A village corporation for four remote Interior communities just won the contract to run San Diego's border crossings

A company owned by four small Koyukon Athabascan villages along the Koyukuk River will keep the U.S.-Mexico border crossing buildings in San Diego running — maintaining their heating, plumbing, electrical and fire-safety systems, and keeping the facilities clean and their grounds tended — under nearly $10 million in federal contracts, work performed about as far from its home villages as it is possible to get inside the United States.

KCORP Reliance Company of Wasilla, the awardee, is a subsidiary of K'oyitl'ots'ina, Limited, the Alaska Native village corporation formed when the villages of Alatna, Allakaket, Hughes and Huslia consolidated their ANCSA corporations. Those are remote Interior communities, most reachable only by air, home to a few hundred people each. Through the federal contracting preferences available to Alaska Native corporations, the company has built a facilities-management business that now reaches the southern border.

The work is building upkeep, not border security. The federal government owns the port-of-entry buildings, and it hires facilities contractors to keep them functioning; the actual inspection of travelers and vehicles remains the job of Customs and Border Protection. Under this scope, KCORP is responsible for the buildings' mechanical systems — heating and cooling, elevators and escalators, fire-suppression, electrical and plumbing — along with custodial work, grounds maintenance and waste removal at the crossings.

The largest of three awards, about $5.5 million, covers that operations-and-maintenance work at the San Ysidro and Tecate land ports of entry for a year beginning in September. San Ysidro is the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. A second award, about $4.2 million, covers the same at the Otay, Calexico and Andrade ports through next spring. A third, smaller contract funds converting two search rooms at the San Ysidro port. Together the awards come to about $9.85 million.

The two larger awards are orders placed against an existing agreement the firm holds with the General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service, rather than a single new contract of that size. Federal records list KCORP Reliance as an Alaska Native Corporation-owned firm, a certified HUBZone business, and a participant in the Small Business Administration's 8(a) program for disadvantaged businesses — the contracting channel through which many Native corporations win federal work.

The company also holds federal work performed in Alaska, including a $5.2 million operational-technology order. Alaska Native corporations collectively generated some $9 billion in federal contracting in 2022, and returned about $300 million to their shareholders last year — the mechanism by which revenue earned on jobs like the San Diego contract flows back to villages like Hughes and Allakaket. The records carry no statement from the company or the GSA.