Nome Common Council Regular Meeting- Sept. 28, 2026

All right, I believe we have everyone that's, uh, coming this evening, so go ahead and call the meeting for September 28th, 2026 of the Nome City Council to order at 7:03 PM. Clerk McCall, roll. Council Member Johnson, here. Council Member Henderson, here. Council Member Miller, here.

Council Member Green, here. Council Member Love, here. Council Member Martin, excuse me. All righty, thank you.

You have before you the agenda. Chair, I'll entertain a motion to approve.

Motion by Councilmember Johnson, seconded by Councilmember Green, to approve the agenda. Mr. Mayor, do you have an add to the agenda? D, which is the correspondence from Jeremy Jacobson. Okay, we can add that. Okay, under communications for record.

Yes.

Any further discussion on the agenda? Adding something? Yeah, it's a communication. You should have a letter in front of you from Jeremy Jacobson under communications.

Any further discussion on the agenda? Clerk may call a vote. Council Member Harrison. Yes. Council Member Miller?

Yes. Council Member Green? Yes. Council Member Lust? Yes.

Council Member Johnson? Yes. Motion passes. All righty, next item on the agenda is approval of minutes from the September 14th, 2026 Town Council meeting.

Chair, motion to approve. Motion approved by Council Member Lust. I'll second. Seconded by Council Member Green. Any discussion on the minutes?

Hearing no discussion on the minutes, clerk may call the vote. Council Member Miller? Yes. Council Member Green? Yes.

Council Member Lusk? Yes. Council Member Johnson? Yes. Council Member Henderson?

Yes.

All righty, next item. Item A, under Communications, September 14th, 2026, public comments for the draft 2027 through 2030 Statewide Transportation Improvement Program, otherwise known as STIP. This is the rather short-term version of the state's transportation improvement program for projects that are in dire need and are— need to be included on the plan because they're needed and not currently there. If there's, uh, anyone's got any, uh, information for them about what should be added, there's, uh, there's how to do it. Yeah, just go to, um, that link and you can make comment as to what's there.

If you see, we do have for the state, they just finished Steadman. They'll start next spring on Sepala and Seneca Creek. That was the one I couldn't think. But we are also this year, you'll see in my report, asking for funding funds for master plan. So they're considering that because there is no transportation master plan for the community.

They said before we move forward, so when I asked, they went, absolutely, you need this, you need shovel-ready projects, and we do not. So, so I'm looking for the money, get an estimate so I'll know what to ask from the state.

Awesome. I have no idea.

My son.

All right, anything further on the stip?

Next item, uh, September 15th, 2026, public notice for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Notice of Intent to Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement on the Graphite Creek Waterway.

Public notice.

You also can go, when you go to, um, and if somebody needs information, you can go to their website and make comment or send a letter. So if anyone needs anything with that, we'd be glad to supply the contact information. Okay, on, uh Item C, September 21st, 2026, letter of support from Mayor Hughes, Ray, the ExHAB 3D proposal.

This is a continuation of the house— the cement printing project. It doesn't commit the city to anything other than being interested in seeing the technology continue to develop. In this case, it's for an application underwater, which may have usage for us in the future as our port develops. So it's pretty interesting, pretty novel technology. Mr. Banker—.

Oh, go ahead. Sorry, I did have a thought on that one, and I think Generally, as mayor, I think you have wide discretion in writing letters of recognition or welcome greetings or letters of support. I was wondering, do we as a city have any, like, internal guidelines or anything to help guide when we write letters of support for organizations, particularly with this one? I don't know that I want to get into the weeds really about this individual entity. But I know that without getting into the individual of this entity, I was just curious if we have any guidelines that we follow about whether we issue letters of support or don't issue letters of support.

I certainly have guidelines for anything that I would do. Number one is, is I don't feel like I've got the authority to commit the city to anything without the council being the one to do the committing. Now, novel ideas, uh, things that are just support for concepts, for something that might work in our future that doesn't commit the city to expenditure of any funds, I don't have a big problem advancing that if I think it's in the community's interest to have that technology, or whatever it is being, being offered, done. So, I realize that perhaps not everyone would agree with every particular technology, but on the other hand, I feel like options is options, and the more options we have, the better choices we can make about our future.

So, unless I have opportunity to, A, consult with the Council on a topic, for instance, this particular one came with a pretty tight deadline.

I don't mind talking about with other folks. Also to get their opinion. So those, those are the guidelines I use. I had a two-part question regarding this. One is, one is, is this the same outfit that is building the above-ground, uh, 3-day house over on the west side of town?

Yes. And secondly, what is the status of that 3-day house— 3-day, 3D house there? Understood they didn't get very far last season. They, they poured the final cement, uh, just a couple days before I wrote this letter. This year?

Yeah, this year. Yeah, about the 18th or so. Um, I, I haven't been over to check the— what it, what it looks like since they've done that, but There's been a lot of discussion with the Denali Commission and EXHAB about the future of that building, and so far it seems like the future for it is to complete it, instrument it, so that we can begin gathering data about what happens inside of it, in terms of the environment. And so they, they plan on, on making it to be a habitable dwelling which the city would have the opportunity to use for temporary housing, perhaps.

I would assume this entity is looking for funding of some type. And did they solicit the city's letter of support to, you know, for their application for funding? Yes, it was for an application from funding from other parties.

Like, I believe it was federal government. Yeah, I believe so.

I might— I do think they've reached out to a couple of foundations too. That's just based on some calls.

Yeah, I think they'll complete it. I do not have a deadline, and I've asked that question.

It's related to funding.

That's it on that proposal. We'll— item D, under Communications, letter from Jeremy Jacobson, subject: Thanks for Adopting Ordinance 260901, and respectful request for a brief revenue review.

What is there for you, Mr. Mayor? I do see that one of the things that he is requesting is, uh, that the council looks at different revenue sources. I think we've talked about that in many months and many meetings past, and we talked about having a work session at some point. We have a second meeting in October. Second meeting in October.

Yes, sir. Great. We looking at it all.

Weren't we going to do that before the pull tab ordinance was presented?

But as far as all the additional sources, additional revenue, you know, options I've never— we were gonna do this back in August. I thought we had also brought it up in hopes that we could bring one of these issues potentially to the ballot, because don't we have to vote certain revenue and taxes out to vote? Well, that's why it would be next year. None of it could have been done this year, so it would be next year.

I thought we were going to have those work sessions prior to presenting the pull tab ordinance for first reading as a replacement because of the significant revenue that the city is going to lose as a result of that ordinance.

That's not how I understood it, but second meeting in October is what we planned. Um, as far as it being related to this, no. I'm just talking about general revenue generators. Yeah, and some of it we've been trying to get the details on, like tariffs and those, you know, because obviously some of them were not that easy. Same thing with the syntax, which is alcohol and those kind of things.

So I understand, I'm trying to make sure I have the right information and I don't give you bad information, Nikki and I.

Okay, if, uh, we're done with communications questions, we'll move on then to citizens' comments. Mr. Mayor, we do have a special guest that we'd ask to come up at this time. This is, um, Mr. Jason Bruni. Did I say that correctly? Thank you.

Uh, of course, APFC Alaska Corporation. They're here all week, and I won't steal your thunder. So thank you for being here. Thank you so much, uh, Mr. Mayor, uh, council members, City Manager Smith, uh, members of Nome. Uh, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here this week.

For the record, I'm Jason Bruni. I'm the chair of the Board of Trustees for the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation. I think you've all heard of the Permanent Fund. We all get our, uh, regular dividends. In fact, this Thursday, uh, we will be getting our, our annual dividends, uh, and we're very happy to be able to have our, uh, regular board meeting here in Nome this Wednesday and Thursday.

So I wanted to come today and invite all the, all of you to, to our meetings and everyone from the community. We'd love to have you come out and, uh, see what we're doing. Uh, I wanted to also use this as an opportunity to tell you a little bit about the the corporation. We have here with us right now both Jennifer and Paul Lynn, who are staff in Juneau. I am in Anchorage.

We have a board of trustees of 6 individuals. 4 Are public trustees and 2 are commissioners. Originally, I was one of Governor Dunleavy's commissioner appointees to the Permanent Fund. I was his Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation. I then, when I was done with my public service, he immediately appointed me to one of the public seats, and I then soon thereafter became chair and been chair for a couple of years.

And yeah, it's an honor to be here and to represent Alaskans. We do have a PowerPoint, Mr. Mayor, if you are up for me going through it. If not, I don't want to bore you all. I know you have a large agenda, but I If you're okay with it, I have about 10 slides I could go through. And is that okay with you, Maryse?

All right, go ahead. Perfect. So next slide, please. So like I said, there's 6 of us that are trustees. The 4 public trustees are Ethan Shutt.

He is the vice chair. Ralph Samuels, former legislator, and John Binkley, former legislator. Are the public— public trustees. And then Janelle Earls is the Commissioner of the Department of Revenue, and Ryan Anderson is the Commissioner of the Department of Transportation. Now, those two positions in December will potentially be transitioning to new folks depending on who is elected, but the four of us will remain, and we have staggered four 4-year seats, and a new appointee comes every year in July.

The, uh, the Permanent Fund also invests the money not just from, uh, the money we put aside. 25% Of every, um, of all royalties goes to the Permanent Fund, but we also invest the money for Alaska Power Cost Equalization and the Alaska Mental Health Trust Fund. With that, you can go to the next slide, please. As I indicated, our board meeting will start on Wednesday at 9:30, and then we will continue, I believe, till 5 o'clock. And then on Thursday, we're going to be starting at 8:30, ending noon-ish or so, and then we're very fortunate to get a tour of the port following that.

We'll have around 25 people coming up for this meeting—staff, trustees, and our investment advisors. And like I said, we're excited to be here, and we want to encourage the public to come to give comments and/or just to come and watch. Next slide, please. So as I indicated, we just celebrated our 50th anniversary. Of the Permanent Fund.

It was formed in 1976 to save money for a rainy day. Obviously Alaska's economy is based on resource extraction, oil and gas, mining, and 25% of royalties from oil and gas and mining go to the Permanent Fund, and then that money is invested around the United States and around the world to diversify our revenue streams. For the first, oh, let's say 40 or so years, it did— only dividends were paid from that. And then around 10 years ago, there was a Supreme Court decision, an action from the legislature that ultimately said that even though there is a statutory requirement for how the dividend is calculated, The dividends are still subject to legislative appropriation. So while this year I think the amount should have, or what, by statutory, um, should have been around $4,000, the legislature ultimately determined it was going to be $1,200 this year.

And 67% of our state's general fund budget is now funded by the permanent fund. Um, so, um, please don't get mad at us for the levels of your dividends. That is the legislature that determines what the amount of the dividends are. We, the Permanent Fund trustees, we oversee the investment arm and the nearly $92 billion that we're investing right now. Next slide, please.

So obviously we have— we focus on diversification and we focus on getting a good return for the state. We have an investment mandate which We say we want to make on average around 5% per year plus what the level of inflation is, CPI. So we have our mandate of CPI plus 5%. And so that's roughly around 8%, 8.5% depending on what inflation is. That's what we aim to try to keep the permanent fund at the level that it is in today's dollars.

And so this year, like I indicated, around $26 billion came from the Permanent Fund. Around two-thirds of our state's general fund is funded by the, by the Permanent Fund. Next slide, please. So we invest around the world. We have investments obviously in different countries, and then we of course invest a lot in the United States.

