The borough assembly will hold a special meeting Thursday, Aug. 21, to consider the next steps toward a new cruise ship dock downtown and a new barge landing and freight staging yard at the former 6-Mile mill site.

The agenda also includes discussion of a possible data center at the 6-Mile site, built and operated by a California-based company that provides cloud computing services.

The public meeting will start with a work session at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall to discuss a memorandum of understanding between the borough and Alaska Marine Lines, which provides weekly freight barge service to the community.

Immediately following the work session, the assembly will meet to consider the agreement with Alaska Marine Lines, and separate agreements with American Cruise Lines, which wants a new dock for its ships that overnight in town, and with Greensparc, the data center company.

The agreements are not leases or property sales, and do not commit the borough or the private companies to construction.

“What I like about them is that they create a structure” for all parties to work toward the projects, Borough Manager Mason Villarma said on Friday, Aug. 15. “It’s really nice to have a road map.”

He called the three agreements “a platform for negotiations” toward contracts, whether those are land or tidelands leases, construction and operating terms or user fees for borough-owned facilities.

American Cruise Lines, which operates a pair of 170-passenger cruise ships in Southeast Alaska and plans to add a third vessel in 2028, wants to either build or lease a dock to accommodate its ships, which spend the night in town.

The company has applied for a 40-year lease on borough-owned tidelands near the Nolan Center to build a dock; City Hall formed a negotiating team in July for talks with the Connecticut-based company.

The borough assembly last month authorized issuing up to $9 million in revenue bonds to pay for downtown waterfront fill and other improvements related to a new cruise ship dock and barge landing, though the borough would not take on any debt until it has detailed plans, cost estimates and binding agreements for the new facilities.

The need for a new barge ramp was unloaded on the assembly this spring, when an engineering report declared that the 47-year-old ramp at the downtown barge facility was unsafe to use, due to significant corrosion and structural issues.

The borough shut down the barge ramp immediately.

The freight lines serving Wrangell have been using temporary quarters at the former downtown mill dock, next to the Marine Service Center, while the companies and borough officials have discussed options.

The focus now is on building a new barge landing, with a ramp and mooring dolphins, at the borough-owned 6-Mile mill property, Villarma said.

Alaska Marine Lines and Samson Tug and Barge share the weekly freight barge from Seattle to Southeast, with freight destined for Wrangell offloaded in Ketchikan and transferred to a smaller barge for delivery to Wrangell.

Villarma said the borough has invited Samson to participate in the talks, but the company is not part of the memorandum of understanding that will go before the assembly on Aug. 21.

The third agreement on the agenda is with data center provider Greensparc, which last year set up a small, modular computing center in Cordova.

The Cordova Electric Cooperative was the data center’s first customer, leaving behind Lower 48-based cloud service providers.

The attraction to setting up shop in Wrangell is the same as Cordova: Both communities are served by hydroelectric power, which is attractive for cloud computing companies looking to market themselves as environmentally friendly.

“We deliver rapid, scalable solutions powered by green energy in remote communities. Our modular, prefabricated infrastructure has set a new standard in affordable, environmentally conscious AI hosting,” according to Greensparc’s website.

In anticipation that it can strike a deal with Greensparc to build and operate a data center at 6-Mile, the borough has been talking with the Southeast Alaska Power Agency, which operates the Tyee Lake hydro plant, about putting in a new circuit and transformer at the property, Villarma said.

The borough also is pursuing a possible federal grant for industrial development to help pay for the improvements needed for any or all of the projects, the manager said.

The municipality bought the 6-Mile site from its previous owners for $2.5 million in 2022, in the expectation that it could sell or lease portions of the 42-acre property to promote economic development.

Tideline Construction, which is moving its operations from Juneau to Wrangell, took over about 10 acres at the site for its scrap metal recycling, rock crushing and construction businesses. It traded for the land this summer, performing cleanup and grading work valued at $880,000 across all 42 acres of the abandoned property in exchange for the 10 acres.