Bering Straits firm wins environmental work at four Air Force bases

An Anchorage company owned by Alaska Native shareholders from Norton Sound will handle environmental compliance at four Air Force bases, two of which house pieces of the American nuclear deterrent.

Bering Straits Professional Services won the $1,222,148 contract Aug. 17, beating five other bidders. The work is what the Air Force calls fence-to-fence environmental services: compliance and management across an entire installation rather than a single site.

The four bases are Grand Forks and Minot in North Dakota, Ellsworth in South Dakota and Offutt in Nebraska, whose initials form the contract's acronym. Minot flies B-52s and operates Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. Offutt is home to U.S. Strategic Command. Ellsworth flies B-1 bombers and is slated to be the first operational base for the B-21 Raider. Grand Forks runs intelligence and surveillance aircraft.

The General Services Administration set the job as a competitive 8(a) set-aside in March. Site visits ran April 20 through 23, and performance runs through Feb. 16, 2027.

Bering Straits Native Corporation is the ANCSA regional corporation for the Bering Strait and Norton Sound region, whose villages sit off the road system on the Seward Peninsula and around the sound. Its shareholders are Iñupiaq, Siberian Yupik and Central Yup'ik.

The corporation announced in July that it had acquired the Alakaʻina Family of Companies, nine businesses now operating under Bering-Alakaʻina Holdings, taking its worldwide workforce past 4,000.

The contract is a small one for this firm, which also holds about $33 million in Office of Personnel Management work and $21 million with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.