The Wrangell Cooperative Association is nearing completion of its 5,000-square-foot maintenance and warehouse building on Zimovia Highway. The facility is in its second year of construction, though planning for the project started about a decade ago.
Bill Willard, Transportation Department manager, said he hopes to finish the work later this fall. The project is just waiting on some electrical items and then crews will finish the last of the interior work on the building, which is next door to the tribal offices.
As with construction projects nationwide, supply delays were a problem last year, he said.
The all-metal building has high ceilings in the work bays and will be used for equipment and materials for the WCA’s growing list of projects with the U.S. Forest Service. The tribe has been performing trail maintenance, culvert replacement and other work.
Willard said the WCA has hired and trained tribal citizens for the culvert replacement work on Forest Service roads, which provide important access for subsistence and recreational users.
Since mid-2010s, tribal crews have replaced 367 culverts, he said.
“We’ve had excellent collaboration with the Forest Service,” Esther Aaltséen Reese, tribal administrator, said last week. WCA is interested in similar work with borough, she added.
In addition to housing equipment for trail or road work, the new building also could be used for buses and vans if the tribe expands its tourism efforts in the community, Willard said.
The idea for the building and adding to the tribe’s capacity to take on more projects in town started in 2011, he said. The intent is to train people and build up work skills of lasting value for tribal members and to benefit the entire community, he said. The building “gives us more opportunity to expand and grow training.”
Willard credited a lot of people for the new building. His assistant, Liz Romane, and the construction crew were big reasons the project is a success, he said, adding that the tribal council was fully supportive of the project.
Over the past decade, WCA has taken on a couple of large projects on borough roads, using shared revenues the tribe receives from the federal gasoline tax, including rebuilding Weber Street in 2014 at a cost of about $900,000, Willard and Reese explained.
WCA’s office building opened in 2019, after the tribe purchased a duplex and renovated it into office space.
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