City of Sitka Floatplane Base Project Update Presentation

Michael Harmon, Public Works Director. Tonight I'm going to give a quick 35% milestone update on the Sitka Sea Plain Base. I say quick because there's a lot to this project. You may not think it's as quick as you wanted, so you can tell me to move along if I'm taking too long. Also, I'll try and go fairly rapid, so if there's anything you want me to expand upon, just jump in on any slide and fire away with questions.

So project overview, I'm going to go over the timeline, the current engineering design at 35%, some nuances that are going on with the environmental process and our steps moving forward and status of the land acquisition, overall project schedule and next steps moving forward. This project is, many of you probably know, been going on for over 20 years now, but I always like to go back through and talk a little history. Even after 20 years, we get comments, where did this project come from? I haven't heard about it. So any opportunity I can do to kind of repeat some of this, these steps that have gone on, we've done Several master plans studied this up and down the road system, narrowed in on the channel as a key area that we wanted this facility to be at as a community.

And then we honed that in closer to the location that we're at today. We've got stakeholder groups. We've had this as a legislative priority. We have state support for the upland property purchase, which is through them. We've had the Assembly adopted as a high priority project over the years.

We most recently adopted a resolution about a year ago in 2021, really solidifying the location and to move forward into the design phase of the project, which that was a large commitment on the FAA funding side. Once you do that, you're committing to build. Some sort of project, or you're at risk of needing to pay back any funds that we've spent in those phases.

20-Some years later, do we have any opposition or concerns for this project? Absolutely. If you recall a year ago when we had that resolution, we had presentations from different bodies with concerns. Those concerns are addressed through the environmental environmental process under the federal project guidelines. So that is continuing to be addressed, and I'll talk about that a little bit more in future slides.

But environmental process, big picture, is supposed to look at the— based on the scope of the project, is it right-sized? Is it in the right location? Is there any major red flags that would say it shouldn't move forward? Then next steps, if it can move forward, are there anything that should be mitigated, any impacts associated to it? That has been gone through and we got the highest level of approval, so to speak, of a finding of no significant impact.

That means yes, it's an appropriate location, appropriate scope, and there is not any major mitigation that has to happen as a result of the project. So That happened back in, in September, I believe, of 2021 that we got that status.

Some concerns moving forward outside of that will be addressed through things like partnerships, like with STA, to have them involved on the archaeological findings that we may discovered during construction. So we'll work on setting up agreement with them if they'd like to be on site and be involved in that. So we're also working steps in those regards.

The existing seaplane base, woefully undersized for the needs that are projected in the, in the business case studies that have been done. I think you're aware it's at the end of its functional life. We've done some emergency repairs to it to keep it afloat. Even those repairs will soon be coming to the end of their design life. Location's not ideal for any type of expansion that meets the future needs.

There's conflicts in the channel in this location, any number of things. So that's why we're here today, why we are looking at a new facility. To meet the future projections and why we are looking at a different location.

As this project moved forward more specifically in the last couple years, we've ramped up scoping meetings, public processes, mainly through the environmental process. What has allowed this project really to move forward to the next level is the state's commitment when we made it a high legislative priority and lobbied the state to participate in selling the uplands that allowed the project to get off dead center, so to speak, over all the years and really elevated into a moving forward project with the federal funding. So pretty standard process, environmental is heavily involved in getting stakeholders together and outreach is demonstrated in this slide over the, that stage of the project up to the 35%.

When we last left this, September 2021, we passed the resolution adopting this location and, and general concept scope of project. This drawing just depicts what we presented a year ago for that resolution.

And basically what you're looking at here, where you see— I guess I can use my cursor here. Everything in the— oops, gentle with the cursor. Everything that you see in these contoured dark lines is your water infrastructure. What you're seeing here is a dock that stretches out here in the yellow. And these are individual permanent moorage spots for seaplanes on both sides of it.

And these little depictions here are the different types of planes parking on both sides of this. And then as you move over to this other yellow side, this is where the transient floats are for planes coming and going, actively coming and going. We have some potential for wave attenuation barriers out here and additional docks out here. Everything in dashed was not included with the scope, but are potential additives later in the project. And you have a drive-down ramp so you can drive down and get better access to the planes.

And then you have an upland facility here that consists of a ramp to pull planes out of the water to do work on them. Park them throughout a working yard here, have a parking area for activities to come and go, especially for not only the permanent mortgage, of course, the transient use. If you have some type of commercial activity, how do those passengers park and come and go from the facility? And this just depicts a drive— driving down ramp because the elevation of this is lower than the road up here. So it's just simply an access down to the main working area and parking area.

So we moved this forward. The scope of this project has always been thought of somewhere around the $15 million range for a project of, of this magnitude. And then we got the land acquisition at about $1 million. And looked at a match, assuming FAA 6.25% is what their standard match would be, would be somewhere around $1 million.

Now moving forward, we've brought on all the designers, we've detailed out everything about the scope of this project. We've brought seaplane base users in to give us ideas of what they like and don't like to improve it. And we've brought in the— at this stage, you bring in a professional cost estimator. That's required by FAA to make sure we're getting the cost right. And through that process, you can see right away on this slide, now we're sitting at a construction estimate of $34 million, which puts the CPS match at over $2 million.

So the CBS match is doubling as we refine this design.

