Coast Guard awards $36.4 million to repair industrial facility at Base Ketchikan

The Coast Guard has committed about $36.4 million to repair the Industrial Production Facility at Base Ketchikan, the largest federal contract awarded in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough this federal year, according to federal spending records.

The job, awarded Aug. 13, is more than three times the size of the borough's next-largest new federal contracts this year, an $11.2 million federal purchase of pink salmon from Silver Bay Seafoods for food donations and an $11 million task order to Leidos for its Southeast Alaska acoustic testing facility. Work is scheduled to run through Jan. 13, 2029.

The contract went to Bering Straits Development Co., a Nome-based subsidiary of Bering Straits Native Corp. The Coast Guard placed it under a regional construction contract it awarded in July 2024 to four small businesses, including Bering Straits Development and Wasilla's Weldin Construction, and assigns work to them as needs come up. Bering Straits Development's other Coast Guard work under that contract has included about $4.4 million to repair a hangar at Base Kodiak and $3.7 million to renovate marine safety and carpentry buildings in Valdez.

The repair comes as the Coast Guard faces a growing backlog of aging facilities nationwide. In February 2025, the Government Accountability Office reported that the service's backlog of shore infrastructure projects would cost at least $7 billion to address as of June 2024, up from at least $2.6 billion in 2019. The GAO found that the Coast Guard's funding for maintaining those facilities has consistently fallen short of its own targets.