The executive summary is 42 pages of data points like truck weights, locations of school bus stops, speed and traffic analyses and bridge repair costs along the Alaska, Richardson and Steese Highways or ARS Corridor. Study lead Randy Kinney of Kinney Engineering says the report was compiled by a research team, along with input from a 30-member Transportation Advisory Committee, or TAC, made up of stakeholders along the corridor.
“I’ve never had a project like this. As an engineer, it was very interesting, challenging, and I liked it a lot. The TAC involvement was very good on this, and what made this unique is it was such a long corridor, such a diverse corridor. It was really focused on the ore haul,” Kinney said.
The complete report, called the Corridor Action Plan, is 457 pages long. Kinney and his team gave a Scope of Work to the Department of Transportation as far back as 2018.
The report was expected to be completed by the end of 2023, before the ore haul from the Manh Choh mine in Tetlin was to begin. But Kinross and Contango, the developers of the mine, began runs to the gold mill at Fort Knox mine north of Fairbanks in the fall of 2023, and the report came out a year later.
Kinney said the direction of the fact-finding was steered by the TAC. And would not have been so well developed without Shelley Wade of Agnew/Beck Consulting facilitating the many meetings of the Transportation Advisory Committee in 2022 and 2023.
“If this report has any success at all, it's because of the TAC involvement and the level of public involvement that we had,” Kinney said.
DOT spokesperson John Perrault agrees.
“This model of community engagement, building a table and bringing people to it is something that the Department of Transportation is trying to do, trying to make our work less top down and more community led or community informed,” Perrault said.
The report now has a long list of recommendations for DOT, for Kinross/Manh Choh, which developed the mine, and for Black Gold Transport, the trucking contractor with the big double-trailer “B-trains” referred to in the report hundreds of times.
For example, on page 276 of the report used weight data from 5,949 Black Gold Transport trucks between October, 2023 and October, 2024. And figured extrapolated that 17.66% of all the trucks exceeded the agreed limit of 162,815 pounds.
https://files.kinneyeng.com/ARS_PDFs/Final_Plan/FinalPlan.pdf
Kinney says the members of the TAC were ahead of the contract and DOT engineers when they came up the recommendation to keep the weigh scales open longer hours, to enforce compliance with weight limits.
“This is a great example of a TAC driven alternative -- to increase the hours of scale operations. It was not something that, that we came up with. It didn't really seem to be needed, from our viewpoint. But once you saw these trucks going overweight, then that kind of lent a lot of credibility to that alternative,” Kinney said.
But DOT’s John Perrault says the agency doesn’t have the money to hire more commercial law enforcement folks to staff the weigh stations around the state.
“That would be a legislative priority, and where that decision would get made. We do our best to staff across the state with the resources that we're given and we do things like stagger open times to make sure that we are catching a representative sample of the vehicles out on the road and enforcing rules against all users equally,” Perrault said.
A big new section of the report is for public comments received in writing and received in person at public meetings. Kinney said researching and responding to every comment was one of the reasons the report was so delayed.
“And that has happened throughout this process. If something changes or comes up, you go, ‘Oh no, now we got to look at this.’ And we did,” Kinney said.
DOT Public Information Officer, John Perrault says new information was added as recently as November.
“I really want to compliment Kinney Engineering on being very responsive in their scope. I mean, right up to the very last, continuing to incorporate new information that's live on the ground,” Perrault said.
Perrault said he’s still working his way through the report, but would be happy to answer questions from the public. His contact information is here.
(907) 451-5311
john.perreault@alaska.gov
Kinross/Manh Choh is a corporate underwriter for KUAC.
