Kodiak Island Borough Livestream

We're not that far away, so if she needs something, I started out—. She's got the Dillard's, you know, we got middle school stuff. You want water? Yeah, please. Yes, please.

I think she can do that. Um, have you guys seen what DEEP projects the Kodiak Island Borough School District's top ask to be yet? No. 14.945 Million. For what?

Oh, sorry, that's too loud. Keep in mind that we underfunded by $900,000, so Master is going to cap us. Yeah. And we have to run the borough. So I just— I dropped that number because we're going to talk about that.

Yeah, I got to do something for my class and I'm like, oh, Canva. Yeah. It's pretty intuitive. I'm a—. Okay, yeah, I use it pretty often.

I'm in panic mode because I don't know how to use it. Thank you. You had to buy a subscription? Yeah, I got that, but it just brings me everywhere. Your mic is on.

I could hear it in the back.

Hi Heather, can you hear us?

You know, whatever you're doing, so we do more. I mean, I know this is happening. I'm good. Good. Good.

Good. Good. Oh yeah. Hey, good to see you. How are you?

Good. Good. Good. Good. Good.

I just got away. We sure remember that. Oh yeah. Okay. But I mean, it's hard to like—.

So I tried to remind him. We sat there and I said, I want to remember Different seats. Is there something wrong? More of a fun seat? Yeah.

He changes it. I always pick the left ear because I'm completely deaf in my right ear. So I always get mountain time.

Did you get my email? Oh, I did. Thanks. My day is good. Kind of like my day, probably.

Yeah, you're welcome. See, they like the snacks. I know, the pretzels. Get some pretzels, Britton.

Plastic wrappers. Dang snacks though.

I wonder if we should get like, you know, metal jars and then we just buy stuff na la. You see how she doesn't really know her name?

Hi, Heather, can you hear us?

Hi, everyone. I can— I know I can hear you. Yes. Hi. I wasn't able to hear you for a moment.

Hi.

Can you guys hear me?

Great. I'm gonna go back on mute.

All right. I will call the Kodiak Island Borough Assembly Work Session to order. It is Thursday, October 29th, 6:30 PM. We will begin with our only opportunity for citizens' comments tonight. For those who wish to call in The local number is 907-486-3231, toll-free 1-855-492-9202, and please turn off your radio or any listening device to prevent feedback.

And for those in the room who wish to speak under citizen comments, please come to the podium and sign in, turn on the microphone, and make sure the green light is on before speaking, and speak directly into the mic. And please state your name for the record and address all remarks to the Assembly as a body and not to any member thereof. Is anyone wishing to speak? There we go. Come on.

There we go. Sorry, I'm a little tall. Mr. Mayor, Assembly Members. Thank you as always for your service. I'm here tonight to talk about the seating of Mr. Williamson.

I've been trying to follow the story in the newspaper. I've been trying to stay up to speed and do a little bit of research on Proposition 1 and the language that is entailed in that specific proposition. I noticed that there's essentially two primary tenets of that proposition, that the citizens of Kodiak don't want the borough mayor or assembly members to be engaged in any sort of financial relationship with the borough when it comes to direct employment or private contracts. I understand that that second piece is where the questions lie. How are we defining those personal contracts?

In my mind, that's not for this body to decide or for even individuals to decide. I would encourage the assembly to lean heavily on legal counsel in order to get the specifics of whether or not Mr. Williamson is qualified to serve. That's frustrating at this stage because people have already voted. People want to see an assembly member seated. However, I think that it's important to have community trust and to understand that he's qualified based on his contracts with the borough today, or his business's contracts with the borough.

The last piece, when I was doing research, I think kind of speaks to this need for public trust in this process. When we look back at 2013, the borough records show that 948 people approved Proposition 1. That means that close to 1,000 people care deeply about clean government and don't want any of you all to have financial relations with the borough itself. That's a lot of people, and I think we need to listen to those people right now. According to KMXT, 602 people voted for Mr. Williamson.

That's a lot of people voting for Mr. Williamson, but I think that when we look at the numbers, we see that more people care about clean government More people care about transparency, and more people care about the assembly and the mayor of the assembly— of the borough not having financial relationships directly with the borough. So I come here tonight to advocate to please find legal counsel, and I would encourage you not to change the rules. I've heard rumors that there is a desire to change the rules to accommodate a single person. That in my mind isn't fair. That's not how it works.

That's not how it should work. And that's not how people voted in 2013. If there was a desire to change Proposition 1 prior to this, that's a different conversation. Please bring that conversation to the community. But changing the rules for a single person doesn't feel like the right way for good government to work.

Thank you again for your service. I know it's a lot of work and I appreciate your time. Would you identify yourself for the record? Of course. Michael Bach.

I'm sorry, I can't read this big thing right here in front of me. Thank you. Yes. Yeah, thank you. Anyone else?

Do we have any calls?

Good evening, Mayor and members of the assembly. I'm here tonight because the current interpretation enforcement of Borough Code 2.35— what? My name is Jeremy Williamson. I'm here tonight because the current interpretation and enforcement of Borough Code 2.35.015 has exposed a massive structural flaw in our laws. The language of this conflict of interest code is deeply ambiguous, and the way it is being twisted right now proves it needs serious revision.

The administration is attempting to enforce a hyper-literal definition of the code, which bans any personal services contract defined broadly as any agreement involving the performance or services or tasks for the borough. If we are going to use that exact hyper-literal standard, Then let's look at the absolute absurdity it creates. What is a standard assembly stipend? It is a financial exchange for a binding agreement to perform a job. Your seat on this body is a literal— literally an agreement to provide voting, debating, packet reviewing, and a legislative service to the borough.

Under the broad text of this code, an agreement to provide voting and discussion services is exactly the same thing as any other service contract. By administration's own logic, an assembly stipend itself create— creates the exact same violation. It loops in on itself, meaning under a strict literal leading— reading, no one could ever legally sit on this assembly. Furthermore, this extreme vagueness creates a dangerous slippery slope that threatens our entire local economy. If left uncorrected, this sweeping language means that virtually any Private contractor doing business here in Kodiak could be looked at as disqualified from public office, even if they're not contracted by the borough government, because the code ensnare local businesses through routine day-to-day operations.

If a local electrical contractor, mechanic, or a supplier handles a quick repair or sells parts to the borough utility truck or borough school or facility, the administration could claim an implied agreement or services exists. When code language can be twisted to mean whatever the executive branch wants it to mean, it ceases to be the rule of law. It becomes a political tool. This brings us directly to the issue of voter intent. When voters passed this initiative, the ballot language clearly stated it was to prevent borough employees and personal service contractors from sitting on the assembly.

The voter pamphlet, however, completely redefined the meaning. The true intent of the voters was clear. They wanted to eliminate backroom deals deals with high-priced consultants, not disqualify local businesses doing business— open competitively bid road maintenance work. Forcing this hyper-literal interpretation onto local contractors completely disenfranchises the voters who just chose their representative. This dispute is a complex question of law that belongs to the full assembly, not an administrative desk decision.

I urge— I urge you to assert your authority, reject this inconsistent interpretation, and allow the certified winner of our local election to Thank you. Seated. Thank you.

Anyone else? Any calls?

Okay. Then we will move on to Manager's comments.

Seldotna, and so we're trying to combine travel with Seldotna to save money. They are right now looking to approve the week of March 8th for their in-person. That doesn't mean we won't have to do work before then, but it should be sometime during the week of March 8th. If they're able to combine travel, they would be here. So that's moving forward.

Uh, we had a full-day mediation meeting with the union on Friday, October 23rd. There's a request for an executive session that I'm going to ask to be added to the November 19th regular meeting to discuss the outcome of mediation. Uh, last week I was able to attend the annual business meeting and annual awards dinner for the Chamber of Commerce. I sent a letter of support to AML to get a grant to help evaluate rural healthcare and critical access hospitals. They're applying for a grant through RHTP for that.

