City and Borough Assembly - Regular Meeting

All right, Sarah, are we ready to go on your side? Awesome, well, thank you, everybody. I was watching the wall clock, which happens to be a little bit slower than iPad time, so. It is actually 6.01 now, so we better get this show on the road, huh? Welcome, everybody, thank you for joining. I'll call to your order the regularly scheduled meeting of Tuesday, July 28th, 2026. Please join me for a flag salute. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. The Assembly of the City and Borough of Sitka would like to respectfully acknowledge the traditional First People of Sitka. With gratitude, we proceed on Tlingit Ani. Sarah, roll call, please.

Mayor Eisenbeis.

Present.

Mr. Yesdad.

Here.

Ms. Carlson. Here. Ms. Riley. Here. Mr. Christensen.

Here.

Mr. Mosher.

Here.

And Mr. Salim.

Here. Thank you. Any correspondence or agenda changes this evening? I see none. That'll bring us to our ceremonial matters this evening. A citation honoring U.S. Coast Guard Day. I'll read the citation first and then we have representatives from several of our commands here that will come up to accept the citations. A citation honoring U.S. Coast Guard Day. The city and borough of Sitka recognizes August 4th as U.S. Coast Guard Day nationwide and especially wishes to honor all Sitka-based personnel of the U.S. Coast Guard. Whereas Sitka is a Coast Guard city, one of 37 communities in the nation, to be so designated. And the City and Borough of Sitka and its citizens take this responsibility seriously by making special efforts to acknowledge the professional work of Sitka Coast Guard men and women in reaching out to these personnel and their families and making them feel at home at their home away from home. And whereas July 4th is National U.S. Coast Guard Day, marking the birthday of the United States Coast Guard, which began in 1790 and received its present name in 1915 when Congress supported providing the nation with a single maritime service dedicated to saving life at sea and enforcing the nation's maritime laws, and later added maintaining the country's aids to maritime navigation and other missions. And whereas... The City and Borough of Sitka and the community of Sitka continue to support and honor the five Sitka Coast Guard units, Air Station Sitka, Cutter Kukui, Aids to Navigation Team Sitka, Marine Safety Detachment Sitka, and Electronic Support Detachment Detail Sitka as America's Guardian of the Seas. Now, therefore, the Assembly of the City and Borough of Sitka, in recognition of the 236th birthday of the U.S. Coast Guard and Sitka's status as a Coast Guard city, does hereby recognize the professionalism, skill, and unwavering devotion to duty of all Sitka Coast Guard personnel to provide Sitka with the safety, security, and stewardship of our oceans in an often dangerous world. We thank you and your families for our service. Signed and sealed on this 28th day of July by myself and the clerk, Sarah Peterson. Now since we made everybody get all dressed up, we gotta at least have a photo op, right? Again, thank you all. This is something that we do annually, something that I look forward to, especially when new commands come through and I get to meet new faces, right? But, you know, this is a very welcoming community to all of our Coast Guardsmen. So we thank you for being here, for coming up. And then, yeah, if you wanted to say anything, since you have the opportunity.

Sure, I'll start. I'm BMC Dean Buckler. I'm the officer in charge of ACE Navigation Team SICA. I got here last June, so I've done one full year here in SICA, and I can say that it is a wonderful, magical place for me and my family. I have a one- and a two-year-old, and they absolutely love the support. And just like the citation said, a home away from home, they feel right at home here in SICA, and it's one of the most best places I've ever been. So I appreciate that. Thank you.

Thanks, Wes. Good evening, everybody. Commander Joe Plunkett recently took command of Air Station Sitka. Excited to be here. I was here from 17 to 20, one of the best tours of my career in pinnacle aviation to take command of an air station. So it's a pretty unique spot that we have here to be in such close partnership, and no other unit I've ever felt so appreciated by the local community. So thanks again. Next year is the 50th anniversary of Air Station Sitka, so plan on a big celebration. We're excited to be here. Thank you, sir.

That's cheating. Thank you guys. I didn't know this this morning, but I wore my blue so I could blend in with them. Moving on to special reports this evening. We have a couple scheduled special reports. Sitka Tribe of Alaska, Yetikuka, are you here? I don't see. Anyone else from Sitka Tribe of Alaska? Great. Moving on to our department quarterly reports. We have two this evening. We'll start with Electric and Ron.

Good evening, my name is Ron Vinson. I'm the Electric Utility Director here for the city. Tonight I'm gonna be reporting on the state of the Electric Department for the second quarter of FY26. So, quick overview. You'll see this in the document that was shared, but Some of the highlight areas to point out over this last quarter, we addressed our annual hands-on safety. That usually happens between March and May. It's a good opportunity for all of our staff to get some hands-on safety training. We pull in some consultants and it's a really good opportunity for people to catch up on their training, and then also kind of get some exposure to things that we're not used to. So we addressed that in May. We also had some contract development this last quarter, getting us prepared for some of these big upcoming capital projects. In addition to that, we worked through a number of customer jobs. totaled about 14 total service additions or service expansion. So we get a lot of folks that are upgrading their service from 100 amp services to 200 amp services to have more modern infrastructure in the homes. We saw a lot of that this last quarter. As we're getting into the better weather, more constructions kind of heating up. We tackled quite a bit of workforce development. We onboarded a handful of new employees. We also saw one employee go. So I have a little bit more in this presentation about that. And then lastly, move forward with a handful of capital projects. We addressed the PLC replacement in our Marine Street substation. That'll help with a little bit of resiliency as that substation is split into two different functional areas. This PLC will serve as like a backup in case we hit an emergency or if we have a failure in our other substation. We also addressed some server replacements. This is something that was pending for a while. We had an opportunity to get these installed. We're going to commission them in October. But the project, again, is addressing resiliency within the system, making sure that we have good fallback solution in case we have a failure in those existing SCADA servers. Then another big one that we tried to tackle, and we were actually pretty successful with this one. We wrapped up installation of some dam failure infrastructure up at Green Lake. You'll notice there's a new pole up there. It has some, cameras up there we're also installing some lighting but that is to help get our operators having eyes on the the system up there because it is a remote facility making sure that if if we do hit a situation where we're over topping they can hit alarming and and trigger those alarms for the city It's all part of our EAP expansion, making sure that we're prepared for emergencies coming forward. Couple other things. Some of the current challenges we have, safety management. We still have a couple policies that we're that are typical of this industry that we wanna implement. Those are in draft form right now and we're looking forward to this next quarter actually implementing them. One of them is an updated lockout tagout policy. We also have a respiratory protection policy which previously had not been in place and it's a pretty standard policy that we really need to have specifically for one of our unit teardowns that's coming up in August. A couple other things for current challenges, regulatory compliance. We had our FERC inspection, our annual FERC inspection. More will come out in our next quarterly report because it happened in July. But the overall inspection was squeaky clean, no major findings, anything like that. However, what we're finding is FERC is asking for a lot more reporting, documentation. It's kind of an industry-wide expansion. It's not just for us, but these things are going to become more annual costs that we're going to see hit our budget. And in some years, it'll be somewhere upwards of about a half a million dollars for some of these reports. So they're very expensive. I feel like we do have a good relationship with FERC. We're gonna keep working on that, making sure that we have their trust and that they are hopefully trying to get those reports back down to something that's more manageable. We're still working on inventory management. This is another challenge area. Our inventory management, we've been working on a new system, implementing this new system. I feel like it's going pretty well. There are some growing pains with it, it is going to streamline the way that we're managing our inventory, and it'll help us hopefully do better reporting as we get to the audit seasons in the year. Coming back to staffing, we did see one employee move on from the department in the last quarter. That was our T&D manager position. We did backfill that position with an interim contracted employee. Lots of good work going on in that area. We also have a couple other positions that we filled. One of them was the generation manager, or the generation systems manager. That was a position that had previously been vacant for a number of years. And then we onboarded our two new student assistants. Again, if you recall, that's kind of helping out with our student assistant program, where the goal is to grow a local youth, hopefully all the way up to lead this department one day. A couple other notable things, budget, we wrapped up, of course, budgets aren't completely reconciled yet, but we wrapped up around 70%, 78% expended. So nothing too notable there. I think probably the two impacted areas there would be high budget estimates for our inventory. So the last couple of years, we've been trying to stock up on inventory to meet spare part inventories. And I think that was probably one of them that we overestimated. The other was just unfilled staff positions. So a little bit of a budget savings there. Let's see, next thing, look ahead. So our next quarter, we're looking to reducing vacancies. We do have one candidate that's going to come in, which will close out our T&D recruiting. We also have FERC inspections. Like I said, we had FERC inspections a week or two ago, and I'll have some good information on that. Submarine cable replacement. So not everybody knows this, but we have about 19 different islands, or at least 19 different stretches of submarine cable. Those are all on various levels of permitting that has happened over the year. Whereas last year, we made sure that we're starting to catch up on environmental permitting, documentation about where those are so that they can be reported on things like charts. So we're working on updating a lot of this stuff. We do have a submarine cable replacement that's happening this Thursday, so the 30th. We'll be replacing the stretch from the O'Connell Bridge out to the first island here, and then the outage to actually connect that submarine cable will be happening on Friday the 31st, so keep an eye out for that. And the last plug that I will make, The electric utility subsidy program, the applications are opening up on August 1st, and those are going to close October 31st. There's a number of PSAs that'll be coming out. You'll start seeing bulletins come out around town, and there'll be more information on the city's website as well to help support that. Lots of things going on. Any questions?

Questions for Ron? Ron? JJ.

Thank you for the invitation and being a part of screes planning that happened earlier this month. It was really, really eye opening to know how much goes into kind of the forward thinking part of the division. Is there any updates or thoughts that you want to share about kind of the future of the department and what's getting kind of conceived right now?

Yeah, so regarding specific to the SCRESS stuff that's going on. So let's see, what was that? Maybe two or three weeks ago, we had a pretty productive workshop. This is part of a series of workshops and data collection and stakeholder engagement that's going on with the community to develop a renewable energy strategy. The strategy is supposed to focus specifically on community engagement, taking that engagement and then developing a strategy for implementing renewable energy as we move forward. There's a lot of interesting things that have come out of that. I think though that strategy has been developed so far in partnership with the community development and planning department, I think one of the things that I'm seeing come out of it is a lot of guidance for how to manage some of these kind of gray areas that we run into. I'll give you a good example. Our diesel generation, we have three older units. I mean, they're probably 40 years old or so. We should not be using them anymore. Their reliability factor is very low on them. We do rely on them still. We're getting to a point where we need to replace them. We do have some money that we've been setting aside each year to replace them. However, we're kind of at a crossroads where do we replace them with diesel? Do we start looking at alternative fuels? Do we look at backup battery systems? Those are the things that we need a little bit of guidance on, and this strategy is going to help address some of that. It gives a little bit of guardrails for it. Thank you.

I did just have one quick question, because I think it's probably a longer conversation if we wanted to get into it, but on their water planning outlook, it looks like both Blue Lake and Green Lake are spilling already, which is abnormally early. Does that present any concerns for later in the winter on how we manage our battery, essentially, there?

So yeah, so one of the notable things, sorry, I don't wanna talk too much on this stuff, but, because I could all night. One of the notable things here is that we did spill about two weeks early. It's largely due to this year's snowpack that we're seeing. We're still seeing snow on the mountains. One of the things we're working on with PNNL and NREL is developing better water modeling to understand that. We don't have good water modeling right now. We don't have good weather sensors. We don't have snow pillows, any of the monitoring systems that you typically have in a watershed. I don't think that it's going to negatively impact this. I think what will end up happening is we'll probably start seeing occasional spills going all the way up until the freeze around December.

Okay, yeah, when you said two weeks, how I interpreted these graphs is that we were a couple months early from what it looked like to be, so two weeks is not as big of a concern as spilling like November 1st, so thank you.

Yeah, yeah, I think what we've been seeing is usually it's about the first week of July, and it's pretty darn consistent. We did see some spills starting in the mid-June area, so...

Thank you. Hey, Ron, would you say like Fairbanks Morse diesels are kind of designed to be 50-year runners?

They were designed to be in submarines, so they're designed for a 30, 40-year lifespan at least. They're right there. They aren't the most efficient when you compare them to newer motors, or I'm sorry, newer generators. Yeah, I mean, we're getting to a point where if we have to have spare parts brought in for them, they're custom made. So we're having to go back to the manufacturer, get the specifications, and then having somebody custom make rings or pistons or whatever it is. And it's just, it's going to continue to get more costly. The other thing is with DEC, I don't know how we're still, how they're still allowing us, you know, to be permitted to even run these. I know. Yeah. Well, my honesty gets the best of me. But yeah, we need to start looking to the future and we have been. We've been putting away money. We have about three million set aside for the replacement of those when we do decide what we're going to go with. There's a ton of good options out there right now. Some of those options do include newer model diesel units.

Yeah.

Well thanks Ron, appreciate your time this evening.

Yeah, likewise, thank you.

I'm moving on in Department Quarterly Reports and bring us to Fire Department and Brian.

Good evening, my name is Mark Seavey, I'm the Public Works Department Head. Sorry, wrong notes. Good evening, my name's Brian McLaughlin, I'm the Interim Fire Chief. Thanks for having me up here. I'm just finishing my first quarter here as the Interim Fire Chief role, and as I mentioned in my written report, this can largely be encapsulated this time as change and growth. To say that coming into a role after two men who encapsulated almost 50 years of firefighting service is daunting, that would be a gross understatement. But every day is a new lesson, a new procedure, a new opportunity for me to improve my ability to serve the men and women of the fire department and the community here. But regardless, there's inevitably a significant amount of change within each transition of leadership, and my aim is to maximize that change in a productive manner as possible. So going through some of the numbers, general business, we're 6% through the fiscal year and 2% through our budget, which seems like we're tracking pretty good right out the gate. I should note, however, that we are already trending slightly below glide slope on the overtime budget. That's washed up retired aviator speak to say that we're about $3,000 more spent on overtime three weeks into the fiscal year than the forecast model would have us. That's not an oversight or negligence. It's the expected result of a combination of factors. One, not having a deputy chief yet hired and therefore being able to fill in as a qualified engineer and also me not being a qualified engineer. yet working on it, but we're not there yet. So as a result, we've lost some of the backup bench strength currently that existed in the previous command requiring the existing engineers to come in off-duty more frequently than they have in the past. I expect this trend to continue at a minimum until we find a permanent chief and deputy chief assigned to the department and get them qualified on the equipment. So that's more aligned to just tell Brooke that I don't have my head under a rock, I know what's happening and I'm working on it. Otherwise, we're tracking pretty well. Recognizing the cuts needed from the previous fiscal year into this fiscal year, we're realizing about a $55,000 decrease in discretionary spending on our budget, including training supplies and tools, which is noteworthy. It's a further $45,000 decrease in the temp wages. which may be another factor that drives up some of the overtime costs, which are evened out or leveled out from the previous year, so the same. Again, this is just primarily identifying some financial focus points for us early on so we can manage and address them throughout the fiscal year. As mentioned, EMS calls are down a bit from this last year. We transported about 24 cruise passengers compared to 42 this time last year, which obviously means that there's a clear trend in increased health of cruise ship passengers. or we're just lucky. Either one, we're down a little bit. The fire department purchased recently a little under $200,000 in assembly-approved life-saving capital assets that should be up and running in all our ambulances by August, or in August. Happy to get more into detail on those if you'd like, but we sincerely appreciate the approval of those assets as it represents a noteworthy increase in the capabilities offered to our community. So those are all really good things. Our focus points right now is getting into the fire department and helping keep moving it forward. We have people in partnerships, policy and training have been kind of our initial focus out the gate. We've enjoyed excellent partnerships throughout the city and the community and businesses. We stand side by side with the police department on a day to day basis. I would say that we've gotten, We've developed such a good rapport with the police department that in only one week's time, we've gotten Chief Hall to be the dunk take target and wear a junior firefighter's helmet. So this is big news. We've worked very closely with CLAA, SEARCH, Guardian, LifeMed, the Coast Guard, Troopers, Forest Service, Chamber of Commerce, School District, so many others in our day-to-day. Just within the last three months, establishing and maintaining these positive relationships is essential to providing the best services we can to the community, and so we're really focusing on that. We had a great dam exercise, a great exercise, for the dam failure with the electric department and also then moving into the new search hospital. That transition has gone very smoothly because of our ability to communicate and just really work with the search leadership as much as possible to make sure that went without a hitch. Policy, we've been really, leaning into drafting updated new policy that was kind of drafted prior to this in 1994, updated in 2010. We're bringing it up to the late 2000s. But we've drafted a 12-chapter fire department operations manual that addresses everything from HR to uniforms, fire, EMSR, permitting and public information, or public engagement. We're developing better systems for vehicle maintenance tracking. and reviewing and updating all the numerous emergency operations plans that exist for the city. Volcanoes, as I mentioned, dam failures, tsunami plans. So we're going through all those, trying to make sure they're all up to date. And a lot of them had, hey, in this case, call Joe at this number. When Joe doesn't exist, he might not exist at all anymore, but definitely doesn't have the same phone number. So we're updating all that stuff and getting into it. Third question. Pillar there is training, and we've really been focusing on standardizing and bringing our training up to speed for firefighter, EMS, SAR, dive, and boat operations. Boat operations specifically, I like to address the ERV. We are not the U.S. Coast Guard, but we do have, we're a fire department next to the water with a boat. So we don't have the capabilities of the Coast Guard, but we have some capability, and we're trying to make sure we develop a policy that is safe and operationally effective within the capability of the fire department. So we're focusing on that as well. Ultimately, where does the rubber meet the road on this? As I mentioned in there, the results gonna speak for themselves with the, incredibly unfortunate crash of the Coast Guard 6002 in June. That was an intensely busy day. If that was the only thing that happened, it would have been an intensely busy day. But they had six other cases, including two CPR cases, a couple kids, and then the second SAR case. And so it just, the crew was, just on fire all day until midnight. I think our last case was on midnight, which was a medevac from an aircraft to the hospital. We also recently had the Sitka Hotel fire, which fortunately we don't get a ton of structure fires here, but we were able to find and address that one before it became significantly damaging and the hotel and restaurant are back up and running, which is great to see, which is ultimately our goal with any of this is to keep things running as best as possible. Getting to some of the examples also, getting to watch the Sika Fire Department, Sika Police Department and search teams work, for instance, for over an hour and a half on one gentleman on CPR. I think he got shocked seven or eight times and died an equal amount of times and came back and is alive today, eating pancakes somewhere in America, south of here. And just a really great opportunity to see that and even to, up to including just yesterday i had the privilege of watching our your incredible city fire department personnel uh provide life-saving care to a two-year-old right on the front uh floor entrance of the of the fire department entrance it was pretty incredible um In the big picture, our community is in really excellent hands with the men and women at the fire department. And we look forward to continuing to serve this community day by day and continuing to train so that we can provide the best service possible. And that's what I have. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Questions for the chief? Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Continuing on in special reports this evening, anyone else here for government to government, municipal boards, commissions, committees, municipal departments, school district? Great. That'll bring us this evening to persons to be heard. This is public participation for any item off of tonight's agenda, not to exceed three minutes for any individual. On the very bottom, there's a button. I'm going to hold this down. Thank you.

