Corps has no 2027 maintenance dredging money for Nome yet, port director says

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has no money budgeted so far for maintenance dredging at Nome and several other Alaska ports in the 2027 ice-free season, Port Director Joy Baker told the Nome Port Commission on Thursday. Anchorage is the exception.

Baker said the gap is part of the Corps Alaska District's typical budget process, and the Corps has a couple of other chances to find money in its work plans, "so all is not lost." Nome and the four other Alaska harbors that get annual maintenance dredging have reached out to the congressional delegation, she said, with the message that even though it's a funding issue, "we absolutely need our annual maintenance dredging of the channel."

Baker said Nome's problem isn't as significant as Anchorage's, which is why Anchorage got the funding, "but all of our facilities are clearly just as important."

"It's happened in the past, it's been resolved, so I'm hopeful that we'll be on that path again," she said.

The job is smaller than it used to be. When gold mining upriver sent sediment down the Snake River, the harbor dredge worked three months a year to keep Nome's harbor open, the commission's vice chair recalled. Now, he said, "they whip it off in two weeks."

The small boat harbor

The funding question comes as Nome gets ready to expand a small boat harbor on the Snake River, dredging new ground next to a section the city dug in 2017. The city intends to put the dredging out to bid early in 2027, with digging through the ice planned for March and April. Ramps, a revetment and floating docks would follow. The project has a federal BUILD grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, plus matching money from local partners and the Denali Commission, Baker said.

The city will maintain that harbor itself no matter what, the harbormaster said. What it wants is for the Corps to extend its own channel maintenance farther toward it. That maintenance now stops at the boat ramps, Baker said.

Sediment settles wherever the river first gets deep, the vice chair said, so without Corps dredging there, the harbor would fill in faster. "Otherwise, we're gonna get stuck with the bill," he said.

An earlier Corps project that would have dredged in the river was set aside after delays pushed its cost above the program's $10 million cap, Baker said. The city had asked the Corps to deepen and widen the turning area by the ramps so tugs and barges could make a three-point turn there. If language about Nome in a pending federal water resources bill passes intact, she said, it will be easier to get the Corps back to the table.

Separately, Baker said Phase 2 of the Port of Nome expansion, its dredging phase, is scheduled to go out for construction bids next month, pending final approvals from the Corps. Kiewit crews working on the $399.4 million first phase, which extends the west causeway, plan to leave for the winter in early to mid-November and return in April.