The Auke Bay Marine Station, owned by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is up for surplus, and at least two organizations in town are interested in taking it over.
Docks and Harbors, a City and Borough of Juneau entity, and the University of Alaska Southeast submitted letters of interest at the end of April to the General Services Administration, the government agency that manages federal buildings and is in the process of screening the station for surplus. If interested parties can demonstrate they’d use the station in a manner that benefits the public, the government will hand it over for free.
“We’re not saying we want it; we’re not saying we don’t want it. We’re just saying we’re interested,” CBJ Port Director Carl Uchytil said in a recent interview. “We need to do more homework because a lot of things that are free don’t come without cost.”
The Auke Bay Marine Station, a facility sprawling over nearly four acres overlooking Statter Harbor in Auke Bay, is almost 60 years old. It was built in 1959 as a research hub for NOAA Fisheries workers studying the impacts of development on fish production, among other things.
NOAA began the process of vacating it after NOAA built the Ted Stevens Marine Research Lab in 2005. It was cheaper to build the new lab — which is the largest fisheries research facility in the state and cost $51 million — than it was to renovate the old station, NOAA Fisheries spokesperson Julie Speegle said.
“The intention was to vacate and surplus the Auke Bay Marine Station,” Speegle said. The last NOAA employee to transfer to the Ted Stevens Institute left the Auke Bay facility in 2014, and the U.S. Coast Guard has been leasing the building ever since.
Some 20 U.S. Coast Guard members currently occupy one of the property’s nine buildings — more than 33,000 square feet in all — according to Coast Guard District 17 spokesperson Kip Wadlow. About a dozen of the members stationed there work with the Electronic Support Unit, providing internet and electronic support for Coast Guard operations statewide. The remaining members are engineering support for Sector Juneau.
When NOAA began the surplus process, the standard for all excess federally owned properties, it approached the Coast Guard first to see if it would like to take over the property, but the Coast Guard declined, Wadlow and Speegle said. The Coast Guard members working there will have to vacate the premise by this time next year.
“We’re going to take those people there and find new places for them,” Wadlow said. “I don’t think we’re going to be hurting for facilities. They’ll still be doing the same jobs; they’ll just being doing them in a different office here in Juneau.”
Both CBJ Docks and Habors and UAS only found out about the station’s surplus application last week. In their April 29 letters to GSA, the second to last day of the application period, both asked for more time to develop a more detailed plan regarding how they might use the property.
“It caught both of them a little by surprise,” said City Manager Rorie Watt, who has since spoken with Docks and Harbors and university officials to make sure that public interests aren’t competing.
Because both organizations had to submit letters of interest within days of finding out about the surplus, neither had time to sit down with the other to talk about the property. The first priority was “just to keep our hat in the ring,” Uchytil said, and UAS Chancellor Richard Caulfield said.
Now that they’ve declared their interest in the property, Caulfield hopes that the interested parties can sit down and hash out some sort of collaborative use for the property.
“My hope is that we’ll have a chance to sit down with CBJ and other interested stakeholders to find out what the best use for that property is,” he said.
Watt said that the city will work with Docks and Harbors and the university to make sure that Caulfield’s hope is realized.
“There’s probably some kind of joint solution that could look really good for both parties,” he said. “It seems like a good opportunity for a town-and-gown project.”
The facility is big enough to accommodate multiple uses. The 3.96-acre station comprises nine buildings, which added together are about 3,000 square feet larger than Centennial Hall. It also has a dock in Auke Bay, and a salt-water lab, which Caulfield said the university is particularly interested in.
The university has used the station before. A couple years ago, while the Anderson Science Building — the university’s marine biology hub — was undergoing renovations, UAS temporarily moved classes to the NOAA facility. The station is directly adjacent to the Anderson Building, so it worked out well, Caulfield said.
GSA Realty Specialist Andrew Schwarz told the Empire he is unable to say how many other parties have submitted letters of interest in the property at this point. That information will become available after the GSA determines whether any of the applicants meet the qualifications for the public benefit conveyance, which is likely happen within the next 90 days. If the GSA determines that none of the applicants meet the qualifications, he said GSA will put the building up for public sale, “seeking to recover fair market value.”
• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