Okay. My name is Christian Fay, and I'm a part-time cab driver. The package was passed out, and there was all this talk in the cab community, and they say, are you going to go to the meeting? I'm like, I'm going, and I'm... I'm the only one. Hank is here. Anyway, so I just felt it was important for you to give you a little recap of what happened two to three years ago. So there will be coming in August 11th a new audience you accept or vote on. A new cap audience called Transportation. I know Mr. Leach worked with Juno a lot. But you left out the businesses and the cab drivers in Sitka. I think it's really important. There was only one meeting where the businesses and cab drivers were invited. It was July 18, 2023. There was a town hall meeting. And I just think it's important, if you pass a new ordinance, the businesses have to be included. You cannot impose a new ordinance on a business you don't know what it's all about. So between the two years ago or three years ago, I would have expected it would have been great for some people to reach out to the operators and the owners and say, you know, how does the business work? We have a sheet here which is 20 years old. I can explain it to you, Hank can explain it to you. It's perfect. What's not on the sheet is that it doesn't include inflation, increased cost of living, and increasing gas prices. If we would just use this sheet and increase the pricing, everything would be fine. Everything is included, including tours, and chartering the cab, boxes, excessive bags when you pick someone up from the grocery store. However, here you go.

Just a little recap.

I practiced. We have been here before and it was a disaster for Sitka Taxis from which the business is barely recovered now. One taxi operator was put out of business and Sitka ended up with two cabs on the road as a result. Having the same administration create another regulatory disaster could be the death blow for Sitka Transportation and Taxi. It might also result in another costly lawsuit, loss from businesses injured by misguided administrators. Why not take effective action this time? Why not present the taxi and two operators with the perceived problems and have them create the solution? They are the ones who know how to how to fix what's not working. They are the experts, not the administrators, who have no experience operating or driving. How about something new? Implement changes as a pilot project, track it, get feedback from all concerned parties, adjust as necessary, and implement an ordinance when it's proven to be workable. The same actors as last time with the same approach of administrating the solution. As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Thank you.

Anyone else for persons to be heard? Any item off of tonight's agenda? Seeing none, we will move on to consent agenda.

I move to approve the consent agenda consisting of item A, approve the minutes of the July 14th summit meeting.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded to approve the consent agenda. Is there any public comment? Sarah?

All right. On the motion to approve the consent agenda consisting of item A, Mayor Eisenbeiss?

Yes.

Mr. Christensen? Yes. Ms. Riley? Yes. Mr. Mosher? Yes. Mr. Saleen? Yes. Ms. Carlson? Yes. And Mr. Yesbad? Yes. The motion passes 7-0 on item A.

Thank you.

Unfinished business, item B. I move to approve ordinance 2026-17 on second and final reading, making supplemental appropriations for fiscal year 2027, additional Sitka Park Recreation Foundation support, parks and recreation master plan. Second.

Second.

That's been moved and seconded to approve ordinance 26-17. Is there any public comment?

Thank you, Mayor, members of the assembly. My name is Aaron Proshin. I'm a Sitka resident, member of the SCORE group. I think some of us have been up here in the past to talk about similar things. Mostly I wanna voice my support for funding this master plan. As you know, Sitka has no recent updated plan that identifies the community's interest for recreation. Seems like there's been a good deal of interest recently. everything from increased guided hiking on trails to our little group looking for upgrades in outdoor sports facilities like the soccer field, track, football, softball fields, among others. Safe to say, I think that recreation, including outdoor sports venues and trails, parks, and a wide variety of others, uh also contribute to the health and well-being of our residents and the economy of sitka seems like a lot of people come here specifically to enjoy the outdoor recreation opportunities that we do have but i also want to express support for the opportunity to um provide a public venue for recreation in the community. So people have a voice in what they think is important for recreation of all sorts. This is a plan that will last for a very long time. I think the one that we have right now is from the early 90s, if I got that right. And it's probably pretty outdated. So I feel like $20,000 for a master plan is a bargain for something that's gonna last for a long time and really steer the direction of recreation for the community. Thanks.

Good evening, Bridget Hitchcock. I'm here to also talk about this. Last year's approval of Prop 1 demonstrated that the majority of Sitka residents really valued the future of Parks and Rec. While the tobacco tax revenues may not become available for several years, that makes this planning even more important. When the funds are eventually available, the city should have a well-developed, community-driven plan to help guide decisions about where those investments have the greatest benefit. I think that the investment is small compared to the product that you're gonna get. And I don't see it as giving Sitka Recreation Foundation money. I believe this is a plan that you have a group of dedicated volunteers who are willing to do a lot of the logistics and the research and the execution. And it's a small investment for the work that this group is willing to do. It has exceptional value for the city. Good planning is one of the best investments a community can make. The master plan will provide city staff and future assemblies with an objective community-driven framework for prioritizing projects, for pursuing grants, and making informed capital investment decisions. Without it, these decisions will continue to be made without a clear understanding of what the community prioritizes. My personal experience in this process, different from what I'm asking for tonight, but is working with the playground. We were a volunteer group, it was a multi-year project, and we hired a team of people to get community input about what was important to parents and community members about what was gonna be on that playground. and without that, we did not have a plan for what we should go forward. I know what I liked. I know what other people know what they liked, but this was a very community-oriented process, and I think we ended up with a really nice product. I think that you should take advantage of these groups of volunteers that wanna help out, and giving this money, again, it's not giving this group money, I think it's really benefiting you. You need the plan. I think the city needs the plan, and I think it's a really good investment. Thanks for your time.

Good evening, thanks for the opportunity to speak. I encourage you to consider a yes vote for.

Can you state your name for the record, please?

Yeah, sorry. Hi, I'm KK, or Catherine Preschen. I am a member of the community, and also a member of the advisory committee for the Parks and Rec, and I'm just here encouraging a yes vote, because I can think of three things that are kind of solid foundational pieces, and one is, This initial investment will go into the plan. There's no further commitment that you have in terms of funding. That's just funding the plan. Two, a lot of work has already gone into formulating this plan, and if we don't finish the plan, we've lost on that investment. And three, I truly believe this plan will pay for itself over and over by being able to check the box. We have a master plan when it comes to seeking grant funding for future project opportunities. So, thank you.

Hi, I'm Candace Rutledge, chairperson for the Parks and Rec Committee. I'm here with the full backing of the Parks and Rec Committee. We would like to see a yes vote. We think that, like KK just said, that this is pushing this plan over the finish line that has been in the works for many, many years. And healthy recreation, I think that's one of the main goals of CIDCA for the health of the community. especially mental health and setting good habits for the youth. So I think that you may have received my letter. It was probably forwarded to you. So Ben Huey couldn't attend, so I wanted to say something on his behalf, so I'm putting on my Ben Huey hat. So he was sorry that he couldn't attend and he wanted to reiterate a few points because he's been working on the master plan for about five years. So volunteers on the Parks and Rec Committee have already invested hundreds of hours in developing this plan. Also a contractor selected by CBS in 2023 was unable to finish a master plan. The Sitka Rec Foundation has an MOA with CBS and is bringing capacity that city staff lack. Previously appropriated funds to SRF were merely left over in contracted services and never intended to fully cover the plan cost. So with Ben Huey's words, as well as the full backing of the Parks and Rec Committee, we hope that you guys can consider voting yes today and pushing this over the finish line.

Thank you.

Anyone else on 26-17?

Hi, my name's Amy McLaughlin, and I'm here to ask for your support for the master plan funding. I'm part of the Sicker Recreation Foundation, I just wanted to share that in the MOA when that was approved, it does say in section four that the city borough of Sika may contribute to the funds for the master plan beyond what was allocated in 2023. But I also just think that this, like everyone else has said before, this project only supports the city. And while SRF may be the catalyst behind getting it done, it's for the city it's for parks and rec it's for the people of the community and it will involve the community members input to make sure that we have um the priority list to know what's important here so i just ask for your support on this and thank you for your time

anyone else last call thank you all for your comments i appreciate your time this evening that'll bring it back to the assembly for deliberation got a question for you john um you know the last meeting because this is second reading of this topic um

What kind of a master plan is this? Is this strictly a facilities master plan or just programming involved? Or is that someone from the Parks and Rec Department would need to tell, or excuse me, Parks and Rec Division would need to tell us that?

Well, I don't have anybody here from the Parks and Rec Division tonight, but no, the intent was for Parks and Rec facility planning mainly.

So facilities, so as far as I know, but this is probably just me speculating, the Parks and Rec division is operationals, it's people, it's scheduling, it's doing the programming, and the Public Works Department is responsible for the facilities, is that correct?

Yes, that's correct as far as capital planning for the facilities.

So this is the helper organization of the programming division of the planning department. helping out Public Works with a master plan for their facilities. Is that mainly kind of?

I think it's close. I mean, things have restructured over the years, right? We used to have Parks and Rec, which was mainly just maintenance operations that used to be a sub of the Public Works Department. Since that has broken off, yes, there is. mainly the activity programming and scheduling and the operational stuff that happens in the Parks and Rec Division. But I would say it's more of a cooperative relationship between, you know, just like our other departments, we work with Public Works to find out what the capital plan needs to look like for those individual departments. So yes, it is true that the capital plan still lives within the Public Works Department.

Yeah, I think this is a kind of a unique circumstance because the library department doesn't need to do any capital planning beyond their physical building. And really, Parks and Rec is the only thing that has multiple sites, multiple assets, multiple things to consider, other than the school district having multiple, and that's a direct relationship with Public Works. So I'm coming from a place of, well, you know, thank you for the help, but also where is Public Works in this? I haven't seen anything about coordination, collaboration, and it's helpful, and I know the ex-officio member on the Parks and Rec Committee is the Parks and Rec Division manager. So how do we actually get to the people that are running the facilities, and how does this master plan incorporate their input as well? because that's how we get to that general fund, or in the future, that tobacco tax money, and ultimately the staffing from public works. That's an important piece for me to understand, and I'm I voted no last week, not because I don't support the programming aspect of the division within planning and community development, but it seems like an outside group helping another group do a thing that maybe isn't to to elevate the priority of this division but in a way that didn't seem you know cooperative or in cohesion with the overall people that run the facilities that we recreate on so if anyone can help me understand that a little more i'd be happy to hear something and i really do want to get to yes on this tonight

Yeah, I mean to me this is pretty simple. I think rarely is planning a bad idea and We've identified the need for a plan like this a lot over the years To me this plan is more to figure out what the city people have said to want in their recreation facilities and it'll be up to the city to figure out if and when we can do some of those things and prioritize them. So I think a plan's a good idea, and I think this is cheaper than if we did it ourselves. I mean, would it have been nice if the City Recreation Foundation had managed to raise enough money so all we had was the original 14,000 or so? but it didn't happen and it doesn't surprise me, but they did raise a fair amount. So we're getting this at about half price instead of 75% off, which is still generally when I see half off at the grocery store, I grab that. So I'm not real concerned about, okay, they didn't manage to raise enough money or things like that. It's just, do we need the plan? I think it's a good idea. And are we getting that at a good price? Yeah. So I don't really see a whole lot beyond that. And again, this is not the kind of plan that's going to say, you know, we need to change the light bulbs every few years. This is much more of what facilities do we want? What facilities do we need to upgrade? And I hope some sort of a prioritizing. This is what the community would like us to focus on. We all know that this not to create any money and but it will allow us to, when money becomes available, to pull out the plan and say, hey, this is a high priority. And we're doing the same thing with the streets plans. I mean, this is all, a lot of it is having something ready. I think something at the last meeting mentioned there was money for some shovel-ready programs and we didn't have a plan to go for those. And this, hopefully, would allow us to do that. Everything's a little bit of a risk, but I don't see this as something that's gonna go away. If we vote no, I suspect pretty strongly that in the next year or two we'll be being asked to fund the whole thing. And I'd rather have somebody else fund some of it at least. So I think it's pretty straightforward and it's not, I also heard that we don't really have the staff capacity to do this ourselves right now. and so it's nice to have somebody else do it um so like i said i'm not trying to try not to overthink this that we need a plan and this is giving us a pretty big discount on it katie and then john

Well, I have a question for John, so if you want to go first. My question is on that statement in number four, the funding contingency. It says CBS may contribute to the funding of the master plan beyond the stated above amount contingent upon the availability of funds secured through grants or support sources accessible exclusively to government entities. I'm wondering if you can tell me since January if the municipality has pursued or received any grants or support sources to support this project?

Not that I'm aware of on planning grants. I mean, we have applied for a multitude of grants, but I don't think there is any. We've not received any for this, nor have we applied for any specifically to this master plan.

