CDC orders $1.4 million more Atlanta construction from an Anchorage firm

A construction company owned by four small Athabascan villages in Alaska's Interior collected nearly $1.4 million in federal work this month, building for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — in Atlanta, about as far from its home villages as the country allows.

MTNT Construction, based in Anchorage, is a subsidiary of MTNT, Ltd., the Alaska Native village corporation formed in 1976 to represent McGrath, Takotna, Nikolai and Telida — four communities in the Upper Kuskokwim River basin, three of them on the Iditarod Trail. The corporation is headquartered in McGrath, 221 miles northwest of Anchorage, and owned by roughly 460 shareholders, most of them Upper Kuskokwim Athabascan people, many living in those remote villages.

The reason a village corporation on the Kuskokwim ends up building CDC facilities in Georgia is the reason it matters to Alaska: the federal contracting preferences available to Alaska Native corporations let MTNT win government work anywhere in the country, and the corporation's stated purpose is to turn that revenue into dividends, college scholarships and jobs for its shareholders back home. Money earned on a job site in Atlanta becomes economic support in some of the most remote communities in the state.

The three payments — about $825,000, $270,000 and $299,000, all in the first week and a half of August — are task orders placed under a larger construction contract MTNT holds with the CDC, awarded in 2022 under the federal 8(a) program for disadvantaged small businesses. Rather than bid each job separately, the company was prequalified once and now receives work as it comes. The contract has generated at least eight such orders since last fall, including one in July for fire-suppression repairs. The federal records describe the August work only as construction, without naming the buildings or the scope.