Assembly Work Session of March 27, 2025

I'm going to go ahead and, um, call to order the Kodiak Island Borough Assembly work session of Thursday, March 27th, 2025 at 6:32 PM. And the first item on the agenda is citizens' comments, and the local number is 907-486-3231. Toll-free number is 855-492-9202. And, um, please come forward and sign in, uh, to, uh, podium and make sure to turn on the mic and state your name for the record. Direct all comments to the assembly as a body and no member thereof.

And we will start here. Julianne. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the assembly. My name is Julianne Curry. I live in— it is the little green lights on.

Did I do it right? Can you guys hear me? Thank you. My name is Julianne Curry. I live in Service Area 1 on Woodland Drive, just about at the end of the road on one of the roads with one of the most popular walking trails in town.

My husband is Raymond May. You guys have seen us a lot in 2025. We had to 3 different borough assembly meetings to be able to get a service area meeting put on the agenda. We spent a significant amount of time at the last service area meeting talking about the drainage issues on Woodland Drive, and we've been attempting to get some resolution to the significant issues that we have on that road. So I'm here today to thank you guys, first and foremost, for putting on the agenda talking about service areas in general and whether or not the process is working here in the Kodiak Borough and what can be improved.

So you guys have a letter that should have come in earlier this afternoon from me. And it had some attached documents as well from past communications that we've had with the borough assembly. I'm hopeful that I can get through the recommendations that I made in under 3 minutes, but the first recommendation for improvement for the service area process is to clearly define the role and responsibilities of the service area boards. Number 2 is to review the service area boundaries and determine if adjustments would result in service areas that are more manageable in size. Review the benefit of capping service area boards at 5 members is number 3.

Number 4 is to create a clean and effective method for providing feedback and concerns to service area boards and to the board members themselves. Number 5 is to review the service area chair compensation and determine if compensation is appropriate. Number 6 is establish borough code that prevents a member or a mayor of the borough assembly from serving as a voting member on the service area board. And number 7, last but not least, ensure that service area meeting frequency requirements are being met and establish accountability measures. So there's justification for all 7 of those recommendations.

I'm really looking forward to continuing to participate in this process. Super glad that you guys brought it up. And my husband and I will both be in attendance at tomorrow's Service Area 1 meeting. I encourage borough assembly members to be able to attend and watch how that process unfolds. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

I appreciate the time. Thank you, Julia. Anyone else wishing to come forward, please do so. And sign in and we'll go from there.

Good evening, my name is Beata Daley and I'm with the Kodiak Collaborative for Child Care and After School Programming. It's a grassroots task force designed to develop creative solutions to child care and after school programming needs here in our community. Many of our Kodiak families have limited or no access to child care Businesses are struggling to retain employees with no childcare. Childcare workers are struggling to stay in the field because of low wages with a relatively high cost of island living. We are what is considered a childcare desert.

Change in this area is necessary, and it's also very attainable. Creating a strong childcare system in Kodiak is just— isn't just good for our kids, it's critical to our economic growth and stability of our community. When parents have access to affordable, quality child care, there are fewer days of work missed to take care of kids, less employee turnover, and provides an attractive incentive for attracting new employees to our island home. We ask this governing body to move child care higher up its priority list of issues to tackle if we are to strengthen our economy by supporting our workforce of today and also developing our workforce of future generations by offering a strong foundation in early childhood. Over 20 community organizations have joined our task force and are passionate advocates for child care programming here in Kodiak.

Organizations include some of our largest employers such as Providence, KANA, KIBSD, as well as other organizations vital to our community such as the Chamber of Commerce, Parks and Rec, Kiiha, the Kodiak Island Housing Authority, Public Health, Shunak Rural CAP, Lutick Museum, and we would very, very much like to work with the Borough Assembly on this too. Thank you. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Erica Blondin. I'm with Kodiak Collaborative. As Beata said, we have a unique opportunity in the— we have a very unique opportunity that we've been working on in the next coming weeks, one that at best only comes around every 5 years. Kodiak Collaborative has been working diligently to fulfill requirements of a 21st century learning center, community learning center. It's a grant, a competitive grant through the Department of Early Ed and Development.

If awarded, the grant provides up to $900,000 for the— for up to 5 years. So it's $900,000 per year for 5 years, up to $900,000 for 5 each year to provide after-school programming to enhance educational enrichment to youth in grades K-12. We are garnering support with our city government to update the teen center and collaborate with Parks and Rec to provide more formal afterschool programming at the teen center. We are working with Shunak to try and expand birth to age 5 child care, all in a comprehensive model that includes all ages. This is a community lift.

We need the borough on top— to hop on board with us. We can't complete this grant or recreate this model of care without a physical space. Because there hasn't been a decision on the future of North Star, of the North Star Building, we would like the opportunity to finish putting the pieces in place for a collaborative and comprehensive child care system in Kodiak. By submitting the grant due on April 16th, award notifications are mid-May, with the North Star Building listed as the space. There will be details from a borough perspective that will need to be addressed in the coming weeks, such as building maintenance responsibilities and working on the— through the what-if scenarios.

So what we are asking for is a letter of support from the borough assembly.

Thank you. Thank you.

Go ahead, Tom. Leo, excuse me.

I did, I did. I know you're Leo. You swatted me once. My name is Leo Parnas and I've lived in Kodiak for a long time. I've lived at 4011 Woodland Drive for over 50 years.

I think we were the first ones out there other than the Seneca Way. And throughout the years, we have seen a lot of water drainage coming down from the upper hills. And we recorded it, and Scott did do something about it about 4 years ago, I think, Scott, wasn't it? Yes, yes, it was. We did some ditch cleaning, and I thought it helped.

But it really hasn't. It should be addressed a little bit more seriously than that. We need this screen, we need some culverts, and, uh, I have a picture of what it looks like when the weather's right. Um, do I pass this around? Give it to the clerk there.

And an issue also is from the— our neighbor, they have an issue also where all the water comes down and I believe it's affecting their house. They're having problems with their sheetrock crumbling and we're having problems in our house too, but we try to address it. We put gravel in our driveway and you can see the water is running It's like a river running right down the driveway. And it builds up at the end now. It doesn't go over the top like it did before.

Where you see this frozen driveway.

What I'd like to do is, maybe, somebody can come in, and I can talk to them about it. Or, Scott, if you get a chance. I think we, it won't take that much. But, I don't know how much money is available to do this and how much time is available. We have a loader, we have a backhoe, and I don't—.

It's not on. Oh, okay. So we have all that too, but I don't think we're allowed to do that. If anyway I could help in any way, my son and I just went out and evaluated it, and we see where there's a chance where there's a crown Water should flow this way and water should flow that way. It's just sitting.

There's no drainage at all. And one driveway, I think behind my neighbor's house, there's two driveways above them with no culvert at all. It would help if we can get something in there to help it drain a little better than it does now. I know it's a tough thing, and we've asked to have this addressed before. And it was done by Scott, but we're pushing for a little bit more work than that.

Any questions? No? We'll talk. Thank you. Okay, well, thank you, and you guys have a good afternoon.

Thank you, Al.

Okay.

We're now answering a call from the queue. Good evening, Assembly Work Session. Go ahead, please.

Go ahead, please state your name. Hello, my name is Tom Lance. I live at 1338 Mountain View Drive. Go ahead, Tom. Okay, thank you.

Hi, everyone. I would like to just address a— you're going to consider later on in this meeting a draft motion to direct service board accountability. And I know that you guys know that out here in Menasha Bay Road service area, which I am a part of, we haven't been able to maintain a quorum for almost 4 years. And one thing that I'm afraid of if you do go ahead with the way that the draft is written, you'll hurt small service areas that have a hard time maintaining quorums. And what I mean by that is if we lose one member, if we only have three and we lose one, we can't have a quorum.

And there are a lot of service areas that have a hard time keeping enough members on their board to maintain a quorum. So please consider that.

We've tried to conduct meetings in the past and for lack of a quorum, we couldn't conduct business. And I guess We've been operating illegally because we don't have a quorum, but yet we've been able to maintain our roads without a quorum of board members. So I guess, you know, we're still functioning, but yeah, we would like to have a quorum. But who's going to step up to do this? I don't think— I don't think the borough wants to take over management of our road service area.

You have to have somebody here 24/7.

So just consider carefully what you're proposing there and before you make any decisions on making that change, several of those changes that I see in the draft version that I see online. Consider carefully what kind of impact it may have. It may discourage people from participating at all knowing that it takes at least 3 to make a quorum in our case.

That's— I guess that's all I have to say. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Tom, for calling in. Any other Anyone else wishing to come forward and speak under citizens' comments, please do so at this time.

Should be a green light when you push the button. Push the button. Boom, there we go. OK. Obviously, I didn't come as prepared as I should have. If you could state your name for the record, please.

Jeremy Young. And I'm down at 324 Sea Breeze. So I'm kind of at the bottom of Woodland, which has a lot of problems, obviously. I have the pond down there. And then I bought the property next to myself as well because there was a lot of issues with the neighbors and stuff.

So I was trying to eliminate those issues. Well, now in the last couple of years, my property is completely underwater almost. Almost the entire property that I bought is now covered in water, and it continues to climb. And now it's at the base of my house, and all the sheetrock in my house is cracking. And I've been complaining for 3 years about it, but something has to be done.

My culverts are way underwater, and now I'm sinking because I'm built on fill. And now since my house and my foundation is slowly becoming underwater, I'm sinking, and my whole house foundation is going into the water. So something has to be done here. I probably should have come to you guys a couple years ago, but it's getting to the point now to where there are serious issues happening down at the bottom of Woodland, and we have to have some sort of exit on the pond because everything is routed down to the pond, but there is no exit on the pond. So I am the drainage, but there is no drainage on my drainage.

So I have to have something happen down there because I'm just continually getting flooded out Every year I've risen about 2 feet in water, and now I'm to the bottom of my house. So I have to either start pumping the water out onto the beach, which cause more problems with the neighbors, and I don't have licenses to do that, or hire someone to start pumping the water out and start billing somebody. So those are my only options to save my home. So it's kind of becoming a big issue. So I don't know where to go from here, but this is where I'm at.

So I thought I'd bring the issue to you guys. Thank you. Thank you for coming forward. Anyone else wishing to speak under citizens' comments?

Hello, my name is Craig Gustafson. My property is at 288 Bay Circle.

I appreciate all the culvert work that I saw done on Sunset today. I saw you. Oh, and my property goes kind of adjacent to Jeremy's. It's along the edge of the pond there, and I got a, I got a fence line that's at least 20 feet underwater now from that pond. And I'm being taxed on the whole 2.5 acres.

And it's unsustainable for me. $800 A month for taxes on my property is—. I can't do it anymore. And I want to save my house, save me to live in Kodiak. Maybe the borough would like to have that beach.

I'll give it to him. I just don't want to pay taxes anymore, not, not $800 a month. And, um, that pond is just getting bigger and bigger. And I appreciate you, uh, sucking out my, uh, my drainage last month because of the water break across the street, and it filled up my custom drainage. I appreciate that.

But, uh, now that is graded right to my drainage, and it needs to be maintained once a year. It takes about 15 minutes to do, and— but I do appreciate you guys coming out and do that for me. And, um, there's some concerns, and I appreciate you guys' time. Thank you for coming forward. Anyone else wishing to speak or call in under citizens' comments?

You are now answering a call from the queue. Good evening, Assembly Work Session. Go ahead, please. Yeah, this is Kirk Miller, and I got a bad echo here.

Um, how about now? Yes. Okay, it's a little better on my end. I'm Kirk Miller with the South Coast Region, uh, Department of Transportation. I was going to give you guys an update on Otomoloi.

Are there any— hang on just a second, Kirk. Are there any other citizens' comments in the audience here tonight? I'd take that before we start on this. Sandra?

Hello, my name is Sandra West. I just have an idea.

About the mental health buildings, I know we talked about it last night.

Of course we all want affordable housing. It just— I haven't looked at it real close, but it doesn't look affordable. That's what I'm just going to throw out there. It looks real tough.

If teardown is what's best for the community, I hope and pray we can do as much salvage as possible.

You know, our landfill is also full. Everybody's creeks are full and ponds are full, and our landfill is also filling up. So I don't know what that takes, but I appreciate having an opportunity to speak to the community here, and maybe someone's got an idea on how we can help salvage that and save some of that old wood versus cutting down young wood and hauling it up here. Those are my ideas. Thank you.

Thank you, Sandra. Anyone else wishing to come forward under citizens' comments? With that, we'll go ahead and move into the agenda items. Now, I'm assuming we still have a technology problem and that we can't bring the others online. I guess one of my questions is, is Ryan able to hear us?

Everyone, everyone said that they can hear and see you just fine. So Kirk said that he can do the presentation by himself. Okay. So he's gonna take over all the technical stuff too. Okay, so with that, I'll go ahead and turn over to you, Amy, and let you introduce Kirk.

Thank you. Kirk Miller is here with South Coast DoD. He's one of the project managers or people who have been working on the Otmoloi project. He has a PowerPoint presentation that hopefully will— he'll be able to screen share. If he can't, NOVA has a copy of the presentation, so we'll be able to go through it either way.

Kirk was expecting to have like 3 other people to help him, but he's volunteered to take over the presentation on its own. The goal for tonight is to review a little bit of the history of the project, talk about how much money was dedicated in the beginning versus how much that those funds will buy today. And then he's going to give us the alternate ideas of how we can get that project finally done. Thanks for being with us, Kirk. And we can see—.

We can see your slideshow. You can go ahead and start, Kirk. Okay, thanks. First of all, can you hear me? Yes.

About see me in a little tiny corner. Okay, I can turn my video feed off. Maybe that might be better.

You're coming through, you're coming through fine. Your presentation is on the screen, the first page. Okay. Good to know. Okay, thanks for having us here tonight, Amy, and the rest of the members there.

And so what we're doing tonight is just going to give you a quick— this is a 50,000-foot overlook of Otomoloy and what we're up to and some budget problems we're running into. And we do have a proposed solution moving forward. And so with that, I will just kind of run through this little presentation, kind of help keep my thoughts centered here. You folks are very familiar with Ot Maloy, goes from Rez Drive to Menasha and also includes this section of Mallard which goes to the North Star School. And we started this project out— well, a little background.

This project is basically to improve the road geometry, drainage, convert the roadway surface from gravel to asphalt, and improve safety and convenience for estrian access that was also identified in the 2013 Safe Routes to School report. And a secondary project goal, at least from the Department of Transportation's perspective, is we would like to transfer ownership of Otmoloi from DOT PF to the Kodiak Island Borough. And just a side note, Mallard is not a DOT PF roadway. This is kind of a side project in there, but we're throwing it in.

Here's some history. This is kind of embarrassing. This goes back to 2005 with a state legislative appropriation of about $3.3 million. State forces started to work on the design of this project. That's all the money we thought it would take at that time.