And this week I met with our ADC representative to provide an update on our notice of violation conditions. Uh, we have a lot of recruitment that we're doing. We're still looking for an accounts payable technician in finance. We've had 10 applicants for our GIS analyst job. There is actually a website called mygsjobs.com.

It's amazing when you advertise in the right place how many applicants you get. Mm. I am working on a job description for a human resources person to come in, probably part-time, but actually just do human resources. Previously, human resources has been handled as a collateral duty, so we're looking for someone with the correct background to come in and do that. In engineering facilities, uh, received a resignation from our engineering facilities director.

Kodiak's last day will be November 20th. I have one applicant in for that job. Um, we had the same person apply for project manager and maintenance mechanic. We offered an interview for the maintenance mechanic. Um, haven't been able to get that scheduled yet, but he's out there.

And the leachate treatment plant operator that we just hired had to resign earlier this week, so that job is open again. In finance, we have made it through the October 15th is the full payment deadline for those that are paying in installments. The second half installment is due November 16th. Please keep in mind that the Postal Service rules have changed how their date stamping is handled. Mail isn't receiving a postmark in the same manner as it has in the past.

So if you're mailing close to a deadline, please go in and get it hand stamped so that we have the correct date. Nothing to— nothing has changed on the property assessment and taxation implementation project. If you are looking for your property information, there is online access through the property information link on the borough website. And Dora added the accounts payable technician again in that section. In IT, they're working on bringing Starlink satellite service online at Womens Bay Fire Department.

They've also been out at the landfill. The birds have eaten all the COVID off the Starlink, so we had to figure out how Starlink— to protect the Starlink without blocking the signal. So they were out there working on that this week. They installed new firewalls and network switches at the landfill covering the scale shack, the leachate treatment plant, and the baler facility. The GIS position is vacant.

IT staff is covering that work. They updated the borough zoning map for Ouzinkie, so thanks to those staff members who are doing GIS until we get someone hired. And they're working on our copier lease renewal. There are a lot of Xeroxes around the borough, so that's a bigger lease than you might think. In community development, the Planning and Zoning Commission held held its regular meeting on the 21st.

The commission continued to review the Beaver Lake properties disposal. The commission voted 6-0 with one member absent to recommend the assembly that the Beaver Lake properties be retained. So that will come in front of you, um, soon. That's just a recommendation, so it still comes to the assembly. The Borough Parks and Recreation Committee met on October 20th.

The committee reviewed update on the Kodiak Shorttail project from Island Trails Network. They focused on the inclusion of the project inside of the STIP, which is the State Transportation Improvement Program. In addition, the committee discussed the Beaver Lake properties land disposal and authorized the chairman of Parks and Rec, Ben Milstein, to submit a letter to the assembly supporting the retention of the properties. In Engineering and Facilities, our fuel spill assistance— the soil was declared clear by ADAC at the landfill. We're going to use that to cover as cover rock at the long-term care center.

We're still waiting for a response from ADAC. And nothing changed with Karluk. We're gonna do that next summer. Out at the leachate treatment plant, the citric acid dosing skid is installed but not operating yet, but they are waiting for the electricians to go out there and finish that. The Long Technologies is here and they were working at both KFRC and in this building.

Over the last 2 days, we ran into a lot more asbestos than we had originally thought, so NWFF was here today to give us a quote on how much it'll take to get rid of the asbestos in our, um, mechanical spaces so we can move forward with that project. The landfill bear fence is substantially complete. The overall cost was under $50,000, and I just wanna take a second and thank Kodiak for that because if you guys remember, that first fence design that we got was $544,000, and so coming in under $50,000 is remarkable. And not only did the cost come in, but he's continuing to get materials from Defenders of Wildlife. They're still gonna send us more wire and more teeth posts and more insulators because we've moved the perimeter fence into the maintenance road, but there's a gate going out to the leachate treatment plant.

Um, and so we need to include the leachate treatment plant inside of that perimeter. Right now they're on the outside, but we ran out of materials, so that's where we're at. But he's continued to work on that, and Defenders of Wildlife, um, has been a really good partner in making that happen. So that price point is pretty amazing. Uh, Baylor rebuild— landfill staff has been working on that for a couple of weeks.

It's nearing completion. If things continue to go well, we'll be back to bale fill by the end of next week. So thank you to the landfill staff for their work on that. Nothing has changed in designs. I'm still going to meet with the school district and for plans about the East Elementary roof.

Upcoming contracts include for auto and tire heating and plumbing and electrical services. Those are posted and close on November 10th. We're working on the RFP for landfill cell 2 design. It's going to be posted in, uh, next few weeks. We have the contract tonight for the non-operational or after-hours bear management services, and also tonight we have change order 1 and 2 with Long Technologies for the building automation and sensor replacement projects.

We have a Solid Waste Advisory Board on the 4th. The ARB is going to meet again in late November, and the maintenance meeting with the school district is scheduled for November 5th. Um, at the back of your packet tonight, you'll see the October 2026 projects report. For the new people on the assembly, we do a projects report at the last meeting of the month, just so you have an idea of what the projects team is up to. In assessing the properties being reviewed or inside of the city of Kodiak Island, um, we still have a couple of senior citizen and disabled veteran exemptions that are not determined yet.

Um, 16 with no PFD determinate or that aren't getting a PFD and 11 that are undetermined and only one disabled veteran applicant is still out there. The Kodiak Masonic Temple and the Calvary Baptist Church are in progress. The temple is with legal and the chapel in Bells Flats is— staff is still working on. We don't have any movement on our Alaska Supreme Court case with Canna. Scott Brent Erickson, our previous attorney, sends us an email every Friday And it's like, no news.

So I— they have 30 months, so December will only be 24. So we still have 6 more months it might take to get that decision back. But that's something we're anxiously awaiting. And after that, you will see the projects report. And that is all I have in the manager's report tonight.

I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you. Any questions for the manager pertaining to the report?

All right, seeing none, let's move on into the agenda. Thank you, Aimee Williams. Up first, we have a presentation, the quarterly presentation from Discover Kodiak Station. Sabrina, come on down.

Good evening, Assembly members, Mayor, Borough Manager, and staff. My name is Sabrina Hicks, and I am the Executive Director of Discover Kodiak Island. Before we begin, I'd like to share a brief update on what Discover Kodiak Island has accomplished during the first quarter, July 1st through September 30th. It was a busy summer. Between July 1st and September 15th, we welcomed more than 7,800 people through our front doors.

Port Lions. We also wrapped up our cruise season with 29 ships visiting the city of Kodiak, 2 additional ships visiting other parts of Kodiak Island, one ship notably visiting Old Harbor for the first time. Our Adjust Your Altitude hiking challenge had another successful year with 820 participants and more than 1,100 registrations. We also completed Phase 2 of our downtown pocket maps. I brought a few copies tonight to share with assembly members, but I do want to mention that anyone in the community can come into our office and take a few and share them, save them for visitors.

They are free. We made some really nice updates to it based off of community feedback and even assembly members from you. We—. Marketing continues to be our primary focus at Discovery Kodiak. Our job is to promote Kodiak as a destination and encourage visitors to choose our community when planning their Alaska travels.

We're currently finalizing our 2027 marketing efforts, including advertising in The Milepost, Fish Alaska, Hunt Alaska, and several other publications. We're also working on our 2027 visitor guide now with 22,000 copies scheduled for distribution locally throughout Alaska and beyond. Our digital marketing, marketing continues to grow as well. Between July and September, our Facebook and Instagram content received more than 437,000 views combined, helping us reach both returning visitors and new audiences. Next week, I'll also be attending the Alaska Media Roadshow, where I'll meet directly with travel journalists, writers, and other media professionals.

