f your organization's foray into Alaska involves energy or construction services, tourism, telecommunications, electrical contracting, environmental consulting and remediation or real estate development, it will likely be working with one or more of the state's regional or village native corporations. Formed by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 as an alternative to the reservation model implemented for native populations in the lower 48 states, these corporations today are powerful economic engines from the metropolitan Anchorage area to the energy-rich North Slope. Some of the larger of the 13 regional corporations have surpassed the US$1-billion-in-revenue per year mark and are on their way to being among the top economic forces in the state.
      Village corporation land on the Arctic Slope is naturally valuable with oil and gold beneath it, but savvy players elsewhere are no less fortunate.
      "The lands we received are in an urban area," says Curtis McQueen, CEO of Eklutna, Inc., based in Eagle River near Anchorage. "As the city grows and expands and needs more residential, commercial and industrial land, we're the only game in town." Eklutna used to sell or lease land, and that was the extent of its role in Anchorage's growth.
      Now, he says, land is in shorter supply, and Eklutna has more skin in the game. "The way the corporation is going now, we will be a design-build, turnkey developer for you. We have enough leverage to do the site work, build the building and have a few more profit centers for our corporations than we've had in the past."
      Like its larger, regional counterparts, Eklutna is in several lines of business, from residential and commercial development to supplying sand and gravel to private and public developers to leasing space at its 155-acre (63-hectare) Birchwood Industrial Park in Eagle River. The Alaska Railroad Corp. is helping generate interest in the park, which has rail access north to Fairbanks and south to the Port of Anchorage, which is in the midst of a $700-million expansion. Interest in industrial space at Birchwood and elsewhere is on the upswing as a $26-billion natural gas pipeline project moves closer to becoming reality.
      "Where are you going to store that pipe when it comes in from the port and needs to be sent up to Fairbanks, and where do you store the construction equipment?" notes McQueen. One tenant at Birchwood is building prefabricated houses for use in rural Alaska; the rail link can send them north to the interior or south to the port for shipment by water to points in western Alaska. More interest in the site is coming from Asian companies needing transshipment centers and exporters sending seafood and such raw materials as coal and timber back home.       "Eklutna is the largest single owner of land in the Anchorage area, and they are not taking undue advantage of their position. They are taking appropriate advantage of their ability to provide land that previously was not available, because Eklutna wasn't in the thought process of making it available," says Bill Popp, president and CEO of Anchorage Economic Development Corp. (AEDC).
      Popp says a "fairly significant amount of acreage and buildings" is still available in Anchorage under several different ownership entities.
      "On balance, while Eklutna has brought an important new land resource to market, there is still a significant and competitive market for land and buildings," he stresses. "The Port of Anchorage is adding about 130 acres [53 hectares], and we're also getting some preliminary signals from the military that they are making some of their land available for private-sector leases for light industrial classification on some of their fairly substantial acreage along some of the major highway corridors, particularly the Glenn Highway. They haven't finalized plans, but an initial look is being taken at that idea."       Meanwhile, Cook Inlet Region, Inc. (CIRI), an Alaska native regional corporation, is moving forward with plans to jointly develop a wind farm on Fire Island in Cook Inlet, near Anchorage, with renewable energy company enXco Inc. In July 2008, Gov. Sarah Palin and the state legislature approved a $25-million plan to fund the infrastructure needed to connect the wind farm to the area's Railbelt energy grid.
      As with other renewable energy projects in the works, the long-term benefits of the Fire Island project in today's lower-cost-of-oil context look rosier than short-term benefits envisioned when the project was getting under way and oil prices were on the march.
      "In the long term, it's not jobs intensive, and the cost of power probably will come in relatively competitively with current costs of power based on natural gas burn," says Ethan Schutt, CIRI's senior vice president, land and legal affairs. "Over the long term, the economic benefit is predicated on rising fuel prices as opposed to a flat, non-fuel charge for the wind."