And we won't get into a lot of history here, but this effort stalled out for various reasons. Not super important why, and it kind of went into a dormant period. We then resumed discussions with the Kodiak Island Borough, and we were able to federalize this project. In other words, we added federal funding. We executed a new memorandum of agreement with the borough in 2021, and that budget was increased to about $6.4 million total.

And we thought that'd be plenty of money. At that point in time, state forces resumed preliminary engineering cost work. Construction funding was even increased to $8.5 million in between the time of 2021 and say a couple years ago, and that includes some utility relocation work. So we've got a lot of money thrown at this. So the more time that goes by, the higher the costs that go up, and we desperately would like to find a way to finish this thing.

So we hired a consultant engineer, Kenny. We're going to get it all done as quick as we can. And we got them on board in about December of 2023 and gave them all of our files and said, go to town, let's get this done. And, uh, preliminary design was resumed. The construction budget for the scope still remains a problem today.

And on that bottom bullet there, our cost estimates are on the order of maybe close to $11 million, including a 20% estimating contingency. And so we're about $2.4 million over the current budget. So we resumed discussions with the borough what to do before we proceed ahead with any more engineering here. We figured we better come up with a plan. So we've been talking to you guys for quite a bit, emails.

Mark Hickey, I see, is on the phone here. He has been helping too, and we're trying to come up with a solution. So a little bit of background. Back in 2021, we were proposing to improve the entire Otomoloi with about a 10-foot-wide pathway. It was going to be separated with a curb and gutter, concrete curb and gutter, and there'd be this 10-foot pathway going all the way through Otomoloi.

The primary reason for the wide pathway was a multi-use, both pedestrians and bicycles and we agreed this was good. But considering that we are $2.4 million over budget, we started looking at other options. How can we make this a little bit cheaper, still get the result that we need here, which is to get pedestrian connectivity and improve that roadway at the same time? So what we got— there's a long intermediate stretch here that I'm not going to get into, but we did send a team to Kodiak and and talk to you folks about reducing that pathway width to 5 feet. And at the end of the day, when we hired Kinney Engineering, this is pretty much the concept for almost all of Otumaloy.

We were going to put a 5-foot-wide sidewalk in there. We were going to keep the rolled curb and gutter because that provides some better delineation between peds and the roadway. But we, we felt we just couldn't afford that 10-foot-wide sidewalk. And there's more to it than just a 10-foot sidewalk. The wider you go, the more ditches, the more drainage things, the more right-of-way problems.

We're also correcting some lines and grades up by Peninsula Drive. So the narrower section here for Ot Maloy seemed to make sense, and I believe we had borough concurrence pretty much to proceed with this. So with that, we've revised the we are now proposing two typical sections for the Otomoloy Corridor. The first section goes from Mallard to Minashka. This would be the second section, but the second section would go from Mallard to Minashka, and we propose to eliminate the rolled concrete curb and gutter and just run with two 5-foot paved shoulders out there.

And the reason for doing this is pedestrian use between Mallard and Monashka is less than it is from Rezanov to the school. So we thought this was a good compromise, and it does save a little bit of money. Mallard Way is pretty much the same as it always was. We will provide a sidewalk and a rolled curb and gutter there separation all the way to the school. And beyond the school, there's some more Mallard improvements, and the sidewalk drops off.

And you can see in that second typical section there, it, it's just a rebuild of the road that's there pretty much on existing geometry and width. Now, we all know the school is closed, so, um, but yeah, something might happen with that school someday. It might be used for other things. So We're not downplaying the significance of Mallard Way, but it is a section of road we need to look at as far as cost reductions go. But at this point in time, we're prepared to design the entire Otmiloy from Rezanov Drive all the way to Minashka, and we're prepared to fully design Mallard Way.

But with that concept in mind, we took a look at the cost here. And you can see we've got this broken into the three sections. Otmoloy from Reznov Drive to Mallard Way and Otmoloy from Mallard Way to Menasha. That's where we don't have the 5-foot or the 10-foot path on either of those, but they're part of those cross-sections that I previously showed. We probably went over them pretty quick.

Mallard Way is pretty much the original design. You can see 3 cost figures at the bottom for each of those sections. If you add them up, you get up to that $10.996,000 figure, and we only have about $8.5 million for construction. So we're, we're still a little bit short here. I know there's a lot of information.

I'm breezing through it pretty quick, but here's a slide with a whole pile of bullets. This kind of sums up where we are right now. We're struggling statewide to accommodate transportation infrastructure needs versus available funding. So money isn't falling out of the trees, and, uh, but we do truly wish to get this project done for the community. If we can make these adjustments to the design that I just went over very quickly, the ped pathway reductions primarily from Mallard to Menashka, if those are acceptable, then I think our current cost cost projections are close to budget.

We're still short $1 million, $2 million, but we haven't advertised the project yet. We still got more engineering to do, and perhaps we can come up with, with some refinements. And that's why we're proposing to design the whole thing, including Mallard. But we would like the borough to consider the Mallard segment as an additive alternate, considering the recent school closure and perhaps we don't know what's going to happen with the North Star School. If the bids come in favorably or we find more funds, we would obviously build Mallard.

So we're not just throwing it out. We'll design it, advertise it, but I think we need that in our back pockets as a savings. We could save about $1 million if we didn't do Mallard. Alternatively, I would propose the Ketchikan Island Borough could allocate additional local funds. We would not refuse those to increase the budget to cover Mallard, maybe another million dollars.

And I do want to point out that the department will continue to economize this design and seek additional federal or other revenue streams as the design process progresses. So we're, we're not really done with engineering yet. And I think we could find a few dollars here and there, but I, I think the numbers are pretty, pretty tight. I, I just don't think we got enough to cover Mallard with any sort of comfort factor. So if we could either get that in as an additive alternate, and in the meantime, we'll continue to look for more federal revenue.

We do have another couple years here before it actually gets built. That bottom bullet says we design and advertise the project in late 2026 or early 2027. That still remains a goal and it's still feasible we can get it done by that time. And that gives us a year or two to continue to shake the money trees and see if there's more federal funds out there we can throw at this. Um, what I'm asking for you folks tonight is not a decision tonight but a consideration.

You guys can check out this PowerPoint or I can provide other information. And I want to think about Mallard as being an additive alternate and I also want to think about finding more money. But kind of a really high-level stuff here. I just think we're too short on the cash and I'm kind of worried about what we promised to do in the original 2021 MOA. So eventually, if we gel this scope, we need to amend this 2021 MOA to reflect, to reflect the final scope and the final budget.

So at some point in time, I'll be going back to the borough with the new MOA. We'll update the background information in there and the scope of work so that we are both in full agreement as to what the borough is getting versus what's being spent, etc.

Thank you, Kirk. First thing I'd like to say is we agree with you going to Ketchikan for the increased money.

But all things, Aunor, I want to thank you for the presentation. We don't have these figures and that before us, but we'll be getting that and basically have more discussion on this. It's a work session, not a meeting, So like you said, we won't be making a decision tonight on here. And you've given a fair amount of information to be digested here. But I want to thank you for, for taking the time here to work with us, especially with the technology problems.

So, Dave. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As an assembly member who lives on Lakeview, which which is obviously right off of this project. I will not vote in favor of anything that eliminates sidewalks. In 2020, I believe it, my neighbor's son was hit by a car on the corner of Peninsula Road and Otomoloy.

With Northstar shutting down, all the kids who— whose parents have been driving them to school for all these years are now going to be going to bus stops. Those bus stops are on Otmoloi in the area that DOT is proposing not to provide a sidewalk. So for me, that makes this proposal a non-starter. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Okay.

Scott.

I guess this is typical of state government in Alaska. This has been going on since 2005. I live on Peninsula. I've lived there since 1995, and this is just a joke. There's a school there, kids are walking on the road all the time.

They can't find a way to fix this road in all that amount of time. I'm depressed by it. I don't think we're going to change things on that. Now they want to shut off half of the road. No way.

Um, Anyone else with questions, discussions? Steve? Um, on your proposal, did I misunderstand it, or were you still planning on putting a pedestrian 5-foot walkway versus a 10-foot on Ocmulgee? So what we're proposing now is a 5-foot sidewalk from Reznov Drive to Mallard Way. 5-Foot sidewalk on the Mallard segment, but the second section of Rezinov Drive, we are proposing this typical section.

Can you see that one? Yeah, I see it on your— we see it on the screen here, which has no— it shows the, the Otmoloy from Mallard to Minashka. Yeah, this is Mallard to Minashka segment of Otmoloy. And this is the most cost-effective solution. I mean, we could drop back and do this one all the way to Minashka, but again, I'm trying to save pennies here.

It leaves—. There'll be more discussion on it on there. Larry, do you want to speak?

Larry.

Well, I've been— thank you. You know, I was the Northstar principal for 10 years, and I was— has been— I've been advocating for this road from when I first took over. And I, thinking about the past, just, there doesn't seem to be any use for it. So looking toward the future, I appreciate what you're trying to do, and I certainly would hope whatever we come up with, even if we have to wait a bit, should have sidewalks all through the whole loop on Otomoloy. We've had a number of issues since the school was put there, and the borough built the school there, not the state, and the borough really did nothing to to fix up the roads in the area to make it safe.

The Northstar PTA applied for a grant from Senator Stevens to take care of that curb, and that was, gosh, a million and a half bucks right there. But that was because of advocacy of the PTA. So I hope that this will go forward. I'm a little frustrated that it's taking long. I really appreciate all that you're doing to try to find funding.

And again, my concerns are that we have a sidewalk going through the whole loop to protect kids, and I don't think it matters to me whether it's 10-foot or 5-foot. Um, you know, 5-foot sounds fine to me as long as it covers the whole road. And, and anything that we could do to squeeze out money from the state legislature or the governor to contribute to this, please let us know what we can do. And thank you.

Any other discussion?

Kirk, I want to thank you for calling in tonight and running through the slideshow here. And we'll be staying in touch, and this will come up on future work sessions for discussion here too. So, um, thank you tonight here. Sorry for the trouble in getting through to begin with. Yeah, it's not a problem really, and we're, we're still open-minded.

I'm not coming to you tonight saying this is it or nothing. Uh, we're still trying to work together to save a penny and get you guys what you need, and if we go back to the sidewalk, so be it. We'll go back to the money tree. I just don't know where the money tree is right now. We don't either.

I understand. Thank you so much, Kirk. Yep. Maybe we should just build the sidewalk and leave the road as it is. No.

Um, do you need a time to set up or are you good to go?

Should I stop sharing? Sure, Kirk, that'd be fine. Thank you for— thank you for participating tonight here. Yeah, and keep in mind this PowerPoint has been furnished to the borough. You guys can look at that.

It also furnished a memo from our engineering firm, Kinney, that has a little more information Okay, thank you. Amy said she'll get us a copy of this, so thank you. Yep. Okay, bye-bye.

Okay, next item is Signal Hill Mental Health Building's public opinion presentation. Staff report, Amy. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Project Manager Cody Allen and Project Assistant and Patricia Valerio are going to present the feedback and comments that we received from the survey and during the public forum that happened on March 25th. They have combined many of the comments on this lovely board and they have a presentation as well.

Good evening, Madam Manager, Mayor, and Assembly. Next slide. The objective of this presentation is to present the information gathered from the electronic survey and public inform to the Borough Assembly to help guide future decisions. The scenario is that we invited the community to share their thoughts on future use of the Signal Hill buildings, more commonly known as the mental health buildings. And the goals are to present the data collected and then provide examples from the community survey for potential future use.

I think we have a clicker issue.

So the survey timeline: on March 4th, 2025, KIB and ENF Projects Office staff launched an electronic survey to gather input from the community and potential strategic partners interested in investing in the future remodel of Signal Hill. The survey was conducted electronically and ran for 22 days, and KIB staff received We received 250 responses in total from that survey. In addition to the electronic survey, an in-person public forum was held on March 25th at the Kodiak Fisheries Research Center. This event was intended to accommodate the community members who either were unable to complete the survey online or just preferred to communicate with us in person. As described, there's a visual board in front of you that has the comments from those participants.

Next slide.

Question 1 was focused on gathering feedback on what the community needs are. 56% Of the 28— or 56%, or 28 out of the 50 survey participants suggested affordable housing as their top priority. 20%, Or 10 out of the 50 survey participants, suggested other community needs, which I believe you were passed out a packet outlining the others. But just to highlight that, 6 out of the other options were housing-related. Only one was selling related, one was looking at private business partnerships, and then two other were community or agricultural use.

Any questions on that so far?

Question 2 is focused on if the community thinks that the Kodiak Island Borough should prioritize partnerships with private investors, nonprofit organizations, or public agencies to support future redevelopment. 66%, Or 33 out of the 50 survey responses, suggested yes. Only 16%, or 8 out of the 50, suggested the other, with 9 saying no.

Next slide. Question 3 focused on the 3 previous options that were presented to the KIB Assembly. They were largely on if we should ask our architectural engineering firm to rebuild, demolish the building, and/or demolish the building and seek alternative options, and a 4th option as Other was presented. 38%, Or 19 out of the 50 survey participants, suggested the other option, with the other options predominantly being focused 6 on demolish, 6 on renovation, 3 on selling, and there was 3 neutral comments. Only 34%, or 17 out of the 50 survey participants, suggested that we should work with an A&E firm, Jensen Yarbrough Wall, to look at rebuilding the existing structures.

Question 4 focused on what concerns, if any, does the community have about the future use of these buildings? Collectively, all the responses received, so 50, broke down housing in some aspect or another. 11 Or 22% of the responses focused on affordable housing, 9 or 18% were focused on school or teacher housing, and 6 or 12% were looking at low-cost or transitional housing for the community.

Question 5 was just to see if the community would like more engagement, and so we asked if the survey participants would like the Kodiak Island Borough staff to contact them regarding the situation or provide updates. Of the 50 responses, 38 respondents, or 76%, said no. 12 Who we have contact information for, 24%, percent has provided their information. And I'll transition this part to Patricia. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] The Kodiak Island Borough hosted a public forum on Tuesday evening.

Providing an opportunity for public engagement and discussion. The KIB staff were pleased to welcome Mayor Scott Arndt, Assemblymembers Whiteside and Mr. Ledoux, and Manager Amy Williams, Director Seema, and Interim Director Jenna. Additionally, we had 6 members of the public who attended and participated in discussions with those who were there. We are very thankful for the folks that did show up, so I just want to make sure that I share my thanks for them.

During the forum, Cody made a verbal presentation regarding the goal of the forum, and the staff presented key project information through a series of visual displays. These included 3 informational poster boards, 2 large pro/con T-charts comparing the options between demolition and renovation, and supplementary materials outlining the project budget that were set up on the tables around the room. This setup facilitated meaningful dialogue and allowed attendees to share their perspectives. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] So the first poster board in the room was about the current buildings and the layout which the original rebuild ROM was based on.

The second poster board featured the land deed information providing details on the land conveyance for public review. The final poster board, which is available over there, showcased AI-generated building renderings illustrating potential updates to the buildings if renovated in place. Additionally, we included the Facebook comment word cloud that I created so that we could capture the intent or what people were saying online for those who were there physically in person for the forum. These visual materials were designed to encourage discussion and ensure transparency in our decision-making process.

