A little Unalaska park keeps its tax break one last time before the lease runs out

Tutiakoff Park, a small community park in Unalaska, gets to stay tax-exempt for one more year — but it's the last time. The city's lease on the land ran out at the end of June, so starting in 2027 the parcel will be taxable.

The park sits on land the city has leased for years from its owner, the United Methodist Church, and that lease is what kept it off the tax rolls. This year it still qualified for the exemption, because the lease was technically still in effect on the first of January — the date that determines a property's tax status for the year. So the City Council voted this month to restore the exemption for 2026, one final time.

The vote came with a small wrinkle: the city's assessor had actually missed the parcel when first drawing up this year's rolls, not realizing it qualified — so the council's vote was a correction, adding it back after the fact. The fix means a little less money for the city, about $4,600 in property tax it won't collect this year — a rounding error against a tax base of roughly $605 million.

Next year, with the lease expired, the roughly $442,000 parcel joins the tax rolls for the first time.