Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska is officially in the federal contracting business.
Tlingit Haida Tribal Business Corporation, the business arm of Central Council, announced Wednesday its acquisition of KIRA, a facilities maintenance and base operations support services company based on Boulder, Colorado.
The goal of the purchase is to provide unrestricted revenue to the tribe.
“I’m excited. I think it’s going to change the face of the tribe,” Central Council President Richard Peterson said. “This will allow us to plot our own destiny because it’s unrestricted. We can do what we want with it.”
A lot of the funding Central Council receives is program-driven through grants, and most of it can only be used on citizens who live in the tribe’s service area, Southeast Alaska, Peterson said.
“There’s this belief out there that we get money based on our enrollment, which is only true for the service area. We don’t get money for those that live outside of Southeast Alaska so we’ve never been able to do anything in way of service to those citizens,” he explained.
Central Council has 30,336 Tlingit and Haida citizens. Peterson estimates that almost half of them live outside Southeast. Many live elsewhere in Alaska and in Washington. He envisions being able to expand scholarships and educational opportunities with the new revenue.
“When someone under hardship has a funeral, here we’re able to offer funeral assistance. We can’t do that if you live outside of the service area,” Peterson said.
“We can use money for match and leverage to build upon what we have and go in new directions if we want to,” he continued.
Due to a non-disclosure agreement, Peterson didn’t reveal details of how Central Council financed the purchase of KIRA, though he did mention equity from the tribe’s trust fund.
Central Council formed Tlingit Haida Tribal Business Corporation in 2010 for the purpose of generating unrestricted revenue for the tribe. It became active in 2014 with Richard Rinehart as CEO.
He’s now also the CEO of KIRA. He communicates on a daily basis with former owner and KIRA president Carlos Garcia.
“They have a national presence, they’re in the industry we wanted to be in, and Carlos has a great plan under Alaska Native ownership,” Rinehart said.
Through the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) status, Alaska Native Corporations or tribally-owned companies are granted special opportunities in federal contracts.
KIRA employs about 660 employees. Its biggest contract is with Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, said Rinehart. The base has 17 million square feet of facilities and 40,000 people.
“They do everything. They run the heating and cooling plant, the electrical plant. They run the water and the sewer treatment plant. In the winter when I was there, they plow the roads. In the summer, they mow the grass,” he said.
KIRA has mechanics, electricians, plumbers, carpenters and other service people who maintain Fort Carson.
“They run the facility completely,” Rinehart said.
KIRA is also a contractor for the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and has other job sites around the country, he said.
Rinehart said Tlingit Haida Tribal Business Corporation doesn’t plan on buying any other federal contracting businesses.
“This will be the main platform that we’ll grow from,” he said.
Tlingit Haida Tribal Business Corporation also has plans to renovate the Thane Ore House into a cultural immersion park. That will also generate unrestricted funds for the tribe and provide tribal members with training and cultural opportunities.
“It’s hard to get all of our citizens the service that they deserve, the training they deserve,” President Richard Peterson said. “The Thane Ore house will allow us to provide retail service training, they’ll learn customer service, hospitality, those areas.”
The park will have master-apprentice programs for carving totem poles and canoes that Peterson said will “hopefully be the spark that continues the revitalization of our culture, that perpetuates our culture in a positive way and we’re able to sustain those programs.”
He said purchasing KIRA will create the sustainability Central Council needs.
• Contact reporter Lisa Phu at 523-2246 or lisa.phu@juneauempire.com.