So the survey was posted on the Kodiak Island Borough Facebook page and was shared across some various Facebook groups. Staff gathered the comments and created a word cloud to summarize the general feedback received from the community, and it was highlighting the key concerns and priorities expressed by the public there. So as you can see, the biggest word across the center is housing. And if you have any questions, we are ready to take those. Okay.

Dave. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to thank you guys for the work and time that went into this. It's—. I don't know.

You know, read through all the comments and, um, very much appreciate, uh, the effort that went into the outreach and, um, engagement with the community. One thing I would like to just throw out as a, as an observation is I get really uncomfortable seeing something posted that says, well, this is what we got from Facebook. Um, I think Facebook is about the most toxic thing on earth and our local Facebook groups are even more toxic than that. So I don't think— I just, I don't think Facebook is representative of our community. I think there's a few incredibly loud voices that drive conversations the same way every opportunity they get.

I think some of the moderators of the various forums in our community curate what they let people see based on their own beliefs. Even if they don't live here. So for future use, I would personally prefer not to see Facebook word clouds and prefer to see that word cloud generated from the free-form survey results. So thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you.

Larry.

I liked your presentation. A couple of thoughts. One is I don't believe the borough has enough money to refurbish these buildings.

But if we did, I would like to do that. Now, one of the questions I have is simply the state and the feds have had lots of grant money available, and rural districts all over the state has— have taken advantage of this to pay for teacher housing. And I don't know if we've explored that avenue because the money may be there to do it. If we had the money, I would do it. If we don't have the money, then why would we bother?

The other is that I used to attend forums for many years, except lately, and HUD did a number of presentations and they indicated that for communities in need, They had zero-interest, 40-year loans to build infrastructure, including housing. And I'm wondering if we would— because I think we all agree that we would like to have housing for our community. And if we had the money, that would change the whole chemistry, if you will, of what we're talking about. So it might be good before we make any decisions to explore the options of federal money. I don't believe there's a lot of state money, but there may be federal money.

I don't know. I don't think anybody knows right now, but it would be nice to check into that and see what's happening. The other is, just I'll say it real quickly, um, if you look at a lot of houses that were built in the '40s and '50s, it's all military lumber. You just look at the wood and how it's milled. And that's because there used to be hundreds and hundreds of wooden structures here that were torn down and salvaged.

And one of the things that you used to be able to do in the community is the Navy would bid out their houses for people to tear down, and they would go out and tear them down. And what we might be able to do— and I don't know, it's a different world— But if we were going to demolish them, to put them out for bid and see what people will pay to demolish them, instead of us paying somebody else. Because the amount of material in those buildings is worth a lot of money if you can salvage it properly. So it might be that if we talk to some of the construction community, we may be able to bring in a few coins. And also, that would mean the material will be salvaged.

Which will keep it out of the landfill and provide building materials for other houses in town. So again, in short, I hope we can explore federal loans through HUD and other sources to actually take care of them. But in the absence of that, I think we should look at other ways to demolish them that may save money and provide something for the community to build other houses. Thank you. Any further discussion or questions?

Steve.

Um, I know housing is desperately needed in town, and if federal grants were gotten to turn it into housing, I don't know if the borough is the proper one to be leasing to individuals. We have enough trouble with the buildings we have leasing to corporations. Being a landlord to individuals. If we build it as housing, I think it's a very bad idea for the borough, as much as we need housing. Now, if the school department maybe want the lease for teachers and they deal with it, that, that's something that I might consider.

But I just feel the borough should not be a landlord to individuals. The headaches, problems, if you get into evictions, all kinds of things. It could just be something that's not in our wheelhouse. Thank you. Scott.

There are two sets of buildings there, and the cost for rebuilding them is considerably beyond our budgets.

Which means we need a partner if we're going to build them. And the community is saying, yes, build them. So we're going to need a partner for that. I do know that the school district has had hired people and they couldn't find housing in town, so they didn't take the jobs. And that's been a problem for a number of years already for the school district.

The other place that I'm familiar with is the police haven't been able to hire, um, first responders for the police jobs because of the same reason— they couldn't find housing. I think whoever should manage those buildings should be able to handle both the school people and the police people that are needed. That still doesn't seem like enough there. I wonder if Canna is interested in helping as well. I think we should look for federal funding as Mr. LaDue suggested.

And I think we should keep things open about this. I think it's fine for us to champion rebuilding them and then to have someone else handle the leasing of them to individuals. Thank you. Any other questions? Bo.

Not a question, but just, um, thank you for all of the work. I thought it was very creative how you all handled this. When I walked in there, I was like that— I think someone else said it— like, where are the chairs? And then you all explained what was going on. I'm like, ah, beautiful.

Um, let's get people moving around. I read all the information and learned quite a bit that I didn't know going into that. So thank you for that. I guess, um, a different perspective on how you presented the comments. Um, I agree to an extent that if that were the sole, if Facebook were the sole source of information, I would agree, but in this case I don't.

I lightly disagree in that having this survey, reaching out via social media and casting a wider net would always be my preference. And I like the way that these newer word clouds are presented. The bigger the word, the more responses came for that category or that word. And I've been reading all of this, and all of it's very grounding. And one of them in there is conflict, you know, someone mentions conflict.

We have conflict as far as how we can use this building. That's a challenging thing that we need to remind ourselves of, is we have very limited use. And so I thought it was well done casting that wide net. I think it's great reaching out to as many people as possible. I agree with everyone else.

If we can find a partner, I have no doubt local entities are aware of this, bring the suggestions. We certainly can't just, with the current figures in front of us, afford to build housing. We just can't. At $8 million, $9 million, that's just a non-starter. But if we can find a partner who will provide a mutual benefit to the community and whatever organization That's, I think, our best case scenario.

I would certainly prefer to see that versus tearing this thing down. But thank you again for your effort. I think without that, we wouldn't have had as many people paying attention to this. So great job.

Thank you. Thank you. Amy, anything you want to say in closing?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I don't think we've exhausted all of our quest for finding partners in whatever project we want to decide out there. I think there are still entities in the community that might be interested. I'm really happy that we gave ourselves the option with that scope change that allowed us to have time, because before we really were being pushed into a corner. We didn't have time, and now we do have that time so we can continue the look and to get more community opinions, look for other funding, and ask for community partners.

And so I think that our quest continues. Thank you for the update. And with that, we're going to take a 5-minute break.

We have 5 individual apartments that are already leased to individuals.

And so, yeah, actually, and we can—. We've already talked to QHOP about the possibility of managing for us. Clarify on housing authority. To me, I'm looking for—. I don't want to be a landlord, but I think the resources are fabulous.

Oh, I have no problem hiring, you know, working on the management team, right? Just some—. The more apartments you get, the harder it is to keep them clean. Absolutely. Last thing we want to do is have to move very quickly.

Okay, it's on my property, would have had to get there sooner or later anyway, so—. We'll go ahead and reconvene the work session. Next item is Service Area discussion of the update on status of Road Service Area Contracts. Staff report, Amy.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As requested at the March 6th— excuse me— regular meeting, an agenda item has been placed on the work session tonight to allow for discussion about concerns that residents might have with service areas of the Kodiak Island Borough. In addition to the regular advertising completed by the clerk's office, the this agenda item was advertised on Kodiak Island Borough's Facebook page and shared to various other community pages. It has also been discussed and included in the March 20th regular meeting manager's report. I took this from a recording of a meeting I was not at, and so we left some— or I added some areas of discussion that you might want to hear.

I have the folks that are in charge of the roads service area contracts in the room, if you have specific questions about the road service area contracts, or if you have questions about how service areas work, or whatever direction you want to go with this.

What's the wishes?

You want to speak, Paul? Sure. Okay, so I'm, I'm curious about, um, all three of these. Well, I guess I suppose we'll touch on the meeting frequency and another agenda item. So service area chair responsibilities, uh, including compensation and complaint process for residents.

I think we have a lot to discuss for these two items. Um, it's still [Speaker:COMMISSIONER HART] I mean, we have code we can refer to, but I think the public, some of the public and myself included, are unclear as far as how the chairs are meant to interact with the public or members of the service area, taxpayers of the service area, and how we handle the complaint process. I still feel that we have some room for improvement for the complaint process that will better serve both the chairs of the service areas and residents of the service areas. I think we need to centralize it. Folks need to have a way to submit a concern or an issue where it can be seen by all, or at least by staff, and including a date timestamp, what was, what was resolved and why.

And this will better protect both the decisions made by service area chairs and their justification for yes or no to the request, and provide some bookends for those who are issuing a request from a service area chair or board. I think this needs to happen. We keep running into concerns that come up that seem to be ongoing for sometimes for years. And without knowing what the outcome was or the justification for the outcome, I think this is going to continue and it just seems to waste a lot of people's time. It lacks transparency.

And so I think we have some room for improvement on how we handle that part of the process. So that would be my suggestion is we figure out a way to centralize this. I'm open to suggestions on what that looks like, but I do think it would better serve both the Service Area board and chairs as well as the residents of the respective service areas. Larry, this—. I'm coming up to my 6th year on being on the assembly at different times, and I've had more calls about service district complaints than anything else.

And I just listed a few of the things that people have shared with me. Concerns about meetings, being able to hold meetings, when are they, when do they take place, How do you put a quorum together? There's concerns there. I think there's a lack of— there's a misunderstanding of the purpose and role of a service district. What is their responsibility?

Where does their money go? What is it used for when, you know, they pay their taxes? I don't think it's really out there. Budgets, you know, I've heard comments that One of the service district is paying $130 a day for the use of a weed whacker or moving cones from one part of Bell's Flats to another for hundreds of dollars. And the list goes on, heavy equipment, how it's used and who determines what you use and what you pay.

And I don't think those are really obvious to the public. You know, our budget is right before for the public to see, but I don't think the contracts that have these kinds of costs are available to the public. And I know the borough has them, but I don't think the public does. And I think they would want to know that we're paying $130 a day for a weed whacker, for— to rent one from whoever is doing it. And so I think that's important to do.

I'm concerned, and I think this relates to it, the apathy when there's an election, positions are unfilled. That's because I think people perhaps— it may be they don't have the time, but 4 times a year isn't a lot of time. And, uh, there seems to be some apathy about why bother with it. I'm concerned about complaints. We've had a number of people show up saying that, how do we complain?

Who do we complain to? What is the role of the borough when there's a complaint related to service districts, what are the protocols, and where does the buck stop? Um, I believe that there has to be better communication with service district members, and I don't know if part of the contract should be to hire somebody to publish the minutes of meetings or information that is on— that is going on so that people can be an active part of the process.

I think, you know, I had a call recently and I think Mr. Lance shared it in the Manasheka Bay Service District. They can't get a quorum together. They've tried and tried and they're in order to get any business done, they just have to do what needs to be done. So I really think we need to take a close look and I know later on tonight we're going to talk about meetings, but the reality is it's not just about trying to put together a quorum. It's all of these needs.

And so there are a number of challenges, and I think that we just need to sit down and work through them. And I'm really concerned when we have people that are at risk of losing their house, and they don't know what the role of the borough is, what the role of the service district is. And I don't know where that's written down, who makes that decision. If it's in the ordinance, or if it's not clear to the public what their role is with regard to drainage ditches and ponds and those kinds of things. So I think all of this has to be talked about, and it's gonna take more than just a meeting to take care of it.

And so a lot of it's just going to be communication, writing it down, making it clear, and making sure that the public knows exactly what they're getting and what they're paying for. Thank you. Scott, uh, some of these smaller service districts can't find a quorum, and that's been repeated for a number of years that I've been on the assembly, and they just never can come up with enough people to field a quorum. I think maybe after a few times at trying to do that, maybe they should be molded in with another larger service district because there just aren't enough people there in order to support the service district that they have. And this is a citizen-driven situation, and if you can't get people to volunteer for it, then you got to go to a bigger pool.

Thank you. Any other comments?

Jared.

We're working through a couple of things. I think we also need some clarification. So I'm looking at in the code Title IV, 4.15 and 4.20, and basically where the buck starts and where the buck stops. I think the code waffles a little bit and is a little bit unclear about the role of the chair of the service area and the role of the manager.

And so I think we need some work and some clarification there, too. The— in 4. 20.020, The— it's the— not to throw our manager under the bus or a curveball, and she may well be aware of this, but Section B says that it's the manager that directs and supervises the administration, like activities in the service area. But there's another part of the code that grants the chair the power to, you know, contract and oversee that work also.

And so, yeah, there's no clear delineation of if there is a service area that has no chair no quorum, or, you know, if it happens, a chair who decides not to do— decides not to do anything, where does the manager then pick that up?

And so, I think we need to have a discussion about that, too. And, you know, with all these— activities, especially with, you know, a complaint system, I think I agree that is something that should be centralized and does sit, I think, clearly under the supervision of the Borough Manager and the staff here. That's how I'm reading this.

And, oh, yeah, there it is, indeed. It's the Manager and the Board works together. To develop contracts, selecting contractors, monitoring and supervising contractors. So I think the relationship between the borough and service area, it's a lot— it's not as linear as we think. It's more systematic.

And I think we don't have an understanding— I don't really have a very clear understanding of how that how that system works either. So I think we need to look at the entire code so that it's clear for residents to understand also. I think it's just— it's pretty muddy. In some places, not in all places, but I think especially in terms of administration, it gets a little muddy.

What else? I had some other notes.

Nope, that was it. I think it was just who oversees activities. Addressing citizen concerns and making— and the delivery on those activities that they plan every year. Thank you. Oh, and then Steve.

Thank you, and I appreciate that, Dr. Griffin. That's what I struggle with. I know others up on the assembly do as well, is when folks come asking for us to help, I don't know how to do that other than I check in and see where we're at. But without having some sort of formalized request or complaint process where we can track these items, including how it was resolved or not, including justifications, I don't know how we get past a lot of these issues. So that would be my suggestion on where we think about starting.

But without knowing what that would entail, I'm always sensitive to workload management for our staff, but to me, this seems the logical place to start is can all of these issues we've, we've listened to that have been brought to us in the past 6 months, I think could be resolved whether the person bringing it before us received what they're requesting or not, but at least we would have a way to track that and provide a way for our service areas and the residents of the service areas to weigh in and do it in a way that is objective, it is transparent. But I would have to defer to our manager about, you know, what that could potentially look like with nothing time-sensitive behind that statement other than I think that is a logical place for us to start. Steve and then Larry.

Not living in a service district, I can't speak from experience except for what's been told to me, and it seems that several residents are not getting responses to complaints. Meetings aren't being held. It's my understanding service districts were kind of set up because they knew what their area needed and wanted to make decisions for that area. And that type of thing, I'm very much in favor of. But if they're not getting quorums, not having meetings, not having responses to members of that district who have complaints or problems, I think we need to seriously look at what a service district does, why, and how.