We have real estate, we have private equity, we have domestic equities, bonds, cash, gold. Different investments. And what the trustees do is we set the allocations at what we feel the different amounts we should be invested in. Now, a lot of people come to me and say, "Hey, Bruni, why aren't you 100% in stocks?" Well, that would have worked really good in hindsight. But let's say we had done that in 2008 when the global financial crisis had happened and we all that were invested in stocks lost 40%, 50%, 60%.

That's not the smartest diversification. So we focus on, of course, wanting to get the highest return we can, but also capital protection as well is so important, especially because we rely on it so much. So we do take input from the public. We always want to hear, hey, I think you should be all in gold, or I think you should all— you should go into crypto. I hear things all the time.

If you have suggestions, if you have ideas, we want to hear them. And You know, ultimately, obviously, that fiscal discipline is so important and that responsibility to Alaskans that we are maintaining the value of the fund and increasing it over the years, especially again, given our dependence, two-thirds of our budget from the state depends on the Permanent Fund right now. And I think it's important to point out we are— New Hampshire is close, but we're really the only state in the union that doesn't have a broad-based tax. We don't have an income tax. Or a sales tax, and we're able to fund our state services through the contributions of the Permanent Fund for now.

Next slide. So you can see how the fund has grown. This— there's a lot of different lines on here. The very bottom gold line that you see, that's the total contributions of predominantly oil and gas, but there is some— 25% of all mineral royalties also go into there. And you'll see the green area is the earnings reserve.

That's the amount that can ultimately be spent. Spent. So if you buy a stock at $100 a share and it grows to $200 a share, you can't actually use that money unless you sell that stock at $200 and net $100 earnings per share. So otherwise it's unspendable amount. So that's where that, the difference between what the growth of the fund and the earnings reserve on that account.

I could get into a lot of details, but it's just It's around $92 billion right now. Next slide, please.

So the— as I indicated earlier, the draws, the percent of market value, around 5% of market value is what we take out on an annual basis. That, of course, started, I believe, in 2016, and it's grown every year as the fund has grown. I think— and then, of course, like I indicated earlier, The amount of the dividend is determined by the legislature. Next slide. Again, just repeating what I said, $92 billion and how it's broken down into the different accounts.

The reason why I'm focusing on this is the next slide.

The—. Right now, if the legislature wanted to, it would only need a majority from the House and the Senate to take that entire earnings reserve. And so they could take, uh, I don't know the exact number, but, uh, $18 billion on just a simple majority from our permanent fund if they wanted to. Now they're only taking $4 billion. They're only following the 5% of market value, but we believe it's important to bring the two accounts together through a constitutional amendment to make it so that that 5% of market value will only be what's taken out on an annual basis.

And it will make it so that there isn't that confusion that the legislature has between what's in the earnings and what's in the principal and what can ultimately be taken out for state government. Final slide that I want to point out is I just want to reiterate how important it is to get public input. We work for you. Now, I don't get paid. I do get an honorarium, but this is the 4 of us our volunteers in this role, and we, we want input from Alaskans on what we can do to help manage your money, to help manage the accounts for future generations.

So we have an email address for comments that come to the board at [email protected].

We also, like I said, we're here in Nome. We've been in Barrow and in Valdez, and we like to go around the state to, to have different meetings, and we want to hear the input from from community members. This Thursday is obviously a big day because it's the day we all get our dividends, and you have an opportunity, obviously, for some of us that save it for our kids or pay off bills, go on trips, or there's Pick Click Give, and many people give what they get to organizations like the Lions Club. I know that there's the Aurora Borealis Lions Club who receives donations. I was a member of the Old Man's Club in in Anchorage years ago.

When I became a dad, I stopped going. I'm sorry to all the Lions that are here. I promise I'll start back up now that my kids are all grown up. But like, there's a lot of charities that benefit from the permanent fund distributions as well. And this week, obviously, we're going to see that huge influx to the state.

And with the public's input, we obviously want to make sure that we're investing it responsibly and getting your input in that. So final thing again, we have a website. APFC.org on the next slide. There's a lot of information on there. There's great resources for your kids.

Alaska Resource Education, which teaches about our oil and gas, mining, timber resources in the state. It also has a module about the Permanent Fund. If your kids want the curriculum for that, please come and talk to me or Pauline or Jennifer. We'd love to share that with you. And in the meantime, thank you so much for your hospitality here in Nome.

We look forward to seeing many of you at the meeting on Wednesday and Thursday. And with that, Mr. Mayor, council members, I'd be happy to entertain any questions you may have. Thank you.

Thank you. Save questions for your meeting. Okay, perfect. Thank you all. Thanks so much for your time.

Thank you, Mr.

Any further citizens' comments? Steve Longley, home. Just to update, I signed my insurance documents today, so tomorrow I should get the final certificate of insurance for my shuttle. I'm adding the— I already added the city as an additional insured on the policy. Which isn't required, but I did anyway.

It's going to be a $1 million policy, which is like 3 times what you guys require. The only issue I'm having is the shuttle, and it requires on the bus thing proposed fixed route. So tomorrow or the next day when I get my documents together, I'm going to apply for a bus permit. And I'm going to put something generic like Shuttle A will leave at 6 o'clock from point, you know, wherever it's parked, do through the majority of the city streets, and then return at the end of the day. Shuttle number 2, you know, some similar.

Whether the city clerk buys that or not, I don't know. But I'm going to try it. Tizzy Kirk says yes or no. Says yes, we're good. Says no, then it goes to the city manager because I will appeal.

And the city manager has the same, um, thing where yes or no. He says no, it's going to be on your guys's desk at the next council meeting if I can get it through the other two people before then. But like I said, you know, I'm trying to— I realize that's going to take you guys 2 or 3 months by the time you do your ordinances and your second reading and first reading and all that. It's not You guys can't change the ordinances overnight. Um, so I'm just gonna— when you guys do finally change it, I'll be there with the application on the clerk's desk or on your desk, one or the other.

Um, hopefully the city clerk or the city manager approves it. If not, it'll be in front of you guys at the next council meeting. Thank you.

Any further citizen comments?

I'm Paul Costell. I'm here with the Chamber of Commerce. Blake's out of town, and also I've got some folks here in the back. They assigned me the speaking duties, so I'm here on behalf of the first reading of the pull tab ordinance. Just wanted to remind everyone that the state developed the charitable gaming in 1960, 66 years ago, and it's for enacting regulations allowing games of chance like pull tabs, raffles, bingos to give religious, educational, civic, and veterans groups a reliable funding stream.

And I think it's worked rather well. Most places around the state it still works rather well. Maybe about 10 years ago or so, Nome, for some reason— well, we there's reasons for it, decided that most of that money was not going to go to these charities that are listed here, and it became a revenue source for the city. And part of what these— this group is asking for is that we kind of return those funds to what the state envisioned all along with the charitable gaming, is not a tax. In fact, it was supposed to offset municipalities having to raise taxes to support the different groups that the charitable gaming groups are supposed to do.

We're required to spend all of our money at the end of the next fiscal year locally. I mean, no other corporate entity, you know, is required to do that. So that's a big thing for us. Right now, as we're all doing our math, and I was just talking with some folks in the back, we're making about $40 $42 a game to minus 81, was it, Jenny? Losing $81 a game by playing the game.

We got to pull the game. It's almost not sustainable, and it has to do with cost of goods sold. You know, the games are not cheaper right now. Freight is, you know, shipping's not cheaper. Those are some costs that are fluctuating just a little bit.

The only thing that we actually have control over is this ordinance that's in front of you. And if this doesn't go through, we may try some opportunities to try and get it on the ballot in the future, but I'm not so sure looking at these numbers. And I run the same type of numbers. It's, it's getting to where it's not sustainable, and these groups are not going to have a reliable funding force, um, source which was envisioned by the state of Alaska. And we'd really like to get back to that.

We spend the money very well in the city. We're very responsible with it. Do we define where we're going to spend it in advance? Absolutely not. No charity does.

They get asked for monies after the fact that they've raised money and it gets donated out and so forth. So really like you guys to take this very serious because it's going to be important for our community, I think, in the long run because of the sustainability of this doesn't last. There's not going to be any of this tax revenue, and there's not going to be any charities raising any money and putting money into the community as well. So let's see if we can undo what Nome did about 10 years ago and get us back, back on track with the state. I'd really appreciate it.

So thank you for your time. Hi everybody, I'm, uh, I'm Alex Thompson. I'm representing the Bering Sea Lions Club. I'm the current president this year, so Um, I'd like to just expound a little bit on what Paul was saying. There's two main factors that we need to address.

One is if we do no longer do these pull tabs, there will be no tax revenue. So the other side of the coin is if more charitable organizations don't want to do pull tabs, there will be zero tax revenue from pull tabs. None. The other part about it is we deliver 100%, 100% of the money that's given to us is put back into this community, all by volunteers. Everybody here does not work for free.

Any of the services like the Ice Golf Classic, the chicken feeds, The, the innumerable things that the charity organizations do in your town, that will have to be taken over by somebody else. We'll have to find other sources of revenue. And if we do take it over, like if the city says, well, we're going to take a more active role in some of these things, well, they're going to end up having to pay labor to do it. All this is done for free by organizations. I think we did, what, over $150,000 in local scholarships every year, all the local kids.

So the money that, that is the city's quote unquote losing out is really actually going to the members of the community directly, not being funneled through the city and not having an overhead taken off of it. So yeah, that's the two things I really want to stress on is if we don't do pull tabs, there is no taxes in the first place. And if we, and if we want to talk about value of services, everyone here is a volunteer in these organizations. Everyone delivers their time and all the value goes 100%. We have a 100% return on every dime that's given to the charitable organizations.

Stations. And that's all I really want to say. Thank you much for your time.

Any further citizen comments? Sure.

I'm Steve Smith, and, uh, I was just concerned about a few— one thing in particular. And I was working two jobs, so I— it's a little late getting here, so I hope we didn't talk about this already, but I caught a little bit of the, uh, utility board meeting the other night, and we're talking about how we haven't had audits and budgets in 5 years, maybe longer. Who's responsible? Who's accountable? Is that— are you— since John is the head of Nome Joint Utilities, if he's not getting the job done, does he get fired by the city council, or is it the city manager's job, or What are we going to do to fix the problem, or do we just keep kicking the can down the road?

Do we have any answers?

Anyone? Anyone? They can't answer? This is just—. Okay, I'm the only speaker.

Okay, well, I think it's time. Let's, uh, let's hand him, uh, let's send John down the road. Tell him it's time to retire and have, uh, I think he's got some good people working for him that should be able to step in and make it work.

That's the only thing weighing heavy on my mind tonight. So thank you.

Any other citizen comments? Uh, Jeremy Jacobson, I'm a non-resident and Good evening, Mayor. I just wanted to comment on the new ordinance. What was it for this month? I think it's on the agenda tonight.

And the way the ideal tax, the excise tax on the ideal net, it looked like it's going to net the city the same as the first ordinance, I think, which was around $59,000. In revenue. So I guess my concern was how the city then would make that difference if there was a plan before they cut around a quarter million of the revenue, because getting the city's budget seemed like it was a lot of trouble last couple years. Excluding this last year. So that was my concern, was just, um, making up the difference before we cut the revenue.

