North Pole community works toward new welcome center

NORTH POLE, Alaska (KTUU/KTVF) - Organizers in the North Pole community are currently fundraising to establish a new 2,200 square foot welcome center near the North Pole Plaza in a lot off of Santa Claus Lane.

According to Howard Rixie, Treasurer for the North Pole Community Chamber of Commerce, the chamber determined in 2022 that a new welcome center was needed because the longtime center, a 60-year-old cabin near the Elf’s Den Restaurant and Lounge, was infested with mold and had to be torn down.

Welcoming operations are currently run out of a smaller interim center built on skids near where the new one is being planned, with the intention of selling the structure when the community no longer needs it.

“This is a community project. It’s a legacy project for the entire community,” Rixie said.

The new center, as it is being planned, would help to ease the transition into the community for new residents, including servicemembers coming into Eielson Air Force Base.

“It’s a part of building the North Pole legacy,” Rixie said. “North Pole is obviously not the same that it was in the 50s and 60s or even the 80s or 90s here. It is growing. When you add 8,300 people into our community from the military, it’s changing the dynamics of the entire area.”

It would also serve as a resource for members of the community who are looking for services, including schools, churches and other entities.

The North Pole business community, meanwhile, is expected to be able to use the welcome center for advice and partnerships, while high school and young adult workers entering the labor force can go through the welcome center to connect to local apprenticeships and other programs.

“We found that these are the needs of the community and said, ‘Okay, we have to change our whole business model,’ and then it was predicated on those three mission sets: welcoming, business development there and labor development, all that, and the welcome center is intended to play a role, an active role, in all three of those mission sets,” Rixie explained.

In addition to fulfilling these missions, the center, according to Rixie, would house a historical museum and a space where new business owners can test out their ideas.

Between $1 million and $1.5 million still needs to be raised for the project to move forward, Rixie explained, a process that is expected to take another two or three years.

The community has been holding a variety of fundraisers in recent years to make up the rest of the needed money, including a weekly farmer’s market, an October wine-tasting, and on Aug. 22, the third annual “Days of Christmas Past Fundraiser Dinner,” exploring what North Pole was like in the 1970s.

“We want to be able to go through and do things deliberately as far as reshaping or shaping our community and so that’s where this welcome center is, is helping shape that whole future North Pole community,” Rixie said.

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