Skagway manager seeks $2.08 million levee contract and calls budget shortfall her error

Skagway Borough Manager Emily Deach asked the Borough Assembly in a memo Friday to award the West Creek Levee Improvements contract to Hamilton Construction LLC for up to $2,078,000. That is about $868,000 more than the $1,210,000 the draft 2027 budget sets aside for the project.

"The draft FY27 budget includes only $1,210,000 for the project – this was my error," Deach wrote. She said she will separately ask the Assembly to amend the budget. The amendment will account for $500,000 already approved for the levee this year and the work expected to be done this year, her memo says, but it does not say how much of that $500,000 will be spent, so the size of the correction is not yet known.

The Assembly meets Thursday, Nov. 19, at 7 pm and has both the contract award and the budget's public hearing and second reading on its agenda. The budget's third reading is set for Dec. 3, and the promised amendment is not yet in the meeting packet.

The municipality requested bids Oct. 12 and received one, Hamilton's, which was opened Nov. 9. RESPEC, the project's designer, estimated the cost at $2,172,555 in an Aug. 17 update. That estimate is about double the $1 million total the 2026 budget listed for the project when it set aside $500,000 in sales tax this year.

Class III riprap, the rock armor laid along the bank, is the largest line in Hamilton's bid: 4,200 cubic yards at about $277 a yard, about $1.16 million. The contract requires the work to be done by April 1, 2027.

The work covers two sections of the levee on West Creek by Dyea Road and West Creek Road, near the Taiya River, where municipal documents describe stretches of 720 feet and 30 feet missing rock armor.

The project traces to a December 2022 inspection by PND Engineers, which the municipality commissioned while exploring a housing subdivision south of the dike. PND found the levee in fairly good condition but noted a 20- to 30-foot unarmored gap. It said the gap posed no current risk but should be monitored, and that conditions exposed part of the levee to outflanking that "could quickly undermine and destroy large segments of the levee wall under extreme flood conditions."

In June 2023, Deach, then deputy manager, told the Assembly "the state of the levee needs to be addressed before lots are developed or sold" in the proposed S'áxt' Héeni (Devil's Club River) Subdivision. In March 2024, the Assembly voted 6-0 to approve a $160,000 design contract with RESPEC. Then-Assemblymember Orion Hanson, now the mayor, made the motion and said the levee was not completed after the 2002 flood and the roadway is eroding, the minutes record.