That's all. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Davidson.

Any further citizen comments?

Seeing none, all right then, we'll move on to, um Unfinished business, which is blank. So new business item A, an update from the Queric Gnome Recycling Program. We have actually two presentations. The first presentation is Queric. Anama is here and Om Shannon, and doing a— we were out this week and last week taking a look at things.

So we have a presentation. Thank you for being here. Just make sure that he's got that. Okay, all right. Hello everybody, I'm Anama Shannon.

I work at Cowork and— hello everybody— I just wanted to give an update on what we're doing with the monofilament building. I know that most of you have known for years we've been talking about this building. Um, it's a City of Nome facility out at the monofil, um, built in the '80s, and it was really just a shell and kind of a storage area for a really long time. And so we negotiated a few years ago, I think, and, uh, or at least a couple, to let K'waerq renovate that and do a long-term lease and develop a regional recycling center. And so just wanted to give you guys an update and tell you a little bit about what we're doing.

So it's going to be kind of a short presentation.

If you don't know, the Coeur d'Alene Environmental Program, we've been in operation since 2010, so 16 long years, and we do things like the annual e-waste event. And trainings and outreach. And we clean up contaminated sites and we do a bunch of backhaul. So we backhaul household hazardous waste like electronics, lead acid batteries, fluorescent tubes, things that are in your home that shouldn't go into the dump because they can present a lot of hazards and health conditions and they're bad for our environment.

I forgot to add to that also, we've started a marine debris cleanup program, so we're working in tandem with NSCDC and helping with backhauling that marine debris, as well as leading some of the cleanups, and that way, the debris they clean up isn't going into the local landfills of our villages. It's now being backhauled, sorted, and then sent sent out to recyclers. So this is the building. If you've ever been out to the monofil, you might recognize the one on the left. That's kind of what it looked like, and again, it was just kind of a shell.

And so we have been working on renovating it. We've got the new siding on, some cement and new garage doors. So that's pretty exciting. This is before and after. Go ahead.

This is the main bay. So on the left, it was just a dirt floor, and we took about 10 inches of that dirt out. We laid the right kind of fill and insulation and vapor barrier, and then we prepped it with in-floor heating and did the concrete. So I think the next slide, yeah, shows that. So that was funded and supported by NSCDC, the in-floor heating.

The main renovations is being supported by EPA's SWIFRR grant, Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling, and then also the Norton Sound Health Corporation has come in with a bunch of support this year to help us close some of our funding gaps. So this is just kind of like, we, once we took the siding off the old building originally, we realized like all of the sheeting underneath was rotted. So then we had to buy all new sheeting and, and get that on there just to make sure it was nice and strong. The septic system going in So we, if you've ever been inside that building on the left-hand side, um, all along the side, uh, we've pulled out all of those rooms and boards and everything. And so we're just completely redoing that whole left side.

And, um, that space right there, it's going to be, um, office space, staff locker room, restroom facilities, a mechanical room, and some storage. So we'll be able to have our workers out there and comfortable. The upcoming plans: we're going to complete construction and prepare to get started next year. We're hoping to finish up construction around April, so it'll be, you know, late spring, early spring. We want to develop and work on recycling ordinances with the City of Nome, and we're probably going to have our first meeting on that here pretty soon.

Um, you know, really what we want to do is we want to— we want this to be a benefit to our community. We don't want it to upset anybody. I think sometimes if we go in there and slap a bunch of fees in there or something, it turns people off. And we really want this to be a benefit to people and to help make our community better. Um, so really just looking forward to working with you guys on what works for our community and getting feedback from businesses and residents so that we can incorporate those ideas and make it what, what everybody wants to see.

And it's not just for the community of Nome. This is actually going to serve all of the tribes and cities in our region. We've got a really great backhaul program. We've been bringing stuff out of our villages for 16 years, and we use Bering Air. They've been in there since the beginning saying, "Yeah, we'll bring anything back.

We've been taking stuff out to your villages for 30 years. We're happy to bring stuff back." So, 40 years now.

Alaska Marine Lines has been great and they give us discounts on the backhaul out of every village. So, yeah, so we're really looking forward to being able to boost the communities in our region as well. We're going to be bumping up our environmental education. We're creating a job right now at Kwé'wërk for an environmental education position. So they'll be like working in the schools and doing a lot more to educate people about why it's important to be responsible with our waste and how that can affect us like through subsistence resources that we gather and eat and how that affects us.

And yeah, ultimately just build long-term support for this recycle center. So that's— looking forward to doing that with you guys and our community.

That's it.

Does anyone got any questions for Nama?

All right, all right, thank you, thank you, thank you. Next is, um, it's the North Narcan presentation. It should have said presentations. All right, yeah, so I'm asking, uh, Megan Kernan to come up, and it was brought up in meeting last or before referencing Narcan and some of the issues surrounding that, so I went and brought the expert in, so I will turn it over to Megan. Thank you so much.

I won't 100% claim to be the Narcan expert, but I am the lead for the project for Norton Sound. So I'm Meagan McKiernan. I am the Chief Quality Officer for Norton Sound. I am a PA by training, and I do hold my doctorate in medical science. I also have an undergraduate degree in forensic science specializing in toxicology.

So kind of where my background in this comes from. So, uh, you may not know that Alaska has nearly, uh, the highest rate per capita of overdose deaths in the nation, unfortunately. And while the rest of the country has started to see a very significant decline in overdose deaths in the last couple years, Alaska's decline was very small. Last year, and in our region, unfortunately, we're going the wrong direction. The primary cause of overdose deaths in Alaska being opioids.

However, 72% of those cases are combined with other drugs. So that could be marijuana, it could be methamphetamine, it could be cocaine, it could be kratom, it could be gabapentin, other things. So I'm going to talk specifically about naloxone because that is the drug with the highest lethality. Sorry, that is the solution for the drug with the highest lethality. Naloxone is the life-saving drug on the market.

Think of it as CPR or an AED for an opioid overdose. An AED does not fix somebody's chronic coronary artery disease. It doesn't take away your high cholesterol, but it gets the heart going again. Narcan is that— or Narcan's the brand name, naloxone being the generic— is what can reverse temporarily opioids in the body, allowing the person to breathe again, giving time for their liver and kidneys to flush out excess opioid so that they, again, when those, the naloxone wears off, that the drug works again. Can we play the little video?

This is from the NIH.

Saves lives. No time to sit idly by. More and more people are dying of overdose from the likes of heroin, fentanyl, and prescription pain medications like oxycodone and hydrocodone. These are all examples of opioids. Opioids are drugs derived from the opium poppy plant or made in the lab.

They can treat pain, cough, and diarrhea. But opioids can also be addictive and even deadly. The number of opioid overdose deaths has escalated more than 400% since the turn of the century, with tens of thousands of lives now being lost every year. But many deaths can be prevented with a life-saving treatment, naloxone. When given right away, naloxone can work in minutes to reverse an overdose.

Naloxone is safe, has few side effects, and some forms can be administered by friends and family. When is naloxone used? You can save a life. First, recognize signs of overdose. Pale clammy face, blue fingernails or lips, vomiting or gurgling sounds, inability to speak or be awakened, slow breathing or heartbeat.

If you see these symptoms, call 911 immediately and consider the use of naloxone if available. How is naloxone given? Home preparations include a nasal spray given to someone while they lie on their back, or or a device that automatically injects medicine into the thigh. Sometimes more than one dose is needed. The person's breathing also needs to be monitored.

If the person stops breathing, consider rescue breaths and CPR if you are trained until first responders arrive. How does naloxone work? Naloxone is an opioid antagonist, which means that it blocks opioid receptors from being activated. Activated. It is so strongly attracted to the receptors that it knocks other opioids off.

When opioids are sitting on their receptors, they change the activity of the cell. Opioid receptors are found on nerve cells all around the body. In the brain, opioids produce feelings of comfort and sleepiness. In the brainstem, opioids relax breathing and reduce cough. In the spinal cord, opioids In the spinal cord and peripheral nerves, opioids slow down pain signals.

In the gastrointestinal tract, opioids are constipating. These opioid actions can be helpful. The body actually produces its own opioids called endorphins, which help calm the body in times of stress. Endorphins help produce the runner's high that helps marathon runners get through grueling races. But opioid drugs Drugs like prescription pain medications or heroin have much stronger opioid effects, and they're more dangerous.

Over time, frequent opioid use makes the body dependent on the drugs. When the opioids are taken away, the body reacts with withdrawal symptoms such as headache, racing heart, soaking sweats, vomiting, diarrhea, and tremors. For many, the symptoms feel unbearable. With continued use, opioid receptors also become less responsive and the body develops tolerance to the drugs. More drugs are needed to produce the same effects, which makes overdose more likely.

Overdose is dangerous, especially for its effect in the brainstem—relaxing breathing. Breathing can be relaxed so much that it stops. Leading to death. Naloxone knocks opioids off their receptors all around the body. In the brainstem, naloxone can restore the drive to breathe and save a life.

But even if naloxone is successful, opioids are still floating around, so expert medical care should be sought as soon as possible. Naloxone works for 30 to 90 minutes before the opioids return to their receptors. Naloxone may promote withdrawal because it knocks opioids off their receptors so quickly, but otherwise naloxone is safe and unlikely to produce side effects. Naloxone saves lives. From 1996 to 2014, at least 26,500 opioid overdoses in the United States were reversed by laypersons using naloxone.

While naloxone is effective —potentially life-saving—treatment, more needs to be done to solve the opioid overdose epidemic. The National Institutes of Health launched the HEAL Initiative in 2018, expanding research across multiple NIH institutes and centers to speed scientific solutions to the national opioid crisis. Research is underway to improve treatments for opioid misuse and addiction and to enhance pain management. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, or NIDA, is a leading NIH institute for research on opioid misuse and addiction, and its support helped the development of the user-friendly naloxone nasal spray. For more information, see NIDA's website at drugabuse.gov and search naloxone, or visit nih.gov and search NIH HEAL Initiative.

General opioid information can can also be found at MedlinePlus.gov. This video was produced by MedlinePlus, a trusted source of health information from the National Library of Medicine.

Okay, next. Okay, so in response to the opioid epidemic and overdoses in our region, Norton Sound launched first in the state naloxone vending machines. You may not know that the vending machine we had first at patient— the main patient hostel across from the hospital was the first naloxone vending machine in the state. It is a deposit box style locker unit, or in the lower 48, it's what Amazon lockers look like, has 22 compartments and dispenses is a kit containing 2 doses of naloxone. It's available to the public free of charge.

Due to some state laws, we have a question that asks folks if they're 18 or older. We technically can only give it out over 18. There's— I can't do anything if somebody checks the wrong box. But anyway, inside the kits that we give out, are 2 doses of naloxone. Important to have 2 doses, because like it says, one isn't always enough.

And anyone who's done EMS will tell you that's very true. In the hospital, so once the patient's revived, we get them to the hospital, we're probably going to put them on an IV drip of naloxone to keep it going in their system for several hours. Also in here are some test strips for xylosine. And fentanyl, which are two very dangerous substances that are often contaminated in someone's other drugs they may purchase. They may think they're buying a prescription pill, or they may think they're buying cocaine or methamphetamine, but you don't know if it has fentanyl or xylosine in it unless you test it.