Looking at— so this better depicts the water side, pretty similar scope to what we presented a year ago, a little bit of expansion of more transient here that we added and some small bells and whistles. We've also taken some things away, so all in all, Scope's not much different. This details out the uplands. You can see pretty similar. You have a ramp to pull out the planes.

Parking area's moved a little bit, but more or less nothing has significantly changed from when the scope was approved.

Looking at a year ago today, what's going on with the cost, and we've analyzed that quite a bit. There is some increased scope to the longer permanent slip floats, larger transient float area. We increased it by 3 slips, and you have a little bit more extended area for vehicle turnaround and putting the fuel down on the dock. Those all have some increased cost to them. We have a little bit of increase to the uplands for The wants and wishes to have better facilities for commercial use when passengers come to get out of the weather.

But the real significant change that we are seeing in the cost is a little bit twofold. More minorly so is inaccuracies that you'll get not having a professional cost estimator, not having the design engineers detailing everything out, but more so is inflation. Just unprecedented what we're seeing. Saw that in my presentation last assembly meeting with the airport project. We're seeing it on all our projects.

It's like nothing I've seen before. I watched the Blue Lake Dam from the outside, and that wasn't an inflationary— I think that was more of an accuracy issue that you will see from an early concept in carrying that cost through too long and not adjusting it.

Just not seeing very much of that here. It's mainly, mainly the unprecedented inflation since COVID hit us and market conditions. So the professional cost estimator was able to vet that out pretty good with some recent bids that have come in.

So with that increased cost, what does that look to our budget today? This just outlines what we've expended in our cumberances today, what grants we have to date on the top there. Looking forward, we still have to accomplish the land acquisition at just under $1 million.

And we will have a 6.25% match as we planned in the resolution adopted a year ago. So you'll see And I'm outlining the 6.25% match here on the right-hand side going forward of $47,000 for the land and $2.125 million for the construction for a total match, including the little bit of match we have up here that we've already spent on the first phases of $2.172 million. I have a minor nuance to this, that the land acquisition will have some administrative costs. This is straight the offer price that I plugged in there for— that the state agreed on. We'll have some administrative costs to process that.

So this will go up a little bit, but I don't think it's too significant. So it gives you a high-level approximation. Of where we sit today with the current design. We recognize that we always feel a duty to try and design and show options that fit within the original intended budget. So we would like to come back and do that with this body in the very near future.

We can see high level, and that's a That's the biggest cost increase I've seen in my career. What do you do with that? It's a pretty dramatic cut to the project, and we have a small match, so it's not— I don't see it as an easy decision when you look at the amount that you will give up for that extra million-dollar match. But we want to bring that forward and have a, a very important discussion about setting that match at the right level, which sets our design at the right level as we move forward. We're at 35% that's the time to do it.

We don't, we don't want to do a 65% design, which is very expensive at the wrong scoping level. So these areas highlight what you would have to cut out. We'd be looking at on the water side, cutting out a lot of the transient where you'd have 2 transient over here and cutting out the most the FAA is going to allow us to cut out of the permanent mortgage based on the business case. If they're going to fund it, they won't let us cut a lot beyond that. So it pushes a lot of the cutting to the water side.

So on the water side, you would see us cutting out basically all the ability to pull out planes, park them, and we would stick with We need to reconfigure this a little bit. If you're only doing parking and access to the float basically in your uplands, we will simplify this more when we bring it back to you of a more simplistic parking and access to this to get this down within the $15 million construction.

So the other piece I wanted to touch on is the environmental process. I'd mentioned that we had got gotten the finding of no significant impact about a year ago. That has now been revisited through the concerns and requests that we— FAA has received, one of which STA has requested the seaplane base to be relocated. So they did a full audit review of that environmental process, and they feel they need to circle back on some items on that. I'm not getting the sense there's any major red flags that would change that ultimate finding.

There may be some mitigation added, but the main thing that it does is it now pushes our project out yet another year. So now we're looking at a 25 construction completion period when we were at a 23. Then, then they pushed us to 24, and now they're pushing us to 25. So we keep getting pushed out in the process. What we're trying to do on our side is make sure we are not the delay moving forward in this process.

And one of the key things we have to focus on in that is moving forward with the land acquisition piece. We have an agreement with the State of Alaska to do that by December 31st. So we come back with these more detailed options to shrink the scope to a $15 million budget and look at if we want to do that. We also want to solidify a match or a funding appropriation enough to move forward with the land acquisition so we can hit this this deadline and not delay the project and not open up that land acquisition to renegotiation.

This purchase of property can be reimbursed through the federal grant, and it also possibly— we still have to verify this— be used as a match. But we have for sure verified that it can be reimbursed.

Again, looking at the schedule real quick, it's pushing us out to Construction completion of 2025. The environmental steps are a little bit unknown right now. They are telling us that's approximately a year or longer to get through what they're outlining to us, and they'll get us those details. I might possibly have more information on that by our next presentation. So again, next steps to bring back right-sizing the project, comfort with what match we're dedicating to the project, and address the property acquisition.

And then from there, we'll move on with the environmental and continue to pursue the grants and get those secured, which that side looks real optimistic, other, other than we will not see 0% any longer from what I.

See, but we made it with the 0% for the design phase meeting that September 30th deadline last year. So that did save us a good, good chunk of money on the project on that phase. That's all I have tonight. If there's any questions, I'm available.