And who's going to be responsible, because if nothing's happening just because they don't have meetings, whatever, they're not taking care of their people. And those people are part of the borough assembly's responsibility in my mind. So therefore, we— I don't know whether we need to change service districts, combine some whether it just turns into the borough. I don't know how to deal with it, but the fact that lack of board cooperation work is defaulting to nothing happening is not an appropriate solution. Thank you.

Larry. Well, I would like to thank Mr. May and Ms. Curry for the document that they sent us. Where they listed, I think, 7 recommendations that will help the system work a little better. But I agree that we need to take a look at the entire code, and I think the best way to do that, because it's sort of multidimensional and couldn't really fit on a yellow slip, that we probably need to put several assembly members to sit down and spend some time working on this. At the same time, talk to some of the service district members and really take a look at that and as soon as possible.

And I think that we have a good framework here just to start some of the discussions that we received tonight in this document sent by Mr. May and Ms. Curry. So I'd like to move on that as soon as possible. I think it's really a good idea. Jared, has Kodiak ever had an ombudsman?

No.

A manager?

Okay. Thank you. It might be—. It varies whether it's the— we've gone through the strong mayor, weak mayor. So it's the manager under the weak mayor.

Right. It's the mayor under the strong mayor. But historically, Kodiak has never had that, the ombudsman, that one person like in the middle who handles exactly what we're talking about and finds the answers for residents.

I know Anchorage has one because, you know, there's a bazillion people that live there. But I was just asking. Thank you.

What's your question, Larry? Mr. Sherrod. Is he online? Can he talk on the phone now? Can you hear him if he wants to speak?

He just—. Are you there, Ryan?

He took his— We can't hear you, Ryan.

Mr. Mayor, I give Ryan the phone number. Okay, to call. Amy, thank you. May I offer some answers to the questions? Meeting schedule, uh, the code requires for quarterly or more frequently.

If the board decides that they want to meet more frequently, I know that during budget season a lot of them meet every 2 weeks or once a month getting ready for a budget. And so if we want to change it for more than quarterly, that's going to have to be a code change. For the quorum issues, you are now answering a call from the queue. That's okay. Especially with Manoj Gobei.

Um, hi Ryan.

Hi Ryan. Hi. Yeah, thank you. Okay, the code says that the majority of the authorized membership has to be be present. So I remember when Darlene Turner came in for that comment and she said— had comments about that it was ridiculous that we made it— that it was less than that.

But the danger of that, the danger of only having 3, is then you have 2 people, or if you only have 2 people on the board, then 1 person can make your decisions. And so that's kind of why those rules are the way those rules are. But I— there probably is something more we can do with that. When we talk about the purpose and the role, um, the purpose of the boards is that those members are elected to represent the homeowners in their areas. Chairs are supposed to direct the work.

They're the ones that call out. They are the ones that, um, give the direction on what needs to be sanded, what needs to be plowed. They're the ones that are giving, like, the specifics of the contract. They have a co-chair to back them up if the regular chair— and then they kind of disperse that work. Where does the money go?

That's a good question, but we have budgets for all of these service areas, and so if you were to go to a board meeting or ask the finance director or ask me and you want to know where your money is at, we can literally just print you a report and show you where that money is at. So I think that one's easy. Where the contracts are held? The contracts are with the borough and the contractor on behalf of the service area board, so the contracts are held at the borough. It's a borough contract.

So if you want to see them, again, just ask and we'll show them to you. The $130 a day weed whacker— thank you, Mr. Ledoux— that's something that bothers me as well. That's not in the new service area contracts. That kind of language is taken out, and that is not an option anymore. The way that they bid does not include rental fees for daily equipment like that.

Why don't people know what service boards are? I think the majority of the people have a mortgage, and if you have a mortgage, you pay your property tax, your service area, your fire protection area all wrapped up in your mortgage, and you don't ask a lot of questions about that unless you're a homeowner and you're specifically paying attention, or when you get your notice of value, you're really getting that out and looking. But if you don't own your home and it's just a mortgage, um, that's such an overwhelming amount, and you just get a letter once a year that says You're here, pay $400 now or break it up into 12 equal payments and pay nothing now. And that's how the community is seeing those fees change. They don't— I don't think there's a really good understanding of what those ups and downs means and that your service area and your fire protection boards are affecting your mortgage in that way.

As far as minutes— sorry, you guys had a lot of comments. As far as minutes, all of those meetings are um, Open Meetings Act meetings, so they're all recorded, minutes are done, and those are all posted and available online with all of our other minutes. They show up in the consent agendas at regular meetings. When you look at what you're consenting to, you'll often see those kinds of minutes. And finally, the complaint system.

We actually do have a road service area complaint form online. I have pulled it up here. It has the date that it was submitted, who submitted it, what service area you're in, what your complaint is that is timestamped. Right now they're taken in by Megan Christianson. Megan Christianson has a copy of all of that.

It goes out to the service district chairs. I've already talked to her about not only sending it to chairs but sending it to boards as well so that there are more than one person per service area knowing about the complaints. So that is something that we can look at, see the timestamp, see the complaints that are coming in. They're kind of collected on a monthly basis, but that's totally up to us for as far as policy. So if we want to send that out every Monday morning to boards, they might hate us, but we could do it.

So we could— we have the mechanisms in place. It took me a second to find this form, and so we can definitely do a better job in making that more accessible on the website. And our complaint form, like our general complaint form, is kind of hard to find too, and we We can make those easier to find. Just because we can find them doesn't mean the public can. So I think a lot of the things we talked about are easy fixes.

When it comes to the quorum and the meeting schedule, that's going to require code changes. If I missed anything, please let me know. Thank you, Amy.

Larry.

I really appreciate your comments. The only comment about your comments is that those all need to be made available to the public, and just publishing them on the web, I don't think really gets to as many people as we think. And I, and I wish there was a pamphlet or that explained how service districts work, what their responsibilities, and outlined the complaint procedure, not just on the website, but in some kind of document that people actually can see, because I learned a lot just by listening to what you were sharing. And I think those are all well and good, but if people aren't aware of them, then they really aren't there at all. If you're telling me I need to make an infographic, I like infographics.

That's easy. I mean, if that's easier to put all the information in one place so people know what's going on, that's something that we can easily do. Obviously, I like making them. I think it would be a good idea, but I need somebody else to agree to that too, I think. I agree.

I agree. Ryan was going to say, do you have any comments?

Other than I agree? I mean, we have a lot of work to do, you guys. So yeah, this is going to be a great process to get started.

So. Paul? Thank you. Yeah. I'm glad that that form exists.

I would like to see us reorganize how it's used. I think all complaints or requests, however we want to categorize those, need to be funneled through that system. We have options for folks to contact their service area boards and chairs. It sounds like that doesn't always result in communication or being able to reach folks. So I would prefer to see this form front and center somewhere towards, if not on the front page of our borough website, service area complaint form right there.

Everyone can see it, or close by there, easy to navigate. And let's see how that works. I don't know what needs to be done to— for us to— do we need to introduce an ordinance to redirect how these are funneled through that system? But to me, it seems it's disjointed in that they could call the service area, they could call the service area chair, they could call the borough, they could use this complaint form, they could come stand in front of us and tell us that they're having issues with service areas, or they can email us and tell us the same thing. That's 5 or 6 different ways that they can submit a complaint, many of which probably don't land in this complaint system.

I don't think that everything that the community comes to service areas with is a complaint. I think that there are work requests that come in and a lot of them are very successful. I think this system is meant for, hey, if you've tried to contact your service area and that's not working. But we could change it to work order requests. We could do a work order request system and request that people put it in there.

One of the service areas already does that. Women's Bay has a system where they, log every request that comes in so they can just track them for their own knowledge. So that instead of calling it complaint, we can direct it to be more of a, hey, I would like this to be done in my service area. I think one thing we do have to be cautious about is just because someone makes a request, sometimes it's not the borough's responsibility to fix the stuff. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not.

And so just because someone puts in a request, that doesn't automatically mean that tomorrow we're going to show up and dig out the culvert under their driveway. If that is the case, I have a culvert under my driveway that I would like dug out. But, but I think it's— so we should log the request and then we should spend some time reviewing them and making sure that the boards and the chair get them and then have a follow-up process. I think the The failure is the follow-up. And so once we do something with follow-up, I think we'll be in a much better situation.

Larry?

Just a final comment on this. I would say over the years in my experience that most of these service boards are working very well. And we have a lot of people that have volunteered a lot of time to make them work well, and I don't want anything that might have been set here tonight to infer that these people that are managing this aren't doing it to the best of their ability. And, and I appreciate that. I think we need to, as we've heard tonight from most assembly members, we need to take a close look at what we're doing.

But I do appreciate the work that's been done and continues to be done. Thank you. Okay. With that, we'll go ahead and move on to The next item, which is FY 2026 budget review for several general fund departments and a special revenue fund. Staff report, Amy.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Tonight we're going to be going over several different departments. It looks like it's kind of an odd order, but we're trying to get the finance director in and out as soon as possible so that she can go on to other commitments tonight. Um, and so sometimes when we go through budgets, it's hard to follow depending on whether you have opened the actual agenda item or you are looking at the entire packet. So I gave you an Excel spreadsheet.

If you're looking at 2D, you'll see the page numbers are listed on the right. If you are like the mayor and looking at a paper copy and you have the whole packet, um, the page numbers are listed on the left-hand side for your ease of finding the information. So, um, Dora is attached to a lot of the different budgets, and so tonight she'll just be going through a few of them that she takes care of. I will go over the ones that I take care of, um, and then finally at the end, the clerk is going to go over the legislative and clerk's budget.

So if you're looking at agenda item will be on page 2 if you're looking at the whole packet. We're going to start on page 8.

Evening. Um, the first one here, the— I'll be going through the general fund ones, are the borough attorney, and I decreased a bit of it. You'll see last last year. We budgeted $85,000. This year we're at $24,000, so I took it down to $55,000 in total.

Is there any questions? No. My understanding that there's also attorney's fees in other departments. This isn't the total attorney's fees, just so I know. Correct.

Since Community Development and Assessing have quasi-judicial actions they have their own attorney budget for those particular items regarding that department. These attorney fees are for the borough in, in general. I just wanted to clarify that so that you'll see it again elsewhere. Continue.

Any questions on this?

Uh, we're gonna find out what the Supreme Court is doing about the Canna, um, uh, case, and that's probably going to happen by the end of the fiscal year. Is that not— no. Oh, by the end of fiscal year '26, '25. I don't think we'll know by the end of '25. I think we'll know by the end of fiscal year '26.

That long? Yes. Which account would that come out of then? Assessing. Okay.

Okay. Thank you. Sorry. As long as we have the same answer.

Thank you. Anything else on YouTube? Jared. Where does—. We had this issue with insurance, and is that what it was in paying attorney fees?

From our insurance up to that set amount. Oh my gosh, my brain has just gone gray and wet right now. Um, um, uh, where, uh, it wasn't, um, I was gonna say, what was the issue? It wasn't Canna. It was, um, oh, it was, uh, it was a, an employment previous, uh, settlement.

It was a settlement from a previous fire chief. So those—. Yes, applicant, thank you. Those insurance costs or those attorney costs were paid by the insurance company, and our settlement is in the general administration expenses. I saw the settlement there, but insurance is The attorney fees from that insurance is in a completely different place.

The attorney— the insurance company took care of the attorney fees, right? And so, okay, all right, so you won't see those in here at all. Gotcha. Thank you.

Any other comments? Go for it.

Moving on to Finance Department budget.

I think the only— my printing and binding includes the publication of the popular report halfway down the page, $450,120. And dues and periodicals, I have a couple of new employees. I'd like to get a couple of new books for them. Otherwise, I think my budget's It's pretty much the same as in prior years, except for the salary increases, step increases. Yeah, but I also don't have— I didn't, I didn't budget for, um, the accountant costs.

It's a fiscal tech now, fiscal analyst. So, okay, I just, I just noticed that you're Printing bindings exactly the same going forward and dues and periodicals.

Oh, sorry, Jared, go ahead. I had a couple of questions from the public about this over the past few weeks, and I think I gave them a good answer. Can you explain why we charge our departments rent? So this building belongs to the building and grounds funds, not to the general fund. So we— I tabulate the costs, our department tabulates the costs for what this building is, and then shares it amongst the building residents.

So part of the costs are covered by the city, part of them are covered by us because we both enjoy the use of the building.

So those go— those rents go into the building and grounds funds. So that's why we have an expense, a rental expense. The money's being moved to a different fund, and that other fund is what pays for the utilities, the repairs and maintenance. Scott, I have a question. If we have other people in Northstar after it's no longer a school, for instance, Kana and the city and the borough in the gym, will they have to pay rent on the parts they are using?

Go ahead, Amy. That is going to be an assembly policy discussion, which I am thinking that the new group that the mayor is putting together, that ad hoc committee, will address as one of the items. Thank you. Some of those decisions will have to determine The use of the fund will determine the type of fund it is, whether it's a special revenue fund or whether it's an enterprise fund. There's rules regarding that, so at the time those decisions are made, there will be more clarity on which type of fund it is.

Further discussion? Continue. Any other questions on finance?

Nice. Oh, Dave. I apologize. Having attended that Kodiak collaborative meeting the other night, as we heard in the public comment, you know, they're looking to submit a grant application that would pay up to $900,000 a year for 5 years to provide free aftercare to, and potentially summer care to children in Kodiak, which, you know, KEDC, they say the two biggest issues affecting our local economy are housing prices and child care. So this is potentially an opportunity for the borough to, to greatly assist in one of those two.

My question as it pertains to the finance budget is one of the things they mentioned is they need a lead organization for this grant. How hard would it be be to add a 0.5 FTE type of situation if necessary for the grant administration, if awarded, to then come out of the grant funding, if the borough were to be interested in signing on as lead agency. Amy.

So, complicated answer, Mr. Johnson. Grant for them is due by mid-April. We will not be capable of hiring a half-time employee to, to do that grant before then, and that grant needs to have the lead organization listed in it. So that's going to be very tough for us. We don't have a grant writing team like some of the possible other organizations do, um, because we are just teaching our current staff to operate in a way, um, that kind of hybrid because we haven't been able to fire a full-time— fire, excuse me, we haven't been able to hire a full-time accountant.

We're making do with someone we borrowed from you. Thank you, sir. Um, and so we've adjusted our processes, um, in order to make things work with less than we should have right now. So yes, is it something that would fall under the finance department? Absolutely.

But with switch over to Tyler software. That— we haven't even gotten to the finance portion of that, and it takes an unbelievable amount of time. So I'm very concerned, and I've told Kodiak Collaborative about that. I'm worried about the capacity as we are— we don't know what's coming for the future of that Tyler crossover. We're gonna have to run parallel systems with Harris and Tyler, so we're asking the staff that we do have to come up to speed in two systems.

