NIH gives Anchorage's Olgoonik $5.1 million in three uncompeted contracts

The National Institutes of Health runs on chilled water. Its Bethesda campus is a research city, and the Central Utility Plant that cools it has to work every day, because the labs and animal facilities it serves cannot warm up.

Keeping that plant maintained is the job of a company owned by Wainwright, a Chukchi coast village of a few hundred people with no road to anywhere.

NIH awarded Olgoonik General $5.1 million this month across three contracts. The largest, $4.2 million, covers a year of preventive maintenance on the plant's industrial chillers, cooling towers and drives. The others cover piping for the equipment that washes laboratory cages and racks, and a lab renovation.

The maintenance work sits inside a five-year contract NIH awarded in 2024 with a ceiling near $25 million, of which about $9.1 million has been obligated so far. The contracts were awarded without competition, under a federal program that allows agencies to award work directly to Alaska Native corporations and other disadvantaged firms.

Olgoonik General is a subsidiary of Olgoonik Corporation, the village corporation for Wainwright.

What that means back home is contested. Wainwright resident Hopson has said the work is "done internationally and nationally, and not in the community." Kevin Berry, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, points to the other end of it, saying revenue from this kind of contracting funds dividends that reach roughly 200 Alaska communities a year.