So we give folks those. There's also a CPR mask for rescue breathing and a pair of gloves in here. So these are available 24/7 at the patient hostel. Both patient hostels have one of these units now.

And to do this, it takes about 20 seconds to get out of— to get the Narcan out kit out of the machine. The first question, you tap, tap the screen, it'll ask you, are you 18 or over? You say yes or no, and then it will say, what do you want? And in that machine we have our kits. We also have what we call prevention kits.

So for someone who maybe has history of a substance use, we have kits of things to do other than drugs— beading kits, drawing journals, blankets.

Crafts, many things, and resource numbers for folks looking for something other than drugs to do. Well, we can skip that video. Okay, so where are they? They are just in the lobbies of the two hostels. You don't need a key or anything, just go in there, take it, no questions asked.

Here's where we were loading them into the machines— loading machines in the building. We had a group from Nova Scotia came and delivered the machines from a company called Dispension.

And, you know, now there are other units going in around the state funded by a couple of groups, but we kind of, we really led the way in this process.

Okay, so where did the funding for this come from? Behavioral Health has a substantial Substance Use Prevention Treatment Aftercare Program called SAPTA that purchased the first unit. We used Alaska Opioid Settlement Grant funding for the second unit, some tribal opioid settlement funds. We got a grant from the National Association of Community Health Centers, and then it's stocked with naloxone and other items provided through the settlements. We have a nonprofit partner called Direct Relief, and Project HOPE, both of which provide us no-cost naloxone, and then Norton Sound makes up any difference.

Improvements. So these are the preventative care kits. This is one of them. These are very much a hit. I will say these go out very quickly in the unit.

We do restock at least once a week, but I have an alert on my phone, so I always know. If any of the machines are running out of naloxone. They do run out of care kits. But okay, so what's coming in our region? We now, in every community except Nome, have 24-hour outdoor naloxone boxes.

We have a project we created called ORCA, the Opioid Response Community Action, and I, along with a group of our interns put together, we designed, kind of engineered, and put together heated outdoor boxes. And these keep Narcan from freezing. So naloxone has to be stored above freezing, you can't use it when it's frozen.

And so we have installed these boxes. One was in Unalakleet all through the last winter, did pretty well. Except when it got unplugged. Turns out, doesn't— the heater doesn't work when it's not plugged in. But it is a very simple heater unit.

We have temperature monitoring inside to make sure everything stays at the goal temperatures. We have installed 15 of them in the surrounding villages, and we have 4 devices ready for Nome. We just need locations. Norton Sound will provide the box, will assemble it, will stock it, but we need it, we need a location, and we need power access for, and we want them spread throughout Nome, so that folks can access them. Next.

So, other options. In addition to picking up naloxone, you can also get naloxone from walking up to the pharmacy. Just ask, they will give it to you at no charge. Is it no charge to know it in some? No, but we are covering the cost for that.

Public Health Nursing has it. Inomind.org, you can order it for free online and they'll anonymously ship it to you. We have a number of local offices and businesses that have naloxone boxes now, and you can request a naloxone box for your office using this QR code. Uh, Reba posted it on our Norton Sound Facebook again today. So we have boxes that have naloxone, we can put it inside your AED box, and starting this year we just started offering sharps boxes as well.

Uh, we realized in Norton, within the hospital, that for example if we have staff who are using let's say they're on Ozempic and they give themselves their Ozempic shot at lunch, they have nowhere to put that, that needle unless they go into a clinical area. So we're making— we're not asking what kind of things people are injecting. We just have safe places for them to be disposed. So Norton Sound and Kawarek both now have sharps boxes in bathrooms. If you would like one in the bathroom in your business, Again, use this QR code or the link on the Facebook page, and we will give that to you at no cost.

We also do trainings for the community. Anybody who would like naloxone training for their staff, happy to do those trainings for you.

Okay. And everyone here has now been Narcan trained. You know how to do it. It's really shoot it up their nose. That's about as easy as it gets.

Keep calm and spray it up their nose. If someone does not have an opioid on board, if opioids are not the thing, it will do nothing. There are very close to zero side effects of naloxone for a person who has no opioids on board. For someone who has opioids on board, it initiates immediate withdrawal. That's what we— why we use it.

However, the video told you what the symptoms of withdrawal are, and they're not very nice. The pain that they've been blocking comes back. The nausea they've been blocking comes back. They may puke. Okay, puking is better than dying.

They may have— lose other bodily fluids. Again, better than dying. So we encourage everyone to carry an Arcan with you. Again, don't let it freeze. In the lower 48, they say don't leave it in your car because it'll get too hot, and no one's worried about it freezing.

But if you would like to have some Naloxone of your own, I have those here and happy to share them with anyone who would like them. And any businesses willing to have naloxone in your business, you never know when someone's going to have an overdose. Most common age in Alaska for overdoses is 25 to 45. It's not kids, it's not teenagers, it's adults. Question?

Thank you. Thank you very much.

We're updating all of ours as far as vehicles. We have to carry them in and out, but also all of our buildings. And we're going to be doing, uh, Narcan training with all of our staff in the next coming weeks. So, um, what happens with all the sharps after the boxes are full? Because about 10 years ago, Norton Sound stopped sending them out, and so a lot of our villages started having needles, like from diabetics or whatever, in the landfills where people were going and taking their trash.

So it's— we got the SHARP boxes, but what happens when they're full? So Norton Sound has a SHARP disposal disposal process for the villages and Nome, it's a little bit different. For the villages, those boxes are sent back through Nome where they're packaged and they're sent to a disposal facility outside. Within Nome, we have the ability to run them through sterilizers, and then the actual kit we have can be disposed in a way that it's not crushable. So it keeps them safe long term, and then it is safe to dispose of standard trash once it's been treated.

But we don't dispose the village sharps in Nome. Those are all sent out at very, very expensive, but it's done. All righty, thank you very much. Thank you.

The next item on the agenda is the oath of office for Student Representative Lane Search.

Come on up. You have to go all the way to Mom and Dad. Hi, hi, Lane Turk. Do solemnly swear. Do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States.

That I will support the Constitution of the United States. The laws and the laws of Alaska— the laws of state of Alaska— and the ordinances of the municipality of Nome— and the ordinances of the municipality of Nome— and that I will—. And that I will—. To the best of my ability— honestly and faithfully— honestly and faithfully— discharge the duties of my office—. Discharge the duties of my office—.

Of student representative— without fear— without fear—. Favor or partiality— partiality. Favor or partiality. And therein do ever justice. And therein do ever justice.

To all persons and to the city. To all persons and to the city. So help me God. So help me God.

Congratulations.

All right, the, uh, next item on the agenda under new business, Item C. Clerk would read that for me. Ordinance 26-10-01, an ordinance amending Chapter 3.35 to adopt the pull tab excise tax and amending Chapter 17.10 to exempt the sale of pull tabs subject to the excise tax.

There's the, uh, ordinance. I will entertain a motion to introduce. Mayor, point of order. Could I request that any council members that may have a potential conflict of interest with respect to this ordinance state that on the record, please? And that includes the mayor.

For transparency purposes.

Sure. I am president of the Chamber of Commerce. I don't get a salary.

I may go on trips for the Chamber of Commerce. Chamber of Commerce does use pull-tab funds to fund its operations. That's about it. I'm not sure what the actual process is, but is that a conflict of interest?

I don't believe so.

I would disagree.

And again, I'm not sure what the process is to declare a conflict of interest or challenge. Sure. I believe that you have a conflict of interest because the Chamber of Commerce, as stated in previous meetings, will receive a substantial increase in their income as a result of this particular ordinance, and, and I believe you're still the president of the Nome Chamber of Commerce. So I believe that constitutes a direct conflict of interest.

Okay, I would have to I don't, I don't know. I thought it was more of a direct compensation, so I don't— I also don't know who would rule on it.

Can the city clerk give us some advice or direction? The council could vote on that, but, uh, I mean, unless he is voting as a tiebreaker I don't think that the voting portion of it is an issue, but as for commenting for and on behalf of something and mixing roles, I would not support the favor of that. Can you guys speak up, please? I'm sorry, we can't hear you.

So, so typically it becomes murky when he's representing two different things at the same time. So doesn't normally the mayor actually decide on conflict of interest issues? Yes. So if the mayor can't decide, does the council? Yes.

Yes. And how does that process work? By vote.

You'd have a basically motion declaring, in your opinion, conflict. And then you would vote on that, a first and a second, and then if the council disagrees. Yes. I feel very uncomfortable doing this, by the way, but are you claiming a conflict of interest with respect to this particular ordinance?

Um, I, I would have to study the definition. To know how to answer that better.

Mr. Mayor? Yes. Uh, I don't believe that any of us in this room really know the exact answer to that question, and it seems like if we're gonna vote on something, that we should get further information either tonight with research from the city clerk putting up on the screen, or from advice from the attorney if it if it's something that we need to vote on.

Okay, so what's your recommendation? Motion to table.

Should we make a motion to table?

There's been a motion to table with ordinance. The ordinance, the first reading, the first reading, until we can get legal. Yes. Okay, I'll second that motion. It was—.

Yeah, Council Member Miller, Council Member—.

So there's a motion on the floor to table the pull tabs ordinance. Is there— until we get a legal opinion on my potential conflict of interest.

Is there any further discussion? Under discussion, if we could clarify, if we determine that you are unable, or it's a conflict of interest, unable to vote, what's the process then if you're not able, in case we have 6 people and we have a tie because you are, you are somebody who breaks a vote, otherwise you don't vote. So it'd be good to get clarification. All right, just for now and for future. For that, that's, that's pretty simple.

If he has a conflict of interest and it, if it's 3 and 3, it straight up does not pass because he cannot vote if he has a conflict. Correct. Clarification for attorney on that, then we can hear what you're saying. Yeah, it'd be good to ask, ask, uh, absolutely, attorney for that as well.

Any further discussion on the motion to table? Yeah, I was just thinking that I was wondering, in my mind, was this playing out, I was thinking that whether there's a conflict or there isn't a conflict, if if somebody made the motion to move the ordinance and then if there was no second, it would die, or if somebody did make a second for the purpose of discussion or whatever. I mean, the answer about whether or not there's a conflict or something is answered at a future time. We wouldn't necessarily need an answer on that tonight, but I think we can wait to get clarification also. I don't know that it matters.

So I think where the motion is to simply table— No, right. Yeah, then the motion came up to table it. So then that kind of put everything up. Okay, yeah, I'm tracking. Okay, a little slow tonight.

Sorry, a little slow on the uptake. No, that's fine. I should be drinking more than water. Coffee in here.

Specific? Not if the table—. If table is next meeting. Postponement would be for a specific date. Table leaves it on the table until it's brought off of the table by a motion.

Okay, so it could happen next week. It could happen, sure. So you, with the concurrence of the first and the second, you can change that to to postpone until the next meeting, which is what she kind of said, as opposed to tabling, which then it stays on the table until it's brought off the table. Your initial statement did include the next meeting. I'm comfortable with the tabling.

Yeah, Mr. Mayor Beach, so one of the things that was brought up earlier also is that we were going to have a work session at some point to get information on excise taxes and things because that's what we're voting on and that is set for the second meeting in October. We have a workshop.