Well, in that regard, just I know that this body has had a conversation about this already. I did listen back on that, but wanted to bring my kind of questions and bummed Kevin can't be here tonight, but hopefully I got a good understanding of the information that he provided at our meeting in January. I think that this plan is a good idea and I think that that's what I heard from a lot of the body, right, is that we don't disagree on the benefit that this provides our community and that Sicker Recreation Foundation is an extremely valuable partner with very dedicated and knowledgeable volunteers. I know you guys put in a ton of work and time as well as the Parks and Rec Advisory Committee to just make the recreation opportunities in this town as great as they are. So thank you for that. And that is why I voted to approve the memorandum of agreement and the city's partnership with them back in january to provide that seed funding for this plan and my stated understanding at the time was that we provided the seed funding and if the entity can't raise the rest of the funds you know we get that money back um it was stated at that meeting that YOU KNOW, THIS ENTITY IS UNIQUELY POSITIONED TO LEVERAGE THESE FUNDS AS SEED CONTRIBUTION TO SECURE LARGER GRANTS AND DONATIONS AND BRING PRIVATE RESOURCES TO BEAR. SO I THINK IT'S FAIR TO SAY THAT WE HAVE THAT COLLECTIVE UNDERSTANDING AND I DO UNDERSTAND THE DIFFICULTIES WITH MAKING THAT HAPPEN IN THIS ENVIRONMENT AND WE'RE ALL ADDRESSING THOSE DIFFICULTIES, RIGHT, OF REDUCED BUDGETS AND KIND OF POCKETS TIGHTENING. One of the other things that we received is an estimate of around $30,000 to $45,000 for the remaining work that was due in January because a lot of the technical components had already been done. And so now that SRF has received a quote for $61,000 to $76,000, that is double what we heard back in January. And I just say that to really emphasize the kind of fiscal considerations that are having to go into this discussion. my concern is more with the moa that we have and how those work with the entities that the city holds them with uh you know memorandums of agreement are our formal agreements that we enter into with many entities including many who support city facilities like the library or the animal shelter and these establish shared expectations of how we're going to work together why we're working together what each of our responsibilities are and so these agreements require a level of trust between the partners that they're gonna be adhered to, and that that's the plan of what we're doing. And so in terms of the things that are in the MOA, including seeking and securing funding necessary to fund the creation of the master plan, upon securing funding, procuring qualified planning services to develop the master plan, having the draft scope of work reviewed by CBS before contracting the services, it just sounds like the cart was put a little bit before the horse in terms of doing this, given that a contract has already been signed and a work product is expected by January. And so I was a little confused about the process in which that happened with, it seemed like there was an agreed upon plan for how things were gonna be pursued and then now we're being asked to fund a portion of this because some bills are coming due. I think my discomfort with this is not at all with the master plan. I think this would be a valuable document for us. But this is one partner of many that we hold these agreements with. And if any other nonprofit or business that we have one of these agreements with, you know, such as the Friends of the Animal Shelter or CETA or the cruise ship dock were to, you know, not have the impression that these are documents that establish our shared expectations that we hold each other accountable to, that would concern me. And so that's why I think it's that process behind those agreements is what's really the part that we're all discussing. I don't think it's the value of the master plan that we disagree on, it's the process that's been happening. And so, That's why I'm having a hard time with the supplemental requests. Like, I support the plan, but I think it creates an understanding that these memorandums are not, you know, we're not accountable to upholding them. And also that the city will cover contractual obligations that are entered into by third parties. And so, for me, that's not fulfilling my obligation to be prudent with, you know, how we spend taxpayer dollars. We just heard from the fire department about a $55,000... you know, decrease in discretionary funding. And so I think that putting the master plan, you know, as part of the whole budget process, which which happens you know and starts in january in earnest and like considering it against all of the other cuts that we had to make um is how this is supposed to work right and that's like we take the community input we weigh it against all of the other things that we have to budget for as a city and we see if it's in our budget but you know we're receiving a supplemental request um for something that i'm not sure about the timeliness of this issue given that the tax that we have that tax base to fund recreation facilities is not yet available. So absolutely, we need a master plan. We're gonna have a dedicated funding source to improve these facilities and that plan is gonna be critical to doing that. But I am kind of uncomfortable moving forward with this unless we amend the MOU to make clear that the city should not be assuming any liability for contractual obligations entered into by a third party and also reflecting, you know, if we choose to move forward, the increased appropriations amount, because that is a significant chunk of that that should be recognized as the city's investment, so.

John, please. Thanks, I don't mean to break up that chain of thought, but I want to go back to one of Ms. Carlson's comments on Public Works involvement, and I just want to clarify that throughout the stages of the plan already, I know Public Works has been talking to them. Most of it's been just on asset mapping and inventorying and trying to get those things into our inventory so we can get the condition assessments and a rating system. So that step has taken place. So there has been some work there. And I don't think there's any doubt in the value of the master plan. But I think there needs to be some expectation management as well. You know, we have other commissions like the Library Commission, right? And the Library Commission, yes, they don't control the building and things that happen in the overall capital plan for the city, but they do make recommendations in building that. And that's how I see the Parks and Rec Division working with Public Works and then the overall capital plan. They'll have now a master plan, they'll hear from the committee where their priorities are, and then combine that with our risk scoring system, that's what's going to help build out the future plan. So when I say expectation management, I hope that there's not this expectation come January, February, March of next year when the FY28 budget's coming together, that it's like, oh, this is what everybody said they wanted, and these are high priority for us. Move those to the top of the list, because one, the funding's not there, and it still needs to fit in with the more broad capital plan. But That's a really long way of saying, yes, Public Works has been involved in working with putting this plan together. Kevin?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, everyone, for your comments. They're well taken, I understand. And I'll say it now, as I said last week, I don't think anybody at this table doesn't support this plan. I think everybody's very excited about having a master plan for Parks and Rec and for our facilities. But I just wanted to, something some people have said about the fact that we don't have the funds available yet to start addressing the needs that this is gonna be pointing to. In my mind, that's part of the point. When we had ballot, or prop, I think one was it? Was it prop one? It doesn't really matter what the title was. There's new ones every year. The point is when the community was given a chance to basically support Parks and Rec and putting money aside for a fund, even if it's gonna take many years to fund, overwhelmingly voted in favor of that. in my mind, I think it was like 60%, but in my mind, that's a mandate that the community really is passionate about these things for obviously many reasons. And so in my mind, I think I understand and I respect, I completely respect everyone's opinion on the MOA, I totally get it. But from my perspective, I think we're getting hooked up, kind of caught up in process and you're right, Katie, that we need to be, follow through with our MOAs, but in my mind, these folks here are doing a service for us that we would have to do ourselves, acting as partially volunteer subcontractors for us. And so when the MOA was I think we should have probably been more realistic and honestly just agreed to give more at the time. I think that's what's happening right now. So I have no problem giving another 20,000. Obviously we can't just keep going and going and going, but I think this is a very fair request. Because the point is, we need to get a plan. This is just to fund the study and then to create the master plan. And then we have to start prioritizing and planning and the thing that I think we're also forgetting is having a plan like this also will help enable and arm people with like the Sitka Recreation Foundation to go out to outside entities and get fundraise with that because right now we just have really no idea we have things in Sitka we'd like to fund but if we have a plan in hand they can go out with their marching orders and go try to raise funds. And I think it would be a lot more funds available, bear more fruit is what I'm trying to say. And while that's going on, this is a years-long process. So I would encourage the body, although I respect and understand people's opinions, to vote in favor of this and recognize the community's commitment strong desire for parks and recreation. And yeah, that's it for now.

Thank you.

Chris and then Scotty.

Though this is my first meeting with this agenda item up here, I was here at the last one and it's been a great discussion. A lot of points have been made from both sides that I definitely tend to agree with. I think Katie's right, kind of the cart was put before the horse a little bit. I tend to not really like that. JJ made a comment last meeting, which I definitely tended to agree with too. I didn't really care for it right at the beginning of a new fiscal year. The timing was kind of a little rough. But I do tend to always go back to the way that people voted for Prop 1 and that recreation is something that is valued in this community. And this is kind of the next step towards Prop 1 or just anything with recreation. I'll actually point to something that we're gonna take on a little bit later this meeting of, funds that are unexpected that show up and that you might need to act quickly on them. And if we have a master plan in place and know what priorities are, it would be easier to designate those funds to a potential project, whether it's number one or number five on the list, depending how much funds are coming in. Right now, if we had some unexpected funds come at us for some sort of recreation funding, we wouldn't really know what direction to throw it at right now. And I feel like as if we did have a plan put together, it'd at least be easier for whatever assembly is taking that on to go in that direction. So, Yes, there's some stuff I really don't like, mainly with the timing and kind of some of the MOA stuff I do agree with. But in general, SRF is a great organization. They've been a good partner with the city. So I'm going to support this and try to get the ball rolling, I guess. Scotty?

No mention of the pool. You know, I'm gonna vote for this too. People came down and calibrated me of how much it means to them. you know, and then I got an email just before, where did I get the impression that people are talking about a new facility? And I'm like, well, that's what it was all about. And then they had to come back and say that we're gonna fix existing stuff too with that percentage of the tobacco tax, but still no mention of the pool. I'm on this assembly to get another lifeguard at that pool. I'm on this assembly to have seniors swim for free. And the main reason why I'm Cowtown and gonna vote this in of how loose it is is because i think everybody in this foundation is going to support me in eliminating the senior sales tax unless you show cause we can't eliminate food tax for families i want to try to do that too but we can't eliminate food tax for the whole town and even talking about building something else is out of line to me with we're running out of money going to give a million dollar dole out now for child care to try to save the town so i'm voting yes for this because i i'm just hoping that it's not like another gpip thing where they hire mcdowell group to say hey the survey says we need a seven million dollar barge or the survey says this or the survey says we need a new facility up by keep i don't know what but i I'm going for it because I hope it lines it out and includes the pool because there's nothing more in the wintertime to keep your head on right in this town than going to the pool. That's why we need more hours, more opportunity to swim. So I'm voting for it. But something's weird.

So for me, I think this has been reiterated amongst the previous yay votes and the previous nay votes is that this assembly is supportive of developing a Parks and Rec master plan. What it really comes down to for me is timing and ownership. At this point, 28 days into the fiscal year, there was some thought about this before the fiscal year. I think if this, full amount, even the $75,000, if that came forward to us in a resource proposal during the budget process, we would have debated this for an eighth of the time. It just would have gone forward, right? So timing is absolutely huge here. And then it becomes an ownership issue. If I have an MOA with a group and the very first meeting afterwards, we're already looking to modify the intent. where are we going with it? Why did we have it in the first place? There was a comment earlier that it was never meant to cover all the costs. That was not my intent when I originally signed on to the MOA is that we were having some very small seed money and other entities were gonna come up with the rest of the cost. At this point, I am more interested in us owning our asset management plan for our facilities because that's what this is. It's an asset management plan for our facilities. So if this was coming back to us as do we want to allocate $61,000 in total to a plan that we own, Yes, I can support that. Staff capacity has been brought up is why we don't. But we had our Parks and Rec division manager sit in front of us and allocate on SRF's behalf. So undoubtedly had some backend work to do on that too before that person could come up here. So I don't necessarily believe that staff capacity is a issue there when our division manager works with our public works in order to get this asset management going. I do want to point out that a comment was made about process. To me, all we do is process. That is our job, that is what we do up here, and that is why we're seated for. So process is important to me, and that is why I will vote no to allocate this additional money, but still want to see this included in next year's budget cycle so that we can have a comprehensive budget. talk about it i do know that there is a also a pretty fresh donation policy within the municipality so if sitka recreation foundation would like to jump start our side i understand that they have raised some money that is possible to donate that to the municipality in order to get this project jump started so that's where i stand on it as of now i'm happy to hear any more discussion the assembly may have jj

question for you John have you been having conversations with parks and rec division on if this doesn't pass tonight what that contract could be amended to that's already been signed but wasn't funded nothing beyond knowing that the contract is scalable but I don't know what that what the threshold is Okay, so nothing about just pushing out that January 2027 return date to look at options? Has there been any conversations about like a plan B if this doesn't pass tonight?

No, not that I'm aware of, or at least not in my office.

Is there anything you can add to this conversation to help me get to yes?

I'm hearing a lot of comments about the MOA and the language in the MOA, and I would, and hearing a lot about process as well. I think memorializing this in some manner, whether that be if this passes comes along with an amendment to the MOA that comes back for consideration, so it's memorialized and we outline exactly what the funding is supposed to be used for, so that change has been captured and delivery dates are memorialized.

I'd be interested in entertaining that if the group wants to get me to a yes, or we can just see if we can count to four and move on.

Chris, and then Katie. I do have a question about the ownership thing here, John. So if SRF is the one who's getting this master plan, when it's all done within the MOA, I guess I'm kind of missing a few pieces since I'm the new guy here and not fully up to date on everything. Does SRF own the master plan then or does that get donated to the city or joint ownership? How's that gonna work?

I will use donated with air quotes because I believe the intent of the MOA was to get the plan done using their expertise and their ability to connect with the community. Plus, not a lot of that... state government red tape in uh in process you know they're they're handling the procurement and the the contracting um and then it would come back to the assembly and the assembly would um formally adopt it by motion and then we would more air quotes we would own it after after that katie um well jj uh

I was going to ask if there was interest in entertaining an amendment to this, but it sounds like there is, so I would like to propose one. I do want to vote for this. I do have concerns about the MOA, and I think that more broadly, it is important to ensure that that document is accurate and something that we can you know depend on going forward especially because it contains within it the understanding that the city will adopt this so it's it's in the interest of both parties to have that be a document that we support given that that is also what states are you know willingness to accept this and why we engaged in this process in the first place so um I would move to, oh, she's pausing me. I thought it through in everything, Sarah.

You still might get to. So this would, so the motion on the floor is to approve the ordinance for funding.

and then I just want to talk through to make sure and I'm well I'm wondering if we can add on to I can tell you my intent okay okay my intent would be to propose a motion that supports this appropriation contingent upon a MOA amendment that reflects the increased appropriation amount and asserts that CBS will not assume liability for any contractual obligations made by SRF to be reviewed at the next meeting. Is that appropriate? So it's passing the supplemental appropriations contingent upon the modification.

I think we can amend the motion to add that piece on at the end.

Do we even need to? Can't we just direct staff to revisit the MOA? Sorry. Just trying to look for easier ways.

So that's kind of what I was thinking. I mean, if you want to do that, that's great. But another option is we vote for it, and then we direct John to bring back a memo or an amendment to that effect.

The problem then is that funding is appropriated without anything solid in place. There's no documentation of, and it's no guarantee.

So that's why I would say this approval is contingent on the MOA coming back to this body. And those two things do not need to be reflected in the motion itself, but I wanna make clear what I'm asking staff to do in that revised MOA. So I'm happy to make a motion that supports this appropriation contingent upon a revised MOA being presented to the assembly at the next meeting, if that is supportable.

Sarah, let's talk this through, I think it's appropriate, but I also understand, I think your concern is that we're not talking about the MOA at this time. Am I categorizing that correctly?

Yes, but. Because of the. Tying two things together, but. John.

Yeah, I was hoping to jump in. Sarah, tell me if I'm doing something wrong. But I think if the motion is still to approve the funding, you're approving the appropriation, but can you make the appropriation contingent upon coming back with an amended MOA? Because the original funding was provided under an MOA. If there is additional funding that was not allowed within the MOA, this new funding would be contingent upon the change to that MOA to reflect it.

I'm comfortable with the motion saying that it's contingent on a revised MOA.

Great, Sarah. Did you write down the amendment?

Well, I got a little way down the road, but I did not get the very ending. So I have contingent on a revised MOA that reflects the increased appropriation

AND ASSERTS THAT CBS WILL NOT ASSUME LIABILITY FOR ANY CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS MADE BY THE SICA RECREATION FOUNDATION. I'M SO SORRY. NOT ASSUME ANY LIABILITY OR NOT ASSUME LIABILITY OF ANY contractual obligations made by Sitka Recreation Foundation.

We have a motion on the floor. Is there a second? Second. It's been moved and seconded to amend the original motion to include a clause stating that the MOA will be revamped with a new funding amount and that the, Sarah, please.

Asserts that CBS will not assume liability of any contract obligations made by SRF.

Thank you. Is there any public comment on the amendment to the main motion? Back to the assembly for deliberation.

Quick question for Sarah. Is this a major change?

I...

I believe that it would be. Yes. Yeah.

So we'll have to do a third reading at the next meeting.

Kevin or unless Katie wanted to talk about her motion further.

I'm just sensing that there's some more time to apply for grants. I mean, I think that there's been enough deliberation at this table about the plan and the MOA and the concerns with it that I don't anticipate this will be a difficult dual reading. And also, as stated in the last meeting, there was a scalable amount. I don't think that this, it's not my impression that this needs to be in paid in full by the next meeting. encourage that expectation to not be made amongst other groups because that is not good. So I think that the second, you know, if there's two readings for this, that is fine. If anyone has any thoughts on this.

It would be one additional. Oh, just one additional meeting. Okay. Yeah.

Kevin, you okay if we hear from John? This is more of a process thing. Even if it is a major enough change where it takes a third reading on this, if it was contingent upon a new or an addendum or amendment to the MOA, that's technically a contract which is gonna require my signature and I would have to bring that back to you all anyway to view it, make sure it's right. and then get the direction to sign it. Because I didn't think the assembly would want to tell me to do amendment and and executed without having seen it. So I think we would be back for a another reading regardless at next meeting, whether it's on the specific motion or to get the MOA that it's contingent upon.