That was supposed to be done right at the end of the fiscal year so we could start a new fiscal year with Tyler, but now the due date is— or the go-live date has been pushed to August, so we're gonna have to run parallel systems all the way, probably September or October, like a more realistic date through levy and 3—. 2 Payment dates. So, so it's going to stretch my staff. Scott. That grant, in addition to what Dr. Dave said, was, uh, you have to— it's a reimbursement, uh, funding.

So the first of the fiscal year, there's going to be a lot of payouts, and then you have to wait for the reimbursement on it. That can sometimes cripple people, that first large payment.

Any further questions? Continue.

Uh, moving on to the General Administration Fund. That's a fund, it's kind of a catch-all for anything that's not specific to a particular area, um, such as it pays for our auditors, um, it pays for the safety skills program that all the employees use, the employee assistance program that, again, all the employees use, automobile general use, assessing uses them, maintenance staff uses them to go get parts and whatnot.

So those are the kind of expenses in this fund.

Uh, the only large deviation I can pinpoint is for the budget in '25 for account 432120. We had $42,600 in there. That was $40,000 for any OSHA corrections that we needed to do. I haven't seen or heard anything about that, so I'm not sure if that's going to happen this year, but I didn't put it in there for next year.

Larry.

Just a quick question. Where would be the added expenses of the closure of Northstar be added into the budget? Maintenance of the building to security to heat, where would those— where would that be located? And have we determined how that's going to impact the budget? [Speaker:MS. ANDERSON] So right now, since it's a school building, just as any other school building, until the past the end of the year, it will fall into buildings and grounds.

But the ultimate determination of those expenses and where they're going to reside depends on what the decisions are made for the use. But as I understand it, it's going to be continued to use as a school until— yeah, I believe—. Talking Amy. We do know that the average utility cost over the last 3 years is about $140,000 if we kept it heated to school temperature. And the school district estimates that they were putting about $40,000 a year into maintenance But that also can— that was also all of their consumables.

So their light bulbs and their toilet paper and their paper towels and their hand soap. It was all of the stuff that the school district was providing. So it will definitely depend on what the use looks like and if other people are going in. If we're going to have renters of any sort be in there, utilities will be a part of their rent, um, and as well as some funding towards maintenance. Because if they're going to be in there, if we— even if we don't charge like a square foot rent, the, the minimum that we will have to do is, is cover maintenance and utilities.

I—. Go ahead. Sorry, so I know we talked about this when we created these budgets a month or so ago, um, maybe a little more than that, but at the time we didn't have any indication at all which school they were going to close. So these numbers were prepared before that decision was made. And buildings and grounds, which I said was where it would normally fall, there's nothing— I know there's nothing been added in for that building because at the time we didn't even know what school was going to be ultimately.

And they also haven't said that they're going to turn it back to us. Yeah, so, but to answer— I think to answer your question, there's nothing in in this budget so far that's been for any kind of accommodations for the North Star.

Okay, Jared, and then Scott. Um, can you talk some more about account, uh, 432-100? There's a $20,000 increase for that one for 2026. Yes, we have a contract with our auditors, and it's a 5-year contract, and so those are the contracted rates for them for the next year.

Scott, that was my question too. Okay, continue, Dorr. I should add, I also— I'd have to go back and look, but I may have added an additional $5,000 because with having less theory-based staff in my accounting department, I've had to lean more on our auditors for help. Like this June, I have them coming for a week to help me sort out capital project funds. So I'd have to look, but I think I put $5,000 in there for extra help for them, which is, again, it's a contracted rate, but estimated a few extra hours of their time.

15,000 Extra. Sorry, there was a 5 in there.

Um, I don't, I don't know what other questions you might have about the general admin fund. It's really nice to see 420.110 going down because it means that we're paying less unemployment claims. When someone is fired or quits from the borough, we pay for 6 months after. If they don't even have to live in the state and we are still paying. So as some of those employees that we've lost over the last couple years fall off of that system, that obligation has gone down quite a bit.

Um, the borough is self-insured for their unemployment, so we take the full hit for those costs.

Continue.

Any other questions?

Okay, I think the last one I have this evening is The Education, Culture, and Recreation, and there's 2 items on here. One is the North Star PTA streetlights, and the other is the Carlick IRA Council. Um, information from DED— well, I'm sorry, DCCED. Um, is that normally the community assistance for an unincorporated village is 15.7, this year it's 10.6. However, they were supposed to be on the agenda tonight.

I have not heard from them. They have not returned their paperwork. I've emailed, I've called, I've sent letters. I spoke to someone, uh, still got nothing back from a response, so I bumped that back another 2 weeks. Hopefully we'll get the paperwork for that so we can get them their money, but I just haven't gotten a response from them yet.

So.

It's a pass-through, so it's something that the state gives to us that we pass through, and this is where it's recorded, the pass-through's recorded. [Speaker:DR. HALL] So if we get it, we pass it through. We don't get it, we don't. If they don't come to us guaranteeing that they do 3 of the 7 services, then they don't— they won't get it. They're not eligible for it.

And have the population, isn't that—. Yeah, but the state said they do have the population this year, so it's just a— they just need to sign their intentions of what they're going to use the money for and that they provide 3 of the 7 required services, and I haven't gotten that back from them yet.

Any questions on those? Don't see. Continue.

Thank you, Dora. Moving on, we are going to switch to Borough Management. It is 1:05. If you are looking at the whole packet, page 13. If you are looking at the agenda, it is page— item 2D, it's page 7, uh, you're going to see a change in salaries.

Um, it looks like it's going down, and it is because last year we funded, um, a lands resource manager that we haven't used yet this year or had a need for it, so we took that out for this year. I don't want the community to think that that means that we're not going to sell land. I am just not going to pay a full-time employee to help with the paperwork of that because we're going to manage it in other ways. Overtime I reduced by 50% because I'm just not using overtime in the department. We used to have Megan Christianson come to a lot of the meetings and I just haven't asked her to do that lately because I feel like I can cover it on my own.

But when nonprofits come up, you will see her. Before you go too much further, if you'd state What positions are in the salary? The only positions are special projects, which are Megan Critchison and the borough manager, which is me. It's what I wanted to get out there. Sure.

Thank you. I'm the only one who gets a cell phone stipend. Then the rest of the regular costs for employment are listed there. For contracted services, last year I put $30,000 in there hoping that we could hire someone for a strategic plan. That did not happen.

I'm hopeful that will happen in the next fiscal year, so that same amount is in there again. Office supplies, uh, everything has stayed the same there. Um, we have spent a little bit more money than we usually do on dues, books, and periodicals. That also includes memberships to the Alaska Municipal Managers Association and then the a nationwide international managers association.

Uh, we use honorarium and amenities for employee recognitions, employee quarter of the year, uh, and milestone awards. We used to give out little borough pins that had like an emerald or a ruby depending on the year. That's kind of become outdated, so instead we offer gift cards to local businesses and we give $10 per year year, and you get them at 5, 10, and 15. So when we have someone cross their 15-year mile mark, they have the choice of the pin, or they can get a $150 gift card to a local business of their choice. Every single person has chose the card over the pin.

I have a collection of pretty pins in case anyone's interested. For food and business, we only use that when we have lobbyists or other people that are helping us. I think we've used it in the past when Senator Salon and Ms. Staff were here. We use that to take them out on the town. Continuing education, I have $10,000 in there for next year.

We are going to try to do some focus on procurement, continuing to look at emergency management. I'm going to sign up for the Assessing 101 course when they take it, and we also try to— or I we. I also try to go to the AML summer, winter, and annual conferences, SWAMP, see if it's available, and if the timing works out, the National Conference for Managers is happening in Tampa, Florida this year, and so I'm gonna try to get to that as well. We have money in there for travel and per diem. That is what the account that we use for if we're traveling to villages.

That's our per diem for staying on island and getting out and visiting villages. My rent has gone down because I moved the project's office to the two rooms across from me, and they were both being paid for by, um, the manager's department, and so now they are not. So my rent is cheaper. You'll see an increase in the engineering facilities rent, and then I have parts of my salary that are allocated to solid waste, the hospital, and the KFRC. See as a regular thing that we do.

Is there any questions about borough management?

Okay, uh, the next few that we're gonna look at are questions. I put placeholders in these next few accounts to match what we did the last year. Throughout the year, we've had a lot of conversations about how we're going to fund nonprofits, if we're going to put more or less money. So this is where we'll talk, uh, you don't have to decide tonight, but I just put the same numbers in. So as we look at 100-191, that's our Kodiak Colleges and Library funds.

In 2025, we did, um, give out $100,000. $98,000 Of that went to the college and $2,000 went to one of our small public libraries. Um, and this year I have added that same $100,000 into that account. So if there's any intent or desire to change that, just let me know and we can update that. And then the next two are both 100-192 funds.

One is 110, which is Health and Social Services, and the second one is 120, which is Education, Culture, and Recreation. Over the last two years, both of those have had $85,000 each, so I put $85,000 each. You'll see a bunch of zeros on the budgeted amount because when I I'm going to let you figure that out instead of me. And then we will do our regular nonprofit application program for that. And one thing that we've been putting at the end of the manager's report for quite a while now is that we would talk about the opioid class action settlement fund.

And that's our next fund. That's Fund 273. At the end of nonprofits last year, we said, hey, we should be giving out some of that money to the nonprofits students who could use that, but the process was already over, so we're going to add it to this year's funds. There's a, a long list of who we're getting money from there. It's $119,506 in total, so that's how much we have in the fund right now.

That $119,506 is the total that we have in the fund right now, and those funds are a little bit strange because As people pay out their settlements, they can choose to do it in a bulk sum. They can choose to do it over a number of years. They're continuing to add more. Um, and so when we look at our budgeted amounts, those are ones that have settled on a plan that we know what's going to come in during fiscal year '26. The rest of them we are unsure about, or they're done.

Um, but we're still showing the money that has come in from them. So that's a going to be an account that varies a lot. So what we talked about last year after nonprofit funding was to include an addition in the nonprofit process that would allow people to mark if they were eligible for opioid funds and then what they would do for them. During the week last week, I sent out a list of what those funds that could be used for. I have a couple printed copies if you want to peruse it later, but we would obviously have to follow those recommendations in order to give those funds to the nonprofits that could use them.

So unless there is a change in plan, when we do the nonprofit process, we will include a special section for the use of those funds.

Okay, any questions about those? Okay, uh, that's what those next two pages are. And that brings us to our legislative budget. If you're following along and you're looking at the agenda item, that's on page 13. If you're looking at the whole packet tonight, that's on page 19.

And that shifts over to Nova. Thanks, Amy. Um, Mr. Mayor, members of the assembly, so we'll go into the legislative fund. Um, the mayoral stipend is $700 a month, that's totaling to $8,400 per year, per fiscal year. But we do have, um, a mayoral election in October I added another $700 just in case there's an overlap in October.

And then the Assembly stipend is $43,000. There are 2 seats that are coming up in October, and I provided an overlap of about $1,000 there. Okay, and the next are the FICA, unemployment, retirement, work comp, and the political lobbyist is $72,000. $42,000. Our Juno lobbyist is paid $45,000 for his contract that is expiring at the end of this year.

Okay, and then our federal lobbyist has an open-ended contract with the borough and he gets paid $27,000 a year. Okay, our lobbying expense is $1,500. Historically, mayor and assembly members traveled to Juno in February. And if there's cost associated with that travel, let's say you're going out with a lobbyist and there's expenses, you know, dinner or supplies that we need to purchase, that's where we get that money from, or the funding from. Do you have any questions?

I did not have a question. I was just commenting that we didn't know that existed, as we all paid for the lobbyist dinner out of pocket. Yeah, lesson learned. We paid the price, will not make that mistake again. Yes, and historically the city and the borough used to have a joint reception in Juneau, but we haven't done that in many years.

And so this, this fund right here used to purchase like banners or copying expenses and miscellaneous expenses like that. Okay, office supplies is $1,000. Dues, books, periodicals is $23,000, and that covers the AML membership, which is about $11,000 a year that we pay. The mayor's Association of Mayors fee is $200. We have a SWAMC membership of about $8,000.

SWAMC, every year there's a sponsorship that we give during their event or their conference. It's $1,500. We have a NACo membership dues. It's National Association of Counties, which is $450. And then we have United Fishermen of Alaska membership, which is $350.

Furniture and fixtures, we have $1,000 there. In the past, if a chair breaks, then if I need to get a replacement, then I would take it out from this fund. Machinery and equipment, it's zeroed out. Honorarium amenities, um, I use this for assembly pictures, outgoing assembly members, if we get them a little present, like going away present. Sometimes we do have like swamsee gift baskets or AML gift baskets for like fundraising auctions type of thing.

We also, let's say if there's a reception in Kodiak, North Pacific Fishery Management Council Reception in Kodiak. We've donated in the past, and that's where we would take them that money from. Uh, we had Comfish in sponsorship in the past. We had, let's say, MV Tostamena event in Kodiak. That's where I would take the money from.

Okay, food business lunch, we have $2,500. Uh, we have Assembly travel and per diem, which is $25,000, and we've done pretty good there. We've only spent $4,400 this year. And then the mayor's travel is $19,000. We increased it from $16,500 last year due to the increased cost in travel.

Um, rent is $55,356, telephone is $500, and town meeting cost in case you need to hold a meeting, let's say in Cheeniak, and if there's costs associated with that, that's where I would take the money from. Okay, any questions? Jared. I have a couple. This is actually going back because, Amy, holy cow, you went fast.

Where do you want to go? Just back to the libraries one, and it's not really a big deal, but I heard— and then I think this is a rumor, but it depends on IMLA funding— that the Chinniack Library will actually be closing.

So they used to have a $7,000 grant for the Chinniack Library and $3,500 of of that was, um, they had to use that on books, and then they got to use the rest for operating expenses. If they lose that, then that $2,000 they get from us will not sustain that for the library use. It also is a tsunami shelter, so we have some commitment to keeping it updated, but it doesn't— it doesn't have to be open, it just has to be ready to be used as a tsunami shelter. And that budgeted $200,000. It's not that.

They got that through the nonprofit funding process, and that's just how much we gave them. So that's not a budgeted item. And so if they apply again and the assembly chose to give them more or less, that would be up to the assembly to do so.

And then, thank you. And then I'd like to talk about sponsorships. What Nova was talking about, and this might come out of the manager's budget too, I'm happy to see an increase there to $5,000. I think we should increase our sponsorships of conferences, events. I think it's— I learned more, I think, this year about how important it is to— it's not pay to play, but it is definitely like money and sponsorship does get you places at tables.

And I think we've seen even with the federal administration, when you take away involvement in groups, through money and sponsorships, then you lose influence. And I think now more than ever, the borough needs to increase its influence with groups and systems. And so I would encourage the Assembly to look—. You're talking about account 450200? I think so.

That's the one—. That's what we've used for sponsorship. When Louise comes to us. That, but when we're looking at sponsoring, becoming a— I'm on the board. I'm the treasurer of SWAMSI now, but I guess I'm on there for a reason.