Okay, and I, I don't want to— I mean, I hate to postpone this any further. And what I'm considering is that hopefully it will pass, in my opinion, and but, um, and it's supposed to take first on— take place on the 1st of January if it does pass. So I believe we have enough meetings, even if it's tabled to or postponed to a direct date, if we also take into consideration our workshop that we're going to have to have further information.

We have enough time. And also, in respect for all the people who keep showing up at this to that are participants in it, you know, that is a consideration as well. Because they've been very good about showing up, and we don't always get that support from the community in certain issues. So with respect to that, it'd be good to also get it dealt with. But I'd like to have as much information as we can get to make that decision also.

So what are you recommending? There's a motion. There's a motion to table, which basically puts it to any— how do you determine when it—. Until we revoke, until you take it off the table. Until you take it off.

Motion to take it off the table and goes to vote. So it stays on the table until it's taken off the table. Okay, sounds good.

All right, is that the motion then?

All right, is any further discussion on the motion?

All right, we call the vote.

Councilmember Green? Yes. Councilmember Lust? Yes. Councilmember Johnson?

Yes. Councilmember Henderson? Yes. Council Member Miller? Yes.

Motion passes. Motion carries. All right, we'll move then on to the next item, the utility manager's report. Is there a written report?

There he is.

Uh, good evening, uh, council members and staff. Um, brief report here from the utilities. Um, first off, uh, to talk about the generator that we just, uh, had the 20,000-hour overhaul on, uh, our generator number 2016. Every 20,000 hours, the generators need to be fully taken apart and then repaired and new parts put into them. So, that didn't go exactly how we had planned on it.

We had some problems with an injection pump on it. And it was a component provided by others that then went to the company who did the overhaul for us. And so there's ongoing discussions on some reimbursements for that effort there too, because we had to bring people in here to re— to investigate it and then determine, uh, what the fix was. Um, the, uh, old plant provided the power for the community, is still a good asset to us. Um, and, uh, that was, uh, during the downtime.

Um, our wind turbine program, uh, project, um, went well. We had the repair for turbine number 1, the one closest to town, that was damaged and part of an insurance claim. And then an upgrade was done to both of them while the crane was in town to take advantage of it. Just the crane itself is like $600,000, and we needed to take advantage of that to the greatest extent. Um, we had a sanitation survey that was done.

This is required periodically by ADEC of our water system, and the Alaska Rural Water Association has an agreement to do those surveys that then are submitted to ADEC for approval. Just some minor little issues that are easily fixed, and overall they were quite satisfied with our system. This summer we completed, for the first time in quite a number of years, a sewer main jetting program throughout the community. And so the—. Every section of sewer main was touched this summer, getting rid of grease and other stuff that may have accumulated in the pipe, and hopefully that makes for smoother sailing during the winter.

We had a other leaking transformer bank near Aurora Inn that was replaced. And then we have a reliability upgrade at the, what I call Rusty Park, where new step-down banks are being put in that then serve the greater outside area of the community there with the FAA site, the Weather Service, the radio stations, and everybody out to Banner. Our fuel delivery is expected here in the next week or so. The tanker, I don't believe, has made it to Kotzebue yet, but they're going to Kotzebue first and then will be coming our way. And still waiting for the final pricing on the fuel.

But it definitely is more expensive than last year.

On safety and compliance, we had the Coast Guard annual fuel operations inspection, and that was passed without any remarks. The EPA provided some positive verbal feedback to us after the August spill prevention and response inspection. And the separate EPA hazardous waste inspection identified labeling, uh, labeling, waste determination, and storage concerns, uh, that NJUS is addressing. Uh, we had used the COERA program, uh, to some extent for, uh, some of our waste, and, uh, based on our size They said we should not be a participant in with some of the waste that we were sending, but we will continue to do e-waste and the like with Querc, and we appreciate that opportunity.

Um, thank you. Everybody was aware that we had a fire in the old plant. That's all been cleaned up at this point. Um, our battery storage system, uh, has fire marshal approval and is moving through the remaining punch list items. Um, the, um, work on the exhaust from Generator 15, um, which is another project here, uh, a USDA grant to put a Rankine cycle component to— on the stack, and that will allow the harnessing of about 150 kilowatts of electricity from the stack heat that was going up.

And so that's a great additional savings to the utility.

The— we also then are in line to do some microgrid controls that will upgrade our SCADA controls and some of the aging relays, and that is through the fall of 2027. I'm working on design with our engineers on the Front and N lift station project and Front Street improvements. The Cephalad Drive utility work is tentatively headed for bidding in October. And the— so that's a delay. We had expected it earlier this summer.

And the Center Creek Electric feeder installation or relocation that also was planned to be a 2026 has been moved off to 2027 because of shipping delays alongside related highway schedule.

We did apply for funding through the EDA to look at our tank farm relocation project. And also proposed a megawatt worth of solar power. Incidentally, there are— through the Village of Solomon, they put together a program where they've added a small solar array to 3— 2 of their buildings and 1 of King Island's buildings. And that actually had returned— in all three of those locations returned about pretty close to 1,000 kilowatts apiece. The initial metering was probably slightly off.

It was a little bit more, but it took a matter of getting those meters to be adjusted and configured so that we could actually measure that return to the system.

The— and sorry that I don't have a light on here. When I put my light on, then it blurs me out completely.

Um, but I'm here working at home tonight as I have for many evenings, working on some of the backlog that we have and getting that caught up and moving forward. So we have made some substantial progress on it and Yeah, it's great to have some very good support people. Some—. One that's actually retiring or retired and came back and will be leaving here in the fall as well. I think on October 1st, we have a project that is ongoing to be able to connect in these, um, um, uh, uh, sack robber deals.

And originally it had looked like we were going to have to take a system-wide, uh, outage for several hours, um, and that that had been planned over the evening of April 1st. However, we continued to, uh, look at what the options are. And we now believe that that can be done without having an outage. We will actually be able to run the old plant during that period. And, you know, we are mindful of the temperatures that are starting to drop and that, you know, it was not ideal, but we wanted to try to get this project nailed in this year because there's plenty of other ones that are on the horizon.

And, uh, the— there is some savings to the utility as a result. So, um, we now feel comfortable that we probably can do it without an outage of any kind, but if there was one necessary, it would be sometime between the hours of 2 AM 6:00 AM, and, uh, we will, uh, verify that information tomorrow so that we can get adequate notice out if there is going to be, uh, an outage that people would need to prepare for.

And, uh, I think that is about it for this evening, but I'm happy to answer any questions.

Anybody got questions for John?

Go ahead, Cory. Oh, let's—. Yeah, I caught the non-joined meeting. I was just wondering how the budget's coming along.

Uh, that, uh, is, uh, I'm trying to put some final touches on it, uh, this evening actually. Uh, that's, uh, what these piles of paper in front of me are. So, uh, we are trying to nail that one down. And, uh, besides the 26 that's already gone, we'll have 27, um, to go right along with it.

Thank you. The other thing I forgot was the city manager had sent me a message with regard to giving the council a tour, and we're happy to do that. We had suggested the second week in October possibly, and I guess as far as timing on that, I'm not I'm not sure whether people want to do that during the middle of the workday, if they'd rather do it in the evening, or I almost don't want to suggest a weekend, but a weekend would be fine too. Just whatever is convenient for the council members.

So we will get back to me to, uh, to settle the time. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Any further questions?

Hey, John, uh, thanks for attending tonight. Um, over the last couple of meetings, uh, in which NJU has presented an operations report to the council. The council has made a number of requests individually by individual council members to move the location of the monthly NJUS board meetings from the power plant, I think it's break room, over to city council chambers.

We haven't made it enough, the city council hasn't made like enough official request. I think the city manager has committed to providing, reserving this space for those board meetings. I've also had several constituents approach me and ask me if it was moved to this location that they would attend. I think KNOM has also indicated that if the meeting location was move to City Hall, that the sound quality for their coverage would improve.

What is the best way or the preferred way for us to present that request, I assume, to the NJUS Board to move its meeting location to City Hall? The Board actually did not have a long discussion at the last meeting on it, but it was brought up. They expressed the fact that, you know, they had moved because they were tired of being preempted by other meetings, that there was a period there where we were going to XYZ, we were going over to the visitor center, and it seemed that the Planning Commission took precedence and that there were several other meetings that happened in City Hall. And so they felt that, just like the school board, that they should meet in their own facilities. We are aware of the sound quality, and in order to To mitigate that, we will not run the generator that is directly next to the meeting room, which is actually our Emergency Operations Center location.

And yeah, there's a kitchen in there and sometimes people will eat their lunches, but that was specifically set up for a center, and that way we also have access to our files and the like. And so the board did, you know, bring it up and are reticent to return to City Hall. And I guess to go there too, if the utility is.

I'm good with that. So basically the board has said no, they're going to continue. Essentially, yes. Well, yeah, was that brought up in a public session of the meeting, or— because I don't— I watched the—. Yeah, I mean, it was not an agenda item, it was brought up as in comments.

Okay, uh, that, uh, the board chair reported that, you know, this had, uh, been floated, and, uh, the, uh, then the history of the move, um, was, uh, um, provided by other board members, and, uh, the, uh, it was not voted on, but the board, uh, didn't didn't— they want to continue having their meetings in utility facilities.

Thank you. Hi, John. What is the regular meeting of the Utility Board? Tuesday, the third Tuesday of the month, except a couple of times when there's 5 Tuesdays in a month, then the third one is a little early in the month to be able to have, you know, some of the reporting done. But the board basically said, let's just stick with the third regardless.

And if the information is not available for that meeting, it will be available the next meeting. And for the city manager and city clerk, is the third Tuesday in the month the time when this room is used? No. No. Okay.

So I understand the historic part of it, why it got moved initially as you explained, but it seemed like from public comments and what we've heard as a council, there's been quite a few of the public that also requested that we consider asking the Utilities Board to move and meet here. And I don't think the scheduling is a conflict anymore. So maybe what we could consider doing is having the mayor or the city manager make a formal request that can go on the agenda for discussion with the Utility Board. Well, we can certainly add that to, uh, you know, as a discussion. Again, the— well, I guess the board should speak to it and however it gets done.

But I guess in all the times that we had meetings in City Hall, attendance was very low.

We've actually got a few people show up at the other location, and it's, uh, I mean, it's now it's on television as well, so people have, you know, don't necessarily have to come into the room, which used to be, you know, it was on the radio, which was nice, but I think that there are opportunities, and I will pass these comments on to the utility board. This is the first that I had heard about it directly.

Okay, any further questions? Can— Scott? John, can folks attend the NGA US meetings virtually?

They are on the— you know, I mean, they're being broadcast. Right. And I I, uh, if somebody, uh, wants to attend it virtually, we can certainly arrange that. But, uh, uh, you know, I mean, if we're talking about similar to what I'm doing right now, is that what you mean? Yeah, like on Zoom or Teams or whatever, you know, method you have.

I mean, folks can still attend city council meetings on Zoom, and the reason I ask is is, you know, somebody asked me, how do I ask questions of the NJUS board or NJUS management? I've literally had people come to me and say, how do I interact with the board? How do I ask them questions? And they are intimidated by going to the power plant and climbing the stairs and going into the break room or whatever. And so, you know, I guess if they feel intimidated or uncomfortable, comfortable going to the power plant to physically attend the meeting and ask questions or give their feedback, can they do it virtually on Zoom or Teams or whatever?