Yeah, it sounds good. I think we can pass funding so both entities understand whether funding exists or not, start making some plans off of that, and then bring the revised document back that both parties are... satisfied with. Kevin?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yes, thank you, Katie, for thinking of coming up and JJ come up with a creative solution to get to yes. I'm willing to support this to guarantee that we pass it. I still personally believe that The amendment is not necessary. I think there's enough trust built between the two parties that we could simply vote yes and then ask John to bring back an amendment to the MOU, but that's semantics at this point. So yeah, I'm in favor of this. JJ?

question for you sarah does that change the language within the little box on line 26 of the actual ordinance or is it just the motion that we're updating right now or would it say something like additional srf support based on Amendment with an amendment.

I'm gonna call on the finance director because this was drafted by finance. So I don't want to speak In error I would is she nodding her head?

Yeah, she's shaking her head as if she doesn't need to comment.

Yeah Okay, so we would make amendments to the ordinance the ordinance well just to reflect the language in the motion, okay.

Yeah, thank you

So this doesn't ease all my concerns, but it gets me a lot closer. I think Katie had a lot of my concerns on this. Her comments echoed a lot of my comments. With her presenting this means that there's at least somewhat comfort there. It gets me closer to comfort, so I'll be able to vote in favor of this going forward. It's still not my, ideal route forward. I think this needs to be a budgetary item brought forward in the complete plan. But it allows a couple organizations to continue to get going. My cautionary tale here would be there is now a magnifying glass on this. This one needs to be watched carefully to make sure that we get the product that we need and that everybody moves forward on their intended purposes. I don't want this to become another issue of our van, which we talked about last time where we were promised a van for a small investment and it turned out we basically bought a van ourselves. That is a very real concern going forward, right? And that is a very real track record that we have in this. It's not to try and detriment the group, but that is what we've seen. So I can vote in favor of this. Further assembly comments on the amendment to the main motion? Sarah?

Would anyone like me to repeat it? No? Okay. All right. On the amendment, Mr. Christensen?

Yes.

Ms. Carlson? Yes. Mr. Salin? Yes. Mr. Yesdad? Yes. Ms. Riley? Yes. Mr. Moser? Yes. And Mayor Eisenbeiss?

Yes.

The amendment passes 7-0.

We are back to the original motion as amended. Further assembly comments? Sarah.

I'll read the entire thing this time. All right, so the motion as amended is to approve ordinance 2026 17. On second reading, making supplemental appropriations for fiscal year 2027. Additional SECA recreation foundation support parks and rec master plan contingent on a revised moa that reflects the increased appropriation and asserts that the city and borough of sicca will not assume liability of any of the liability of any contract obligations made by srf ms riley Yes. Mayor Eisenbeis? Yes. Ms. Carlson? Yes. Mr. Mosher? Yes. Mr. Yestad? Yes. Mr. Christensen? Yes. And Mr. Saleen? Yes. The motion passes 7-0 as amended.

Thank you. We are a little bit past our break time, so the Assembly, please take a brief recess. Be seated when you're ready to continue. The assembly is seated. I have had a Reese's, kind of like a Snickers, right? Now my attitude is much better because I'm not hangry anymore. So let's continue on with our meeting this evening. Item C, please.

I move to approve ordinance 2026-18 on second and final reading, authorizing the lease of Block 4, Lot 1 of the Gary Paxton Industrial Park to Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association, Inc. Second.

Second.

It's moved and seconded to approve ordinance 26-18. Is there any public comment? Back to the assembly for deliberation.

Please, Chris. Yeah, I need to disclose conflict of interest that I should probably recuse myself considering I am an NSERAB board member.

Yes, do you have any financial gain to be by a board member? Will you gain financially through this?

I mean, as a board member, no, not really. Do you have a...

Yeah. Do you have a bias in this instance that you don't think you can work through?

I would say I probably have a bias. I'm pretty loyal to Inserow.

Okay. Thank you for your disclosure there. While I don't find a monetary grounds for recusal, bias is something that I'm pretty strong on. I believe that all of our decisions should be as unbiased as possible. So I will recuse you for this next item. Again, thank you for bringing it to our attention. Okay, moving on, minus one. Any assembly deliberation? Sarah? Oh, JJ.

I was just gonna say that since this is the second reading, nothing changed. No, sorry, this is the first reading. Second. Second reading, excuse me. Nothing's changed, so yeah, I think no discussion's needed.

I just wanted to express gratitude for all the effort that went into this on the behalf of NSERA and also the city to revise these terms. I'm a lot more comfortable with this increased rent and also the ability to renegotiate after 10 years, the increased cap there. It's also been illuminating seeing what's happening with our fisheries this year and the returns of hatchery fish, why those reserves are needed and how important these operations are and how that's impacting our broader economic picture. So just in light of these circumstances and the negotiations that happened, I'm happy to support this.

All I remember from last meeting is king salmon capacity. Sarah?

Right on the motion to approve ordinance 2026-18 on second and final reading. Ms. Carlson?

Yes.

Ms. Riley? Yes. Mr. Saleen? Yes. Mr. Mosher? Yes. Mayor Eisenbeis? Yes. And Mr. Christensen? Yes. The motion passes 6-0.

Thank you, new business, first reading, item D, please.

I move to approve ordinance 2026-19 on first reading, make and supplemental appropriations for fiscal year Harrigan Centennial Hall fee waiver.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded to approve ordinance 26-19. Sponsors Tor and Kevin, would one of you like to, or both, do a brief introduction?

Yeah, so this was my idea because it kind of came to me when we were being asked to forgive Centennial Hall fees for, I forget which non-profit was coming in for a big item. And also I've been somewhat involved with planning large meetings and symposiums and things. And I will say right now, this is meant to try and poach some conventions and things from other towns. That's the whole point behind this. The idea is that if someone is bringing in more than 100 people and they have to state that they're doing that, they would have their fees for their convention waived for however many days they're in town. And the nice thing about this is that the money would come from the visitor enhancement fund, which comes from the bed tax. And if you have more than 100 people or more, right at 100, the bed tech doesn't quite cover what the fees would be. You get much over, and it does, and you get well over if you get a big one, like 200 people, we're ahead of the game. And the fact, and it doesn't matter if it's for-profit, non-profit, the whole point is you bring people to town in the off-season, starting in October, in the winter, and you have an event here, will waive the fees for the Centennial Building, which we've done quite often, but the problem with that is like when it's, like when we had the firefighters associations, that leaves a hole in the budget for the Centennial Building. When we say yes, we agree, this makes sense, we're gonna have sales tax and bed tax, so this fixes that. This allows people, makes the Centennial Building whole when we do that. It also, frankly, will save us time because it's kind of automatic. If you bring in more than 100 people, it's covered. And this, by the way, making the money will recoup and the bed tax does not even begin to take into account sales tax, money spent at restaurants and bars, more people, you know, money being generated, economic activity. The other nice thing about this is it's risk-free. If it doesn't work, we don't spend the money. We're not actually spending the money. We're walling it off that if we do do it. I don't expect a whole lot of use this coming year. I think there are a few that might come in. But it'll allow our new tourism person and the new Visit Sitka to really pitch us. And I would love it if some doctors in Des Moines decided to come up. That's kind of what it's after. And if we're pitching ourselves as a place to come have your educational or trade, whatever meetings you want, you know, it's a nice little shot in the arm for the economy in an off-season when we're not doing, when we are busy. And if it doesn't work, no harm, no foul, because the money doesn't, it will just go back in the Visitor and Handman's Fund. I've talked to John a fair amount about this, and the idea is that the Centennial Building director will determine the goal and apply to it, say that they are gonna bring in that many people. And we did rough numbers, but considering the 6% bed tax and the cost of hotel rooms now, it should pretty well cover it. This is not... saying that we are overpriced. This is not saying that we are unfair, it's just the opposite. It's saying that this is a way to entice people to come to Sitka. So I know that if I was planning, like I said, the doctors from Des Moines or whatever, the dentists, and you're like, hey, we can go to Sitka and we don't have to pay for our facility, and then we fill up the hotels in November or October or February, whenever. And if it doesn't work, no harm, no foul, because the money's not actually getting spent unless they come in and use it. So I think this is, it's not a huge thing, but it's a little bit of extra economic activity that we might be able to promote here in town. And if anybody has any questions about where we came up with anything, I'm all happy to speak to them. Kevin, anything additional?

Just nothing really, super quick. This was, yeah, this was Tor's idea. It's a brand new idea that's never been tried before. I said, sure, I'll co-sponsor that with you. I think it's a neat idea. I am interested to see what members of the body think, and... Any questions? And this is a, you know, we'll see what people think, and we can always, you know, this could be a thing that morphs and grows or changes as we get, as we see how it works out.

Thank you. Is there any public comment on Ordinance 26-19? I'll bring it back to the Assembly for deliberation. J.J.?

questions of the sponsors. I mean, it makes sense that we're looking at this, anything to kind of promote Why does the money need to leave visitor enhancement fund?

Because that's the way the accountants and the finance people want to. Because basically, as it was explained to me, we have rules on how we handle money. And it's not really going anywhere. It's just going to get blocked off. And there is enough in there to do it. And like I said, it could go back in if it doesn't get used. No, my initial thought was that an event would happen here and the Centennial Building would bill the fund right then. But apparently we can't bill ourselves and that's what I was told at least. So this is how I was told it had to be done.

Okay, I guess my question then goes to Brooke. Brooke, can you explain this to me? We have a fund for enhancement of an industry, but yet to use that money we have to transfer it to a different fund to then allocate it down and maybe at the end of the year we give it back. How does that work?

So the reason that the money is being transferred to the general fund is to make up for the fact that there is no revenue being recorded from that use of Centennial Hall. The technical piece of how those entries work is it's not a one time transfer and then we send it back if we use it. I will only transfer that funding if it's used. So pieces of CPV kind of work like that too. We have an indirect

portion and then we have the direct that's based on actual spending it would work the same way okay so this ordinance here we're looking at supplemental appropriation of like up to 50,000 if it gets used all okay within the current fiscal year that we're in okay yes and if we once we receive those applications and they're fully approved that's what would trigger me to do an entry that records that transfer Okay, and we're considering the shoulder season, what was it, September through October, which is all within this fiscal year, so it works out nicely. Thank you for considering all of that. And knowing your role, thank you, I appreciate it.

Any other questions for Brooke while she's in front of us? Thank you for your time, appreciate it. Katie? Katie?

I have a question for the sponsors. I think this is a good idea. I'm interested in it. When it starts applying, it says the effective date is now, but there are, I think, conventions that have already booked potentially for the off-season. I'm thinking about the Land Trust Conference. I'm forgetting the exact name of that, but I believe that's coming in the off-season. Is this retroactive for ones that have already booked, or is it just going forward for bookings that don't exist?

As far as I'm concerned, and you can help me out here, I mean, the actual language, I wouldn't mind if one that's already booked got it, because again, they're doing the economic activity. That's the whole point. And again, what I really, one of the things I really love about this is, If it, and I don't know if that one's big enough, honestly, if it's got 100 people, because it has to be not just 100 people attending, but 100 people from out of town. And so the effective date is October 1st, so... I would think that they would get it if they applied, but they'd have to meet the requirements. And that means enough bed tax money to pay for it. Because it's not, to me this is like, it's a marketing thing in a lot of ways. And so if we are marketing ourselves as an affordable place to come have your conventions, having people brag about that or say, hey, we got to do this and we didn't have to, then that's a good thing. That's what we want. We want people out there saying Sitka's a great place to come have your meetings, come have your symposium, come have your convention. And that's what I hope happens with this.

So some thoughts from me, because I like the yin and the yang of all these. I feel like I can vote in favor of this. I feel like the heart and spirit of it is in the right spot. But I'm definitely gonna be watching and curious if this disincentivizes smaller conventions from coming. A 75-person convention goes, well, I don't get it for free, and they do, and I bring almost all the same amount of people, right? Is that a legitimate concern? I don't know. That's why I say that's something I'm gonna be watching. Something that I would also prefer to see on this is that this applies to new conventions coming. If someone already comes and they're already booking, then all of a sudden we just give it to them for free. Where is the added benefit of that, right? We don't... We would have seen that money anyway, whether or not the convention comes in. I can think of one that this may affect very directly, and that's Southeast Conference, because they now have their convention in the third week of September. Ketchikan and Sitka are going to be the spots here going forward for the annual. They're going to come, but if they shift it now by a week, now we give them Centennial Hall for free. So where's the added benefit of that? Like they're going to come. So it's just a thought here. And then I guess my last thought on it is the 100 person threshold. I understand the reasoning behind it. Like we need to find a level. We need to find what we're trying to encourage in town for sure. But if it's on a per person basis, is there a smaller level where a 35-person convention, because they're only gonna use so many of the rooms, right? Is there a level where they can then reimburse through the fees that they pay amongst the community that level? Because honestly, I'd love to have a 35-person convention in December. Just curious on that 100 person level and if a smaller level can still generate the economic activity to make the offset worthwhile. Because visitor enhancement fund is a, it's a very clear spot to do this from. The assembly has the, ability to allocate funding from there, and I think it's an obvious spot to make this happen from. So support the idea, have some thoughts going forward, and it seems like Tor wants to let me know on some of those.

So the 100 came from, that's what it costs. I mean, it's roughly equal to what it costs to have the whole building, roughly. I would say that... this is also, we're going to try this, and if it starts to become, yeah, let's look at prorating it, say you get 50% off if you bring 50 people or something like that, if we have the interest. The other point I'd like to make about, for instance, AML or Whale Fest, those guys are probably going to come to us and ask us to waive some or all of it, or very likely, maybe not AML, I don't know, but a lot of the time they do. I mean, I can't tell you how many, I'm sure Sarah can tell me how many times over the years we've had people come up asking us for that. And this, to a certain extent, takes us out of the equation. And that's a good thing. I mean, this way we are not saying, well, they're a good facility, they're a good operation, but do we really want to put a hole in the budget? Well, because more often than not, they come up and make the same arguments. We're gonna bring in bed tax. We're gonna bring in all this sales tax and get things going. You should give us a break on the Centennial Building. And we often do. And so that's why I don't have too much heartburn about somebody like AMO because there's a, I don't know if they would for sure, but they often do. I know that like the fire chiefs, we had to do that. And other cities do. I mean, not Juneau so much, but I know Ketchikan does. They will waive the fees to the Ted Ferry if you bring in a decent, I'm not sure their mechanism, but they definitely do it. So again, it's something we're gonna be competitive for. And like I said, this isn't set in stone. We're gonna try it, and if we turn the, hey, we need to figure out a way to do smaller ones, great. We can do that. I mean, it's not gonna be that hard, and we'll have some track record to do with it. But we gotta start somewhere. That's all.

Katie, you had something? JJ?

More questions for the sponsors, and a bit more about your analysis. So this is up to 50,000. About how many conferences is that? 10? 10 conferences a year. So nine, if we're thinking, I read through the criteria, Mount Edgecombe High School's Thanksgiving would qualify for this because they're all out-of-town attendees. They don't have a Sitka.

I believe they get a big discount anyway. I believe they do. I mean, they're a nonprofit, so they wouldn't pay the full amount anyway.

But they definitely, all 400 kids, they take the whole building. So I think they would qualify.

And we see the benefit of that.

Yep. We're always looking for creative ways to fund education here. And they're the only school that we don't have a direct line to. So this is our way of helping those students out.

I guess my last on this, because I am voting in favor, but Tor talking to me about some of the more reasoning and thinking, now it sounds like we are just filling budgetary holes as opposed to encouraging new revenue overall at this point. I'm not opposed to that either, because these conferences that come in, and Southeast Conference most likely does get a discount to use this place, so we are, making Centennial Hall's budget whole, I think the downstream effects of new revenue will be a bonus. Chris?

Yeah, I like this in principle. I think it's something that'll be interesting to see. I think kind of economic theory stuff, so that's fun. Now, you've said that we're trying this. Is there a review time or?

Every budget.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, in general, I like it. I do enjoy economic theory. I mean, it makes sense on paper, so I wanna see it work.

so is this not i think i had the understanding it was written in here that this was like we recommend that this you know trial period be established for three off-season cycles um is it not a trial period is this meant to continue and we are just to evaluate the viability of it after three cycles or will this kind of expire as an item after three cycles

I would say that it will become really obvious in three years whether or not we want to continue it. What I find attractive for this is, like I said, there's no harm, no foul, because the money literally stays in the fund until it gets used. And there's a certain amount of filling budgetary holes. But there's also, I mean, all it takes is a couple three, and we're seeing a real bump. And so, like I said, I don't expect a lot of new business this year. But maybe next year. I mean, because word has to get out in the year after that. So, you know, in three years, we should know. And at that point, it'll be clearly obvious. I would hope to say, yeah, we want to keep doing this. Or, well, that was nice. That didn't work. But I think it will.