Our goal is to build relationships that lead to future visits and media coverage of Kodiak. This gives us opportunities to share Kodiak's story with audiences we may not otherwise, otherwise reach through traditional advertising. All of these efforts work together to keep Kodiak visible as a travel destination and support the local businesses that depend on visitor spending. Another project we're working on is bringing back the Salmon Derby. Discover Kodiak is currently pursuing our very own gaming permit once again.

We understand there are restrictions on promoting the event until that permit is approved, so we're being mindful of those requirements. Once we have the permit in place, we'll— you'll be hearing much more from us on the work that we're doing to bring that back. Now, the main reason that we are excited to be here tonight is to share the results of our tourism study conducted by the McKinley Research Group. This was a significant investment of Discover Kodiak, but we felt it was important to have not only a baseline but reliable, reliable independent data that shows what tourism contributes to Kodiak Island's economy, businesses, and jobs. We chose McKinley Research Group because of their extensive experience conducting economic research throughout Alaska.

Our goal was to have information that could benefit not only Discover Kodiak but the city, the borough, local businesses, and our community. I'm joined tonight by Heather Holland of McKinley Research Group, who led the study. Heather worked closely with us throughout the process, and I'm glad she could join us to present the findings and answer any questions that you may have. So with that, I will hand it over to Heather. Hey everyone, thank you so much for having me.

Heather Hoagland, Vice President of McKinley Research Group, calling in from Bellingham. I did put some time in in Alaska, Sitka and Juneau, but I'm one of many expats here in Bellingham. I'm going to go over just about 10 minutes maybe of our major findings from this report. I wanted to say thank you to Sabrina and the team at Discover Kodiak and the board for working really closely with us and choosing to do this study at all. I'm going to share my screen here and let me know if it comes through.

Let's see, let me pick the right one. All right, can you guys give me a thumbs up if this is coming through? There we go. Yes. Small.

Yeah, okay, cool, great. Yeah, as she said, economic impact of Kodiak Island's visitor industry. This was a really, really fun and challenging project. As I told the board a few weeks back when I presented it, you guys have a really unique visitor industry. I've been doing this since 1999, and it was really fun to learn about your industry and to see what makes it so unique.

I'm going to talk a little bit about how we approach this study and our methods. First of all, McKinley Research Group— you may remember us as McDowell Group— we've been doing Alaska tourism and economic research since 1972. I've been doing it since 1999. Our scope for this project was calendar year 2025. It was important to the board and to Discover Kodiak to capture those both the summer and the off-season kind of visitor impacts.

It was also really important to capture those in-state visitors, and sometimes when we do these studies, we just focus on the out-of-state, especially when we're talking about a whole statewide basis. You know, we've done economic impact of visitors in the whole state, so we have to just focus on those out-of-state visitors bringing in those outside dollars. But you guys get quite a few in-state visitors, um, for example, those folks who are going deer hunting coming over from Anchorage. You have a lot of business visitors coming over to do medical or to do Coast Guard related stuff. So we really wanted to capture the full picture of your tourism industry.

We did interviews, phone interviews, and also exchanged some emails with about 15 local tourism businesses, kind of a range of retail. We got some lodging, we got, let's see, some tours, that sort of thing. We got some great data from some of these businesses, including, for example, Best Western gave us some great data on their guests and where their guests are coming from. That was a great resource. We also have sort of a big library of data that we we pull from.

So Bureau of Transportation Statistics, we know how many people are getting on planes in Kodiak and flying out. Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska, we get their entire database, we know exactly how many people are coming to Kodiak and how long they're staying. The Alaska Marine Highway System, we're under contract with them to handle their passenger statistics. Alaska Department of Fish and Game, got a lot of information on anglers and non-resident versus resident, how many days they're angling, sport fishermen, all that stuff. US Fish and Wildlife Service, a lot of great data from them as well on the refuge and the visitor center.

And then the City of Kodiak, Kodiak Island Borough, these two municipalities provided a lot of information on sales tax and other kinds of municipal revenues, that sort of thing. And then we just keep a big library of research. We are currently surveying folks in the Anchorage Airport. If you guys have flown out of Anchorage, you might have been bothered by our pop-up survey that comes up and says, tell us about your trip. But that helps us keep track of the visitor industry, people coming in and out of Alaska.

We have that going in both Anchorage and Fairbanks, and we added Sitka this year. I have to put a plug in, if you guys have Wi-Fi in your, in your airport, we can do a survey for you there. I think that's it, about it for background and methods. So one of the main things we always, you know, figure out first is how many people went to Kodiak in a given 12-month period. Our assessment or our finding was that about 69% of your visitors traveled by air, 29% by cruise, and 2% by ferry.

And again, we get really exact data from both the cruise and the ferry. With the air, we have to tease out how many of those air visitors are Kodiak residents versus non-residents.

So I'm going to talk about some of your markets just to help give you, you know, you guys understand your own visitor industry quite well, but I wanted to let you know how we approached it different markets that we looked at. Sport fishing and hunting, these are your two biggest kind of spending markets, and as you know, you guys are premier destinations for both fishing and hunting. You have a really wide range of experiences for both of these, so you've got one-day charters maybe from someone who is coming in, and maybe even a VFR, sorry, visiting friends and relatives kind of person doing that, that one-day charter, or you can have a week-long very high-end lodge experience as well that's remote, you have to fly to, that sort of thing. And then hunting, as you know, you've got these big, you know, the bear trophy hunting that can command tens of thousands of dollars per person, but you've also got a lot of folks, as I said, coming over from Anchorage and doing more casual deer hunting. Both of these, you know, these are your kind of big ones, I would say, in terms of spending, but they really interact with a wide variety of your businesses because you've got accommodations, you've got guides, you've got your small planes or boats, you know, outfitters, they go to local restaurants and spend money.

So there was a lot of attention. We spent a lot of time trying to understand these two markets, the fishing and hunting markets. We have happened to have a lot of information on your cruise market. It is quite a big chunk of your visitors in terms of just volume, about 25,000 passengers visited in 2025. We can look at it call by call.

We have a nice table in the report if you're interested. You guys do have an interesting cruise market because they're mostly medium-sized ships. That's not the case in almost any other port, right, where you've got mostly medium-sized ships. Only 9 of your vessels, only 9 calls were from ships over 1,000 passengers. Only a couple really small, small ships of, you know, under 250 as well.

And you've got really big fluctuations month to month, which I'm sure is so fun for your businesses catering to these, to these visitors. But you can see you've got that huge chunk in May and then goes down a little bit in June, and then a really big chunk in September. And many of you probably know these are positioning cruises. They're sort of repositioning their vessel from Alaska to other parts of the world, and Kodiak is a nice stopover for them. So that's what makes you guys really unique as far as the cruise market.

We also, and you can look in the report if you want some more detail, but we looked at these other markets that are all, they all play an important role, right? The bear viewing in particular, but you have lots of amazing wildlife to see. You've got wildlife viewing, like marine mammal viewing cruises, but bears of course being a huge draw. People just doing sometimes like a floatplane trip or, you know, just a day trip, even just on the road system, all kinds of folks wanting to see the bears. But also you've got a couple of destinations that are just about bear viewing.

So again, a kind of a range of experiences available to visitors. You've got culture, you know, your museums are really, really important for attractions, you know, in the city of Kodiak. We spoke to a couple of museums and really impressed how many people are coming through there. And then you've got things like culture camps, the Fognek Culture Camp, you know, that brings in some folks from outside.

