Juneau's new budget ends all trail brushing and cuts the arboretum

Juneau's newly adopted budget takes a visible bite out of the city's parks: it ends all brushing on city-owned trails and cuts staff at a beloved arboretum. Parks and Recreation Director Marc Wheeler laid out the fallout in a report to the department's advisory committee.

The trail cut comes from a $75,000 reduction to the contract with Trail Mix, the nonprofit that keeps the city's trails clear. With that money gone, brushing on city-owned trails stops entirely in the coming year — no small thing in a coastal rainforest, where vegetation reclaims a path fast if no one cuts it back.

At the Jensen Olson Arboretum north of downtown, a roughly $41,000 cut lays off one part-time worker, trims another's hours, and ends the public programming the arboretum has offered. City Manager Neil Steininger, defending the reduction this spring, said it wouldn't kill the place: "This won't completely shutter the Arboretum. We will not be bulldozing over the plants. It will... continue to have some life."

Not everyone was satisfied the cuts were painless. Assembly Member Beth Weldon pushed back on the trail-brushing reduction, casting it as the loss of real maintenance rather than mere landscaping. The trails, she said, are "not used just to beautify the city."

The budget carried other changes as well. The Assembly voted to vacate and sell the old Mt. Jumbo School in Douglas, with gym activities and a maintenance division moving to the Marie Drake building this fall. And in October, voters will weigh a 1% seasonal sales tax — collected April through September — meant to help pay for indoor and outdoor recreation, though only the Assembly could decide how to spend it.