Kevin? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, I agree with the comments from the table. I'd like to see this as a, I view this as a test run. Everybody has made great comments. I think as word of mouth passes, you know, it might... be a very positive thing. It's kind of like an experiment in my mind. And I hope it works. It sounds really good in theory, but we can always revisit this. In my mind, if something's going wrong with it, you know, after a year, we don't have to wait three years. We can adjust as necessary. And I guess what I'm trying to say is I think we should be real flexible with this as far as, you know, we'll try it, and if there's things that need to be tweaked, we can tweak the program as necessary.

I was hopeful that the three years was acknowledging that time frame where our contract with Visit Sitka at its 4% increases each year was going to be getting right to around what our current number of rooms in town can support in that fund. And if we're giving the full $50,000 every year, we'd be hitting a point in about three years of where we need to make decisions about that SICA contract or other uses of the fund. So that's where I was seeing the need for a review in that time frame. Katie?

Yeah, I appreciate your comments and your point about the threshold for the numbers and potentially lowering that if there's a desire. I don't see a ton of discretion in here for the Harrigan Centennial Hall manager to change that 100-person threshold, but I would be interested in hearing in that report if there have been people who reached out who said, I'm a little bit less. Is there an adjustment that we can make? And then potentially that's something that we can revisit after a year. to see if that number can be amended to encourage more business, but I'm happy to vote for it as it is.

Anything further from the assembly? Sarah?

All right, on the motion to approve ordinance 2026-19 on first reading, Mr. Yesdad?

Yes.

Mr. Moser?

Yes.

Mayor Eisenbeis?

Yes.

Mr. Salim? Yes. Ms. Carlson? Yes. Mr. Christensen? Yes. And Ms. Riley? Yes. The motion passes 7-0. Item D on first reading.

Thank you. That would bring us to item E, please.

I move to approve as recommended by the Gary Paxton Industrial Park GPIP Board a request for a proposal for a long-term lease of Lot 16B at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park for private sector development.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded to approve item 26-128. Gary, I understand you have an introduction for this one? Correct, that is 127 that we are starting on, not 128.

Hi, Gary White, GPIP director. So the next two items here you're gonna be looking at are two RFPs that the board has recommended to be moved forward to see if there's public interest in some of the property out there. For the past, I'd say year and a half, the board's been doing a lot of planning out there now that the haul out we knew that the haul out was coming and we're getting ready to try to get some of this property out there that's vacant right now into the hands of small businesses. So we looked at the next item first, which is lot six, which is next to the haul out. And this item is a lot that's up on Sawmill Creek Road. It's a 20,000 square foot lot roughly. And Back in the day, the lot was actually at the level of the park and not the level of the road. And during the Blue Lake Dam project, a bunch of rock was deposited there because we needed a place to put rock. And so the board's been going back and forth about whether they wanted the rock removed or to leave it at the road level. And so... We've had requests for property related to the haul out and property just related to anything that's zoned for the GPIP. And so the board decided to take this item and put it out for request for proposal to see what type of businesses would be interested in using this piece of property, where the next item, they're restricting it just to the Marine haul out because it's right next to the Marine haul out. So this RFP is written to take any type of proposal as long as it meets the zoning requirements. And it also says we're gonna decide this question of whether the rock level should be left at the road or if the rock should be removed to come back down to the park level based off of what type of proposals come in. So the RFP in front of you has all kinds of options of stuff they've gotta submit and a scoring criteria. Talking to some folks before the meeting, one of the things we have in here, if you'd look on page seven, it says community benefit. And we have in there at the very top, the third thing down, it says breadth and depth of community benefits, Contributions towards supporting the marine haul-out facility and local economy. I have no problem with taking out the marine haul-out facility and just leaving it as supporting the local economy, because this is kind of how the RFP is written towards. It's like, we just want to support the economy, see what different types of businesses come in here and not score it, versus the marine haul-out versus a non-marine haul-out, but that's up to you guys to do so. um when when the board approved this we were still talking about the different types of uses and if i would have looked at this closer i probably would have taken that out myself because this is a template that we've been using so uh just another point is um there's as as you look at the map here uh this is kind of our our somewhat plan um and we're releasing just just these two to begin with to see what type of demand comes up see how many types of businesses are interested in this and to see how we can tailor the rest of the rfps going forward so i'll be available for any questions anybody has thank you for the introduction gary we'll call you back up if we've got questions is there any public comment on item 26-127

Hello, my name is Jay Stilwell and I am Executive Director of Fortress of the Bear. And I want to let you know that Fortress is seriously considering lot 16B to expand our sanctuary parking. And before proposals are due, I wanna flag three concerns with how this RFP is written. Usable space and access aren't defined. Lot 16B is only 20,135 square feet under a half acre. And the RFP itself says direct vehicle access from Sawmill Creek is not guaranteed and may not be available. The state right-of-way runs roughly 43 feet in from the road center line. The lot sits on a curve where site distance will control whether a driveway is even approved, and DOT can instead require access off the interior GPIP road. none of that net usable buildable or parkable area is spelled out in this RFP. We're being asked to commit to a 25 year lease and a 24 month build out timeline without knowing how much of this lot we can actually use. Scoring is structurally tilted towards the marine industry. Gary White just said that they're gonna, on the community benefit, that they're willing to change that verbiage, but I still wanna read our concern based on what we saw of the RFP. Of the 100 evaluation points, 20 sit under community benefit. But that rubric defines the category as breadth and depth of community benefits contribution towards supporting the marine vessel haul-out facility and local economy. That bakes marine industry support directly into one score meant to capture community value. And in a tie, the proposal with the higher community benefit score wins outright. A nonprofit like Fortress, whose benefit to Sitka has nothing to do with the haul-out facility, is scored on a criteria partly written for a different kind of tenant. Three, Fortress' actual community impact doesn't fit the boxes. That same criteria as proposals for net new jobs and net new sales tax. It doesn't take into consideration existing jobs that we've created with 10 year round staff and 20 seasonal staff. So we're up to 30 employees. That's a pretty large impact in this community. The metrics existing are built for commercial and an industrial operator. It doesn't ask about visitor spending, school groups, or educational value. Fortress already brings in roughly 20 million a year into the local economy.

Thank you for your time this evening. In fairness to everybody, we're gonna ask you to stop at the three minutes. Thank you. Any other public comment on 26-127? Assembly deliberation? Tor, and then JJ.

Yeah, it won't be long. I have no problem standing on this RFP to see what's out there, and that's it. boiling it down to the simplest thing, just, yeah, see who's interested, see what they wanna do. It wouldn't necessarily result in a lease or a bid. I mean, it's just the first step. And then the dirty little details would have to be worked out. So I think it's not a bad idea to go out and see what people wanna do. And I've heard this lot talked about way more than I ever want to. especially what we're going to do with that rock, or we want to keep it or sail it. So it makes sense to go ahead and see what's out there. And I think that we are capable of determining what, you know, looking at the matrix is one thing, but we're also going to be the ones who say we think this is the best use for our community.

Thank you. Questions for Gary? Want to come up, please? On the drawing, your little diagram of all of GPIP and what lots are where and the colors, lot 16B is in the middle of lot 20 and lot 19. And there's little arrows that point to those lots and also say potential leases. So is there a reason why lot 16B is going forward and the two adjacent lots aren't?

because I've had people that have asked me about 16B. Currently lot 19 and lot 20 are rented or leased right now. So we have Fortress of the Bear on lot 19 and we have, can't think of the name, but a timber mill on 20 right now. So as I was saying before, we picked six because it was close to the to the haul out and then for the other uses outside, we picked 16B because I've had a number of folks that want to, to develop that lot.

And with the adjacent two lots rented, I believe it's somewhere in the policy where if there's a bigger use of the land, the board can move towards a lease and not have the rent.

They're leased on a 30-day basis, so if there's a higher use for that, then we can go, here's your termination, you have 30 days, and then we can put it out for RFP.

I think the higher use might be a lease.

Yeah, well, it's a lease now and it can be a long-term lease.

Okay, thank you. I just think there's perhaps some limitations, but maybe not with the interest you're receiving and some priority through access, especially with it being in that curve we heard. and priority may go, or just usability may go to a neighbor. So is it truly the fullest of the least capabilities? Okay, so thank you for that. I appreciate that answer.

And Chris, I understand. Gary, you can't get up that fast. I understand you had a question for Gary as well.

I kind of did, but it was actually kind of answered. I knew that there was an access on lot 19, because that's how I accessed lot 16B when I was working on it. So yeah, my question was, is who did have it? I couldn't remember. I thought it was Fortress of the Bear.

No, that was put in back in the mill days. There used to be an access easement that came down through there. And it was there 18 years ago. And whenever they did Samuel Cove phase three, they put it back in. And so the board, we discussed this with the board, the city could have gone and spent the money to look at all of the driveway permits and put all that money out there, but the board felt it was the best use of our limited funds to have a potential bidder or proposal for this property to figure that out.

Yeah. Okay, yeah, my question for you is answered, so. Anything else for Gary while he's up here?

Kevin?

Yeah, I'm trying to be careful because I don't want, this is not a negotiation or anything, but can, during your introduction, you indicated that, you know, this RFP is more towards, you know, general and not necessarily emphasized, but then a person, a public person to be heard kind of contradicted that a little bit, is from my understanding, or was that, did I understand wrong? I was wondering if you could address that.

Well, the only thing I think if I would have looked at this with a, with a second set of eyes is, as I said in my opening remarks, that I would change the community benefit to be the breadth and depth of community benefits contributions towards supporting the local economy and just basically strike out marine vessel haul out and.

Are you saying that we should change this?

I think it would fit more within the overall RFP of we're looking at all kinds of different business opportunities, just not related to the, to the marine services industry here. Very, not very far away, but on the other side of the park from marine industries, we, we could very well have marine industries that would like to bid on this. But I think, you know, some of the other bidders that I've talked to, um, Out of the three I talked to, only one's interested in marine services. The other two are just looking for general types of economic development and building the economy out there as long as it falls within the zoning code.

But the board did approve it as is?

What the board said was we're gonna leave it open and then I went back and changed everything that was related to the marine services except maybe that one part that I didn't catch. That's what I'm saying. If I would have caught it, it wouldn't have been in there.

Okay, so it sounds like an administrative correction, not something that needs to pass at this body.

I would be happy to do the regular administrative thing. I don't think it's a...

Thank you.

Yeah, gotcha.

Are we all good with me? Looks like you're off the hook now. Thank you.

Chris? Being a part of GPIP for quite a while, I agree with the board that this lot would be a good one for just kind of general purpose and not so much necessarily dedicated to the haul-out facility. The next lot that we have coming up next That one definitely needs to be specific with the haul-out, I think. But yeah, for this one, I would agree. Take the haul-out out, and yeah, let's put it out there and see what kind of interest is there. I know the lot well, so good luck to those bidders.

Anything further? Sarah?

Right, on the motion to approve an RFP for a long-term lease of lot 16B at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park for private sector development. Mr. Mosier?

Yes.

Mr. Yesdad? Yes. Ms. Riley? Yes. Mr. Christensen? Yes. Mr. Saleen? Yes. Mayor Eisenbeiss? Yes. And Ms. Carlson? Yes. Motion passes 7-0 on item E. Item F, please.

I move to approve as recommended by the Gary Paxton Industrial Park Board

approve a request for proposal for a long-term lease of a portion of lot six at the gary paxton industrial park for private sector development for marine vessel and marine services uh it's been moved and seconded to approve 26-128 gary is there any additional introduction to this one or is it same same great thank you uh any public comment on 26-128 Assembly deliberation. JJ?

But on this one, haul-out use is preferred, only difference. So that wouldn't be an administrative change needed for every reference to the haul-out. Yep, and this is just a portion of that back piece as to kind of include the circle where boats are already part. Isn't I don't recall seeing it in my first reading, and I kind of just briefly did my second reading of this. Gary, is there any reference to the utility easement, the electric easement that goes above, and any restrictions that might be listed on that because of our main power lines or some of those big power lines?

I didn't catch the last part.

The power lines that go above this lot.

Yeah, those will fall more under the building official thing. There is an abandoned fire line out there, but it's been abandoned. That happened years ago. And just a little bit more clarification. When When the haul-out was developed, we gave up a big chunk of lot six for the yard itself, and so this is the remaining, that's why it's a portion, and we're saying approximately 10,000 square feet, and we're putting the burden on the bidders to go in and get it re-subdivided and get the actual square footage so we can make this into lot 6B, I guess, once it all gets settled and done, once we figure out who the proposals are and everything else.

Thank you, because it looks like you're looking for people that will do bigger things and maybe wish to have some structures or temporary structures, permanent structures. So understanding all of that in advance before entering into at least, because there's other things that get pretty detailed in the cease agreement, so I was wondering why that section of stuff isn't included in here.

We're leaving that up to the proposals. Part of their bid will tell us what they wanna do, what type of buildings it's gonna go under, what it's gonna do to support the all out and the community, and then the selection committee will go through that, value it, go to the board, and then come to you guys for final approval.

Anything else for Gary on lot six? Bravo is what it's gonna end up being it looks like. Thanks, Gary. Further deliberation? Sarah?

All right, on the motion to approve an RFP for a long-term lease of a portion of lot six at GPIT for private sector development for marine vessel and marine services. Mr. Saline? Yes. Mayor Eisenbeis? Yes. Mr. Christensen? Yes. Ms. Carlson? Yes. Mr. Yestad? Yes. Ms. Riley? Yes. And Mr. Mosher? Yes. The motion passes 7-0 on item F.

As I think item G will take longer than 10 minutes, maybe 15 or so. We should probably take a recess before we get to that one. Please be seated when you're ready to continue. Moving on to our 15 minute item is all we have allocated for this one. So this is a discussion, direction, decision on a project selection for a fiscal year 2027 designated legislative grant. I could get into this, but then I would be stealing John's thunder, so John, please.

Thank you for giving me the delay so I could finish chewing the goldfish that I started on. Well, shall I continue? No, no. So as you'll see in the packet, there's not a lot of background information here because we're moving fairly quickly on this one. As you'll see in the packet, we received a letter from Department of Commerce Community and Economic Development for $4.5 million as a designated legislative grant for the purpose of projects to repair, maintain, and upgrade port facilities and harbor infrastructure, enhance passenger safety, and provide services to vessels and passengers. So that's a fancy way of saying CPV money. This comes from the state CPV fund. When we received this letter, we have a 30-day timeline to provide the state with a scope of a project. As soon as I got this, I called the state and said, hey, thank you, much appreciated, but This isn't something we applied for. I'll call it a windfall of money. So we didn't have anything really in the hopper ready to go. There's ideas out there, but acting on an idea without a discussion in front of the legislative body was likely inappropriate, and since there are so many ideas, we rallied as quickly as we could, put it on this meeting, and Judson even leaned into this and asked the Tourism Commission to meet so they could have some input, not make any formal recommendation or anything, but have more of a forum to hear some other ideas on it that will meet the scope of CPD requirements. So I will just stress as much as I can that that timeline, we're coming up on 30 days, looks like August 13th, so about two weeks from now, I'll have to have a scope to them. It doesn't need to be, from my conversations with them, it doesn't need to be a fully defined project scope, just something, the conceptual plan on what we want to do to start the clock on the five-year money. There will be a five-year spending timeline on this. So I'm looking for some guidance and a formal selection of a project from the assembly after they hear some input from possibly Judson on what he's learned on some of the other ideas or hear some assembly ideas as well.

Great, thank you for that. Judson, since you happen to make yourself available at this meeting, If you could come up and give us an overview of the Tourism Commission meeting and thank you for getting this in front of them. It's generally a question we all have is did this go in front of the appropriate body and at this point it sounds like it did. So anything you could add to the discussion would be most helpful.