Adventure, you've got a small market that are doing their own thing and being really adventurous, probably not staying in a lodge, but kind of camping and doing that sort of multi-day hiking, multi-day kayaking. You've got a now a special event centered around those sort of mountain running. Those are what we call adventure travelers, and that's a market that's certainly been growing as we've seen over the last couple of decades. Special events, we looked at that. We talked to the Chamber of Commerce about the Crab Fest and the huge numbers that show up for Crab Fest.

You've got the rodeo, those kinds of things. I would put sporting events like high school, people coming for high school events from other schools to compete. Those are all, that all falls into your special events category. And then business and VFR, we kind of lump together. These are two elements of most visitor markets, right?

Most places welcome people doing business and VFR, via visiting friends and relatives. What makes you guys a little different maybe is for the VFRs, you know, you've got that Coast Guard base, and we heard a lot about how many people that draws from outside and that they're spending money. A lot of times VFRs don't spend as much because they stay with their friends and relatives. Other people can't stand staying with their friends and relatives, and they spend some good money on hotels. And then you've got, of course, business folks who are spending a lot of money.

You've got medical care professionals, you've got Comfish, that's bringing a lot of fishing industry folks to Kodiak and spending really good money. Business folks do spend, tend to spend money on dining and on hotels, maybe not as much on, you know, local attractions and things like that. But that's just sort of an overview. Of course, you're gonna have other little niche markets coming to visit, but that's really what we looked at. When we were putting together the pie of visitors.

We did an analysis and an estimate of how much these different visitors were spending, and as I mentioned, sport fishing and hunting markets were really your number one. They ended up spending about the same money, even if they represent different numbers of folks, you know, a lot more sport fishing folks than hunters, but hunters are spending more on a per-person basis. Business and visiting and VFRs, we mushed together, they're spending almost as much together as those other two markets at $28 million. And then together, those other markets spending $11 million. Cruise passengers are a much smaller percent of the pie in terms of spending when compared to how they represent in terms of numbers.

And that's just a common element of the cruise market because they're not spending money to stay the night, right? They're not, they're not having those extended stays, so they tend to have a much lower per person spend, especially if they don't have really high-priced tours like you see in Juneau, maybe $1,000 to go on a helicopter tour and ride behind a dog sled. So you tend to see higher spending in those kinds of ports. So altogether, add it all up, we came to about $100 million, $102 million. And interestingly, we came at this from a few different angles, just in terms of methods.

You know, we built it up from, from the bottom up, saying, okay, here's how much people are spending, and also looking at your sales tax, your sales numbers, gross sales. How much are people spending on hotels? How much are they spending in these visitor-impacted industries? And, and it really came together nicely. So in terms of economic impacts, you guys have probably heard this language before, also called like multiplier impacts.

What you take is all that direct spending, that $102 million, which you can see in the third pie over here, and then you add, okay, these visitor businesses they're making more purchases with those dollars that visitors pay them. So they're paying for utilities, they're buying supplies for the restaurant, that sort of thing. So those are called indirect. There's another category called induced, when those employees of tourism businesses spend their local dollars. Let's say they go to the grocery store, they buy gas, they buy clothing, that sort of thing.

So together we call those kind of indirect or multiplier effects. And you can see all together, our study found that 675 direct jobs plus 175 indirect jobs gets you to 850 total jobs, sort of resulting from the visitor industry in 2025, labor income of $45 million total, and total spending of $130 million. And we did an analysis of Kodiak's total employment, and it's not easy because you've got all these fishermen that make things heart. Again, interesting economy. When you look at like the QSU, the Department of Labor data, that doesn't capture all the fishermen, but we happen to also study the seafood industry, so we have really, really good data on how many people in Kodiak are participating in seafood and fisheries.

So we were able to put that together and determine, out of the total employment in Kodiak, visitor industry representing about 9% when you include the impact We also look at municipal revenues. You can see we, we estimate about $4 million in municipal revenues when you put together the city and the borough. Lodging tax being the number one— not number one, sorry— being about almost half a million, $464,000. Sales tax is the number one, $2.8 million attributable to sales tax. We did take into account your sales tax caps, you know, your various factors going into those.

There's definitely, it definitely plays a role in, in limiting tax dollars from the visitor industry. And then cruise ship fees, that's pretty easy to figure out. They're paying to moor, you know, they have certain fees that they, they pay to visit Kodiak, and that added up to about $660,000. So as I said, about $4 million, and $3.8 million of that going to the city, $150,000 going to the borough. I think that just about wraps it up for my presentation.

There's more detail in the report if you'd like to read more about the different markets, more about methodology, more about how these numbers break down. But that's kind of the quick and dirty highlights of the report, and I'm happy to answer questions.

All right. Thank you, Heather, so much for that. Are there any questions for Sabrina or Heather?

Um, Heather, I have just one. Um, oh, Mr. Gardner, I'll take you first. Yeah, um, I think this is more directed at Sabrina, but, um, it's pretty stark contrast in how much municipal revenue goes to the city versus the borough. Um, I'm just wondering in my own head, maybe you can lend some insight Do you have any ideas on how the borough could better capture some of that revenue?

You know, that was something that I was looking at because it is such a big contrast. Um, even just looking at, you know, I think that'd probably be better left for a different discussion, maybe a discussion with the borough manager, maybe a discussion with you guys afterwards to see what ideas are I'm opening— I'm open to listening to suggestions. For what we're doing in our office is we're just trying to see what we can do to increase our revenue internally. Salmon Derby is one of those things. The gaming permit is one of them.

The last thing we'd want to do is try to, you know, take without first trying to bring it on internally. Thanks. I just wanted ideas. Appreciate you.

Thanks. So I have a couple of questions. So one, this is a snapshot from 2025, correct? That's correct. Calendar year.

So it looks like a great year, right? A better story would, of course, be like the trend, right? You know, where were we 5 years ago and like where are the projections and those kinds of things heading now? Are there future plans to follow up so we can see trends?

There is. It has— not that we know of. The last survey that we had done by the McKinley Research Group was an airport survey, and I believe that was done in 2018, Heather, or it was—. Oh boy, oh, 2016 was actually the statewide study, and we did include Kodiak visitors in that, although we did not have surveyors in the Kodiak Airport I think the last time we had surveyors in the Kodiak Airport was 2000, like the year after I joined this company. I think it's been that long.

So, um, but I think a good sort of rule for you guys, or something that Sabrina could take on, uh, certainly we're happy to do more work for you, but if you just look at emplanements, that's a really good thing to track over time. You can track it by month, and you can also look at your population, which we did. You know, we looked at your population, how that has changed over the last 10 years. I do have this data handy if you want to look at the last 10 years of employments. I can even add it in the appendix.

I mean, employments being your, I would say, your number one driver of the, of your tourism economy, right? I mean, cruisers is a big chunk, but not so much on the, on the spending side, and ferry is quite, quite small. So I do think that air employments is a really good thing to track along with your population. Presumably, as your population goes up and down, those folks are flying less. So yeah, some— just one really quick and easy idea.

That data is public, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and we have our fingers on it all the time and can help you out with that. Okay, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, and then finally, on the, the jobs numbers, 850, do you have that broken down to full-time, part-time, temporary, seasonal? No, that's an overall, uh, just annual average.

That's not broken down. I will say that tourism in general tends to be, as you know, quite seasonal. I will say though, also in Kodiak, you guys had a strong winter market, you know, with your hunting and with your business and VFR coming in the winter too. So not as seasonal in Kodiak Island, in my, you know, after doing this study, as we see in a lot of other communities.

Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. I appreciate your time.

Thanks for your support of the study. Thanks for everyone that's helped from the borough side also on giving us data. So I appreciate it. It's nice to see you guys. All right.

Thanks. Thanks, Sabrina.

Okay. Up next, we have a discussion with Representative Louise Stutes.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and assembly members. Welcome. Nice. Congratulations to the new members and welcome back to the members that have been here. So nice to see you all.

