Anchorage Assembly to vote Sept. 1 on two $4 million AWWU on-call repair contracts

Two contractors would be on standby for the next three years to handle emergency repairs, critical maintenance and construction on Anchorage's water and sewer system, under contracts the Assembly takes up Tuesday.

YH Constructors Inc. and Frawner Corporation would each hold a contract worth up to $4 million over three years. Neither is guaranteed any work. The arrangement puts approved contractors on call and issues them jobs as they come up, with each individual order capped at $300,000. Crews would work on an "as required basis," the Anchorage Water & Wastewater Utility says.

AWWU is the largest water and wastewater utility in the state, serving roughly 225,000 water customers and 252,500 sewer customers. It tracks each month how many of them lose service for under four hours, four to 12 hours, and longer than 12 hours. Residents have complained of equipment failures and long waits for private pipe thawing, some reporting a month without water.

The utility has separately recommended four smaller three-year contracts of the same type, at $750,000 each, for asset management and mapping work.

Federal oversight reports, including from the Interior Department's inspector general, have warned that broad on-call contracts of this kind can narrow competition and make the cost of individual jobs harder to see.

Assembly member Erin Baldwin Day named the pressure behind all of it at a January budget workshop. "We have a lot of legacy infrastructure that we have built roads and pipes, um, things that are not indefinite resources," she said.