Structure, a 7-month-old Juneau-based company, is looking hard at building an assembly plant in Wrangell to put together the hardware and software components of a new system for utilities and businesses to remotely monitor their operations.

If the company goes ahead with its plan, it could mean a dozen year-round jobs to start, with dozens more in the years ahead.

“Thank you for picking us and not Petersburg,” said Borough Assembly Member Jim DeBord, after the Structure team spent almost 90 minutes presenting their plan and answering questions at an assembly meeting on April 14.

Structure’s business plan is to build and market remote-monitoring systems that are easier to use and less expensive than what’s currently available. They want to emphasize the training of local operators, so that rural communities can avoid the high cost and delay of bringing in technicians from out of town to fix problems.

“There’s a real heavy dependence on down south and even foreign vendors,” Structure team member Ephraim Froehlich told the assembly.

“We want to be empowering communities to be doing this work on their crucial infrastructure themselves.”

Wrangell is an attractive location for the assembly operation, he said. The town has affordable electricity, available land and a deepwater port.

The team wants to “bring jobs back to Alaska and keep jobs here,” said Structure partner Blake Rider, who has an electrical engineering degree and has “been doing industrial automation for 20 years, that makes me a workaholic,” he told the assembly.

The initial building for assembling components would be about 20,000 square feet, Froehlich said. That’s about the same size as Stikine Middle School.

The operation would start with a dozen assembly jobs and grow to 30, 40, 50 as Structure manufactures its own components, he said.

The team is working on site selection and funding for the business venture. “We want to do that as quickly as possible,” Froehlich said.

Getting a building put up, outfitted with equipment and a crew hired to start assembling and shipping in 12 to 14 months “would be ideal for us,” said Jake Haas, one of the founders of Structure.

“We buy existing parts,” modify components, load software and assemble the system, Haas explained.

The company is in the business of designing and building SCADA systems (supervisory control and data acquisition). Such systems have been used since the 1970s to monitor sewage pumps and water lines, including Wrangell’s own utilities, and multiple other production operations.

Andrew Scambler, Wrangell’s water treatment plant operator, said he uses SCADA every day to track water quality, filters and pressure with real-time information.

Team member Peter Peel showed a prototype monitoring console, which he called Version 2.5. It’s assembled with “more-or-less off-the-shelf components” to work with Structure’s software to collect data from sensors and display the information on a screen for operators to monitor what’s happening at remote sites, such as pump stations or pipes.

The data could come to the console by fiber optic or copper lines, cell or radio signals, Peel said.

The plan is to build the consoles in Wrangell, develop the software in Sitka, and maintain the company headquarters in Juneau.

Peel, Haas, Froehlich, Rider and several other members of the team attended the April 14 assembly meeting. Just about everyone involved is from Juneau, with a couple of Sitka members, one from Skagway and one from Norway.

Expanding into a full manufacturing operation, which could double the building size, could take two to three years, Haas said.

The company is not publicly sharing any cost estimates for its Wrangell building or its overall business investment at this time.

“The funding component is feasible for the assembling,” Haas said in an interview the day after the assembly meeting. “The manufacturing part will take quite a bit heavier lift.”

The borough assembly on April 14 unanimously approved signing a memorandum of understanding with Structure, calling for both parties to cooperatively evaluate “potential development of a hardware assembly and manufacturing facility in Wrangell,” probably built at the 6-Mile Mill site which the borough wants to develop for commercial and industrial tenants.

The building could go where the borough had thought a private company, Greensparc, might build a 10,000-square-foot data center.

“This town is not super-stoked on the data center,” and the assembly is likely to say no, Borough Manager Mason Villarma said at the meeting.

Borough officials have been supportive of Greensparc’s efforts to possibly build a data center in Wrangell to house computer servers that would provide data storage and processing for customers. Community testimony at several public meetings, however, has been mostly negative, citing concerns over demand on the town’s power system.

Structure’s interest in the borough-owned property at 6-Mile is a good opportunity for the borough to pivot away from the data center, Villarma said.

The borough hopes the main tenant for the former sawmill property will be JAG Marine Group, which is waiting on an economic feasibility of building a shipyard at the site. Wrangell has applied for a $50 million federal grant to cover much of the cost of developing the site for a shipyard, barge freight yard and other uses, including utilities and streets.

The agreement approved by the assembly on April 14, which does not bind the borough to spending any money, commits Structure to “work in good faith to plan, finance and develop a hardware assembly and manufacturing facility in Wrangell,” including coordinating with the borough.

The agreement, which runs through December 2028, “is non-binding and serves as a high-level framework to guide collaboration between the borough and Structure,” Villarma explained in his report to the assembly.

“I am so excited that you are even considering Wrangell,” Mayor Patty Gilbert said at the meeting.

Structure’s team includes Chad McGraw, of Sitka-based McGraw Construction, who has toured the 6-Mile site and is drafting plans for the assembly building, Haas said.

“I’m a big supporter of these guys,” said McGraw, whose company has built projects in Wrangell and throughout Southeast.

“We feel very fortunate to have team members who truly believe in this,” Haas said.