Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

The U.S. Forest Service will demolish and rebuild the bridge at Excursion Inlet by Sept. 30.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski announced in a press release that the Forest Service recently sourced components for the new bridge and will soon barge them in to begin work.

The Ocean Beauty cannery uses the bridge for accessing its water supply.

The Forest Service had planned to abandon the defunct bridge but the borough made a deal to pay $270,000 of the federal agency’s roughly $700,000 estimated cost of rebuilding it if the borough agreed to take ownership

“I thank the Haines Borough for agreeing to assume ownership of the bridge after repairs are complete, and thank the Forest Service for their hard work to structure the bridge replacement agreement,” Murkowski said.

The Haines Borough Assembly voted 5-1 in early July to assume ownership of the bridge with member Tom Morphet as the dissenting vote.

In an assembly meeting three days before Murkowski’s announcement, Morphet made a motion to direct Haines Borough manager Debra Schnabel to seek congressional delegation assistance to keep the Excursion Inlet bridge, once it’s rebuilt, in the U.S. Forest Service’s ownership.

Morphet compared the purchase of the bridge to the borough’s purchase of the Lutak dock, citing high replacement costs that the infrastructure’s revenues wouldn’t support.

“Almost 50 years ago we thought taking over the Lutak dock was going to be a great thing for this community and if you take the revenues that we’ve made from the wharfage and crossing of that dock I don’t think they amount to the $35 million replacement costs,” Morphet said.

Assembly member Heather Lende agreed with Morphet’s concern but said she wouldn’t want to jeopardize plans to rebuild the bridge in a timely manner.

“We’ve got to have it for the cannery there and the community at Excursion Inlet,” Lende said. “I wouldn’t want this to end up harming one of our largest sources of borough revenue because we were quibbling over it.”

Ocean Beauty is the second largest property taxpayer in the Haines Borough and buys fish harvested from Lynn Canal, Cross Sound, Icy Strait and the Fairweather grounds.

The Forest Service will hand over ownership of the bridge to the borough once it’s rebuilt.