Anchorage Assembly to vote on $11M Port construction management deal

The Anchorage Assembly takes up two construction management contracts for the Don Young Port of Alaska on June 23, with a combined ceiling of $11 million if all renewal options are exercised. Mayor Suzanne LaFrance has recommended awarding indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts to Alaska-based CRW Engineering Group and Professional & Technical Services. Each contract is capped at $1.1 million per year with four one-year renewal options through 2030.

The Port matters substantially. It handles roughly 90 percent of the containerized freight that arrives in Alaska — food, fuel, building materials, almost everything that comes by water — and the on-call engineering contracts feed into the Port of Alaska Modernization Program (PAMP), a multi-billion-dollar effort to replace aging dock infrastructure that's been in service since the 1960s. The modernization program has been one of the most consequential and contested public infrastructure efforts in recent Alaska history, with cost overruns, timeline extensions, and engineering disputes shaping multiple Assembly cycles. Individual task orders under each contract are capped at $250,000 — a per-order ceiling that determines how much work the Port Engineer can authorize without returning to the Assembly.

IDIQ contracts give the Port flexibility to call on engineering support quickly without procuring each task separately. Defenders argue that flexibility is necessary for an active modernization program; critics of similar structures in other jurisdictions have argued that aggregate spending caps obscure how cumulative dollars get spent across many small task orders.

Five firms competed under RFP 2025P063. The evaluation committee selected CRW and PTS as most qualified. The Assembly vote on June 23 is the final step before the contracts can be executed.