Thank you. I'm Judson Rusk. I'm the tourism manager here for the city. Like John said, last week, under some tight time frame, I was able to get the tourism commission together for a work session. No official recommendations made in that work session, but we did have a very productive conversation about this. I gave the direction to the Tourism Commission to bring any and all ideas to the table so we could discuss the merits of them. I wanted to be very clear in that meeting that we were not only in the boundaries of what CPV funding can be used for, but also to kind of harken it back to the strategic plan of the city and sort of the recommendations of the tourism task force from a few years ago about how to specifically leverage the tourism industry for the benefit of everyone who lives here, right? So with that in mind, we discussed multiple ideas. The conversation, as a body, pretty, it was a general consensus that we came down to two different ideas. Everyone in the meeting prioritized these as the top two ideas. We didn't prioritize them in the same way, but they were the same two for every single person. And the two ideas that we had talked about the most were One, kind of rolling this money into the Lincoln Street project, just as an overall addition into that project. It's part of the capital plan. It's been sort of on the docket for quite a while. And it is an easy project. say, argument to make. We wouldn't even have to justify CPV money being used for that, especially in this quantity because of how many cruise passengers use the downtown stretch. The other idea that we talked about the most would be using this toward the seawall. I have to give some context on this one though. That was the number one sort of project that the Tourism Commission wanted to see this go toward. However, using CPV money for that particular project, even though it is cruise related, the ships that dock at the seawall don't pay the CPV head tax. So this would be a, if we wanted to put it toward that, I think it falls completely within the strategic plan of the city of addressing not only the needs of the infrastructure of the city as a whole, and it also benefits the cruise industry, but that would be a conversation that myself and other people in the city would have to take to other bodies to see if we could use that money for that project. There was a third idea that was brought to me, and this was not at the meeting, but I wanted to relay this because it's been brought up to me personally by multiple people, is that it's putting that money toward a passenger ferry that would operate as a water taxi from the cruise ship dock to downtown. I know this idea has been floated before. I'm going to be candid with all of you here. It was talked about before my time in this role, so I don't know exactly the extent of that conversation. But it has been brought to me that we could use that money to retroactively fit a passenger ferry vessel that is already in town and then redo it interior, exterior, and motors. And that would be the use of the grant and then that would address what is a common public issue about the number of buses on the roads. So from what I understand, the boat in question, if it was up and operational, every time it ran would take about five buses off the road, which is something that I hear from the public quite a lot is the concern about enough traffic. So to recap from the Tourism Commission work session, The seawall was the idea that was sort of championed the most, but I have concerns about the use of that. Lincoln Street was next, just rolling it into that project to make sure that gets sort of up and off the ground, and then a passenger ferry to address the bus issue.

Question for you real quick. Did you, I know you don't have budgets for these things, but do you have back of the napkins ideas on whether four and a half million dollars would do it on these three items? I do.

Yeah, that'd be probably more of a John question than a Judson. So John, we can address that in a second here. Questions for Judson?

Judson, when you said you're gonna take how many buses off with this ferry, five buses? Five buses per trip. So you're gonna taxi from the cruise dock into town at eight knots and you're gonna take Anyway, I'm good.

I understand where that, I'm not the mariner. That was just brought up to me as the idea for the project to speak to the specifics of the boats and how the operation would work. I'm not the person to answer that.

But you got a handle on the CPV possibilities? And so nobody mentioned anything about the 480 volt rapid charger to alleviate the bus problem by, it's already been stated that the people out the road would buy one electric bus if there was some way to charge it. And so with all the transmission lines going out underneath the bridge, nobody brought that up. Use this money to get a charger to charge town would be our benefit, but also to alleviate the diesel buses by being able to charge one bus there with the CPV money. Does that sound like something would fly? Because it's their electric bus, but then town would get to have an electric charging station for electric cars

In a grand CPV discussion, CPV has to be used for the direct benefit of- That's where I'm at with you talking about the buses.

So I'm biting into that. If you're gonna eliminate buses and then have another fossil fuel waste at eight knots bringing in 350 people take all morning to get to town, this alleviates buses too with where people are going. So that's why I'm hung up on that. Is that a possibility of using this money to get an electric charger?

Yeah, I think that would be, it would be approved use of the funds. The only reason I didn't bring it up is I was relaying what we talked about in our discussions. And until right now, no one had brought that up. But as long as that, if you were talking sort of big picture, if we were talking about an electric charging station for buses specifically to be used to alleviate the shuttle buses for the cruise ship passengers, then the CPV money I think would be eligible for that. if that was used with the CPV money used to sponsor that and then we use that bus or that infrastructure to do other things with it, that would raise some questions.

Well to me it's like you're gonna continue the seawall or the seawalk? You mean by the co-op, the city cold storage when you say seawall?

The seawall, yes, the one by the cold storage building.

I see, thank you.

Kevin and then Katie.

Actually, I'm okay right now, thank you.

Katie. Thank you for that clarification. I wanted to know more what the seawall project was, like what was discussed. Can you summarize it? Is it like to support the structural improvements that are needed to that? I think we just lost a grant because we didn't have enough money to complete that. Would this be enough to bridge the gap? What are your concerns? John question. My other question was not sounding like something that came up at the Tourism Commission, but something that was discussed previously was a trail access underneath the Indian River Bridge to go to the other side to facilitate the transportation of passengers without the rogue walkers across Samuel Creek Road, which I think a lot of people would appreciate and would drastically increase safety. Is this something that would be appropriate for that? Do we have an estimate for that funding-wise?

Yes, that is a project that I've actually been working on sort of quietly behind the scenes. That is something that the community has been wanting. It's been something the cruise ships have been wanting. Yes, this would qualify for that. The reason that we did not discuss it in depth, that came up at the Tourism Commission work session, is that this particular grant, it has to be issued for one project, and we use it on one project and we can't delegate it to other projects. In the grand scheme of things, that underpass projects, the last time we got a quote for it was in 2023, so lots of things have increased by then, but in 2023, it was just over $500,000 to get it done. even if we doubled that, we would still that would not be a like prudent use of this particular grant, because there'd be so much money left on the table that we could put somewhere else.

Thank you for that. Yeah, I was wondering about like, can it be used for multiple projects? So thanks for clearing that up. In regards to what you said about the Lincoln Street project, and not having to justify that because of how many people use Lincoln Street. Yes, and also my understanding is we have to justify every cent of how we use this money. And so, I think that I'll be interested to hear from John. I think the last quote for Lincoln Street was something like $20 million of this would be a quarter, you know, but would there have to be calculations that go into that? How would we make sure that Lincoln Street, which is like our main street, also for the community year round, how would those community ideas and concerns and, you know, desires for that street be central in a project that would receive like a significant portion of CPV funds?

Yeah, when I said earlier that we wouldn't have to, it'd be easy, you are correct. We have to justify every cent of CPV money that we use. The Lincoln Street project is such an encompassing project. And again, I did not come with numbers ready about Lincoln Street, but just to kind of, again, some napkin math here. the amount of visitors that we have per year. Obviously they're using the sidewalks and the streets. If we were gonna break that project down into like what percentage of CPV money or what percentage of the usage of Lincoln Street goes to cruise ship passengers, we would also determine on a percentage of like local business sales downtown how much is there a dramatic change in the summer season for those five months, then we can take that percentage difference and apply it to the percentage of the overall project. And we can item line that down all the way to utility usage in those five months compared to what is in the off season. And kind of the point I was trying to make was all of those are definitely going to come to more than four and a half million dollars with sidewalks, pavement, and just redesign of the street to make it more pedestrian friendly. Yeah, I'm saying it's a very easy argument to make.

OK, that's great. And you don't anticipate that there would need to be like I think when we think about Lincoln Street remodel, you know, we're thinking about, yeah, how do we make this more accessible for visitors and locals alike? But you don't think that we would need to make specific adjustments for visit like we would be beholden to making specific modifications for visitors, given that it the usage so exceeds that 4.5 million that kind of whatever we did with it would fit the bill for the funding.

I don't believe so. I don't want to specifically speak to engineering, but the overall idea of the Lincoln Street project is to make it more accessible for everybody. And whether you're a cruise ship passenger or whether you're a local, physical space is physical space, and we're going to make it more accessible and comfortable and usable for everybody. So I don't think there would be anything beholden to specific groups.

Thank you so much.

Quick question. Kitty touched on it. So this has to be used on one project. That was on my list of questions. So it can't be, we can't use a million dollars here and $3 million over here. It has to be one project. Is that correct?

Correct. We have to submit a scope of work for a single project.

Thanks, Judson. I think a lot of those questions were a bit outside of your wheelhouse, but you managed them very well. We'll toss all of those.

I was like, if John needed to step in any time, he could.

We'll toss all those other ones back to John as the expert on receiving the grant. But we thank you for your perspective from the tourism side of things. Appreciate it. John, we had a lot of questions. Did you summarize those and you have succinct answers for us all? Which, which ones do you want first?

Okay. Well, I got it in this order on my, on my email. So I'm starting with, I'm starting with Lincoln street first the Lincoln street project. So the most recent estimate we have from engineering, and this is not to cast any doubt on engineering's estimates. I just, things tend to come in a lot higher than what we plan on. The most recent estimate is $15.5 million to get Lincoln Street completed. Right now the available budget is between six and six and a half million. We still have a funding shortfall of about $9 million to get that project completed. Also keep in mind with this grant, the money needs to be spent in five years. Keep that in your mind as it's gotta be spent down. Moving on to the Marine Service Center bulkhead and seawall project. As you remember, we had a build grant for that. Actually, it was called a raise grant at the time. We had a little under two million available for match money. We got a $7.9 million grant from DOT. That project, although that was our original budget, was around nine, 9.3. Estimates escalated to about 15 million. We put it out to bid with the budget that we had. We didn't get any proposals on it, and now it looks like the estimates for that are about 16.3 million right now to go with our original proposal. I have some numbers on what's available in our CPV fund now, if that is helpful to hear. But right now, the available balance for our CPV fund is about $4.2 million. And there were some other questions about, what was it? I can't answer the question about, did the Tourism Commission talk about the, under the bridge project or potential project with the charging station. I don't have estimates on that. You already heard from Judson on estimates about the underpass, I guess. There were other ones. Which ones am I missing?

was continuing the seawall on, or no, that was my seawalk, seawall still.

Different, yeah. About the seawall, I was just wondering, you know, it sounds like there's maybe, like that facility is used by more fishermen, subsistence fishermen, but a bunch of different parties. if we were able to put 4.5 million towards it, we don't have that grant. Still, they invited us to apply back or something. I'm wondering, would it be enough to do it? And if not, do we lose the money from the state because it's not spent or?

No, I think that's a viable project. But there's the pros and cons, right? As soon as you spend tourism money for that facility, you have turned that facility into a tourism facility, a partial tourism facility, and you might run into conflicts over usage times. Plus, the smaller ships tend to go to that facility if they go there at all. and we were feverishly trying to look this up thank you judson and brooke and thank you for scott for pointing me to it only certain size ships pay into the head tax fund and i believe it's over 250 passengers so we might be inviting ourselves to get larger ships at the seawall so just things to take into consideration but the pros of it are if With this money plus the money we have, we might be able to do some major maintenance, not a rebuild, but extend the service life of it. Or, and don't hold me to this, there might be the potential to leverage this extra money as match money for a bigger federal grant if we were to still qualify for the federal grant and maybe get us across the finish line for the entire project. But again, your... turning your seawall into a partial, I say cruise facility, but it would need to be available to cruise passengers.

John, did you say both? At 16 million for Lincoln, the total thing, and then 16 million for the seawall? 16.3 is the estimate on the seawall right now. And Lincoln Street is 16 also. You only got nine or something? Lincoln's 15 and a half.

additional questions for john if that's okay. Tell me about that 15 five for Lincoln Street. Is that all of the enterprise funds or just the general fund contribution?

That's all of the funds right now the the projected amount is nine and a half from general fund to two and a half from water two and a half from wastewater and a million dollars from electric. And there's there's gaps with each one of those.

Yes. And I recall In our budgeting for the last two years, we've been doing some good savings from the enterprise funds, but not the general fund. And the general fund, I believe, is probably going to be more of that planning, that prep, and the surface treatments, which would be more directly, you know, something you'd point to in this named enhance passenger safety and provide services to vessel passengers as that kind of phrase used in this letter of what we're trying to achieve. Is that how you would see that money as general fund or would it be a split between all of the contributing

I mean, the safest bet, this is strictly my view on it, I don't like to give opinions, but I think the safest bet is the general fund portion, the paving portion, the sidewalks, those are the things that are most greatly going to have an impact on passengers. I think it would be a stretch to say the water and the wastewater and the electric infrastructure is serving tourists, so I think you're on the right path there. I don't know. My wastewater infrastructure serves quite a few tourists every day.

I just have one more question, maybe for you, maybe for Mark. I think the crane at the seawall is one of the only publicly available cranes. Is there one out at GPIP on that dock? No. So that is our only publicly available crane? OK.

And that's highly talked about, uh, ports and harbors correction. Um, yeah, just for the community, if you're listening and you're coming from the maritime side of Sitka, when we say here on the land, seawall, we mean port wall in your world. Um, don't know where the term seawall came from, uh, but that's what we mean there. And the waterside and Marine services center there on Cali on, um, with the crane and the parking lot that, you know, however many decades ago was the recycling center. So that's the area in town we're talking about.

Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at this list, and I realize we have the time structure. I actually really like the charging port idea, but I don't think we could... I think it would be hard to spend four and a half on that. We'd either spend a whole lot less or a whole lot more.

I was thinking that, you know, with tribal help, because they kind of learned.

No, I agree, but I just don't think that, I don't think we could pull that together in two weeks. You know, the project scope and all that. The ferry, We did look at that when I was here back when I was parks on the planning and zoning, we looked at that pretty hard and I don't think four and a half million is even close to being enough for that because you'd have to, have a place to land on this side of town. Because the problem is the harbor. And when you have to go slow through the harbor, it adds so much that they really would say they'd have to drop them off essentially at the seawall or at Petro down there. And so I don't think we, again, it's not one I don't think we could pull together in two weeks, nor do I think we could do it with four and a half million. The seawall, strikes me as a little bit problematic using CPV bonds, and then also even more problematic than Lincoln Street on trying to get it spent in five years, because we have to go find the rest of the money we haven't even really started. And so it leads it down to Lincoln Street, given the time restraints and the fact that, an overused phrase, it's the most shovel-ready, and it'll also, impact the most tourists and the most Sitkins. I mean, really, I mean, every tourism, pretty much every tourist that comes to town is going to get impacted. but so is every Sitkin. So we're always saying we're looking for those dual use ones. It'd be pretty hard to find one that does both as well as Lincoln Street. So I haven't heard anything tonight that we can come up with in two weeks better than Lincoln Street. So just to keep the conversation going.

Scotty and then. I'm gonna get ahold of the mayor of Craig because he put in the two charging stations that T&H paid for down in Prince of Wales. And he also put in the two hydro plants and we've talked extensively about it. I'll get back to you before a week on with some real numbers on that, because Lincoln Street's a no for my vote. We got enough money on Lincoln Street right now. We got other places in town, and that charging station hits a lot of bells, so I can get that information back with somebody that really knows it.

Kevin? Thank you, Steve. This is kind of turning out the way I thought it would. It's this weird amount we gotta spend, situation we gotta spend it in five years. It's four and a half million. It's not enough to do any major big project, none of its own, and then we have to scope out the project, whatever it is. I like a lot of the ideas I'm hearing. I'd love to do Lincoln Street or the Seawall, but basically my question to John is, based on your time here, you're gonna be done soon, you're very familiar with these kind of things. If you were king for a day, what would you spend it on?

I don't think I'm comfortable answering that question.

You don't have any suggestions at all. You don't have any type of...

I think you could rephrase your question on which is the most likely to be completed within the time frame.

Yeah, that's what I'm asking. I'm not asking what you want. I'm asking what we can get done to accomplish these parameters. Five years, the 4.5 or whatever cash that we have on hand. That's what I'm asking.

I think the one that has the most probability to get done because it's mostly designed and we have a good scope is the seawall, the port wall, the seawall, the Marine Service Center. But there are some maybe downsides, some concerns there that you are turning a cold storage facility and port wall into partial year tourist use. But that's the one that I think is highly likely to have shovels in the dirt and or piles driving in the water in this case to get to get done in that timeline. Katie.

