The city is moving forward with plans to increase its fresh water supply. At Tuesday night’s meeting, council awarded a $270,000 contract to the environmental consulting firm Shannon & Wilson to do exploratory work for new well development, and to refurbish existing wells.

Public utilities director Dan Winters explained to council that the city has been unable to meet the fish processing plants’ water demand on five separate occasions since 2005 -- although he noted that most of those times, it wasn’t because the city had actually run out of water.

“Three of those were maintenance issues, one was an actual plant shutdown, and one we just ran out of water because it was a dry season.”

The work proposed by Shannon and Wilson will increase water supply immediately through cleaning and refurbishing existing wells. It will also give the city a better idea of where future wells could be developed. A preliminary study by the firm last year suggested that Unalaska Valley would be the best place, but Council objected because of potential impacts on salmon spawning in Unalaska Lake. Winters told council the new work would test groundwater levels in the area to see whether a new well could be installed without impacting the lake level.

All four councilors present at the meeting voted to award the contract.

Council also unanimously supported a resolution asking the state to speed up the process of building a new ferry to serve Southwest Alaska. Mayor Shirley Marquardt explained she had asked for the resolution to be on the agenda.

“It’s time we get the ball rolling to try and really get our point across to the governor and DOT that maybe it’s time to go ahead and start replacing 49-year-old ferries instead of building new ferries for Lynn Canal where they haven’t even been requested.”

The public also chimed on the issue. Resident Frank Kelty called it unacceptable that, “communities... have been hung out to dry.”

“Three, four years ago -- we knew something like this was possibly going to happen because we kept getting blown off when we talked about “how about a new ferry for SW, when are we going to get something for SW, when’s the Kennicott going to do its original mission, which was to take care of SW.”

Several councilors chimed in with their support, also asking that local businesses contribute data about how the ferry cancellations have affected them, to add concrete numbers to the city’s petition.