By Jasz Garrett
Juneau, Alaska (KINY) – The City and Borough of Juneau’s Assembly holds its retreat every December to integrate new Assembly members into the process and brainstorm for the coming fiscal year’s budget.
Housing and budget takeaways
When reviewing housing needs, the Assembly chose to prioritize regulatory options. One of the thoughts behind this choice is that the rewrite of Title 49 could allow for further city development.
They recognized that a rewrite of Title 49 could spark controversy for how it impacts different neighborhoods, but CBJ’s Community Development Director Jill MacLean said public input will be encouraged.
“The first part of any plan is public engagement,” she said. “The code would reflect on how Juneau wants to be built.”
It could take between three and five years to rewrite Title 49, partially because of the extensive public process.
The rewrite of Title 49 would consider Juneau’s climate and environment, and focus on transit-oriented development. MacLean said the biggest challenge is it’s a complex code and complex land. And right now, it’s designed for flat, urban locations. That doesn’t work for Juneau.
Madame Mayor Beth Weldon said she has run into issues with Title 49 hampering land development since her first year on the Assembly.
“Every year, we keep hearing from the contractors as well as the Planning Commission, and the CDD staff that Title 49 is getting in the way. So, I’m really excited that CDD took my challenge which I gave Jill MacLean, the director, and said, go back to your staff and without any sidebars come up with a strategy that you think will work,” she said. “You could tell that she was very excited, very animated, and the Assembly went with it. I mean, the Assembly said, let’s be bold, and let’s try it. So, we’re gonna do a total rewrite of Title 49 and spend a lot of resources doing it. It will be additional staff, a couple of staff positions and hopefully, we’ll knock it out, and then we don’t have to worry about setbacks as much.”
She said she hopes that contractors will chime in once the public input period is announced.
Their second housing priority was to add more money to the Affordable Housing Fund. In the FY23 budget, the fund balance is approximately $1.4 million with $1.1 million allocated for the Round 3 competition.
The third housing priority was city-led development, such as the ongoing Pederson Hill phase 2 project and Telephone Hill.
2nd and Franklin is another ongoing long-term development program that CBJ recognized as a high priority.
CBJ acquired Telephone Hill from the state earlier this year with plans to develop the neighborhood.
First Forty Feet Consultants and CBJ Engineering have held two open houses regarding Telephone Hill’s redevelopment. Most of the public feedback so far has been advocating for a no-build option due to the history of the neighborhood.
“I would encourage the Assembly to be courageous,” District 2 Assemblymember Michelle Bonnet Hale said regarding Telephone Hill. “Or we won’t be able to move forward.”
Currently, staff are reviewing preliminary concepts with cost estimates and two documents related to historic preservation and will provide the Assembly with a status update and draft documents in the next few weeks.
First Forty Feet should have a wider community survey in the next two months to give the public more direction.
Recently re-elected District 1 Assemblymember Alicia Hughes-Skandijs said that she wants to find out how they can provide the maximum number of units, and how to build where they already have CBJ development since that’s where they have the most control.
Since the new City Hall was voted down this October, 450 Whittier could now be available for multiple housing units. However, the Assembly would need grants to provide that option.
Assemblymember Wade Bryson said he’d also encourage the Assembly to prioritize workforce families to become homeowners. He said he wants to make sure that the police, firefighters, medical workers, and teachers have a home.
“The lack of first responders in our workforce is a symptom—housing is the root of that problem,” Bryson said.
It was also noted the city needs to increase access to homes to make city development projects successful.
Madame Mayor Weldon gave her biggest takeaway from this year’s retreat.
“We’ve reinforced the idea that we all know that housing is very, very important. And we came up with a three-prong strategy, if that would be said and then we went to the budget. I think when we talked about the budget, I think the biggest takeaway we found was that we might be okay with a one-time dipping into our fund balance to make our budget balance,” she said. “Because we ended up with so much excess sales tax. We were also very, very sensitive to the property tax issue with the mill rate. We’ve given the staff direction to do the best that they can to not raise the mill rate to balance the budget.”
CBJ did lower the mill rate this year, the lowest it has been in decades. However, because property values have gone up, some residents will still pay more tax than last year.
Looking at limiting tourism
Once the 5-ship limit goes into place this summer, Tourism Manager Alexandra Pierce said it will be the first time Juneau will be without growth in a long time. This summer, Juneau saw a 40% growth, bouncing back from the pandemic. Going from no tourists to the 40% jump made Juneau feel busier than ever for some locals, raising complaints.
Pierce added the public can submit proposals on how to use Marine Passenger Fees starting Monday. She added that improving the Seawalk downtown with Marine Passenger Fees would be “game-changing”, positively impacting traffic.
Madame Mayor Weldon explained what they chose to focus on for this upcoming tourism season.
“We agreed with Alex that the best way to move forward to decrease our numbers is to negotiate with the lines and CLIA. So I think we’ll let her do that with setting some kind of daily limit, looking at potential cruise ship size limit, also trying to find at least a day a month if we can with no ships,” she said. “That’ll probably be the hardest one to do because as she said, when she introduced her topic, we are a part of a big region, and stuff like that is a little bit hard to do.”
Assemblymember Wade Bryson said he thinks they need to work closely with local tour operators when making any of these decisions. He said while it’s the city’s job to mitigate tourism impacts to citizens, he also appreciates that tourism is a strong part of the local economy.
It was also noted that managing tourism from cruise ships can become legally complicated, according to Municipal Attorney Robert Palmer and City & Borough Attorney John R. Corso.