Well, just, I don't know, one of the things that we're not talking about that we previously had with the CPV funds is the holistic design of a revamped under the bridge facility, which I think the Charger fits into. I don't think the Charger is a $4.5 million project. I think that fits into a broader redesign, which is what we originally asked the staff to do with our CPV funds. And so if we have more CPV funds to add to that, you know, can we not just do a feasibility study but actually implement a plan there? I think that that should be a thing that is considered by this body. I am uncomfortable with the seawall just because of how critical that cold storage is. It's one of five public cold storages in Alaska. We have very few. It is highly utilized by commercial fishermen, by subsistence fishermen, by the public to offload and unload freight. I don't want to see that become A TOURISM FACILITY LIKE I THINK THAT YOU KNOW THE WAY THE SMALL SHIPS USE IT NOW IS IS GREAT BUT IF WE'RE HAVING TO KICK OUT OUR COMMERCIAL FISHING INDUSTRY TO YOU KNOW MAKE ANOTHER DOCK DOWNTOWN WELL THAT WAS VOTED DOWN THREE TIMES BY THE COMMUNITY I THINK TO HAVE A DOCK FACILITY DOWNTOWN SO THAT POTENTIAL FOR CONFLICT THERE AND THE THE ARGUMENTS THAT COULD BE MADE IF WE USED TOURISM MONEY FOR THAT FACILITY GIVE ME A LOT OF uh concern for even though i would love to see that you know i highly prioritize that as an infrastructure project i think that is is really high up there for me but i don't want to see it re like utilized in in a way that it's not meant to be as how it currently is

Before I make my comments, as it's been disclosed multiple times before, I am a business owner on Lincoln Street. As it's been ruled multiple times before by multiple attorneys, I belong to a class of people, so it is okay for me to speak to these issues. And I say that because for several reasons, I do believe the Lincoln Street project to fit this the best. And actually, when I was walking down to John's office to talk to him about it, I'm looking at all the cracks and the unevenness in the sidewalk and all the grinding we've had to do. And I go, well, of course this enhances passenger safety. If we've had to grind our sidewalks down so people just don't trip and fall on them, then there is a clear, need for some revamping there. The other reason I want to advocate for it is we've been told time and time again that Lincoln Street is one of the tension points with visitation. Whether it is bathrooms in places where people don't want them or if it's streets that are open or closed when people don't want them, it brings a lot of contention to our visitor industry. It's been this body's goal to get that taken care of so that we can ease congestion downtown and allow visitors to flow more freely and allow locals their space that they need as well. As someone who's on Lincoln Street every day, I see the congestion down there. I see the amount of people that walk in the road, especially on the Cathedral Arms side of the church, right? They frequently stop traffic there, because they're just kind of wandering down the road as if that's a sidewalk there, because that sidewalk is extremely narrow. Actually, one of our stop signs on that corner, when I walk underneath of it, I have to duck, because the stop sign is that low. So I think that this can be an easy fit with what we need to do here. I think the scope is close enough at this point that we could, and also a thought that I've had is if we're already spending this designated legislative grant of CPV funding, does this unlock additional CPV funding that we have in our coffers because we've already justified the use, right? So instead of being five million short, can we bring another three million in from our 4.2 available head tax money and be almost right there, right? So that, potentially says that this project can happen. I would love to see some additional width in sidewalks. I'd love to see some passenger, pedestrian safety issues happen there. JJ was working on pedestrian safety downtown this week, right? Because it is such a hotspot right there. So my thoughts on it. Oh, and Katie, you'd mentioned under the bus or under the bridge bus depot. I briefly spoke to a large bus operator here in town they're not 100% backing the project right now, right? It's not key to their operations. While they could use it and would work with, it's not something that they're pushing hard for. So I think we would wanna get operator buy-in as well before we hit that. It was JJ and then John.

John, my questions may be what you wanna say. just a bit more of a frame on this. 53 weeks ago, so it was July 17th, it was a Thursday of 2025, the Assembly had a special meeting to talk about Lincoln Street. And at that time, we said it was a priority. And I think we're just continuing with what we said a year ago, and now we have some money to put towards what we already said our goals were. And I think that should be general fund contribution because in the spending plans, you know, that five-year capital improvement program for enterprise funds, we were looking at putting aside money each year to total what's needed from those pots to get here. And that's all been in the works. We set rates based on looking at what those enterprise funds capital projects would be So we're not changing anything. We don't need to meet that full, you know, 9 million today, because we've already started setting aside, but we haven't been setting aside in general fund. I believe, Mark, if you want to say anything about that, I'm pretty sure I'm accurate on that. But you can tell me from your computer if there's anything different than that. And John, it's a little hard to hear that the seawall is further along in that because this group a year ago said it was a priority. So do you have anything there? Is that leading into what you were gonna say?

Yeah, I don't, that's what I was trying to jump in and clarify those comments and to respond to Mr. Moser as well. I don't take that as... that's the one I think we should do. That one, because it's been through that build grant process, and we have full application packages, and we've put bid packages together for it, timeline-wise, it has a higher probability. I don't wanna say it has a high probability. Lincoln Street, again, if we were aggressive, I think it could be tackled. There's a lot that has to go into it, and I'm gonna apologize in advance to the community, but there's going to be a very big public process over Lincoln Street, and I think that's part of the reason why it has flopped a few times in the past, is who gets sidewalks on this side, who gets sidewalks on the other side, if it's one way, which way does it go, is parking on one side versus parking on the other, or is it angled, or what color is the, we need to, that has to be figured out very, very quickly to get a design ready to then act on it. So that has to be factored in with the timeline, but yes, you are, you are correct. And you're going where I was going is that Lincoln street is, is the priority, but the spending timeline is the hard part.

Yeah.

Yeah. That five years. And maybe this would help get us there. because we can continue to push things down or say, you know, it's going to be hard, but when we have that need and we have $4 million that would disappear if we don't, you know, commit, probably would have to hire another engineer because we have schools that need to be, and we have this and that, and to have someone, yeah, available to do this work. I'm seeing it as a need. I'm seeing it as something that's been previously prioritized, and... I think we should move in the direction of giving this $4.5 million to the Lincoln Street project from Harborway to Harbor Drive. So it's basically a harbors project too.

Tor? Yeah, just fairly quickly. I think emotionally, the facility under the bridge would be where I'd like to go. And I love the idea of putting a charging station in there and revamping it for that. I just don't think we could put a coherent proposal together in two weeks for that, because we haven't really done a lot of work on it. I know I'm saying we shouldn't do it. In fact, I mean, I think that, but like I say, just the charging station would, I don't see taking more than a million dollars and probably not even close to that. and we have to spend it all on one. And so given the time constraints and the long history of trying to get Lincoln Street over the line, I still think that's our best option for this. And I will say that having a deadline sometimes helps things move along faster. And five years is not, you know, I think that it's doable, especially since we've already identified most of the funding. So I still think it's our best bet on this. Katie?

Yeah, I mean, I think Lincoln Street is a great project. It obviously needs to happen. It would be great. I'm really concerned about the timeline because it's been in the hopper for like 20 years. So my question is what happens if we don't, if we get to a certain point and we don't complete the project within five years, do we then have to pay this money back? and i'm gonna just assume that we're gonna have some cost overruns with everything that has happened um you know so let's say let's hypothesize this project increases to 20 or 25 million dollars and we lose the 4.5 because we don't complete it within five years like what happens are we then on the hook to pay that back of what we've spent um well we won't be

paying anything back, these designated legislative grants are cost reimbursable, so we would take on the cost, and if we extend beyond, it would just time out, and we would not be able to get reimbursed for our expenses. I mean, that doesn't mean I can't ask for extensions. I'd have to dig through the application packet again. You can't ask for extensions.

You coming back in five years?

Well, I won't be asking. Mark Seavey's going to be asking for extensions.

Okay, so if it's reimbursable and we don't spend the $4.5 million, but we get a certain amount of ways down the project that we don't want to stop, then we just would assume the cost that haven't been spent.

That's my assumption. And again, I'd have to clarify on this. which things are eligible, which does the project have to be complete to be, um, to be reimbursed? Can they, can we say we're just doing this specific, I don't know, first part of it and get that money spent and then start taking on the rest. Those are things I'll still have to work out.

Um, well, yeah, I mean, I think Lincoln street is, uh, is great i am very concerned about the feasibility of it just given the the project history and also the changes that are needed if you expand the sidewalks like it will be a one-way only street in some places and or no parking or a variety of other things that are highly contentious in this community and held the project up before so um it's just like how can we be realistic as a body when we're trying to ensure feasibility of a project. That's why I've come back to the bridge project. It's such a clear fit. But I do think Lincoln Street is a bigger priority. I think the other one would be more feasible. And in terms of a scope and a scale of project, I think staff has already been thinking about that. And also, how built out does that need to be? Feasibility studies and a variety of other things are are allowed under these grants as per the grant handbook. So something to consider is like how advanced does the scope need to be for that project?

Chris. Kind of with all the discussion and just everything here, I'm definitely not for the port wall thing, especially not having gone to the Harbor Commission yet. and getting their input on it. I think if they knew that there was potential risk of losing the port wall facility as a base for commercial and any other operation, that would be concerning, because we have that out at GPIP, that there's days that the fishermen and other users can't use it because it's strictly a cruise ship dock. So I'm definitely shying away from that. The passenger ferry thing is definitely interesting. It'd be nice to have more time to examine that a little bit more and seeing if there would be some interest in it within the community. But I think we're too short. At this point, yeah, I'm kind of leaning towards the Lincoln Street thing. But obviously, yeah, same thing. A lot of reservations with it, timeframe, all that. I'd hate to have another project that we get rolling on and all of a sudden lose a lot of our funding. So it's, I guess I'm willing to take the risk cause I do know it is kind of community wise. It's a bit of a priority. So, um, I kinda like Steven's idea of maybe leveraging some of our other CPV funding to help us get closer to the financial goals here. If we're gonna do this, let's just make Lincoln Street a priority. We have any sort of extra money from sinking infrastructure fund, yeah, it goes into that. If we're gonna do it, let's really go for it. I think it's gonna be tough considering we're gonna probably have someone new at the helm here soon and not having John really help push this thing through. So I don't know, I've used it as a stretch, but it's the only one that I can see right now that was such a short timeframe that we can kind of go after and maybe some sort of master plan for CPV spending in the future. maybe don't need to pay some organization to build it for us, but maybe we create one. So. Kevin.

I,

I am concerned, I was concerned about this agenda item when we started and especially after talking to John a little bit, just got some more facts. I think it's pigeonholing us into trying to force us to make a decision in a very short period of time with limited information because we don't want to lose $4.5 million. I would prefer Lincoln Street. I think it's community desired. I think that's very much a priority of this community. However, I would have been, I think the majority is leaning towards Lincoln Street. I would have been open to Under the Bridge, but I don't even know what that project exactly is. Lincoln Street is more definable. However, I think there's concerns. The timing is just really... bothering me, and I think it's going to be a push, because I remember when John first started and over the years, he said, when you ask me to do one thing, well, there's other things. It's not like the staff is just laying around not doing anything right now, and so this is a huge thing. They're going to have to drop something to make this a priority, because yeah, I wouldn't everybody's gonna have an opinion on this and it should be, absolutely should be a public process where everyone's getting input, but at the end of the day, there's gonna be people who aren't happy no matter what we do. So I guess my question to you, John, is what is gonna have to give

um in order to kind of make this happen because it feels to me just listening to the discussion that it's so there's going to be some just dropping other things just to do this i'd like to hear your thoughts on that i i can't answer confidently yet on what is going to have to give when i said we'd have to get aggressive about it it was already one of the highly rated capital projects i don't think we would probably have to delay some of the future planned capital projects and put all focus to this. Can I list them all off in front of me? No, I don't have the capital plan in front of me. But I think it would be, full steam ahead on that and using our engineering team and public works team, and well, everybody, electric, water, wastewater, getting them all involved and starting on that public process right now to get the project moving. But I would expect some delays in some future capital projects.

With that being said, I mean, if we have to make a decision, I guess my preference would be Lincoln Street, and I'm just very concerned and uneasy about this. We're being forced to make a major decision and one agenda item because we don't want to lose the deadline. I'm just not very comfortable with that, but I don't want to lose $4.5 million, so I guess we should go towards Lincoln Street. I do believe that is a community priority. It's very important to the community.

Um, one, you know, you, you, you, we talked about, we, we mentioned like, uh, under the bridge revamp at the original CPV funds, you know, you sent out an email. I'm wondering if you have put any thought into what that scope or scale of work could look like.

I've not, you know, uh, in fact, I don't think we've, um, we've really started to dig into that one yet just because of, other priorities and projects happening right now. So I don't think we have a strong enough plan on what that would look like.

I thought you were pointing at the clock to let us know that it was well past our 15 minutes.

Yeah, we're currently at 49 minutes and 18 seconds. Mark, please. But Mark, what would you like to share?

So not to dissuade anyone's opinions, just we haven't talked about it at length with the additional funds that are gonna be impacted if we select Lincoln Street. And that's because that is a road and utility project. Both water and wastewater are gonna need to be able to come up with those funds to support it right now and get that over, potentially over the goal line within five years. I think still working out what the official grant agreement is gonna look like In the handbook talking to Judson, there may be room that needs to be substantially underway and not necessarily physically complete. But once we start that, it's not gonna make sense to stop partway. We're gonna need to finish that. So that is heavily gonna impact water and wastewater. And water, neither of those funds have more than around 200,000 currently allocated to that project. So if it stayed at the two and a half million, that's over two million that each of those funds needs to come up with. Water, and Brooke may be able to speak better to this, it's not in the greatest position. It would probably be looking at another DEC loan, and we are already looking at going into repayment for those loans for the water treatment facilities, the UV membrane, and critical secondary. Additionally, we have a five year mandate that we have to finish the effluent disinfection project. a regulatory requirement for wastewater that has to be done. Again, we have a CDS with that, but if there's any creep with that or additional match funds required, that's another competing fund. And just looking at bandwidth for the engineering staff, I mean, right now, looking at those next five years, that effluent disinfection project has to happen. And currently, the plan has been trying to line out to do the seaplane base as well on the heels of the airport. that would be in the next two years, trying to get through phase two of Lake Hirsch Monastery, Kincaid, Kirkman, Mack, Sudoff, get moving on Lincoln Street, the seaplane base, and the effluent disinfection, which is, it's gonna be a tremendous amount of work we're trying to get through, which more than likely is gonna look at contracted staff to help augment and support where it's needed, just for consideration.

Yes, and we've talked, yeah. And we've talked, too, about during the budget process taking on the schools and all of their small projects. And projects are funded. And part of Brooke's interim financial report also stated that it was staff capacity that has limited a lot of those things that are budgeted, funded for moving forward. So yeah, we're just doing a lot of supplemental appropriations tonight. What does a new engineer cost? We're gonna have to hire someone to get any of this stuff accomplished, and we've been talking about that for- I would say all in fully funded FTE, probably about 250,000. And our cost overruns from budgets that don't go forward is that per project if we don't get things done timely. Okay. Another thought to add to this, something we've been stepping around for, two out of the four years that I've been on this assembly.

Tora, for Mark? Just had a thought on this. What's that? For Mark? Oh, no, no, sorry.

Anything else for Mark while we have him in front of us? Kevin?

Yeah, so are you saying, so from what I'm hearing from you, you know, the effluent whatever the name of that project is, that is a federal mandated thing that must be done. It's one of those unfunded mandates that we are having to spend millions of dollars on. If we take funds from wastewater and water, in this case wastewater, we're gonna have to probably raise rates, because if we take a loan, we're gonna have to add utility increases in there.

I'm just saying that I see that as a potential that wasn't, I'm gonna say it's an oversight, it's just that in picking this project, it is a road and utility project and it doesn't make sense to do the general fund portion if we don't touch the utilities and the the raw and the rough order of magnitude that originally came out of that project was it was originally scoped as a replace the road in kind but redo the utilities so we also are just sending out the notifications for the safe streets rfq so that's another piece that was going to be a part of this lincoln street process and that isn't supposed to wrap up until around June, July next year. So if we want that to be a fully vetted plan that's completed and then incorporated into this, again, that's just looking at that timeline. The timeline gets smaller and smaller.

Anything else for Mark?

Anything else you'd like to share?

I mean just for consideration and thinking all the different projects, I agree we don't have a huge scope to go underneath. I don't know if there's any clarification on it. I mean Judson said it needs to be one project. I don't know if there can be. phases or idea, I mean, the seawalk phase two is happening now. There is kind of the phase three that could have dovetailed into that under the bridge trying to connect, which is partially related. And then, again, not to dissuade anyone with the port seawall, but as soon as we start going within water work and looking into environmental assessments and permitting, those can take up nearly a quarter of that timeline once we have A PLAN SO THOSE THOSE ARE ALSO VERY CHALLENGING TO GET OVER THE GOAL LINE IN A SHORT PERIOD OF TIME.