That's my question. We can certainly set that up. The final— final—. If I could have a final question, um, where do we find meeting packets for the NJUS meetings? I know with, uh, if you look at the packets for City Council, Planning Commission, Port Commission meetings.

Where do we go for that for NJUS board meetings? Uh, we don't have them actually, uh, you know, online, but they are, um, uh, you know, we are trying to get a website going again, but the, uh, uh, just a, uh, a quick call, you know, we're happy to add and email them to anybody that's interested.

But eventually we'll work on getting the website after audits and after budgets.

I've got lots of other questions, but I'll—. In the interest of time, thank you. Thank you. All right, any other council questions for John?

All right, thank you, John. Appreciate the report. Thank you. Okay, we'll move on then to the city manager's report. Yes, uh, first report is, uh, court director.

I handed Dan a flash drive with half a dozen pictures on it. Just want to give you guys an update. Can you— yeah, blow those up, please.

Just wanted to give you guys an update on the port expansion. I know that we had some folks express the interest in being able to see some of the progress. So this was Around the 17th, 18th of September, and that shows the contractor just starting to dismantle the spur, which is the spit that goes off the end of the causeway, the rock spit.

Next picture then, and this shows trucks coming up the road hauling the rock that are being removed from the spur, as well as if you can see the one that the loader's carrying there is pretty darn good size, about the size of a small car.

They decided to haul that one up in a loader instead of putting it in a truck. This here is about the 22nd. This is obviously we have the research vessel Skuleak departing and we've got— that's how much work they were able to get done like 5 days in dismantling structure and maintaining, building what they call that little pile of rock there in the front is what they call chink, and they bring out the smaller rock to keep their access road down to where they can access the toe of the spur. So they keep rebuilding it because Mother Nature obviously erodes it as they eat their way back. Next picture, please.

This was today. So, um, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, not— that was Friday. The machine, they're working on some seals now, so they didn't work today. Um, but that was Friday, and they are sitting on a pile of chink material on the structure as they are removing rock and working their way back to the end of the causeway. The road there at the end that you see, that's where they opened up to, uh, access the spur.

Once they get the spur completely removed, all of the stone back onshore, then they will rebuild the nose there on top of that road and resecure the, what they call the end protection, so that Mother Nature doesn't destroy what we've got there at the end of the causeway until spring. Here's the last picture. This is just, I thought I'd throw this in because It's last week's rock barge heading to Barrow. I say Barrow because uktiaġvik. I struggle with that word, but I'm working on it.

But, and Barrow's easier for me. So I think that's all the pictures right there. Okay. Just a couple of other points, and I think I want to do do this every meeting just to make sure everybody gets an update on the project and any other salient points. Based on the time of year it is, um, I wanted to let you know we've got 2 fuel barges coming in, one the end of this week and the second one, uh, the middle of next.

I believe that's the one John was referring to for utilities as well as some Crowley inbound product. That should wrap up the mainline deliveries for fuel. We've got several construction barges and landing craft still to go for running equipment and materials around the region before they all head south, as well as a couple of remaining freight barges. We'll see the Sukhulyak for a long stay mid-October with a brief stopover in mid-November on their way south.

That's a general overview. View of what's happening. And but lastly, I want to add a note from the last meeting regarding the discussion about ordinance disposal process for leases. In research, in researching the history of the process of granting these long-term leases at the port, I located a number that were authorized by previous councils via the property disposal ordinance back in the early '90s. For the Crowley and Bonanza fuel tank farms and the Northland AML container yard, as well as the NSCDC fish and freezer plants that were done in 2000 and 2006.

None of these went out to competitive bid, and obviously that's pretty much set a precedence for how we dispose of property for long-term leases. But of course, if this council wants to do things differently than as we talked about the last meeting, it's going to require some updates to the ordinances or more specificity— specificity— found it, um, in making sure that that is quite clear. But since I've been with the city, the process of disposing property, city property, not permanently, but for long-term leases, is exactly the way we did it this last time with NSCDC.

So, um, thank you for bringing that up. Um, I, I don't disagree with you. The ordinances probably need to be updated. Um, the ordinances for the public for the, you know, leases and disposal. That doesn't preclude or prevent the city from putting out RFPs and putting it out to the public, right?

So we could do that without changing the ordinances, without— right, we may not have done it in the past in those particular instances that you're talking about, but we could still do it, right? There could be There's nothing that prevents the city from doing that. Not a council direction. No, I can run it by attorneys this week. Let's confirm it.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, you're just following the precedent. Yep, we like setting precedence. So, no, yeah, about 30 years worth. Sounds like it's time for change.

Thank you. I was just Just out of curiosity, on that, on that photo where they're taking away that, the end there, you know, where you're showing there, the spur, the spur is there for what? What was our spur there for? The spur was built in 2005 by Keyway, obviously. Uh, that was when the entrance channel was relocated and the east breakwater was built.

The Army Corps designed the spur to reduce the number of lost weather days we had at the City Dock because the swell wraps around the end of the causeway and would make the City Dock very difficult to sit at while you're trying to work, especially if there's a tug and barge combination set. You sit there on the hip and not only is a barge rubbing against the dock but the tug's struggling to stay against the barge. Not so bad for the ship, it's a single vessel, but they're still moving against the sheet pile. Once they built the spur, stopped. I mean, it literally stopped.

I can tell you because I was there. But we know that we're going to experience that wraparound flow again once the spurs are built, but it's It's a cost of progress because the idea is they don't want to lose time next season at the start by having to take a month to remove it. They want to— once the ice allows, they want to just start building out. So it makes more sense. That's my next question, is that the first phase is extending that, extending that further out?

The first, the Phase 1A that they're building now? Yes, that's to build out a 1,200-foot breakwater extension with a 600-foot sheet pile dock, with the first step being removing the spur because it'll actually be in the way. So it just makes sense to remove it first. So we have to take a few steps back to move forward. All right, thank you.

Will that affect the known points or Crownies or Bonanza's fuel barges? No, there's enough of the structure still in place for when the barges come in this week and next, as long as it doesn't come from the southeast, and all bets are off.

All right, thank you, Joy.

Ready for, uh, Chief Heinzman, or I call him Chief Mike, MPD. Mike Heinzman, Police Chief. I, uh, I know that, um, you knew that, uh, when I came back on February 6th, I was hit with some daunting news that I was losing 3 officers. So it's been a big push to try and get I get, uh, 3 good officers, and I, I think I do have 3 good officers, um, at which point, uh, if we find out that the officers we send through the full academy wind up historically staying much longer than the pre-cert officers. However, it takes 8 to 9 months to train them, so I We're in the process of doing that, and in January, 3 of my officers go to the academy for 4 and a half months.

When they return, they'll be able to drive around by themselves and, and do police work by themselves. Uh, I have 3 pre-cert, of which I'm one of them because I missed the cutoff, so I have to go to the pre-cert academy again, which is 12 days. So that's coming up in November. But, um, as far as statistically for what happened in the last 2 months, I'll give you a little bit of a snippet and then tell you a quick story. The, uh, the past months we've had 1,489 calls for service, of which half of them are self-initiated calls, and they could could be anything from a traffic stop to, um, a security check.

But the other half have been genuine calls for service. We've had 18 DUIs. A DUI takes anywhere from 2 to 4 hours through process. We have had 29 assaults, 3 felony assaults, 53 disorderly conducts, 47 disturbances and 8 sexual assaults. But we do our best to try and be proactive.

And one of the things that I found out, I got a call the other week and, uh, it was a reference to one of my officers, one of the new ones that we got. His name is Chance Dixon. You can't miss him. He's the only guy with the '80s mullet driving around. And, and of course, uh, I told them enjoy that because when you go to the academy, they're going to shave it all off.

So, but I got a call from Chuck Faberstrom, and he said, um, we really appreciate your officer out there, and he is playing football with one of the little boys at Anvil Park. So I pulled Chance in and I said tell me what you were doing. And he told me, he said this little boy was out there, and he said unfortunately he had to arrest this little boy's father. And the little boy approached the officer, Chance Dixon, and he said that, uh, when's my daddy getting released? And of course Chance has a good heart to him, and, and he started playing football with him.

He couldn't really answer exactly the little boy's question, but he started playing football with him. He noticed that the little boy's glasses were broken, so he took him to the store and got him some duct tape so he could fix his glasses. And then he wind up buying the little boy a drink, and of course 5 of his little friends come walking in, so he bought every one of those a drink too. So $42 later, and Chance never said a word. He didn't do it for the notoriety, he just— I just happened to find out about it.

So as I'm talking to him, he tells me about another incident in which, um, he said he had a fellow that came up to police headquarters, and he said the— this fellow had, um, had a bad domestic, and unfortunately his, uh, his partner in life had taken all his money and he hadn't eaten for several days. Well, Chance had bought a bag of fish for his lunch. And, and of course, uh, he said, uh, no, wait, I'll, I'm gonna go out there and I'll get you something to eat. So he went out and, and gave him his personal bag of fish, which, you know, I, I, I know that, um, we have a lot of bad press as far as police officers go, but, uh, as I said, I try and get good people for you. We got Son Erickson, we We got another, uh, fellow by the name of Louis Carpenter.

All of them are good people, and that's what I'm trying to fill the ranks with at the PD. So that's all I have to say. It's, uh, local. Yes, from here. Yes, yes.

Um, questions? Sorry, Chief. Yes, sir. Um, when we send officers to the academy Um, you said that the retention improves, right? They stay longer.

Yeah, usually about 5 years. Is there, is there a requirement that once we send officers to the academy, they are required to work for the city for X period of months or years or whatever? They have a, um, money to send them instead of taking those skills and training somewhere else. Well, and that can happen, but it also can be, uh, expensive for them to do to do that. Uh, when they come and sign up and say, I want to be a police officer, they actually get a $10,000 bonus, of which it's in there that, um, it's prorated.

So if they decide to leave after 1 year, they wind up paying half of it back, or, you know, but, uh, ultimately, um, you know, it is rather costly to lose officers. As I, as I said, we use the calculations, $128,000. And I can tell you that, uh, the, the 9 months, 8 to 9 months of training is what it takes. So currently I have one officer, Chance Dixon, who has previous experience, but he has to go through the full academy. He's by himself.

The other two, no, they're with other officers. So Even though they— we might have it on the books that we have these extra officers and we're at full staffing, we're not. And we won't be at full staffing until May. And I did lose one of the officer as of, uh, recent, and, uh, I'm in the process of trying to find someone local as well on that. And if I can, I'm You know, I'll proceed forth and, and do what I best to secure them in the, in the ranks.

So there's no requirement then? You, you, you're required to stay 2 years if you, if you complete the academy. Yes. Okay. Thanks.

And just to follow up on that, I heard you say that if you don't stay 2 years and the officer has to pay back some of the cost of that Academy, or would you say they have to pay back a prorated amount of the $10,000 bonus? So if they say— say they take the bonus and they leave one year into it, they owe $5,000, and they'd have to pay back. But you know, it's like I said, historically it's been a very long tenure are the officers who go through the full academy. The pre-cert officers, they come, they go, as if you've seen many faces to Nome PD. But I'm trying to get really good people, get local people, and I'm doing my best to do that.