But things like SWAMSI and AML and other entities that come here also, So not just COMFISH, but we are becoming quite an interesting destination for events and conferences over the past 12, 18 months. And I think that is a really good opportunity for—. Now she is raising it from 3,000 to 5,000. Exactly. Are you suggesting something different?

No, I am just showing my appreciation. Okay. I see. And that as an Assembly, we should not let that— because I think— Right, we budgeted 3. 3 For the current year.

The current year. We budgeted 2,300. And spent 23. Yeah, that 23 I think we should double. You know, we should be better, I think, as a group of looking for those opportunities.

So like when AML was here, we paid for the coffee. Yeah, exactly. You'd be surprised how much they charge for that. But I think we should explore more of those opportunities. I do support that increase.

The mayor travel one, though, hmm. Hmm. I might need to be convinced more of that one. But thank you. Okay.

Beau.

Good segue into travel. I'm looking at— you know how I feel about this. I think most of you do.

Quite opposed to this amount, um, for both the assembly and the mayor. Um, and so looking at 2021, combined total of less than $1,000 spent. 2022, None. Of course, COVID had a part to play for those two years. 2023, Exiting from COVID $18,000 spent.

Uh, 2024, $13,000, $14,000-ish. Um, 2025, here we are at $14,000. We're asking for $44,000 of taxpayer money for people to travel. Now, I do support travel for AML, Swampsea, for our manager to go to the Hill. However, I do not support any borough travel to the lower 48 or for anything outside of AML, Swampsea, or DC, or Juneau, of course, which is in-state.

However, using these funds without having a direct impact impact statement coming, with the exception of Mr. Griffin very recently provided a very thorough explanation of what those tax dollars provided the community. I am absolutely appalled by the amount. $44,000 For travel to me is astonishing. It's unnecessary and is a complete waste.

Your opinion, Bo, on there. So, um, the assembly travel, which is at the $25,000, has been there, is— it's an option. The assembly has chose not to travel, but if the assembly members chose, it's training that's available at AML, newly elected, and I strongly suggest that everyone that gets elected attend that at least once on there. So it's— to say it's a total waste, I disagree with you strenuously on there. And all travel— the mayor and the manager have traveled to Washington, D.C. last year.

This year she wasn't able to make it, so it was just, it was just me. And, uh, part of this is the attending of the different conferences as the board seat on AML, Alaska Municipal League. That's covered there. But, um, yeah, the, um, the seat on board that, that I have is a 2-year seat, and that was, uh, just renewed in December. So once that expires, yeah, if, if you wished, just wouldn't be able to because it takes, it takes endorsement on there by the assembly.

So, Larry.

I appreciate going over this budget, but in almost every account there's an increase, which is probably expected. But it's hard to determine down the road what is a good decision or what is not because we don't know how much money we're going to have. We know the school district is going to need a considerable amount of money so far, and we have increases in the borough, so it's a matter of not whether we want to do it or should do it, but can we afford to do it? So it's hard to analyze these numbers. So I'm listening to them, and I don't have an opinion.

Looks like there's been a lot of thought to what's been put in there, and I'm not disagreeing pretty much with anything except the out-of-state travel, uh, generally. But, um, we're going to have to really take a look at how much money we have and then say set priorities. So I appreciate these discussions because they give us time to think, and I appreciate your explanations for them and being ready to answer those questions. And that will help down the road when we actually have to set priorities about what we can actually afford at this time. So I may not complain about the $19,000, but when it comes down to brass tacks and we're looking at what we can afford, then I'll probably make comments on different items.

Scott, I think the money for going to DC is crucial. I used to go to DC for various things. You get to meet these people, they get to know you. The city is going to be there if you don't have the borough there too. Uh, the people forget that there is a borough out here, and the kinds of differences of the things we do compared to the city kind of gets lost.

I think it's crucially important that we go, and I support that kind of cost.

You want to double dip? Yeah, Larry. Um, when I worked in Juneau, the city of Kodiak and the borough sponsored the annual king crab legislative affair. It was the most well-attended of all the activities during the entire legislative session. They held it at the Westmoreland—.

At the Bearnaugh. At the Bearnaugh sometimes. And you really had a chance to really talk about Kodiak. And the canneries donated all the seafood and the borough and city paid for essentially the hotel and any transportation associated with it. So it wasn't that expensive and it was a real knockout blow.

I think it really helps if you're really going to make an impact in Juneau, and I'll just say that from my own experience. When you send 3 people down there, if we did, you know, during an AML convention in Juneau to lobby, I think that's pretty worthless. Okay. The legislators get barraged with information and they listen, or their aides listen. If we really want to make an impact, we need to send people down there individually in the— during the session where they can actually talk to these people and they have time to listen to them instead of going around in gaggles of people from one legislator to another saying what you want.

And I think that's effective and I think it works. Thank you. Yeah, one thing I'd point out here too is the current year's budget is $263,000. The proposed budget for '26 It's $268,000. It's a $5,000 increase.

So just wanted to point that out. Amy, what's that? Do you have questions for me or want Nova to continue? Oh, sorry, Amy. Nova, anything else in the borough clerk's office?

Do you have any other questions regarding the legislative budget? Any changes? No. Okay, we'll move on to the Borough Clerk's budget. Um, there's, uh, the salary is going from $296,000 to $324,000, and, um, I put in $10,000 there for temporary help in, in case I'm gonna need it for elections this year.

If not, you know, last year I didn't need it, the past 2 years I didn't need it. I had a couple of communities reach out to me last year and they were asking if I could send someone to the villages, maybe even just for a day, to do— to accept ballots for the by-mail ballots that we mail to the villages. They're thinking of maybe doing a reach out to the community. So that's what I'm thinking there, is that maybe I could hire a part-time person that could go out to accommodate the request. Yes.

Okay. But if my regular employees can do it, if we can find— it just so happened that September is a really busy time for the clerk's office here, that it's hard to pull a, pull a person from the office during that time. So maybe if I have another person that could help me out with early voting here and stuff like that, maybe I could actually go to the village myself and, and reach out to them and, and help them out with their voting.

Cell phone stipend— I'm the only one who gets cell phone stipend. My overtime budget stays the same.

We'll go to office supplies, is $2,000, and I think I've done a pretty good job.

I didn't spend as— oh no, wait, let's see here. Office supplies is at $2,000, and so far this year I've only spent $93.

And then we do have printing and binding, which is $7,000, and postage is $100. News, books, and periodicals is, uh, $1,500, and that pays for my membership and my staff's membership to IAMC and AAMC. In order to get their certification, they need to be a member of AAMC and IAMC. It's a requirement. Furniture and fixtures, I have $1,000 there.

Honorarium and amenities, the three $300 there. We do have Alaska Association of Municipal Clerks, and sometimes we put together a basket when it's our conference for fundraising type of thing.

Our advertising budget is $20,000. So far so good, we've only spent $9,717 as of today. Um, that probably could be reduced by $5,000.

Um, the APOC, $1,000, is that in case you need to put something on the ballot and you want to advocate for it, for or against, it doesn't matter. It's a requirement by APOC instead of doing a last-minute type of ordinance 'cause you need to adopt it in the budget. Instead of doing it in October or September, October timeframe and rushing, we should probably just leave it there in case we need it.

And then continuing education, I have $28,000 that I requested there. In 2025, we had $35,000 and I'm requesting $28,000. If the assembly— I'm thinking of succession planning. I have a few more years left and I think it's important that we leave someone that I have someone trained when I'm— when I go.

And then travel and per diem, the $2,000 is just in case I have to attend something in Anchorage that's not related to continuing education. That's what— where the money is going to come from.

Rent, I get charged $50,942, and that's probably gonna be reduced because we do have some cabinets, fire-safe cabinets, in this room across the hall, and we're finding room in the records room, and we'll just transfer for those over, so I could save a little bit on rent. Um, election local, I think that could be reduced as well. I offered it to the assembly last year and the assembly said no, just leave the money there just in case. Um, but we've budgeted $45,000, but so far the past 2 years I didn't spend that, the money. So that could probably be reduced by at least $10,000 if you'd like.

Boards and committees, we use that for training. Records management is $5,000. We use that for supplies, for boxes and stuff like that. We're also planning to bring in a trainer for our laser fish program. We do have quite a bit of employees that aren't— some of them are not familiar with the program, and it would be nice to bring in a trainer to provide that training, even just the basic ways of searching and scanning and stuff like that.

So we do also use that account if we get an attorney's opinion about records. That's where I charge the fee for the attorney. Okay, and that's all I have. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Any questions of the court?

Jared. Uh, thank you. So for, um, can we talk about the retirement line? It's doubled since 2021. Is this a PERS/TERS thing?

But it seems like it's increased exponentially more than the other departments. I'm thinking it has something to do with that.

Did that come from DORA? Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's based on that 22% surcharge after the regular charge for the person. That's the, what I call the penalty, 22%, which limits school district, the borough, and the city from salary increases on there.

That's a big part of the budget on it. So if you'd like me to trim a little bit Just let me know, and I probably could find a few thousand here and there. If you'd like me to reduce the election, I can do that. Well, one of the things is it doesn't mean it's going to get spent on there, but it's an allowance on there. You know, you can look back and you can see where it's been at $50,000, it's been at $46,000.

It just— I realize it's an off year this year, but there shouldn't have been those 2 years at the 45. I could, Mr. Mayor, also just to remind the assembly that we have a Department of Justice requirement that we have to translate all our election materials into the Filipino language. Irene and I do a lot of that in-house. We do have the templates, and it's a lot easier for me to just sometimes do Google Translate for those words that are difficult for me. But I think we're saving quite a bit of money doing most of the work in-house.

We don't outsource that much. Thank you. Any discussion? This time. Okay, then moving on.

Um, Amy, anything else in the, in the budget review? Um, I got a question from Assemblymember Sherrod in the middle of that, and so I'll get that information out. When an assembly member asks questions, I try to give that information out to all of the assembly members so everyone has the same information. So he had a specific question about that OSHA line item and why we put $40,000 in there and we haven't used it. So I don't know the answer to that, so I'm going to find that for him and I'll send it out to everyone.

And as always, you know, there's a lot of information that got presented to you tonight, so if questions come up after it sinks in, please let us know. We can answer any of those questions at any time. But if the reason we do just a certain amount on a certain night is just to try to focus that conversation. So once it's— we've gone through them and you have questions, just let us know and we're happy to update. Okay, then moving on, next item is discuss draft ordinance pertaining to service areas aimed at improving accountability regarding the frequency of holding meetings.

Staff report. Nova, is that you?

Yes, Mr. Mayor, um, just a second here. On February 27th, Assemblymembers Lee Doo and Whiteside submitted an agenda item request form seeking staff support to draft an ordinance related to the meetings of service area boards. This meeting is for preliminary discussion of the ordinance that's attached to your packet. And the assembly has the option to suggest modifications. So per our code that you adopted last year, unless the requesters decide to retract their request, the ordinance is required to be scheduled on an agenda by May 26, 2025.

So, uh, I, I initially drafted the ordinance and I had sent it to Assemblymember Lee Doo, and he commented and made more changes to my initial draft. And you can see the comments in the document itself. So it's up for your discussion. Thank you.

Okay, discussion?

Larry? Well, I would say that Um, this ordinance is the preliminary request to look at two concerns that have been brought to our attention, and that would be to encourage timely meetings of service boards and to ensure elected accountability. As you heard tonight, one of these service districts hasn't been able to eat for months because they have to have 3 people to have them. You have to have 2 people to have a— excuse me, 3 people to have a majority, and they can't do that. So they're forced, as was offered tonight in testimony, to, you know, break the rules, if you will, to manage it.

And we've had it. So I'd like to take a look at that. I do believe it does— first off, it encourages timely meetings. You have to have 2 meetings every every— you have to have 2 quarterly meetings. If you don't, then you could be replaced.

If Assembly— excuse me— if elected members do not attend meetings and they consistently— and that seems to be a pattern in some cases— then the accountability is that they would be replaced and somebody who's willing to do it. And I think they— you may be able to find people because a lot of people are reticent about putting their name on a ballot. It's a little frightening. But they may be willing to volunteer. And certainly, if we are successful in getting information out to the public in some graphic form, as been promised, then people may know about— enough about the workings of these bodies to actively participate in a different way.

So, again, accountability and for meetings and accountability for the elected officials.

Beau. Thank you. To expand on Dr. Ledoux's statement, it's— I'm conflicted in that These meetings should be held. I mean, the public needs to know what's going on in their service areas. That's why these folks run for these board seats in order to provide the service.

It's difficult for me to also at the same time apply pressure when folks are volunteering. These are mostly— most of these positions are not compensated in any way. I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I feel that if they're volunteering their time, it's a potentially mutual benefit to themselves to make sure that their service areas are being maintained properly in a way that they seem appropriate. On the other hand, it's hard for me to apply pressure when folks are doing it on a voluntary basis.

But that said, if you run for election, you're accountable to that office, and that's where we're at, and from my perspective, is you put your name in the hat, folks elect you to perform that duty for your service area, you need to show up. Certainly, there's gonna be exceptions. I know we have folks who are harvesters who maybe have to go up to the slope or travel for work. That's certainly a problem.

I don't know what kind of flex— additional flexibility we can provide as far as what a quorum would look like. I think about the size of these service areas and how big some are versus others. Perhaps we provide additional flexibility on what a quorum looks like while acknowledging it could potentially result in one person making that decision. But I think we've learned in recent months that that's what's happening now despite the lack of quorum. So we have some work to do on our end as well as far as what the code looks like and what constitutes quorum.

If we're going to have folks show up, some show up and they're like, hey, I'm here. I agree with the statement earlier, I don't mean to marginalize the effort that's being made, but when folks are showing up and they're the only one there, then it's really no fault of theirs. So I think there's some room for improvement on our end as well. But a little long-winded, but coming full circle, I still agree with this. Change in that if you're going to run for this position or elected position, you need to provide that service you've agreed to provide for the public.

So I'm still, still right with Dr. Ledoux on this one. Dave? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Very quickly, I really liked what Dr. Smiley had mentioned earlier tonight, which is, you know, the mechanism being created created that rolls a service board into another that fails to meet their membership or meeting requirements. So that way, the service boards still exist, they just start covering larger areas, and maybe that makes getting the 5-member board easier.

The other point that I'd like to address, and I don't— I'll confess my own ignorance on this one, is whether or not we already allow remote participation. Service board meetings because, as was just mentioned, we have— it is hard to be a full-time employee somewhere and make meeting requirements. And if we can allow remote participation, you know, our fishermen all have Starlink now. You know, that's an opportunity. I get calls from them every day in the summer while they're out.

I think looking at the opportunity for remote participation in these meetings might help bolster the quorums as well. Thank you. Okay. Couple of things I'll throw out there is you're going to— part of what Tom Lance says, you're going to discourage people from signing up for some of these boards because you're looking at kicking them off. We have multiple boards that we don't have any members on.

