Construction Season Slow for Southeast Alaska.

• Author: SWAGEL, WILL

In the city of Yakutat, at the northern tier of the Southeast Alaska panhandle, there's plenty of land for building. But with the economy being limited, privately owned buildings in the downtown area are in short supply.

So Yakutat city and tribal officials are arranging to have two three-story structures trucked from the airport to downtown-to use as the new city hall and possibly new headquarters for the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe. The Federal Aviation Administration constructed the buildings in the 1970s, and the materials used are solid and valuable by today's standards, well worth saving.

Building activity in this northernmost Southeast community is slow for now, City Planner Paul Wescott says. But the pace may pick up with the installation of sewer and electric lines to the high lands above Yakutat's small downtown. That project is expected to yield about a dozen residential lots and a handful of commercial properties.

The town's small boat harbor is slated for expansion and a chemical storage building is to be constructed at the air port, Wescott says. But other than the above, for this season, no noteworthy con struction is expected in Yakutat.

Elsewhere in Southeast, projects especially publicly funded ones-continue at the satisfactory pace similar to recent years, say officials. But in the private sector, builders and regulators report that construction activity is in a relative lull from the frantic pace of the last few years. The exception is Sitka, where a number of residential, commercial and industrial projects are underway or planned to begin this spring and summer, alongside million of dollars in state capital improvements.

Sitka Boom

Sitka Building Official Harry Chartier thinks the present burst of construction activity may have been caused partly by Sitka investors holding back on their plans for the first few years after the Alaska Pulp Mill closed its doors in 1993.

"Industrial and commercial activity is being spawned because we have had several profitable business years in a row and are moving ahead with projects that may have been on the back burner for a while," Chartier says.

Several stores in Sitka's downtown are undergoing extensive renovations, including the doubling in size of one of Sitka's main retail plazas. Residential prices are rising, with new large homes being built on waterfront and view properties.

A main impetus toward industrial development has been millions of dollars in federal timber supply disaster...