It's nice to be here. Um, our Senator Gary Stevens, I spoke to him this morning and he wanted to send his regrets that he was unable to make it. So I'm going to pitch it for both of us tonight. Wish me luck. It's always been nice to follow him because he gets to the nitty-gritty and then I just kind of clean up.

So let's see, I'll start with what I think is going to be some of the biggest issues this year. And what have been the big issues. And of course we have energy and housing. Those are the two big, you know, issues that we're going to be wrestling with. But I think that, you know, we've got a lot of things on the burners.

I jotted down a few things. We need to get a a fiscal plan for the state. And I can tell you pretty confidently that I don't think that's going to happen until we address the permanent fund, the dividend. It's just we're working on a 45-year-old formula to pay out the dividend. The revenue isn't what it was when that formula was created.

Right now, 68% of the state's revenue comes from interest off the Permanent Fund Corporation. So, you know, there's— excuse me— there's been a lot of conversation about taxes of some sort, whether it be a state income tax or a state sales tax or something. But from my exposure, I don't think that you're going to see anything along those lines whatsoever. Until the permanent fund dividend is addressed. That's, that's the big elephant in the room.

That's the big fight every time, um, the budget comes to the floor is what's the dividend going to be. Personally, you know, I, I think that we want to pay the biggest dividend we can afford to pay, and that's the key. And I'd like to see it so it's a consistent number every year, so you know that you're going to get this many dollars, and if there's additional revenue, then you get additional revenue yourself. But I, I think that that would help smooth it out somewhat. So insofar as the fiscal plan, I would say that that's going to be, um, the, the key to that.

I also think that, um, one of the priorities that's going to happen this year is going to be the defined benefit It passed both bodies and was vetoed by the governor. That was— it's not the same program as a Tier 1, Tier 2 program was. There's been— there's some conceived idea that this new defined benefits is going to break the state or cost us all this money. It is not. It is not.

It's a good plan. I support it. We've got to do something, and I believe you've got to treat people the way you want them to treat you. And we are losing teachers. We are losing firefighters.

We are losing police officers. So I think that you'll see that come about straight away when session comes back in. I think that's probably one of the first things you'll see. I think that you will see education once again on the front burner. I don't know in what capacity.

I don't know if it'll be inflation-proofing the BSA. I don't know if it'll be an increase in the BSA. I don't know if it'll be transportation funding. But I think that there will be a leaning towards somehow making up for some lost time. Right now it's a little dicey, and you know, you don't know what's going to happen, and it's somewhat of a concern with— unfortunately, we're all paying the price for higher fuel, and the only benefit, if there is any benefit, is the state's making money.

And right now it's anticipated that we have approximately an $800 million addition over what— surplus is the word I'm looking for— $800 million surplus over the numbers that this budget was created on.

So in saying that, keep in mind in the last 12 years, We've taken $14 billion out of our savings that we have to pay back. So it would be nice to see us put some money in savings instead of racing in and spending every last dime.

Our— let's see— our fisheries situation, you know, we all have heard the issues going on with the trawl industry, it's significant. And it's particularly significant for Kodiak because our trawling industry holds us up. And it works 12 months a year.

I was able to pass the only trawl legislation that passed this year. You have to keep in mind that of all the trawling that happens in state waters, less than 1%— or in the state of Alaska— excuse me— less than 1% happens in state waters. So that is the only oversight that the legislature has. The legislation that was passed requires any trawl vessel that is trawling in state waters to turn on their electronic monitoring system, which gives us immediate data on Chinook, halibut, whatever, all bycatch immediately, which is— I am absolutely against the legislature taking any kind of allocative position insofar as our fisheries. That is not our area of expertise.

You have 60 legislators, and I would say maybe out of 60 you have of 5 that have any kind of fishing background or knowledge at all. Our job is to see that the experts, whether it be the Board of Fish, the Department of Fish and Game, the North Pacific Council, that they have the tools they need to make the appropriate decisions. And that's our job, to make sure that they have that, which is why this bill passed, and it passed unanimously. We had 2 bills one in the House and one in the Senate that were addressing trawl— trawling in the state. And it completely wiped it out.

No trawling whatsoever. Well, both of the sponsors of those bills— those bills were going nowhere because they didn't have any support because they were so wide-sweeping. And they didn't— even the maker of those those bills didn't realize the wide effect it had, but both sponsors supported the legislation that we passed. That legislation that I passed on trawling was at the request of the Board of Fish, along with the in-river sport users, Kenai River Sports Association, Department of Fish and Game, and as I said, the makers of the bill. It was a pretty successful situation.

We also have some issues going on, as you might well have been aware of, with the Board of Fish and some— not the decisions that have been made, but the process in which those decisions are being made. They have been cutting out public some of the public process. There's been a problem with ethics situations. At any rate, I went through Legislative Budget and Audit and got approval to have an audit of the Board of Fish done. So they will go back to all the meetings, they're talking to all the participants and the stakeholders, and the anticipation is, believe it or not, that that audit should be available maybe the latter part of January, first part of February.

It usually takes 2 years to get an audit done in the state, but they kind of moved this up front because they can see what's happening.

So I'm excited about that, and I was really fortunate to get that done. And we also passed the conflict of interest bill. I have been carrying that bill for 12 years. It—. The first time it was heard in the legislature trying to be passed was 1977, and we passed it this year.

And it's a very simple piece of legislation. It says if you are on the Board of Fish and you have a conflict of interest, you may participate in the conversation, but you may not vote. Prior to this legislation being passed, if you had a conflict, which— so if you're— it's an issue that comes up around Kodiak and you own a Kodiak Seine permit or a Kodiak Setnet permit, you had to conflict yourself out and you had to literally remove yourself from the dais and go sit in the audience. You couldn't participate in the conversation. Well, what's the point of being on the Board of Fish, you know, if you can't share your area of expertise?

So now that's the bill passed. So I was really lucky. I, you know, I've been really fortunate in these last couple years. As we know, the— this governor has a history of vetoing bills, and I managed to get 7 bills passed. In the last year, which is pretty spectacular.

I'm giving myself a pat on that one because it's almost unheard of.

We have the ferry situation. You know, our ferries— the contract has been awarded for construction. I heard earlier from, I think it was from the Discover Kodiak, when they were talking about the cruise ship going to Old Harbor. We have ferry service to Old Harbor in the spring and summer months, which is really great. That came about because I was talking to the captain of the Testimena and the Deputy Commissioner of DOT kept saying, can't happen, can't happen.

I said, John, can you figure out a schedule where it can happen? He said, sure. And I said to the commissioner, here's the schedule, it can get to Old Harbor. And it does. And that's really nice, really nice for our communities.

And, you know, we just want to keep on that. I wrote down a few things that I was DOT, we got lots of potholes. We know we got lots of potholes. I went out to a Rocket Launch board meeting about 3 weeks ago, and I walked in and there sat the governor. And I walked up to him and I said, so how do you like our roads now?

He says, I got the commissioner of DOT on the phone. I said, well, I hope you're doing more than talking. We need to get them fixed. It was an eye-opener for him to be able to see that. So hopefully that, um, you know, with, with the surplus of funds, however little, hopefully we'll have an opportunity to have some capital money.

We haven't had any capital money for what, 4 years now? And that's killing us, it really is. We've got a lot of stuff that we could use it for. Harbor, congratulations on that. Harbor grant that— I guess that goes to the city, right?

But that's okay, we like them in this case, huh?

Um, I think that there's a big drive, as we've all heard, about the gas line.

I don't think that there's a legislator in that building that doesn't want to see that gas line go. The question is, at what expense? And Glenfarn, the company that is putting this whole package together, owns 75%. The state owns 25%. Glenfarn is not a company that operates a gas line.

