An Anchorage firm runs facilities services for North Dakota's federal buildings

A company owned by Koniag, one of Alaska's largest Native corporations, is responsible for keeping federal buildings across North Dakota up and running — the border stations and government offices where federal business gets done, some 3,000 miles from the Kodiak archipelago its owners call home.

PACARCTIC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koniag, Inc., holds the General Services Administration's facilities contract for federal buildings throughout North Dakota, worth about $4.7 million for the year running through October 2026. The work is the physical upkeep of those buildings, carried out job by job: recent orders include replacing fire alarm panels at the federal buildings in Pembina and Grand Forks, swapping out two boilers, pouring new concrete walking paths at the Pembina border station, and patching chimney holes at the William Guy Federal Building in Bismarck. Individual jobs have run from about $1,200 to replace an exterior door up to more than half a million dollars for a building control system, with 29 orders totaling about $6.75 million so far.

The money runs back to Kodiak. Koniag is the Alaska Native regional corporation for the Kodiak Archipelago, one of the largest companies in the state, owned by roughly 4,270 Alutiiq shareholders. It runs a sprawling government-services business — a whole family of companies bidding for federal work — of which PACARCTIC is the facilities-management and security arm. Revenue those companies earn funds the dividends, scholarships and elder benefits Koniag returns to its shareholders.

The North Dakota work came a less common way for an Alaska Native corporation. These firms often win federal contracts through the 8(a) program, a set-aside lane for disadvantaged small businesses, and PACARCTIC is an 8(a) participant. But the North Dakota base contract and its orders were awarded through full and open competition — the company competed for them on the open market against all comers, rather than through a set-aside. Across all its federal work, PACARCTIC's 50 largest awards total about $360 million, including records work for the State Department performed back in Alaska.