would have been eliminated by higher construction costs. Concrete and steel costs have increased by about 20 percent.
Additionally, the borough was able to sell bonds in a rock-bottom market when municipalities across the nation with worthy projects were unsuccessfully scrambling to sell bonds. Most important, if the bonds had not sold then, the project would have died.
Lastly, locating the prison in one of the proposed urban Mat-Su areas would not have been less expensive as assumed in the article.
For instance, connecting to Palmer's wastewater facility would require a $43.7 million dollar investment to bring the plant up to standards and more funds to expand it to be capable of treating the prison's expected 200,000 gallons per day of effluent. This cost is 2.6 times more than the estimated cost of providing a wastewater plant at Point MacKenzie.
John Duffy has served as the manager of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough since 2000.
By JOHN DUFFY