The wood already harvested from the Port Chilkoot Dock will be stored at the Public Safety Building until another sale this spring, but wood taken from the dock after Dec. 16 will be disposed of by Community Waste Solutions, borough leaders said this week.
The Haines Borough Assembly recently approved a $40,000 contract with CWS for disposal of the surplus wood.
Executive assistant to the manager Darsie Culbeck said the borough has already made about $15,000-$16,000 selling the usable wood, but it intends to sell more this spring.
The CWS contract will mainly take care of the roughly 500 creosote pilings and other unusable wood removed from the dock. “There is a lot of stuff that is junk. There are rotten creosote pilings that don’t have any function,” Culbeck said.
When CWS takes the remainder of the wood coming from the dock deconstruction to its property on FAA Road, the borough will still be able to use it. However, if CWS wants to use it first, the borough is out of luck.
“There is a clause in (the contract) that the borough still has access to that stuff once it is off the property,” Culbeck said.
So if a project requiring wood pops up – the Picture Point Wayside development, or maybe Battery Point trail boardwalks – the borough can collect the wood if it is still there.
“The borough has access to everything we take to CWS, so even if we wanted some of those pilings down the road, we can go get them,” he said.
Pacific Pile and Marine, the Seattle-based construction firm in charge of the dock project, originally quoted removal of the old dock materials at $250,000.
“Instead of just writing a check for $250,000, we thought outside of the box and got creative and thought we could recycle this in the community,” Culbeck said.
Of the 500 creosote pilings, 31,000 square-feet of decking and countless yards of other wood material at the dock, about two-thirds has been removed so far, he said.