We have two street lighting districts that have no members, and basically I check the street lights and make sure and report to KEA when there's a problem. And if we need to change something in the district, I work with the manager and the, and the Finance Director, because it takes sign-off there too. Um, you have the, uh, Tidegate— Mission Lake Tidegate— they meet once a year on there. Um, they don't have any other reason to meet. Um, you have Bayview and Minashka Circle, which is one service road service district.

And then you have Minashka Bay, which is multiple roads. Three Sisters, Marmot, and Mountain View are the main ones, but there's multiple spurs off of those roads. I suggested to them last year that look at combining those two. They were adamantly opposed to that on there. They— I went to both of their service district meetings this week and agreed to help Minashka Bay with getting their membership up to the 5.

So we'll take care of part of that on there. Service District 1, you know, I'll take the blame that I didn't meet every quarter. It's not a problem. We can meet every quarter. But one of the things is multiple complaints have come in.

Not been service district things. Just because they got water on their property doesn't make it the service district's responsibility. On there, they got a complaint with the driveway across the street. Service district doesn't do driveway permits. Kodiak Island Borough does.

So, so you got to, you got to remember, I'm going to say Because of all the work we've been doing, uh, because it's been such a mild winter since last October, the contractor's been— contractor's been working on brushing, ditching, clearing on things. We've been— I've been in front of over 200 driveways on there. I don't think we have a— we have a pretty good record of working with people on there. And, but the one, the Currys, you know, I understand, but that's not going to be part of the— that's going to be more of the borough will decide some of that. And what Amy went over, you know, as to what we're already doing and maybe some few things improve on, I think will take care of the issue.

I don't think this solves anything here. The existing code, we can just leave it at the 4. Those of— but I think you need to leave some flexibility for some of the districts that they don't have to meet that. Right now they don't have it. We just allow it.

We allow them to pass a budget for less, and we approve it for Minashka Bay for the last 4 years when they didn't have a quorum. So it's a matter of trying to work with them. They're typically getting the job done. One of the things is, you know, and the borough taking it over, they're the ones there calling out the contractor to come do the snow removal. That's the most critical and time-consuming thing on trying to guess what the weather's going to do and and it varies so much in the different service districts, even within Service District 1.

Northstar being our highest point in the district versus Spruce Cape on the water, we don't send the grader out everywhere. So you specify where they're going to go and where they're going to sand. So it's just for discussion there on it. Bo? Yes, I understand some of the points made.

And again, I'm— I don't want to suggest that folks aren't doing a good job, especially in these smaller service areas, but it's difficult for me to reconcile that we don't have enough members in these smaller service areas to have a quorum, yet there's— I have no idea, anecdotally mentioned that there's no desire to consolidate the smaller districts either. So I'm still— if Dr. LaDoux is comfortable with pursuing introducing this, I would like to hear from the respective service areas in person as to how they feel about this and what the limitations are. We can always offer amendments, but without having that information directly from those serving in the service areas, I don't know how we can improve. Certainly a need for improvement, whether we consolidate smaller service areas, larger, maybe Service Area 1 absorbs other duties. We need to do something.

There's certainly room for improvement here. Amy. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. With the two smaller service areas, when we collect tax money from our taxpayers through property tax that goes through, that gets added onto the mill rate for their service areas and fire protection areas, That money gets put into a fund for that area. So when you talk about combining smaller areas, the reason that they don't want to do that is because those set of people have paid this much money into a fund, and then the other set of money has come from another set of taxpayers, and one of them has a lot more money than the other.

So when you talk about combining them, they don't want to give up their tax money that they've put in because That's the whole issue with savings accounts and service areas. When we collect tax from someone, we're supposed to use it for their benefit in their area that year. And so the— when you talk to those service districts or service areas about combining, that the— it's money is the reason that they don't want to do that. Not saying that it's not possible to do, but we would have to work something out with those service areas and how we collect rates money from them in order to get them to be one larger area. Follow-up, Paul?

Please. No, I completely understand that. Yeah, I have no misunderstanding in why that concern is present. I suppose I did a poor job of explaining the consolidation for the purpose of meeting. So if we have meetings, these smaller service areas can meet together.

Discuss their respective service areas. I can't imagine this meeting taking very long, but it's a small area. Minashka A, Minashka B is still Minashka. I mean, it can't be that long of a discussion. I understand the pool of money is separate, the level of services are separate, but if we're talking about getting together and discussing what services we're going to provide, this is one thing we can think about.

Larry.

We are taxing our citizens hundreds of thousands of dollars collectively to take care of their roads. We have ordinance that describes how to do that. When people are not meeting or we don't have a quorum, then the public is not— their money is being spent by either one individual or a a slow minority, hundreds of thousands of dollars with no accountability, if you will, you know, when the public expects a group of people to make that decision. And also, when only one person or two people are making the decision, I appreciate the hard work. This is not a concern.

I mean, it's great that they're there, but they shouldn't have to bear a burden that's supposed to be taken care of by a quorum. And I believe the public— we need to assure the public that there is accountability, that these decisions are made by more than one or two people, because otherwise it becomes very personal. And judgment calls are better made by a group than one individual or two individuals. And I think that we have to take responsibility as a borough, because we're forcing people to pay these taxes, that their, their funds are used appropriately with good decision-making, and they take care of the business at hand. So, and some of these problems need to be addressed by just the way we communicate that we've already talked about that we're going to take care of.

But I do believe there has to be accountability, and there isn't any right now because some of our boards haven't met for a long time, period. And it's not just one person's responsibility. Thank you. Jared. Jared.

Um, thank you. So I'm, um, I'm torn on this one.

Assemblymember, Dr. Ledoux just mentioned accountability, and when we start to play with the language about vacating or terminating seats, I think we need to remember, right, for the most part they were put on there by voters, and then there's there is some election integrity. There's a voter integrity to holding that seat. And so, the accountability is the voter, or belongs to the voters in that case. I understand that accountability on the financial side of it, but that is handled through, you know, borough services oversee the financial aspects. Like the accounting there.

So I really would like to protect the sanctity of the voters' wishes when they elect somebody into these seats. At the same time, voters also have a right, a constitutional right to petition their government. And that takes place in public meetings, and if their elected government is not having those meetings, I think that is— I think that's a constitutional violation. So, it's interesting that those two are kind of, you know, butting up against each other, the integrity of petitioning government or the right to petition the government, and also voters' rights, or voters' interests as expressed through their vote. So, um, hmm.

So, a couple problems there. I'm going to do— I took so many notes today, and then I still, I just wrote myself into circles on this one.

I am, uh, I do appreciate this idea that the body— if we're thinking of this in terms of like a hierarchy, right, there's, there's assembly and then there's service area districts, fire, road, fire protection, things like that— that the assembly at some point should maybe step in to function as the board until the board is is set back up and if that means that the Assembly holds meetings or holds a meeting as a Manasheka Bay and just to give the public an opportunity, right, to petition us about their needs and if there are some, then there are some, if not, if not. But I think there's something there.

Also. But I think there's some, like, there's some integrity issues that we need to protect as we go through these. Yeah, Jared, in response to what you're talking about, rather than the assembly being it, it's already in there that the manager on it. So I think you rely on the manager in the case of the lack of the board. You rely on the manager.

As it's written now, correct, yes. But, um, I think there could be other ways to look at it, um, because I think it's important for voters to be able to petition their elected officials. Manager is important, you know, too, as the executive, but I think there's, there's, there's something just ultimately democratic about being able to petition your elected officials. Scott. I think you've made some good points there, especially about the authority of being elected or the responsibility that the electorate has and conveyed through their election of an official.

That worries me too. I think if you're elected, you should serve the term, and I worry about cutting people off early for from that.

I think what Mr. Whiteside said about having the meetings together but keeping the finances apart is probably the simplest and most direct solution we could come up with. In addition to that, I think that if the assembly is going to be involved in any of these discussions, it's pretty important that they get out there and to see exactly where the roads are because there's tricky stuff out there and Bay Circle is one of them. So I can understand why it's difficult out there. There aren't that many people on those two roads and trying to get people to run for office there is difficult. But I think Mr. Whiteside's solution is a good one.

Larry.

Well, what I would say about accountability in terms of elected accountability, all of us on the assembly are subject to attendance, and if we don't fulfill what the public has elected us to do, then the assembly can replace us and has done that in the past. Um, the other thing is, I think, you know, we have to be creative here because Someone suggested, you know, voting electronically is something that maybe would help. But sometimes I think if, for instance, we have two people out here, two are citizens who have stepped forward to manage their service district without a quorum, by their own words. It would seem to me that if they had an opportunity because they weren't able to get a quorum is to sit with the manager those two people who can come together and make decisions. Because if you're the ultimate authority, that would allow them to make decisions that include having elected people being a part of it.

And also, it wouldn't make our citizens do something that they have to do to make the system work. And we shouldn't put them in that position. And they've You know, the people I've talked to, they've spent countless hours managing the roads. I mean, taking care of what's going on, all without a quorum. And it just seems like when that happens, and if there has to be a meeting because there hasn't had one, then the manager can step in and meet with the people to make those decisions and not put them in a position by— I don't want to say violating the ordinance, if you will.

On their part. That might be a simple solution. And again, since the manager is the ultimate authority, that would validate the decisions they make. Just a thought.

What's the wishes of the assembly? Do you want to move this forward to put it on the agenda for first reading, or do you want to to maybe look at this again on a future work session?

Jarrod and then Bo? [Speaker:MR. BOLL] I mean, I am in favor of moving it forward. And it's with the intent of trying to get Service Area Chairs or as many as we can to get some feedback on this. I think it's going to be difficult to move this forward without their feedback, but I think it needs to be— we need to get this in the pipeline so that we might get a better chance of getting some input from the chairs and from the board members too. Okay.

Bo? I agree. I think we need to get this moving forward and not necessarily with the intent of adopting. You know, we need to have the discussion. We need to have as many service area board members here.

We need their input. We're operating right now with the input from, I think, 3 we've had recently, and it's the same folks. They're working really hard, um, for many reasons I'm not aware of. They just don't have the support from their fellow board members. I'm not to say that people aren't busy, um, but again, without their direct input, it's going to be difficult for me to veer away from this.

Okay, Larry. Well, I certainly, uh, support going forward. The purpose of this ordinance was to do exactly that, to promote discussion and move forward. And I certainly wouldn't want to have another discussion because we'll just say the same things and kick the can down the road, and that happens way too often. And the ability to look at people in our audience and spur discussions that will allow us to make good decisions is important.

Okay, I've heard from 3, need 1 more. I'll be your 4th. I support that moving forward. Thanks. Alrighty, we'll put it on future first writ— yeah, agenda setting, we'll look at where we'll put that.

So, um, we'll move on then to packet review. And, um, first thing is awards and presentations. There's a proclamation declaring the month of April 2025 Sexual Assault Awareness Month, presentation of the certified municipal clerk designation, uh, to Assistant Clerk Irene. And, uh, the next item is ordinances for introduction. Ordinance number FY 2025- 15, amending Title 2, Administration and Personnel, Chapter 30, General Rules, Section 2.30.020, to allow electronic participation of mayor and assembly members to meetings.

Um, staff report. Nova. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the assembly. This was sponsored by Assemblymember Dave Johnson. We worked together on the initial draft, and I sent it over to the attorney, and he made some suggestions, and this is a result of that discussion.

Okay, so any discussion? Seeing none, move on to other items. There's the confirmation of assembly appointment to the Fire Protection Area Number 1 board, Mr. Craig Dagen. I'll give a staff report on that. Um, the seat has been vacant since, uh, the October election, and, uh, he put his name in, and the board recommends approving it.

So next item is manager's comments. Mr. Mayor, before we move on, um, I just want to let you know that today we have received an application for the Manashka Bay service area, and this will create— if we have spoke— we spoke to the two that are currently on the board, and they both agreed to the appointment of Mr. Devery, Andrew Devery. This is an assembly appointment, so that's why I'm bringing it to you tonight. If you agree with it, I can add it to the agenda for next week. I know Mr. Debris.

He's a firefighter out at the Coast Guard base, and I'm trying to remember. I'm thinking he was on the fire board before. I don't remember if he'd been on the road service district. I believe he has served on the, on the road service district. So he was at the meeting Wednesday Wednesday night that I went to that they didn't have a quorum.

And with some arm twisting, we kind of talked them into it. So he's one of those that I was looking to get. There's a couple others that I think we'll have too, so we can get it up to 5 members. So, Mr. Mayor, if I can inject. Sure.

So I just want to get at least out there in the open for potential conflicts. So if we're going to vote on Mr. DeVries, uh, I do want to disclose that he is a 0.75 FTE of mine, so I would ask to be recused of that vote since there is a direct connection to his employment and my voting. Okay, we'll take it under consideration.

Thank you. So anyway, that's, um, with, with no objection I'd be looking to put this on the agenda for next week. Okay? Please do. Get a heads up on everyone there.

So now we'll move to the manager's report. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. There's been a lot of talk about Mount Spurr lately. The state of Alaska has launched a comprehensive resource at ready.alaska.gov/volcano. This site includes real-time updates, pet care guidelines, vehicle maintenance recommendations, and updates from the Department of Transportation on state facilities and airport operations.

The Rural Forum happened yesterday. Seema Groot and I presented. Our presentations covered the partnership with Canada Visit the Villages for exemption work, CIP lists, rural school maintenance, community development plans, and an introduction of the new emergency manager. Seema did an excellent job and represented the borough very well as she shared the success story of her travels to the remote villages. This week we met with the marketing VP of sales for Rentalscape.

This is a software solution that would allow KIB to track, permit, and tax short-term rentals. We're expecting a proposal from them, which came in while we were sitting here, that contains terms and costs of having software like this. I've sent an email to the city of Kodiak to gauge their interest in partnering with the borough and pursuing a solution like this. The cost for us would be $15,500 a year and would cover all the registration, all the accommodation tax. And it's AI software that goes out and actually finds them, tells you how many nights they were booked, can give you a report on every individual short-term rental.

And then they automatically try to book it. They like, like, like 2 or 3 times a week, they go into the short-term rental and they're little AI bots go in there and, and try to book it. So if they were to say, oh, we weren't open or we weren't operating, we would have a record of all the times that that bot went in. Anchorage is using this software and some other companies are, and it's— it was really impressive. The mayor is going to be looking at a different software solution tomorrow at 10 AM because he can't help but put his name in, um, for software companies when he's at NACO conferences.

This the company that I met with on there. This other one, I'm not sure. That's why I didn't worry about staff getting involved. Well, as long as we have a skilled IT person. Yes.

No, no skilled IT. I turned it over to the proper people. No, it was one of those things met there. And the Denali Borough, I pulled Chris, who is the mayor there, into the conversation. So thank you.

Please continue. The software does have a lot of potential, and so once we get that proposal, we'll loop the city in and see if they're interested. Uh, splitting that price would make it very affordable, and it would do the city— it would save the city a lot of work, and it would save us a lot of work, and it would meet all of those things. We would have a definite number. Not only do they tell us short-term rentals, but they tell us all rentals.