So One of the red flags for me, for lack of better terms, is if by chance we were to get Korean money or any kind of foreign dollars, I hope and I would like to make sure that Alaska is protected and that that interest cannot be sold to a foreign company. And from what I've been able to ascertain, if in fact the Koreans determined that this is something that they would want to do, they would want some ownership in it. And I just don't— for me personally, as an Alaskan living here, I'm not sure that that, you know, is something that I could support. I'm all about affordable energy, and I've mentioned that several times. We're lucky here in Kodiak.

We're very lucky. And if we can, you know, I'll support anybody that needs to move forward with affordable energy because that's how I get support back, you know, for the ferries or whatever we need here.

Let's see here.

Education I hit, fisheries, ferries, Board of Fish.

DOT. I'm— I— one thing I am looking at is trying to get some— a little more funding to our Kodiak Seafood Science Center over on Kodiak Island. I think that we really need to start looking at our educational capabilities here. I mean, we're lucky we've got the Kodiak Community College, but some of these tech schools are every bit as— I was talking to the individual who is now operating the Seward Shipyard, and they are also operating the Ketchikan Shipyard now, and they are going to put in a shipyard in— where is it that Murkowski's live? Yeah, thank you, Wrangell.

They're putting one in there. And he was saying to me, they're now pursuing and working with the high school kids And he says, I can take a kid out of high school, give him a job for 4 years as a, you know, working for me for 4 years. And at the end of 4 years, when he can take his test, what do they call that? An apprenticeship? Yes, an apprenticeship.

Thank you. God, it's just one of those nights, I guess. He says he'll be making 6 figures. You know, so it's really important that we look in that direction. And then finally, we have— I'll talk a little bit about maybe what we might see in the way of organization next year.

I think in the House, you're going to see a Democrat House. You may see a coalition in the House. I think that a lot of the members that are there are open to that.

But I think that you will see a majority, and it will be a Democratic House. I think you will see in the Senate a coalition. I think that they're going to need a coalition. If you leave I think the only change in the House is going to be, hopefully, me replacing Gary Stevens and Bryce replacing Lyman Hoffman. Everybody else will be the same.

So Bryce and I are going to be very instrumental in the organization, very instrumental. Which, you know, so I've got my fingers crossed, but I think that that's what you'll see. And, you know, of course I'm going to be looking to where I want to go to protect my communities. And working across the aisle to me is how I do that. And I have a history of that.

I'm proud of that. I'm proud of the fact that I have been in a coalition. I know that it's created some angst amongst my own party. I just got a notice yesterday that my own party is spending $88,000 against me in my communities where I'm running. Good luck.

The chips are going to fall how they do, but it would seem to me that my position is, A, by being in a coalition, we represent everybody in the state. Unfortunately or fortunately, you don't have all Republicans that live here or all Democrats that live here. You know, you have a community and everybody expects a little representation, and that's how I address it. And I don't answer to the party. I like to consider myself a leader rather than a follower, and I am not going to take my direction from a party.

I am going to take it from the people, the people that walk in that booth. That's That's where I'm going. And so I do believe that you will see a coalition in the Senate. And I plan to be a big part of it. So, and I'm happy to take any questions.

And if there's anything I missed, I'm happy to back up and answer any questions. Thank you, Representative. From where I sit, I'm really glad that you've been member of the coalition. I think it's worked— it's worked well for us. I'll ask the Assembly, do we want to hear from lobbyist Mark Hickey first, or state lobbyist first, and then we can take discussion questions together because I'm sure they might bleed over a little bit.

Okay. All right, Mark, it's your turn in the hot seat.

Thanks for flying, flying over. You bet. Good evening. Not sure I've got many topics left to cover. I think Reverend Stutes has covered many of them.

Always good to come out. There is a report. I apologize it wasn't in your packets. I was out of the country till Sunday, so I didn't get this out to folks until Monday. Mark, we were able to include it in the packet.

Oh, well, there you go. Thank you. I was having trouble opening the packet, so I couldn't tell. I would just like to highlight some of the things that I covered, and they are in several cases the same topics that Louise just went through. One thing I didn't put in there that I thought I would discuss briefly is both the organizations that are likely to happen, but also we have a new administration coming, obviously.

And hard to say how that's going to turn out, but the numbers seem to suggest there's certainly one candidate leading the pack. But with ranked choice voting, hard to say how that turns out. But I think there's a I agree with Rep. Stutz that the Senate will be a bipartisan coalition similar to what we've seen with the Democrats and a number of Republicans working together. And the House will be Democrat-based, but you've got several independents that have been part of the coalition before and remains to be seen on the Republican side. Who joins, but I agree with Rep. Stute's assessment.

I think the House could have a little bit of a challenge getting organized just because losing people like Louise and Bryce, they've been critical leaders for many years in organization for the House, and I don't think we'll have a repeat of— when was that? I don't remember. Several years ago, where it went to February or something. But I think— I mean, you've got some capable— obviously capable people, but you have experienced people, but there's— I think there's going to be a little bit of a challenge for the House getting up and running. And then a new administration always has a challenge of getting up and running.

And, you know, attracting people into those positions isn't easy, and it's, I think, become more and more difficult to commissioners and other people that work for the governor. So there's going to be a lot of change. From my perspective, there's a decent chance that there will be more opportunity to see some things happen that have been stymied, uh, with the current governor. I agree with Rep. Stutes, the pension bill will be first and for at the top of the list of the, uh, with those two coal— well, the two organizations we're talking about. It is a substantially different plan than any of the ones that have gone before.

It has several mechanisms in it to try to manage and share risk. And I know there is nervousness. I know AML has had nervousness and they have made some suggestions that some of which were incorporated, how that is going to play out. But as an ex-DOT Commissioner with my background working on a lot of transportation projects and also representing teachers for the last 14 years, It's been a horrible situation retaining the employees. And at DOT, they are able to recruit, but they can't compete with the private sector to keep those people.

And that lack of expertise, unfamiliarity with the federal program and how to do projects, you see it every day slowing down our projects. Projects. I can— we're going to talk about a few here that are going on in Kodiak that I think is a direct result of the lack of the kind of experienced engineering capability that they used to have at the department. And, you know, every so often you'll run into somebody that's got 10, 15 years and is a good project manager and stays. And I'm always stunned that they do because the, the benefits are not competitive for them.

So I think the pension issue will be right at the top. Uh, whether it gets done quickly, hard to say. And signing that bill is going to— may not depend only on, uh, uh, JKT winning, but, uh, he'll sign it. But whether another candidate, what they will do remains to be seen.

The budget, I agree with Rep. Stutes that the opportunity for doing some things with that that are more planning in our fiscal world is would be good to see. Um, $800 million— I had— I, I hadn't heard that number. I looked at it and I've been looking at the prices of oil, but that's not out of the question that we could see that. And that would just be for the current fiscal year. So I think you're going to see some, some interest in using some of that, whether it's possibly funding some more school major maintenance I don't know that there's a lot that could be done with more funding for the current school year, but I think it opens the door because you're also going to see probably a better fiscal situation for the new budget.

It opens the door for discussion about— I'm hearing a lot about forward funding again and inflation-proofing and possibly increasing the BSA. Last go-round, we've got one-time money and we've got that energy supplement. And that's another area where I think you'll see some effort to use the money. You know, our rural areas in particular, and I'm sure you're experiencing it with some of the communities— I mean, all of the communities are facing high fuel prices, but the prices in the rural areas are horrendous.

There are not a lot of options to avoid the costs that come with delivery of that fuel in their cases. So we'll see how that plays out. You always like to think it'll happen quickly, but it always doesn't seem to work that way. It takes, you know, human nature being what it is, longer, and I hadn't tried to do the numbers. Last time around, I believe we had one-third of the legislature new, which in my experience I think is the largest number of new legislators, and I don't think that'll be the case this time.

