The Southeast island town of Wrangell is moving forward with plans to build a massive shipyard that could repair state ferries, U.S. Coast Guard ships, research vessels and military vessels.
Wrangell already has a busy marine service center that hauls out large commercial vessels locally and from nearby communities. The proposed shipyard would service much larger ships, up to 500 feet long, with a lift capacity of about 38,000 tons.
But the price tag is a bit shocking: between $605 and $726 million. The City and Borough of Wrangell has a $50 million grant pending with the federal Economic Development Administration.
“Obviously, $605 on the low end is a staggering figure. We could probably buy Wrangell Island for $605 million,” said Mason Villarma, Wrangell’s borough manager.
But Villarma said developers are approaching it in steps, “phasing the project into digestible chunks.”
Villarma spoke at a town hall meeting July 14 with several project partners. They included proposed shipyard operator JAG Marine Group, shipyard developers Pearlson & Pearlson, regional nonprofit hydropower company Southeast Alaska Power Agency, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority and others.
Wrangell’s shipyard would be built on an existing 42-acre deepwater port, which is a former mill site that the borough purchased for $2.5 million in 2022. It’s located six miles south of town.
There was overwhelming community input on the site’s potential uses, Villarma said.
“We don’t want cruise ships out there,” he said. “We want this to be an industrial complex with blue-collar jobs, trades-based, and that’s really what we focused on.”
The shipyard is estimated to employ up to 500 people at full capacity, which would significantly change the town’s economic landscape, as Wrangell only has a few thousand residents. For decades, many residents worked in the timber industry, until the town’s main sawmills started closing in the 1990s.
The shipyard’s would-be operator, JAG, runs shipyards in Ketchikan and Seward but is based in Michigan.
JAG’s Senior Vice President Charles Minton said the political climate is right for industrial development.
“We want to make sure that the work stays in Alaska, is completed in Alaska, and we service the vessels and the assets that are going to be positioned here, not only from a commercial perspective to help maintain commerce, but also from the defensive posture,” Minton said.
Earlier in 2026, Wrangell borough leaders visited a shipyard in Florida that project designer Pearlson & Pearlson worked on.
Pearlson & Pearlson Program Manager Luke Pitts said they’ll design Wrangell’s shipyard for maintenance and repair, but it would also accommodate shipbuilding.
“We’ve done several of these projects now and have a good kind of baseline of what things cost,” Pitts said. “We’ve also reached out to general contractors that have worked in Alaska in the recent past to kind of back our estimates.”
The partners say the infrastructure needed for the project is in place, including power, water, sewer and fuel. It will take a few years to secure more than a dozen required permits. So, in theory, the project could start construction in two years and take about three more years after that to complete.
That’s if the project can secure hundreds of millions of dollars in further funding.