So if you've seen some of those numbers come back that Kodiak has 400 short-term rentals That's actually short-term and long-term rentals. And when they map them out, it's by colored dots. And so you can see exactly where they're all at. They do different zones so we can tell which tax goes to the city, which tax goes to the borough, what taxes are coming for which of the remote villages. It's a, it's a pretty neat platform.

So, and they're willing to come to a meeting if we are interested. He'll give a presentation at night. They're in California, so they're only an hour off of our time. Um, you already learned about the Signal Hill buildings community forum, so we won't go through that. The projects office has their March 25 update attached to the packet tonight.

Uh, thanks to Cody and Patricia for continuing to put those together. I think it's going to be a nice addition to our information we put out. That's also updated on the website as well. Um, in finance, we got our pricing Um, on our 205 series bonds, the final outcome is going to save the borough $323,259 over the next 10 years. So now that that pricing is complete, we'll be able to pass that through the assembly.

In our foreclosure process, all delinquent property owners have 30 days from March 14th to pay delinquent taxes, and they will be removed from the foreclosure judgment and decree being filed with the court for non-real property small claims documents will be prepared for those delinquent amounts as well. If you are on that list, if you contact the finance department, they'll give you an updated payoff amount. In community development, the department hired for their secretary 3 position, so that'll be fantastic to be fully staffed in community development. They are working on the comprehensive plan, which we have called Plan 2045, and I spoke about that at the rule forum and explained how the rule forum participants could also have their opinions included. For those in the community on the road system, the first workshop that will be held in person is scheduled for April 22nd.

It will be in the cafeteria at the high school from 6 to 9. In assessing, the notice of values were mailed out on the 26th. 6Th. The appeal period runs through March 28th. That's tomorrow, so you have until 5 PM tomorrow to get any appeals into assessing department, otherwise you will have missed the window.

In engineering and facilities, the contractor has begun demolition of non-hazardous materials on the mental health buildings. All non-hazardous material will be removed for disposable at the landfill. Abatement is expected to begin next week, and the contractor intends to complete their work by early July. I want to give special thanks to our project manager for handling the change orders and questions with professionalism that had resulted in maintaining a strong working relationship with the contractor. Those discussions could have went south very easily, and I think Cody's skill with dealing with the contractors has really been impressive, and I'm thankful that he's on board.

At the KFRC, we are going to start manning the touch tank as cruise ships are going to start beginning in April, which is pretty early, but we have worked it out with First Student on having it open to show visitors that facility and showcase our local marine life. At the landfill, the staff is working with the Chamber of Commerce on coordinating the community cleanup event, and the Kanna Native Youth Council has a express interest in becoming more involved. So it's great to see those solid waste partnerships, which you might not think of, grow with CANNA. There is a commercial cleanup event that happens on March— or sorry, May 1st and 2nd, and the community cleanup event is on May 3rd. The Chamber of Commerce actually runs that, so if you're interested in more information, the Chamber of Commerce website is the place to find that.

Our regional solid waste plan proposals are to you by 2 o'clock on April 8th. That's that $250,000 grant that we got from the Denali Commission. So that's moving along. And staff is currently reviewing the fee schedule to determine if updates should be proposed to the assembly. I'm going to keep saying that sentence until I come back and say the landfill rates have to go up this year.

So I'm planting the seeds so you see it coming. Our community pool site with the A&E team is going to be May 19th 21st. We're going to do the pool survey and they will provide us with a written recommendation. There was a maintenance meeting today with KIBSD staff. Uh, we talked about the dates, we discussed, um, the building and, um, what needed to be done and all of the people that were coming to look at the facility.

They're going to have to drain the pool for that visit. That's about a $5,000 expense for the school. District. So the school district is going to ask the city for help and costs with the water to refill that back up. And then we also talked about creating the school district CIP list together as a team, which is a wonderful concept, and I look forward to that meeting.

The projects office, I already told you, report, and the website is updated. In information technology, we have 3 grants in for approval within State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program. They're working on blacklisting foreign networks that attempt or attack to our servers. They will be, uh, checking out our audio for our Zoom tomorrow, and they have completed setting up all the email addresses for Bayside Fire. As a side note on Bayside Fire, all of the PFOS-free turnouts came in this week, and they are very excited about having those.

Unfortunately, the women's bay turnouts all say "bayside," and so we're working on a fix for that. But I told the Chief that maybe it was foreshadowing as those departments might merge in the future at some point, so maybe we can leave them. Do you see how I did that, Mr. Mayor? I threw that in there just for you. I'm happy to answer—.

Thank you. I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. Scott. When you're going to the villages to look at the schools, are you going with the school maintenance people? Yes, we are.

Okay. And I promised the Rural Forum that we're going to do that, and I promised the Rural Forum that we would contact them, the schools and the communities, before we came, so if there was any immediate work that needed to be done, we could complete it while we were there doing the inspection. We are going to move forward with painting Chiniak and taking care of any rotten areas this summer, and then as we travel around the island this summer, we'll determine the schedule for 2026 and what needs to be done. I noticed that the Taylor— Tyler implementation is at 21% again. Forever.

So we thought at this point in time we would be out of assessing and into finance, and we're still in assessing, which is causing problems. So if you look at SEMA's portion of the update, You'll see that they have 4 tickets into Harris. They don't hear from Harris. They're having to do everything by hand. So Harris made this software for us to last for a very short time.

And we've just been with them for like 15 years. I don't— it's a very long time. And so the amount of people at Harris that know how to deal with our software, literally we lost one because they passed away. I mean, it's been a minute. And so— But as I question that 21%, it just isn't moving.

And so that's why that date got moved back to August is we're just not moving as forward as fast as we thought we would be able to. Thank you. Any other questions of the manager? Jarrod. Just real quick, every time I see Bayside's email account, I think it says baysidefreak.gov.

I don't see that little—. Interesting. —I in there. Every time I glance at it, I think Bayside Freak. I love it.

We had— when we put in for the Bayside email address, we got told no, no, no, because there's a Bayside, California, and there's a Bayside here and a Bayside there. And so it took us a while to find one that they were like, okay, you can have it. Dave, thank you. I— no question, just wanted to thank Cody for the capital report, capital projects report. That was awesome to see, and I look forward to seeing those in future manager reports because those updates are amazing to have at our fingertips.

So thank you. Thank you. We're going to incorporate those in at the last meeting of the work session or regular session, just at the last meeting of the month so that we can kind of tell you what happened that month. I mean, you will probably have heard about it along the way, but it's really nice on the website. Not only is the information there, but they've included all the pictures so the public can follow along and see what's happening on the projects visually.

It's nice to see that come back. It used to be done, but it's been about 4 years since it's been done. Yeah, so you've been on 3 years, so yeah, it's— it's appointment, that's right, 4. So yeah, so then maybe it's 5, but we'll go from there. Next item is, uh, Clerk's.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of the assembly. So a few things in addition to the regular and routine administrative tasks that are dealt with on a daily basis. We have an update on the APOC filing. All 21 public officials have submitted their APOC financial disclosure filings going forward, APOCs will require clerks to strictly comply with 2 AAC 5850.

I just found out about this provision in the Alaska Administrative Code last week. So they want us to keep them informed and also the filers to be kept informed whether they're going to— whether they're timely or not. There's confusion also that I had to deal with, with regards to the final statements and also annual statements. We have Planning and Zoning Commission commissioners that their term expires at the end of the year. Technically, they have 90 days to file final, but the state requires them to also filed by March 15th, and there was one that got penalized for a few days.

So I just have to be really watchful and closely monitor the filings on APOC. So forgive us when we keep saying, hey, you know, you keep getting emails from us or reminder calls because they're going to be enforcing it and they're going to be penalizing those who are late. Board of Equalization, we have received one filer so far and we have until midnight tomorrow night for filing appeals. The regular BOE will have training on— they have a training scheduled on Thursday, April 24th. Liquor licenses.

The borough protests on REPL 3293, the Second Floor Restaurant. So we filed 3 protests, which is the continued operation, the renewal, and the transfer of ownership. All 3 will be on the agenda on April 8th. The meeting will be via Zoom, and we will be— the meeting will start at 10 AM. The agenda has not been released yet.

And regarding our EPL 2611, which is the Sizzler Burger Picking, that one, um, the borough's appeal, which was initially denied by ABC Board, and then we filed an appeal on that with the Office of the Administrative Hearing It will be remanded to the ABC board because the city withdrew their protest on that. So our protest is next in line. So we'll see once— I don't know if it's going to be on the agenda for April 8th, but I'll let you know as soon as they release the agenda. Boards and committees, the Borderlands Committee meeting that was scheduled on Monday was canceled. The Joint Fisheries Workgroup met yesterday and appointed Assemblymember Graven and Councilmember Terry Haynes as co-chairs.

We're also preparing for the BOE, and the BOE meeting, the regular BOE meeting, is scheduled on Monday, May 5th. Um, we're also preparing our calendars and our notices for election I have given you a list of the seats that are coming up this upcoming election. If you're considering anything that you want to put on the ballot, let's say for example if you want to combine service areas, that needs to— whenever you alter a service area, it needs to go before the voters. All you can do as an assembly is adopt an ordinance that would place it on the ballot, but you you as an assembly do not have the power to combine. It needs to go before the voter.

And then I attached a little Jurassic Parliament handout here. It says, "Lost the vote? Don't sabotage the council, the assembly's action." So it says, "It's wrong, wrong, wrong. The majority rules." So this is These are really good articles, and I suggest that you take the time to read them, please. And that's all I have.

I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Oh, thank you. Do we know why the Borough Lands Committee meeting was canceled? That was the meeting that was canceled at the first of the month. It wasn't this week.

We've already heard about it. I'm sorry. Okay, so just making sure. Okay, just making sure. Power outage, that's right.

Got it. Folks are—. Steve— hungry for land. Under borough seats that are coming up, it says borough assembly, 3 seats, 3-year terms, but it only lists 2 names. 2 Seats, sorry.

2 This year. It's a typo, so it's 2 seats.

The handout, and I was like, oh, okay, I don't want to kill any more trees, but there's only—. Thank you for clarifying. Okay, any other questions of the clerk? I would like to go back to the manager, Amy. Larry had a question.

This has to go with emergency planning, and I know we have an emergency planning specialist working for the city and borough. And I noticed that in your report—. Microphone.

They're publishing— thank you, Ryan. They're publishing good information relative to what an individual should do if there's an eruption with volcanic ash. And I'm wondering if that plan includes what the community will do, what the borough and city will do if we have that kind of fallout. And but most importantly, and I think it would be really good since we have the expertise, just a personal opinion working with group hysteria at different times, perhaps if he would be willing to go on KMXT if he hasn't, or do a Zoom, you know, live meeting where they could talk a little bit about what's what's going to happen if there was an ashfall that was substantial, what the community is going to do relative to water, different areas, but just to educate the community because not all people read the internet and it would be good for people to know. Just a thought of a way to communicate with our public.

He is scheduled to be here at our next work session on April 10th. Um, that might be a little bit late for what you want, but he has provided updates from the state of Alaska that said that they thought that Kodiak was not going to be in risk for significant ashfall. The biggest interruption that we might have is about 24 hours of air service. That is not stopping people from buying excessive amounts of toilet paper, um, but, um, back to that. So yes, I think that's a great idea to have, uh, Rich maybe do a public statement on just what he's been told.

He has a lot of different sources that he's gotten his information from. Um, as far as what the community does, we do have a section of our emergency operations procedure that deals with ashfall. The borough itself has, in our emergency procedure manual for staff, has what to do in emergency procedures. I've talked to Carl Hertz at the hospital about running generators and what that would mean at the hospital, and we've been working at the KFRC if they had shut down their whole ventilation system. So we are taking steps in the event that we would get an unexpected amount.

Thank you.

Okay, next item is assembly member comments. Scott, I'll start with you. No comment. Larry? No comments.

Steve? No comment. Dave? Sorry, I am going to break that. I apologize.

I just want to thank Sima and her assessing office. I had asked some questions about Anchorage's property tax structure and their owner occupancy rate, and she provided all the information I'd hoped for and then some. It made it clear to me that's not anything that is going to be considered anytime soon, which was fine. You know, sometimes you ask a question to learn when to not ask more. And so I just wanted to say thank you.

Jarrod. Thanks to the Manager and the staff for putting some great materials together for us. Budget work-through was great. So thank you for that. KMXC is going to be updating their website.

They have an emergency preparedness thing, they will be adding volcanic ash fall to that too. Man, I feel like I'm crashing right now. And then, oh, guys, you— okay, the Shakespeare's did their showcase last night. They're doing it again Saturday night. You have to see these actors.

They belong on television. They are amazing. They were on fire Wednesday. Wednesday. So Saturday night at the Drama Pod.

Bo. Yeah, I'm sleepy too, so this will be quick. Um, just quick, uh, opportunity for us to consider. I don't know how we would approach this. However, we do have the Fishery Economic Development Fund, if that's a proper term.

And how are we going to use those funds to spur economic development in fisheries for our community? I've had some discussions with Alaska Sea Grant and what courses they offer, and these are just some ideas of what we consider— could consider— use the funds to help our community and spur economic development through industry. Examples of courses— I'll read some of these pretty quickly and categorize them broadly— seafood processor training. They offer multiple courses in that area, including processor supervisor training. We have commercial fishing-based training, which— direct marketing, there's a direct marketing course for folks who want to branch out and market their own catch, which is a very popular topic recently at our Fisheries Workgroup meetings.

We can offer that to the community and sponsor these courses. Alaska Onboard Crew Training, this is for folks who want to become new fishermen, decide to go out there, they need some proper training to dabble. This could be a barrier for entry. Maybe we can help provide that or squash that barrier for them. Electrical training, vessel maintenance training, tools, shop basics for fishermen entering the world of the fishing industry, outboard maintenance and repair for the sport sector, Alaska Young Fishermen Summits, plenty of safety courses, which I believe are largely captured already, mariculture workforce training.

This is another hot topic and growing area for our local economy. So something to consider. I don't know how we would approach that, just wanted to foam the runway that We do have a pool of funds that we could use to help provide sponsorship for educational services for folks who want to participate in these sectors of our economy.

Thank you, Paul. Ryan, do you have anything you'd like to say? Yeah, so I appreciate the opportunity to chime in. There were a few topics that we went right over without me being able to get a word in. So I'm looking forward to having multiple discussions in a very prompt manner in regards to the service districts and some ideas that I think that we can employ rather expeditiously to resolve some of the issues that are going on.

I also looking forward to a message that I had sent Amy for Microsoft Teams integration rather than Zoom so we can get past the technology interface problems that we had today, which was kind of embarrassing when we're asking somebody to guest present for us. So I'm hoping we can make that, um, if you go away in time for any next remote presentations or attendance. Outside of that, I appreciate everybody's opportunity and flexibility to partake in my remote participation. Participation in these meetings. Outside of that, thank you.

Thank you, Ryan. Mayor's comments? No further comment. And we will adjourn the work session at 9:55 PM. Thank you all.