But that always is a challenge just for people to get up to speed.

I think there will be opportunity for discretionary capital. And you have the CAPSES process that comes around every year where you get to submit projects through your legislators, usually by late January, early February at the latest. And it's been hard to take that seriously for municipalities for several years because you do the work, you put stuff in, and nothing comes out, and it's not because your legislators— because there's not— money's not been there. I'd put the work in this year, and obviously happy to help in pulling together any proposals. It's always good to have a little mix, give your legislators some options.

Life safety, those kind of projects tend to get more attention. There's some match, that gets more attention. Having a mix in terms of the amount of money you're requesting is a good idea because sometimes your number one project might be a couple of million, but the— your legislators have $750,000, and after they accommodate other communities. And so it's good to have some projects that can— that are there as a menu for them to consider.

Going back to my report, the permanent fund— I'm glad, really glad Louise brought this up— that it's a single source of revenue that we have is our investment earnings, and including when you add in the to federal money. And that's great that we're in that situation.

But it's— how sustainable that is remains to be seen. I couldn't agree more about what Louise said, that a fiscal plan— and I know there's going to be a new effort to try and work on that. Without a resolution on how the dividend is paid and what it is and the amount and how to make it sized in terms of what's affordable, we've been trying 8, 10 years to do a fiscal plan. We can't figure it out. We've been trying to do a fiscal plan since the late '80s that I'm familiar with.

When I was commissioner, we had $9 a barrel oil in 1980. 1987. And then you go forward into the Tony Knowles years and on and on and on. There have been several different efforts, all, you know, people seriously trying to work on things. And we still have very little that we've put together.

We have backed off paying the statutory dividend because we can't afford to pay it. And we've made some headway in trying to catch up in education, but we're pretty far behind. And we've been in a— I think I'll call it a trap, but we've been in a situation where we size our government services— and you can always be more efficient, but we size our government services based on we're not going to do new revenue, we need to pay as much of a dividend as we can, And the oil money isn't doing what it used to do, but this year it's going to help us. And that's how the budget comes together. And, you know, we have things like motor fuel tax we haven't changed since the '60s.

So, but I do think the resolving how to address the dividend is critical to whether there's going to be a serious ability to do a fiscal plan. And I'm hoping to— my grandson just moved to Juneau and he's 5 years old and started kindergarten, and I'm really hoping it happens while he's still in school.

I always try to address challenges opportunities, some of which we've already discussed.

The forward funding of education, it's a great idea. We've done it twice in, in the last 10 years or so, but it never seems to hold because we— they do it, and then when they can afford it, and maybe we have a year or two where that works. And then we get into a bad revenue year and the first thing, it's a billion, $1.2 billion, $1.3 billion. First thing that happens is, oh well, we'll just use the forward funding money and don't have to pay for the next year. And now we're back to no forward funding.

That's happened at least twice in the 10 years, last 10 years. I think inflation-proofing, statutory adjustment could be more meaningful, really. The legislature can always elect not to fund, as they have, like with school debt reimbursement. I don't think we're going to have a problem in that area, fortunately, because the revenue situation is a little better. But historically, the legislature hasn't done that with education funding.

They haven't gone in and say we're only going to fund 90% of the BSA. So as you all look at policy options and want to comment on these proposals, those are just some things to consider. But I think you'll see a lot of effort to do more with education funding. Community Assistance Program, the legislature's help, it's back at $90 million. And so the $30 million payout that is supposed to happen is all there.

It's all ready to go unless somebody decides to take some of that money. So it's probably more important to the smaller communities, but that's the first time we've been back to that level in some time. I mentioned discretionary capital revenue.

Again, I think there's gonna be some attempt, depending on who's governor, to go after what they call sort of the low-hanging fruit with oil taxes, like the S corp issue with Hilcorp and some of that, and online tax bill that the governor vetoed twice. Did he veto? Twice. Okay. And he even supported, supposedly.

Ah, Testamena vessel replacement, Luis touched on that. Contract has been awarded after 8 years.

And I was in touch with the department and Craig Tonga's director. They still are thinking they could have delivery by mid-2030.

We'll see, it could be a little ambitious, but they finally got there. They got through Buy America. It's finally happening. It came in at about $350 million, and they've got that funded. The last thing that I had in my report, and we can handle this— maybe I'll just point out a couple things, and then if you've got questions, I always address transportation projects that are in the STIP or how things are going.

Of course, we have a new draft STIP out. I think today was the deadline for comments. And there are a couple of new projects that got added. New in terms of the STIP, they've been looked at. Kodiak Island Short Trail Project, which if I recall, there have been some efforts going on for a while put that together, but it's actually in the STIP.

Although— and it's pretty ambitious— 10-mile, 8-foot-wide paved separated pedestrian pathway along Rezanov. But there's no construction money in the current STIP. It's all for development and engineering planning. It's a start.

Sargent Creek Bridge replacement. Is finally in there to actually do it. That's a direct result of you all working to get that Pell Study money, and it only has a project cost of $6.8 million, which surprises me. It seems low, but it's in there. Peshagshak Road resurfacing and realignment— that is a new project, probably part of what you were experienced going out to, to the rocket launch.

And then you have— I'll leave Otmoloy to the end— Chiniak Highway rehab.

That project, if you look at the STEP, I challenge you to be able to figure out what they're doing. I know how to read that stuff, I used to write them, and I don't entirely understand I understand. I have been talking to the Department. What we are down to is there are 3 construction phases. And one that is going to happen this March that would result in work this summer.

And this is still the rehab between milepost 15 to 31. And then 2 additional phases that they have got in the plan as 20— both for '29. Which surprises me a little bit, but they are all in there. So in theory, you should see a lot of construction activity to complete what they have been trying to do on Chiniak. Out in Malloy Way, they have it still in the plan to put it out to bid— well, to obligate in federal fiscal year '27, which means by next September, so they could then put it out to bid for the following year.

But they haven't finished the engineering. They haven't finished the environmental. They know the scope that they are working on is— they are short funding. And the plan that they talked to the Bureau about is still the plan, is to get that engineering package together and engineer estimate and come back and talk to the Bureau about how are we going to proceed. There may be some pieces that could be split out as an additive alternate.

I like to think with a new administration, for the amount of money that we're probably going to be short, we can go to the new governor, and if we have a new commissioner, and lobby to get that extra money to do it. Uh, it's, it's a personal thing to me, having been involved in getting the money in 2005, '06, '07. And when we got the money, it was never intended that it was only going to be spent if the borough took over the road. That was a twist the department added into it. And, you know, it is what it is.

They're putting federal money in, that's great, because originally we weren't looking at federal money, but Assuming that's a project you still want to see done, and I know things have changed with the school not being open anymore, that's going to come to a head here later in, within the next several months. And as I say, I think once you decide what you think about what they come back to you with, I feel like we should be able to go back to the department and and say, look, you know, let's finish this the way it needs to be done.

So airport projects, as far as I know, everything on the Kodiak Airport is funded. It looks like— you all probably have a better handle on this. I didn't hear back from the project manager. If it's not already done, it's close to being done. And then Port Lions They are still working on it and they plan construction.

It is a big project, but not until 2032. So I wanted to mention that. I think I will stop there and see what questions you have. All right. So I will open it up to the Assembly for questions or discussion with Mr. Hickey or Representative Stutes.

Mr. Smiley. Um, there's lots of, uh, activity in the community about the rocket launch, and, um, it's an Alaska corporation, so it doesn't pay any property tax. Is there a way to get PILT or some money out of them? They talked about employment, but all of the people—. A lot of the people live in Anchorage now, and very few live here.

