WASILLA - NPI LLC, a tenant at the Matanuska-Susitna Borough’s Port MacKenzie, says it no longer is in the business of chipping wood for shipment to Taiwan and Korea.
A three-year, borough-imposed moratorium on timber cutting on borough land has stymied that operation, chief operating officer Ron Arvin said Monday. Jobs at the company used to number more than 100, he said, but now only a handful of NPI employees remain, some overseeing company investments at Port MacKenzie and others working on new NPI ventures elsewhere.
Instead of chipping wood, the company ships 40 to 60 containers of scrap metal each week from the Port of Anchorage to Asian markets, Arvin said.
“That’s what we’re doing to keep the lights on,” he said.
The commodities market is bustling worldwide, Arvin said. NPI is shipping scrap metal, old I-beams and materials from mining and drilling operations.
Arvin said the company is also preparing to open a cement shipping facility at Port MacKenzie. A new warehouse there stands ready to receive its first shipment of cement, maybe this year, he said.
The company was scheduled to bring four ships through the deep-water dock at Port MacKenzie this year, borough port director Marc Van Dongen said. Only one ship docked, in July.
Van Dongen, asked whether the borough-owned port would lose money this year, replied: “We may be in the black next year.”
CH2M Hill, formerly Veco, is talking to the borough about leasing land there to build and ship oil-field modules over the road, but a lease has not yet been signed, Van Dongen said.
The borough land department is also negotiating with Alaska Interstate Construction, an Anchorage-based construction firm, about mining gravel at the port.
If gravel is loaded onto barges there, it means money to the borough in wharfage and docking fees, as well as royalty fees for the extracted materials. NPI would also benefit, Van Dongen said, in fees to use the company conveyor system.
Meantime, NPI has filed two lawsuits, both seeking to recoup $3 million it gave the borough to assist on a $14 million deep-water dock extension. The company also built an $8 million conveyor system to haul its wood chips to barges over the dock. In return, it got exclusive rights to use the dock and can charge companies using the conveyor a fee.
But NPI, in its suit, said the borough has failed to deal fairly. The claims mostly relate to lease credits the borough promised NPI in exchange for work by the company such as port-district road improvements and lease payments.
NPI filed its first suit in May. The borough on Oct. 15 asked the court to dismiss the case, saying NPI attorneys failed to serve borough attorneys with paperwork on time. NPI attorney Douglas Pope, who also represents former state Rep. Bruce Weyrauch of Juneau on federal charges of conspiracy, extortion, fraud and bribery, said in court filings that his office “was overwhelmed with preparing the evidence from thousands of documents” in the Weyrauch case.
He said he believed that the borough had adequate notice of the company’s complaint. A newspaper article in July outlined the claims and, Pope stated in his filing, he discussed mediation of the case with borough attorney Nick Spiropoulos.
On Oct. 16, NPI filed a second, nearly identical suit that would start the process over. To date, Spiropoulos said, the borough has not answered the charges in NPI’s complaint. A response to NPI’s claims is due Nov. 13, Spiropoulos said.
Find Daily News reporter Rindi White online at www.adn.com/contact/rwhite or call 352-6709.