You know, it's— I can't fill all the ranks with local people because they just don't exist. We have a small city, but you know, I'll do my best to try and get people that are going to make Nome their home.

Does it cost the city money to send officers to the academy? It's, uh, $17,000-$18,000 just for the academy alone. And then, um, you've got to figure they, they're in training for 4 months with another officer and The academy is 4 and a half months long. We're paying their full salary while they're there. And then after they graduate from the academy, they have to go to sexual offender training and strangulation training.

Those are additional costs. So just to get an officer where he's capable of driving around by himself, it's, it's expensive. Yeah. So do the best you can to get the good people. That's the number one thing I try and do.

Thank you. Another question. So, so last— so a couple meetings ago you told us about the, uh, Narcan, um, use of Narcan that, that the police department has done, and there was an uptick during the summertime and just overall. And we just heard today that Alaska has one of the highest drug problems per capita in the nation, basically. And, and I had— when you had to leave the meeting early last— earlier last time, but I asked through the city manager if, if there was additional enforcement or additional training that we could do.

And because we rarely see drug busts, we see the results of drug happenings and losing a lot of our kids that are in this town, and we see the Narcan being used even more. So what can we do to prohibit that or bring down those numbers with further enforcement to catch the people who are bringing these illegal drugs in? And what's the efforts towards that? What can we do to help to make that better? Well, um, there is, um, first of all, the state— the Alaskan State Troopers are are the ones that are inherently the ones that are involved in the trafficking portion of the drugs coming in.

Once they've got here, unfortunately, then we're trying to deal with the problem rather than trying to eliminate the problem. As far as what I would like to do, what I was looking into before I just lost this officer, was to get a— there's grant positions for enforcement, and that would be a progressive step forward. But I have to be at kind of full staffing to really do that because it's designating an officer to work with the state, and I just, uh, I don't have the staffing to do that right now. The officers are trained on how to use the Narcan. Everybody carries the Narcan, and as I said, statistically, and you you heard the nice lady today, if you got an unresponsive individual, um, you assume that they're under the influence of narcotics, and then you administer the Narcan.

That's the first step until hospital personnel can get to this person.

But is MPD working with the state troopers on investigations and things for investigating drug trafficking. They, they, they are primarily the ones that do the drug trafficking. They have bigger resources than Nome PD. It's not that we turned a blind eye to them. We make drug arrests all the time.

It's just, uh, usually low-level stuff. But the big stuff, a lot of it's coming in through the mail, and the troopers work with the postal inspectors. And, you know, it's just Some of it's coming in as cargo. We don't have a dog, but, you know, if whatever we could do to try and reduce the number of deaths for— from overdoses, I would like to see happen. But the first step is getting my staffing up.

Once we get there, then I can kind of be using some selective enforcement to try and target some of these problem areas.

All right, thank you.

Yes, all right, I'm at the end. So when you're at the end, it's usually like, all right, just a couple things. And on my report, I do want to mention, and I've got Public Works here, uh, Krusek, we, um our folks, we have decided to take the 3 pedestrian crossings, and in fact, in your— you'll see the actual locations on the map that I've attached, and it's on the right behind the page. We have— in Public Works, they run all the, I will say, the conduit under the roads, the They've got the electrical ready, pigtailed out. So now we're waiting on equipment.

And what else, Cole? What else? We got the other— so as soon as it gets here, we'll be able to put that in place. It's a $126,000 project. The state— we did sign a TORA, T-O-R-A, which is basically an agreement that we will accept the funds, be responsible for the project, and moving forward we operate the actual signs themselves.

So anyway, just to let you know that's moving forward. We've appreciated working with DOT, has been awesome, and our guys in JUS. I don't want to miss anybody. DOT, pretty much anybody else I'm missing? Cole?

Alright, I just want you know, so anyway, those are going in. That's going to help us a lot. I knew the hospital is thrilled about that. The other is we really are trying to move people not to walk or bike on Crushek, but to go and do more of a pedestrian walk on some of our internal, like 5th Street, 4th Street, then come down, then cross over because it is very dangerous with traffic. Trucks and regular traffic.

You see the trucks sometimes, a small vehicle you may not, depending on the time of day. So just to let you know on that. I mentioned to you the STIP, basically I mentioned that about shovel-ready projects, so we are asking for that. Cole and his folks have been working hard on surveys As we are doing, doing surveys on city property, we are finding issues with meets and bounds where things have crossed over over the years, or somebody did a survey wrong or made an assumption. So we are working on that.

And as I think I mentioned here, particularly with the cemetery, space is now a premium, so we need to expand, move the road north and burial sites north. So we're in the process of that, but we have some boundary issues, and we've already met with the organization and hopefully can get that worked out. Let's see, recreation, the basketball court is in process on the backside. We had some issues with the— and I've said it, the readers know it, it's gospel as far as that line. So if Charlie shows up and went, ah, I don't know, so we move to the back and we feel better about shifting, a lot better about that, and the engineers agree.

So I want to thank the readers and everyone else for their expertise in helping on that. I do want to mention that we are going to go live in January. Query on our system, TexMyGov, where people can actually— and they'll be able to go down to a pull-down list and go, it's an animal service, not emergencies. But it may be a dog's been running through my yard. Okay, that's not an emergency, but it will say I have a pothole, there's a sign missing.

General complaints, but they'll be able to do that. We'll have a tracking system by which we can see, was it done? Did we follow up as a team? How long did it take us? So we can then begin to manage our folks to make sure we're responding quicker.

We did just put in place as part of our TexMyGov system, or My Unknown, for our team themselves. So we've got all of our employees on basically a text system where we can do announcements and those kind of things. Everybody has a phone. So also, I mentioned to you we're looking for some grant funds, particularly as it relates to tourism. If you'll notice, we have a lot of some of what I would call the storyboards that are all over the the city, many of them you can't even read anymore.

So we're looking for some grants to replace all those, but also to redesign them. They're busy. And when we've asked people from the cruise ships, what do you think? And they said that it was a lot of information. And it is a little overload.

So we're looking at getting people the grants to draft and put together these new signs for us. And you'll see like, welcome to Nome. Needs some work. A lot of our stuff needs to be fixed, upgraded, and these are, you know, and I'm like, at Anvil Park, you know, there's things that we need to do. They just finished redoing some things with the actual children's park there.

We just did an IC View, just did some upgrades to it. It looks 100% better. I mean, and I think functions, and it's better and it's safer.

Let's see, I do want to mention at the very end, you'll see some— we did our personnel policy is effective now, and we'll be doing training in the next few weeks with all personnel. That has never happened before, but everyone will be walked through the policy. It's important because the policies are not just about the city, it's for the employees too. It's protection for them, and I feel very strongly about that. We also have secured services of— the name always gets me, but Bamboo, and it's one of the strongest small entity HR platforms All of our folks are now on that from responses to applicants, automatic responses from applicants.

One of the things that government does very poorly on, I have found over the years, people apply and they never hear anything, which that's not fair. You're looking for a job. So with this system, I'm already getting with the assistant manager, I'm getting the applications. Automatically go in there, shoot them an email, say we have it. If I need additional information, onboarding, we have Mimi who works for us.

She gets the onboarding information. She sits down with them. Personnel action forms are done by each department and then get pushed up to Peter, one of our finance folks. So that is working really well. We're still not even testing.

We are live on that system, and I'm extremely pleased. Also, it helps us with position advertisements and keeping those things organized. You have been invited. That was mentioned by Jason earlier. The APFC community meeting and lunch is Wednesday at the Mini Convention Center, and you've all been invited at noon.

Uh, the NJUS tour, uh, when I saw John, but I mentioned Thomas too, to look at the week of October 12th. So we'll be polling you for that and the revenue workshop October 26th.

And that's what I have tonight. Any questions? I was just curious where we were at on the recruitment efforts for the assistant city manager and city clerk positions? City clerk? Or what do you mean executive assistant?

I have a clerk. I thought we were— You have an appointed clerk. Assistant city manager, let's start there. Okay, assistant city manager, it is open until the, really the mid-November. If I don't get more applications, I might extend it, but we are starting to get them.

But I'm advertising nationally, and that has helped, obviously. You know, some of the other lower positions, it's not worth the money, so I'm doing Alaska and local. I will tell you, on the executive position, we are not getting— so I'm considering maybe upping the hourly wage a little on that because I'm within $7 an hour of what it was. So I may up that a few dollars an hour to see if I'll get any other hits, but we are not, unfortunately. I'm competing against other administrative folks that are making a lot more.

So do you have a goal in mind of when you think you might have the assistant city manager position filled only. My question behind that is, is we talk a lot about our ordinances that we need update. There's no shortage of behind-the-scenes work that we need to get caught up on and projects that are kind of in the hopper. And we're very eager to— I'm very eager to see the potential. I see lots of potential there in the next 6 or 9 months.

I'm hoping to to see that get pushed through, and we need to have people in those positions to make that happen. Yes, absolutely. Just a comment. I have faith that it's happening. Yeah, we have a lot to do.

Sorry, don't mean to—. Okay, no, that's all I don't know. Yeah, just matter. Back to you. Any further questions?

Sure. Well, for our revenue workshop, could we get the full budget from Nikki on that? Sure. What part of the packet? I know I appreciate the laydown here on— She did update it.

Yeah. And if we can get the full budget so we can look at expenses in addition to revenues during that time.

Absolutely. I don't— I guess I was trying to debate whether to save this for councilman comments or not, but I'd like to give a little direction to you and your staff is that when we have an applicant come in for a shuttle service, it sounds like all things are in place to get a taxi permit, so I'd encourage applicants to apply for taxi permits because we open them up so that they're not limited and that anybody can apply for them. And we have people that come in occasionally and ask, and we sit down with them and explain the process. And we know it's not— we know that it's not unobtainable because somebody was able to get one of those. And so if you have applicants come in tomorrow or any other day, encourage them to get taxi permits.

Ask people out because we definitely need that, right? Appreciate the work that you've done on the basketball court and with the public service and Cole putting into that. It's been many years of talk, and so it's really nice to see that kind of coming, coming to fruition. And the other request I had city staff-wise, as we were walking— my wife and I went for a walk on Sunday and, and, uh, went by— I always called Old St. Joe's Park, but I guess it's Anvil Amble City Park. It's Amble Park, yeah.

And it's really full of trash. I mean, there's a lot of trash there. I pick up on— yeah, yeah. Is there— it's what I don't see there is trash cans.

There's— yeah, there was 3 out there. In fact, I saw 2 today. Well, maybe I missed that, but if, if we have maintenance staff that could That's our highlight of our town when people come in and the first thing they see is a bunch of throwed-on wrappers and stuff. It'd be nice to—. Anybody who wants to go with me with a yellow bag and a pickup thing, I have extras and I try to do that on the weekend myself.

Well, I believe we have maintenance staff that could probably run through there and do it fairly quickly if they keep up on it, as opposed— and I know we've had a lot of windy times too, a lot of trash blowing around. But, but, um, but since that's kind of a highlight of our town, it'd be nice to keep it more trash-free. Yeah, thank you. That's all I had for now.

Scott, um, we've got— every year we do a, um, priorities list for federal and state legislative priorities. And we have a meeting and we go through those. Do we have a similar process in place for deferred maintenance projects for buildings or anything like that internally, like, you know, prioritizing the most critical things, you know? And the reason I ask is I saw the rec center and you, it looks like you're doing some capital planning. And so do we have a way to internally sort of prioritize projects so that, you know, we know if we get, you know, when we're talking about, you know, the NSCDC grants and things like that, we can say, okay, the rec center is like priority one because there's health and safety issues involved.