YEAH THE CURRENT PROJECT IS SCOTE FOR THE ONE TWO AND THREE HUNDRED BLOCK OF LINCOLN STREET THAT'S THE ONE HUNDRED. FROM THE CITY HALL TO. THE BOOKSTORE AND THEN TWO HUNDRED IS BOOKSTORE TO THE CHURCH AND THREE HUNDRED IS. church to the Lake Lincoln intersection. Is there anything there that you think would be more appropriate as a kind of reduced scope phase one to tackle.

We haven't we haven't really broken it down like that before. But I mean is this funding should be eligible for design. I think at least the full section of Harborway to Harbor Drive needs to be designed as one phase. We need a cohesive plan for how traffic is gonna flow from that intersection to the end of the street. But if we potentially, we'd have to look at which phase needs to happen first. Usually the sewer drives that for setting elevations for gravity feed sewer. But, you know, maybe we only potentially get to the church done in the season. I don't see us, unless we have a massive influx of contractors, getting that entire section done in a single season with the restrictions we have on some of our paving. So, I mean, it could be that we prioritize one half over the other, but we have one plan for how it's going to end up.

Sounds like you're making yourself a really great scope.

For Mark? Katie?

Yeah. For the C block under the bridge, do you have any idea of what it would look like to install a charging system there and make facility improvements, increase bathroom space? parking space, tourism flow, like anything like that.

I don't have a scope for that. With the advent of a bus depot, I think it would, if that's what the goal was, I think we'd have to potentially redesign that whole area and look at maximizing the use, depending on how many buses went under there, how many charging stations, and the more we lean towards getting buses down there. I like the idea of it potentially bringing some influx of visitors away from the Lake Lincoln intersection with regard to crossing the street to get into our main downtown area. But the more we maximize that, the less space we're gonna have for potential vendor spaces or a really robust restroom area. And the last bit of the Seawalk was really just expanding the sidewalk, making it a little bit wider and hopefully providing an avenue to get from that location into Totem Square.

And we didn't have funding for the phase three of the CWOC, right?

I believe it was originally put into phases one and two and the state has taken over phase two and that last portion wasn't included because that starts to get out of the area where the state has the right of way next to the road. Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mark. I appreciate that. If we have any questions, we'll call you back up. We'll go Tor and then Kevin.

It just occurred to me that, you know, if we, I like to think worst case scenario.

Okay.

So let's say we pick a project. We've been talking a lot about Lincoln Street, so I'll just use that as an example. Okay, state, we want to do this project. like you said, we're not actually getting the money to spend. Doing it, saying okay, we're putting it towards that project and not making it is no worse than saying no, we're not gonna take the money. I mean, and the same result. And every project we've talked about tonight would have a five year risk. I think it's fairly common for things to go long, and so I don't think it's a huge risk. I think we could probably get an extension. I think it's a very good chance of that. And it doesn't sound like we couldn't go back to this state in six months and say, hey, now that we've had a little time, can we switch it to this? I doubt, that's not an option, right, John?

Maybe. I was told that, We need to get them some project concept, scope, idea. It can be modified, but I don't know. They didn't really clarify if modified meant changing to a different project.

It actually kind of makes my argument even more that if we put it towards Lincoln Street, worst case scenario, we don't use it, which is the same thing as saying we don't take it now. And maybe, like I say, we can fletch out, say, the bridge project and say, well, hey, you only gave us two weeks, and this is what we'd really rather do with it. Maybe they would. So in order to at least get something on the books, again, I think that Lincoln Street is the most fleshed out. And again, worst case scenario, we don't take advantage of it. That's the other option seems to be, that's for everything we're talking about. And I don't wanna just say no thank you, at least not now, not without at least giving a shot.

Thank you. So thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, I'm not saying I wanna throw the money away or say no thank you. I don't think we should do that at all. My opinion right now, I guess what I'm trying to say is I feel very uncomfortable in one agenda item trying to decide on a project that could change the trajectory of many other projects all at the same time without knowing the effects it's going to have on our finances, our funds, our rates that taxpayers may have to pay increases if we have to take out loans. There's so many varying factors, and I feel like we're being pressured to do this because we don't want to throw away the money. Now, if we can just say, let's direct John to look into trying to get this for Lincoln Street, and maybe he can investigate like initially I'm okay with that, putting it towards Lincoln Street, but I wouldn't want to give them the full go ahead to actually start initiating changes in our strategic plan, or not saying our official strategic plan, but our capital project plan until we've gotten more information. And a lot more information needs to be found before we actually start executing some of these things. And I'm not gonna feel comfortable with that until I have better information. Because the bottom line, we don't have enough information to make an informed decision other than to say, We know Lincoln Street under the bridge, but preliminary look into that and try to get an agreement with the state. But we need more information before we can just start changing things permanently, our path, our trajectory.

Scotty? Thor, could you explain the five-year risk on the charging station and your comparison?

Well, my point is that I don't think we could get a proposal in front of the state in the next two weeks that they would accept. I mean, I think that's a real risk, that we couldn't get a flash, whereas the Lincoln Street is pretty well fleshed out. I mean, that's my thought on that.

My thoughts on it is buying a charging station, you gotta lock on the technology right there, there's no mystery to that. And really, when Ron tells you that the cruise ship people, if we continue our infrastructure to Cascade Creek, they'll pay to bring a transmission line from the cruise dock to Cascade Creek. So if you're gonna get four and a half million bucks, two charging stations. If you're looking at a five year project, they're going to, you can put a charging station out at the cruise dock and then one underneath the bridge. You've already got them and it's, it's here. And then the infrastructure is going to come later. Whereas Lincoln street, you're still, you don't know what you're going to come up with that 16 million bucks. The sidewalks were all narrowed by the merchants over 60 years ago. Um, i don't i don't really think spending the money on lincoln street would pass a town town wide vote because there's nothing going back to town where the you know it's all for the love boat people were trying to get something for town in that charging station is something that people want to see in town so that there could be a bus and buses that would charge in the bus operators that I've talked to have explicitly told me that if we bought a charging station, they'd buy the first $2 million bus, even though tribal says those buses aren't working. But at least we'd have a charging station that's still gonna be charging five years from now or 10 years from now. Katie.

Yeah, and I mean, I don't know, I'm hearing different things. I'm hearing like, we don't have a thought enough proposal to submit for under the bridge. And then I'm also hearing like, all we need is like a concept of something that you wanna do, which seems like you could be like, we want to explore a suite of improvements for our tourism facility under the bridge, including X, Y, and Z. and then it could come back to the assembly to actually flesh out what that looks like or how a visioning session i mean like a feasibility study um design and engineering these are all things various other projects that are uh funded under the designated legislative grant program so i'm both hearing like we don't have enough of an idea and we don't need that much of an idea and I'm getting a head nod on the, we don't need that much of an idea. So I don't wanna get locked into saying like, we don't have a fully fleshed out idea when the fully fleshed out ideas that we have, have a variety of issues involved with them. Like I, I think that the Lincoln Street project is a higher benefit to the community, but I think it is also something that comes with a lot of, I don't know, unintended consequences that I'm more concerned about, whereas I feel like the under the bridge feasibility or design, even design and engineering, even if we don't spend all the money in the grant program, we're still getting something that would benefit, like that facility does need revamping, it's gonna have a CWOC going towards it, it can be, utilized in a higher and better way. And it's a more secure fit that I think we would have time to fully flesh out what that concept looked like. I don't think that we need to do that here in one meeting, but we're not gonna run into the situation where we are having to raise you know uh where we're we're giving up a 10 million cds request because we couldn't fulfill legislative obligations right i think i think that that project for me seems lower risk while still having some reward whereas the lincoln street budget seems like bigger reward but like much higher risk in terms of not fulfilling it or um you know getting into a situation where we're we're messing with a lot of other projects and funding sources so juju

We have staff for all of that. It's not our responsibility to fully flesh out anything. We've got a great finance team. We've got a great engineering team. We've got a great tourism team now. Thank you. And we've got great leadership all the way. Here, we're doing the overalls. And in the fiscal planning process, when we got the capital improvement program on the agenda and we didn't have anything near a discussion like this. And that is where those discussions should be. Where are the priorities? Where are we setting? What does the assembly want to see happen? Now we have four and a half million and we're having really great capital planning discussions. Our capital planning budget for the year is far more than four and a half million and yet we don't talk about it at all. And to hear now that we don't have enough information to make this decision, inaccurate, because we are making full budget decisions on way less information. We don't need to have any of this fleshed out. We've got a great team that we trust and looks to us for leadership. We don't need to be micromanaging them through this.

I would respectfully disagree. Yes, we have staff, but we've also given them things to do. I think this is, I'm flexible. I'm not sold on Lincoln Street or under the bridge. My concern is that I do think that we don't have enough information. We have enough information to say, John, go try to get an agreement for Lincoln Street or under the bridge or what have you, but I'm not comfortable I'm just saying right now, alter all plans because we have not fleshed out things like rate increases or anything like that. There's just lots of changes that might happen and I get your concerns, JJ. And those are valid, I'm just, I'm not comfortable with making an agreement tonight on a permanent change other than trying to get the 4.5 million agreed to with some sort of project. But I would also want, if we do that, him to come back with some more information before we actually do anything specifically, if that makes sense.

And to me, that's just a given. We're going to have multiple phases. I don't think we can have both instances in this where we're not going to change any sort of project for anything and accept the four and a half million. Accepting it is going to change the timeline of any sort of project we've been working on and it's going to insert itself in a higher priority level no matter what that project is, if it's Lincoln Street or under the bridge. I mean, I came into this discussion excited for four and a half, and I'm leaving here kind of discouraged, honestly. I don't wanna do this, but I wanna tell John to just give it back. Turn this letter into paper airplane and send it back with Bert. Yeah, I mean, if I can summarize what everyone has spoken about, Lincoln Street is the one that most assembly members have talked about. We've heard discussions on the bus depot rising higher, and we are scared right now about the port wall and not only its potential limiting uses, but the ability to potentially even use this money for it. So as we've gone forward tonight, The only one that I've heard everybody have a reasonable amount of support behind would be Lincoln. We could even submit that to the state and they say no, that that project doesn't qualify. And then we're back here again. unless anyone is opposed, because we're coming up on an hour and 10 minutes discussing this singular item. Let's have John move forward with a Lincoln Street for this, and of course, everything will come back at some point. We still don't have to accept it, even if we put it down. We still have the option to back out. I know we've done that before, specifically on Lincoln Street, where we had about this amount of money that we actually backed away from, and the project was put on hold. So this doesn't obligate us to anything, but it gives us an opportunity to move forward in a succinct, collaborative manner, and then if the details don't work out down the road, we don't have to. if Water Fund is short, if Wastewater Fund is short, because those are the two that are going to affect this project the largest. If we can't get those funds to pay the share that they need to, I don't see how this project happens. So unless there's any opposition, I think we tell John that Lincoln Street as of now is our project. He submits that, we see where that project goes, and then John, as our responsible administrator, keeps us updated throughout the process. When we hire a new administrator, we make sure that they understand that they're gonna keep us updated on this process, and we go forward from there. Does anybody have any massive, overwhelming heartache on that?

Negative, I think that's a good idea.

Okay, thank you all for the discussion. It shows why we need up or down questions delivered to the assembly, not open-ended questions. But we are past our break time. We only have a couple items left. If you want to take a break before we talk about them. Okay, we'll take a recess and then we'll end with our last couple items. Okay, again, now we have another 15 minute period until 10. Can we do this in 15s tonight? I don't know, let's see. So our next item H is a discussion direction on next steps for municipal administrator recruitment. We put this one on here because as we are all aware, our finalist has withdrawn from the application process, decided that it might not be a good fit for her and or the municipality. So has chosen to withdraw. So I wanted this item on here just to talk to the assembly about our continuing efforts in form of some timelines and then get any other feedback if necessary. So right now we are continuing to recruit as normal. Nothing has changed with that just as it has been in the previous when we've been interviewing people. Applications are still being accepted. Applications are still coming in. We do have a wide candidate pool still to choose from, so I would encourage assembly members, if they want to go back and look at any of those applications again, to schedule something with Josh and we can get those on the books. There was a new one that had come in pretty recently that may warrant further review, I don't know. Josh, I think we got one just here recently within the last week as well. So they're still coming in. The good news is we have lots of applications. We've had lots of applications. Um, and they, they continue to, to trickle in. So we will continue recruiting as normal. Um, we've scheduled August 11th, um, our next assembly meeting for an executive session. Uh, if the assembly needs to talk about, uh, applications that they have reviewed with Josh, uh, in further, um, and then kind of come up with a, a continued game plan at that point, if need be. Um, Yeah, so recruiting is normal. We're continuing with that. Review the applications. Josh, what did I miss on that? I think that was everything, right? So yeah, we are, operations are normal on that. We're continuing to try and find someone. Does anybody have any other thoughts we need to relay to Josh on this process? Tor?

Well, just, I happened to be talking to Josh about something else today, and I looked at those ones that just came in. And then at least one that hasn't been checked and is referenced in Google search yet, but on the face of it, you look like you might be a possibility. Well, I mean, but I mean, as I was saying, I'm kind of backing up with the mayor saying that we're still getting applications, and I think that there's a pretty good chance the next meeting there'll be a executive session where we'll talk about a couple of them.

I think we should keep open, keep looking. I did stop in about a week and a half ago, but I'll stop in again to see the new one.

It's almost like Josh has a candy dish in his office now. Everybody wants to come and get a... Not a book guy anymore. More of a Reese's guy. Okay, and again, August 11th, we'll have that executive session on the agenda. That way, if we need to utilize it, we're able to. So that'll roll us into persons to be heard this evening. This is public participation for any item on or off the agenda, not to exceed three minutes for any individual. Everybody's jumping at once, thank you for that. Moving on to reports. Man, it seems like I see you guys all the time, and I talk to you guys all the time, so I don't have any additional reports other than what we've done, besides the fact that August 25th, that meeting, I will be gone for Alaska Municipal League meetings in Fairbanks. I think John will still be here. He's flying up the next day. I have a board meeting the day before, so I will miss that meeting. You will be in the capable hands of JJ. She was real excited to find that one out. Thank you. Administrator reports.

Thank you, Mayor. Tis the season. We have Congressman Begich will be coming to visit city offices on Monday. It's very similar to some of the other candidate visits we've gotten. I've met with Bill Hill and Mary Peltola, so the candidates tend to stop by and ask what the issues are in the city. So we'll present them like we have with everybody else. Our legislative priorities and talk about some of the things going on in the city so they have an idea here, but that meeting is coming up. And I'll put another plug out there for the last thing we need is another thing called CPV, but the commercial passenger vehicle ordinance is, we could call it the taxi code. We sent that directly to commercial passenger providers now to make sure everybody got a copy of it in advance. It's posted on our website. We've put it on social media. I'm sure we'll do some radio and newspaper spots about it. There have been, Contrary to what we've heard, there have been many discussions about this. I would say at least two to three police and fire commissions where draft codes have come forward. The town hall was hosted, and yes, that was a few years ago. There were reasons why we had to pause between that town hall and what we have now. But if you read through that packet very carefully, you will see that, especially in my memo, I talk about item by item what came up at that town hall and what sections of the proposed code addresses that. So this is more of encouragement for the community, providers, or people that are interested in being providers, and the assembly and others to please read through that very carefully before our August 11th meeting on it. That's all I have.

Thank you. Liaison representatives. Clerk's report.

We are halfway through the candidate filing period for the municipal election. We have a mayoral seat, two assembly member seats, and then three school board seats. So the deadline for filing is Friday, August 7th at 5 p.m. So if folks are interested, they can contact our office and we'll get them set up with a packet. And we also have a list of board commission committee openings, the Health Needs Commission, Investment Committee, Library Commission, Parks and Rec, Police and Fire, Entry and Landscape.

Thank you. Any other reports this evening? JJ?

The Sika Walkability Advocacy Co-op finished the painting of one crosswalk on Lincoln Street. So it was a group that this body put me on. We're kind of in year two of that, but we got some grant funding to do that painting and to do other advocacy work. So passing out a little vest so that you're more visible when you walk all around. in the goal of reducing chronic disease by getting out there and moving more. So we're hopeful next month to do another crosswalk just to keep pedestrians safe so we can all be more active and healthy.

Great, thank you. Yeah, I actually saw the crosswalk painted today, and it does have like kind of traffic lanes in it, and the first person I saw using it was like following that traffic lane. So maybe people won't bump into each other on the crosswalk anymore. There is no executive session scheduled tonight, so that would bring us to adjournment. Motion to adjourn.

Second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Thank you all. We are adjourned.