When Anchorage's Acting Mayor Matt Claman was thinking about ways to spend some of the economic stimulus money Congress is sending Alaska's way, the big expansion project set for the Port of Anchorage popped to mind.

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Bill Sheffield

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Matt Claman

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For $75 million, the port could hire about 1,500 construction workers and put them to work almost immediately, the mayor said in a press release.

Good idea, port director Bill Sheffield said Friday. But that might be a typo.

"It's not $75 million," Sheffield said. "I'm asking for $175 million."

Across Anchorage and across Alaska, people with state and local agencies watched from afar for weeks as President Barack Obama's stimulus package moved through the U.S. House and Senate, changing almost daily by tens of billions of dollars in promised federal spending. All the while, they've pondered how to put the eventual money Alaska gets to good use. Gov. Sarah Palin has estimated that could be as much as $1 billion.

Until now, it's been a somewhat academic exercise. This is to be earmark-free legislation. The stimulus money will be apportioned to states according to formulas and directed to an array of purposes intended to create jobs and spur a national economic recovery. Some will go toward tax relief, some to pay for health insurance for the unemployed, for education, for environmental projects, for lots of other things. And money for infrastructure -- billions to rebuild highways, repair aging bridges, replace damaged water and sewer lines.

But now, with the $787 billion bill through Congress and with the president expected to sign it Tuesday, crunch time approaches.

Some city executives in Anchorage expected to work through the weekend, refining potential projects that have been on one list or another since late last year. At the Alaska Railroad, strategic planning director Bruce Carr couldn't say for sure Friday what projects the railroad may eventually try to fund with the stimulus money.

"But we have about six days to figure it out," he said.

According to one of the late versions of the stimulus bill, federal agencies would have only a week to make the money available, Carr said. Public transportation agencies like the state-owned railroad will then have 180 days to apply for federal transit grants, get projects through the federal review system and funds obligated to projects, he said.

Some of the money set aside for "shovel ready" highway projects is on a much tighter deadline -- 90 days to go to contract, state transportation officials have said.

"The bottom line is, there will be a lot of money coming into the state of Alaska," Carr said. "At the same time, this stimulus money is on top of our normal annual appropriations, which also have to be processed. There will be some wild scrambles going on trying to meet the specific deadlines of the recovery bill as well as continue the ongoing projects."

STATE HAS THE CAPACITY

Does the state and its construction and building industries have the manpower, skilled labor and heavy equipment available to handle all the work that the stimulus legislation may pump out this year

"We believe so," said Sam Robert Brice, the Fairbanks-based president of the board of Associated General Contractors of Alaska.

The association's economic forecast for 2009 has projected a 3 percent drop in overall construction in the state this year, and an even bigger drop in private construction.

"We're projecting it will be flat, even with the stimulus ... for 2009," Brice said. "We believe the capacity is there for both the contractors and the Alaska work force."

Some of the stimulus money might be used to move up projects that are scheduled for construction with state or city funds years from now. Or it could be used to complete funding for some partially funded projects.

At the central region offices of the state Department of Transportation, director Gordon Keith has been thinking about ruts. Miles and miles of ruts gouged by winter studded tires and truck traffic into state-owned roads threading across Anchorage and Southcentral Alaska.

And some new construction is in the works too. A $15.5 million reworking of the Old Glenn Highway between South Birchwood and Peters Creek is on the AMATS stimulus list, along with $5 million to add to money for improving the intersection at Lake Otis Parkway and Tudor Road.

As of Thursday, the state was expecting to get a total of about $70 million in funding for Anchorage-area roads, rail and other transit projects, and Keith wanted to devote a good part of that to repairing damaged pavement on the Glenn Highway and Minnesota Drive from 13th Avenue to C Street. He convinced a bare majority of the joint state-city transportation planning committee called AMATS policy committee to take $2.3 million that had been set aside to replace aging People Mover buses and put the money into fixing roads instead.

"This stimulus package is first and foremost a jobs bill," Keith said. Buying buses for the People Mover system might employ people in a bus factory in Indiana, but not in Anchorage.

WASTE TO ENERGY

At City Hall, Randy Virgin thinks some of the stimulus money might help make an electrical generation project at the Anchorage landfill pencil out.

Methane oozes up from the landfill all the time. To stay in line with air quality requirements, the city pipes it to a flare and burns it off. If, instead, the city could afford about $7 million to install a generator to turn that wasted methane into electricity, better all around, said Virgin, who works for the Office of Community and Economic Development.

"Whether there's stimulus money for it in this bill is a little bit murkier," he said.

Virgin's boss at OCED, Mary Jane Michael, is hoping to add stimulus funds to existing money for projects like fixing Loussac Library's tricky-in-winter second floor entrance. Maybe $400,000 could augment private money and provide more summer parks jobs for young people, she said.

On paper, Sheffield's port project promises the biggest employment bump. He insisted the 1,500 construction jobs he says the port could produce for $175 million is realistic.

"We've been employing 500-plus in the last few years in the summertime" on the port's existing construction schedule, he said, adding that accelerating the expansion timeline would save millions in the long run.

"This year anyway we're going to put in about 2,000 more feet of dock," Sheffield said. "If I had the stimulus money I would be working on the south end (too) ... filling more ground, driving sheet pile ... plus I've got land I've already got filled I could start utilities in."

But the port project has its critics too. Bob Shavelson, head of the conservation group Cook Inletkeeper, has written to Congressional leaders asking them to bar the port project from stimulus money until there's a better showing of the need for the expansion, and until questions about its effects on salmon and beluga whales have been resolved.

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