Let's get on that and let's, you know, put as much money as we can towards those projects. Do we have anything like that, or—. You have not, and we were putting one together. It's part of this plan, but it's also It's the process by which staff or departments are developing what are your needs, what do you think your needs are over the next 5, 10 years. Be it equipment, buildings, whatever it is.

And also remember, as you do capital, if you build new buildings, will it take— obviously it's going to be utilities. Will it take additional people? Those kind of things. So yes, we're putting that process together. So we'll be back in here in first meeting in December and then work through January.

My goal is in January we're in workshops. We brought everything to you, and as a group we prioritize our capital projects, and I want all of my departments in so we can, you know, conversation about it is important. Porta, you know, Cole's going to be able to give me details, or, you know, the chief about MPD, you know, the ports, you know, because everything is not just port. There's other things that may be happening out there. So that's part of this 5-year deal.

We also, with the UNIBUDGET system, we also have the module for capital. You describe the projects. There'll be these summaries, but then specifics, designs, milestones as you go through. So we are working on that now. So we'll be coming to you.

Like I said, we really— they haven't had one here. So we're doing that. And thank you.

So nobody gets sticker shock. It just is what it is. And looking at the future, It's going to take investment. Thank you. Yes, sir.

Any further questions for Manager Lee?

All righty, then we'll move on to the last session of citizens' comments.

All right, I'm back. Paul Costello with the Chamber of Commerce again. So I texted my son, he's in the 8th grade, so I'm helping him do math homework if and whenever they have math homework. So I gave him this equation problem for us. So in the charitable gaming, about 85% of the proceeds go right back to the player.

So that's 85%. There's roughly between 8 and 10% that are for overhead, for operating, for the cost of the goods sold. Some of these folks have got to pay someone to actually run a pull tab position, or it's a bartender that's doing something that gets some money. The state gets about 1% and the city gets 6%. So I said, what is that?

And he comes back and he goes, that's 102%, Dad. That's not sustainable. So, um, we can work on some of the overhead stuff. We can't work on the returns to the players. Those are set in stone by the state and, and by the, the the way the games are developed.

The state is a percentage on Ideal Net, and the city's getting 6%. So at some point, if the cost of goods go where we can't play with those, we're at 100%, which means the charities are getting very slim margins here. Two other things. I've been coming to city council meetings and was wearing one hat or another for a really long time. I can really appreciate wanting to make sure that the budget numbers are there.

I can really appreciate that there's going to be a revenue shift from the city getting tax dollars to the charities getting those dollars and how they're going to get spent in the community. The community is not going to lose the money. In fact, they're guaranteed to get 100% of the money from the charities. But in all my years and in running businesses with quite frankly, bigger budgets than the city. A budget is a fluid item.

It's not set in stone. Things are going to change.

There's going to be tough times, there's going to be hard times managing a budget. But to stop a whole government process to wait until you have zero-sum accounting, I think is inappropriate. And then this is actually the first time I've ever seen the issue raised of a conflict for voting on a first reading and discussion where there's no voting that's going to go on whatsoever. You don't even know if you're going to get to the vote. You know what's going to happen if the room looked like this right here on the day that you go to vote on this?

The mayor's position would be moot. Yet we stopped this process for all these folks out here that have been working on this for months.

On something that really shouldn't have been stopped on tonight. Is it a valid question? Absolutely. I'm not going to discount the question, Scott, but tonight wasn't the night to stop the process yet again for something that might not be an issue. We wait until it's an issue.

I've been in the room when Mark's had to discount himself, been in the room when you've had to, but it's on the day we're voting, not weeks and weeks before. Beforehand. Appreciate your time. Thank you, Mr. Costa. Good evening, my name is Jennifer Reader, and, um, I too am disappointed, um, that this vote or this ordinance has been tabled, or I think it was decided to be tabled for this time, um, because there's an ordinance in place and you guys all should know it as council members.

I used to have a copy in my binder because it often came into play between Mark and John and other people who had positions in our community. And the mayor has never once hid that he's been on that Chamber of Commerce. He's constantly stated that he's on speaking on behalf of the chamber in certain instances. So it's not like it was something new. And for this to be tabled tonight is very, very frustrating to hear because this is completely avoidable.

And if everybody's got a pen Ordinance 2.05.070 covers your conflicts of interest in your own ordinances. And I'm really surprised that somebody like the city manager or the clerk or somebody didn't bring that up and say, this is what it says, like right now. Like, this should not have been an issue tonight, and I'm really disappointed that it was. And I just wanted to say welcome to Shirk and good luck on your time here. And thank you guys that are not returning next time.

I know this is a tough job, been there, done that, and I appreciate all the time that you guys have put into tonight. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Reader. Any further citizens' comments?

All right, we'll proceed then with, uh, council members' comments. Start with Representative Schur.

Uh, what, what can I comment about? Whatever you decide, whatever you want to tell us. Uh, happy to be here, and I'm happy to start.

That's it. That's it. All right, thank you very much. Good job. Councilmember Lust.

It is nice to have our student representative seat filled, so thank you for being here. We look forward to your thoughts and input as the student representative. And I— we had a number of presentations today. I was particularly interested in the recycling program, and eventually anything that we can do here GNOME to get things out of our landfill and into a recycling program down the line, extend the life of our landfill, seems of, uh, of interest to me.

And since I am a glutton for punishment, um, I will say that I do believe that we will eventually find a solution on this pull tab situation that everybody will— hopefully the nonprofits will feel respected about as we go through it, while at the same time balancing the needs of figuring out the financial aspects of that. And I look forward to those conversations eventually getting here when we, uh, we're talking about our NSCDC lease. One of the things that got brought up was coming to first reading to be prepared for things to talk about that we wanted to have for discussions down the line. So I came prepared with my list of things that I wanted to bring up, and then we never got to that point in it. But that's okay, it will, it will happen, and, uh, we'll get to have those discussions.

So, but that's all I've got. Council Member Green. I just want to thank everybody for coming and everything that was presented. Congratulations, and I look forward to having you here. And, uh, I may be sometime in October, I'm going to be going out for—.

Have an appointment for my youngest, so I might be gone the majority of a week sometime. I don't know when, it'll be whenever they can get them in. So just letting you know. Thank you, Councilman.

Um, I am happy to hear that we're going to be updating policies and procedures and whatnot and ordinances with more clear definitions. I think that constitutes for a lot of the discussion we have, so cleaning those up I think it's going to take some time, but eventually it will save time. So I'm happy to hear that. I also would like to say, you know, I think keeping our parks clean and free of clutter and, you know, trash is a really good point. But also I've— I think a lot of the material that we are putting down to date is not ideal.

The, you know, this like shredded tire material is, in my opinion, not preferred for our environment and an environment for a playground. So I think the city, like, considering that factor to remove or not continue use of recycled tires for like the playground materials in our parks should be considered. For a long time it was gravel, softer rock.

Also like, you know, taking into consideration like this basketball court is a really good opportunity for our community, but thinking into really trying to take care of what we have right now. Like, we did a really good tour of the schools last year. Our facilities are really not up to par or to standard, I think, for what we would like to serve our youth and their education. And Lane, I hope you take that forward with you and don't be afraid to speak up, um, and encourage your student government to attend meetings and continue to make changes and, um, like charity or improvements to our community. I know the student government does food drives or clothing drives, and, you know, we've had them participate in discussions for improvements to the school.

So I really encourage that you, um, take this opportunity in your leadership back to student government And I gave this kind of same advice to Elora too, is like really become familiar with Robert's Rules of Order. And I'm happy that you're here. And my final comment really being the National Park Service has done a really good update of their facility with a lot of signage. They also have a really good committee for a lot of that and a lot of the work that they've done. So if we're looking to do some of that work around town, I really would encourage that partnership, Lee, to work with like the National Park Service and utilize who they have on their elder committee or signage committee and including a lot of the history that we have.

Also in the signage, including language, traditional language. I know we get a lot of birders too, like emphasizing subsistence. I know it's kind of ironic sometimes to be out egging when there's birders.

So, you know, really just utilizing our position to to emphasize like, um, our way of life here and how, you know, our sustainability is, um, Alaska Natives and communities that depend on subsistence. Welcome aboard.

You picked a good meeting for your first meeting.

I'll reserve my comments regarding the potential conflict of interest until our lawyers have a chance to weigh in, but I would encourage everybody to review the state statutes regarding conflicts of interest and the Nome Code of Ordinances before you make your decision. Decision or your opinion on whether this was justified or not. And I'll leave it at that. Thanks. Thank you, Councilmember Henderson.

Councilmember Johnson. Welcome, Lane. I think I still have a picture up in Old Outfitters that your grandpa brought in when you were about this big with your dad, and, uh, he's always really proud of you, so he'd be really proud of us too. So, um, I guess the only other comment I had was I'm glad to hear in your report, City Manager, that the rec center is still on the agenda for looking for improvements. Along with that, and this event, that's also, I don't know, more than a decade probably in the works of doing that.

But one of the things that to get improvements and get the grants, And to get funding is to have data. And I don't believe our system at the rec center is nearly up to par for gathering data on how much usage is. It's definitely— we all know that it's one of the key facilities that is in the town and one thing that a lot of the town uses. And a lot of the— but our data, I just realized when I went up there, you look through a book and write down a book. I think you provided an in-house solution for that about a year ago maybe, and I thought that was a really good in-house solution, and it was thrown out the door by our contract IT as not being viable, and I think that it was viable, and I think we're going backwards without the data that we could gather with that.

So I didn't comment on that. Encourage you to look at that card system, whether it's actually working, and also to come up with something that's going to gather the data that we need in order to get these improvements we need to get funding, because I don't believe that we're able to get it in our current system. Yeah, that's all I had. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilman Johnson. Mayor Hughes. Welcome, Wayne. Good to have the student representative seated and available.

Um, I don't really have anything constructive to add to the all the things that have been said tonight at this point, other than, uh, Maggie, this is your last meeting. I'm not sure exactly how that schedule works, but if it is, I just want to say thank you so much for your service to your community and serving on this council. It's something that is important to be done, and I highly encourage other younger members of our community to, to participate and to do what they can. We, we have vacancies also on the, on the Planning Commission, uh, yet to be filled, that I'd love to see filled if there's someone out there with— got some interest. In that.

Um, Public Safety Commission is not currently functioning. I'm not quite sure where that is in everyone's mind, but there is, I suppose, vacancies there.

And that's pretty much all I've got for tonight for comments. Mr. Mayor, so reminder to everyone that elections are on October 6th, first Tuesday of every October, municipal elections. And this year there's also an NCDC election. I know there's nothing big and exciting happening like races, but please come out and do your civic duty and vote and show support. I would remind all the council members here, including Councilmember Miller, that I'll need her at least one more time for that canvassing of the election on the 8th.

Right, um, which is, uh, don't leave. That will be the last one for her, and thank you for your service.

Yes, speech. Motion to adjourn. There's a motion to adjourn. Is there a second? Seconded by Council Member Green.

All those in favor say aye. Aye. All All opposed? The reading is adjourned. Woo-hoo!