They want to put new facilities in. It's been increasingly difficult for people to go to Fossil Beach. And any rate, not the best neighbors is what I hear. Any ideas about that? I followed that over time and actually saw a recent article about some of the federal additional federal money anticipated.

That's one I think would be good to spend some time working through and thinking about. I don't— getting a public corporation, I mean, it's a function of the legislature and it's—. Here. We're going to do a little—. Microphone switched around on you.

Yeah, I'm just gonna— I mean, it's conceivable, but it would probably have to amend the legislation.

I can speak just a little bit to that because I just came from a Rocket Lodge board meeting not too long ago, and I think that, first of all, insofar as not being a good neighbor, we had an operator there for a while who clearly didn't recognize the importance of involving the community. I can say that very comfortably, that is not the case anymore. John Obertz, who's running it now, is— he's incredible. He recognizes the importance of having the community being a participant, and to the degree they can. Um, there was talk about PILT or some kind of compensation to the community at the last meeting.

That there's also talk about— they recognize the importance of, say, Fossil Beach and out there, and they are, um, if I understood correctly, which I'm pretty sure I did, there is, um, movement to redo that road down to Fossil Beach so that the community does have access. And, um, They haven't increased— they've always had access to the additional property. It's just that they haven't utilized it. And what's happening now is I think that you'll find, um, it's a lot— it's going to be a lot more dependable on opening and closures of the road, because previously when they had government contracts If there was supposed to be, say, a launch on July 1st and the government comes and says, "Well, gee, you know, might not be till the 4th or 5th." "Oh, gee, it's the 4th or 5th, it might not be till the 15th." They're closing the road. They're more now dealing with private entities in like communication satellites and that type of thing, and it gives them a lot more control.

I think that you'll see a lot more participation, and I— if they haven't been here, I know that they would, from our conversation at the board meeting, they're happy to come and talk to you anytime you want. So I think that maybe that would be your best avenue, is to ask them to come and answer your questions, Mr. Smiley. I think that might help. Thank you.

Curious on the Pilt if they have any particular thoughts about what to do. Well, they don't, but they're working on it, and they recognize that they want to contribute to the community in whatever way they can. They really are, are concerned about their relationship with the community, and I've been on the board for several years, and I've told them, and I told the previous guy, you think you're going to come in here and run Kodiak? You're wrong, because they'll run you right out of here, you know. They need to be a participant and be aware of what's going on, and they need some transparency.

And I think that this manager sees that loud and clear.

Mr. Arndt. Thank you. To both of you, you talked a little bit about it too, Mark. Actually, you both did, about the possibility of forward funding on education. There's a combination, as you were talking, possible forward funding, which would help the communities.

It's a big guessing game every year as to what kind of money they're going to get for the schools, and then it puts undue pressure on the local communities to— and we're a whole lot better than Ketchikan. They got a nightmare down there. But Mike, my thinking is you mentioned possible inflation-proofing building into the BSA. What do you think is going to be our chances of getting more money for this next fiscal year building in this one-time funding into the formula? I would say a couple things insofar as forward funding.

I don't think you're going to see forward funding to the degree that we're paying you a year ahead. I think what's going to happen is the anticipation is to pay you earlier, to have a revenue bill earlier in the year so you don't have to issue pink slips. I also think that there is an acknowledgment, I guess, that there will be more funding coming to schools. I don't think it has been determined exactly how that's going to be. I think there's been a lot of talk about inflation-proofing it, because if it's inflation-proof, then that's going to be perpetual, which would be helpful.

So I think— I can't tell you, I can't guess how you're going to get the money, but I am going to guess that there will be more education funding. And I'm encouraged by that snapshot that you're looking at. And with the funding situation, we got to do better than what we've done at the state level. Well, it's been 8 years. Yes.

And it's just— it's gone downhill. And, you know, this is what I've always said and I still say, you do not improve outcomes defunding the schools. It just doesn't happen that way. And so, you know, you may have to change certain policies to improve the— you know, it's like the READS Act. I was the 21st vote.

The READS Act passed. That was the governor's number one priority. And guess what? He didn't fund it.

If I may, Go ahead, Mark. One other piece, and I'd be curious to get Louise's take, that there was a bill this last year that I guess it was Rep. Story's, came out of education, that tried to address how we do the count, because it's always struck me as pretty peculiar to have a count process that happens in October that then immediately has the impact in the current school year of adjust— and now with what's going on in terms of the economy. Juneau, for example, just had a pretty sizable drop in enrollment. I don't know what you all have been having, but—. Drop.

And it sounds good, and I don't know that the bill that was put together was completely thought through, but that also struck me as worth trying to, as part of getting the money earlier and having a different— I think her idea was you could rely on your prior count or your new count. You wouldn't get stuck with a situation where immediately for that school year you're having to deal with the loss in enrollment. I think you're going to see that come back. I also think there is by a very few, very few legislators, a movement towards voucher schools. I'm going to tell you right now, I'll never support that.

I will never support taking public funds for private education. That just doesn't work. And I also think, think that you may see some legislation for a little more accountability insofar as homeschool. There It's not— I think that, you know, one size never fits all. And so some kids do better with homeschooling than they do in a brick-and-mortar school, but there needs to be some accountability.

And they need to— I was talking to a 5th grade teacher and she said, you know, that's the year that kids have been homeschooled and then they put them back in public school about, uh, 5th grade. And she said, I get one of two types of students. Either they can't read at all and they're 2 years behind, or they're 2 years ahead. It's really interesting, but there's, there's got to— I wouldn't be surprised to see some legislation putting a few parameters on homeschool kids. Yeah, and maybe I could continue for sure on there.

Thank you. The other, the other thing is one of the things I've seen in the last almost 4 years. South Coast— I can't speak to the others, but we're in the South Coast District— and State Highway Department has not had any money for maintenance on the roads. So I want to say prior to that, they had done some chip seal projects on the state roads and that. And then in— and when I was talking with Chris going over the last several years, it just— Scott, there's— we have no money.

We're barely getting the potholes fixed. That's the emphasis, is trying to keep the potholes filled. So I'm hoping with some of this, you know, I— you talked earlier about the different construction projects, but we got to maintain the stuff or we lose it. You got to recognize that the DOT department has been almost totally taken apart. It's really not a good situation.

They've lost almost all their good people. Chris Goings is gone now. I mean, there's really some great people. And we're in South Coast, which is with Juneau. That's our main office for Kodiak Island.

And when that happened, I called and they said, really? You don't want to be in Anchorage still because I can guarantee you're going to get nothing done.

I've figured out a pretty good way to rattle cages. I'm not going to give away my secrets, but I tell people, call me. Call me. I mean, if you see something that's really egregious— there's going to be potholes, and I think that you're going to see some improvement on that. As time comes because we have a little extra money.

And it's not just here, it's statewide. But when you see something really egregious or dangerous, you know, life and safety— I know there's some potholes out by Otmoloi, or, you know, right around the corner from Fort Ambikobe, and I've been on them pretty seriously about that. And, and they're getting pretty good about I see another big hole out there, but there are some holes that if you hit them, I mean, I think a couple years ago a truck rolled out there hitting a pothole. It's—. Call me, that's part of what I do.

Just a quick follow-up on that. I have nothing against our local workers that are here. What they do is they take the people from the, from the airport when they're done with what they can do, and due to weather conditions, they can get them on the road. To help patch those potholes. I'm amazed at the lipstick they're putting on a pig.

They're doing a great job, but we need more. Thank you.

Thank you for your statement on vouchers. Mr. Gardner. What projects on our CIP list are you more or less hopeful to see come to fruition here in the, in the relative future. And should we pull the harbor off of there since the city just got a sizable bit? Or, you know, just curious to hear what your thoughts are.

Do not pull the harbor off of there. Do not pull the harbor off there. What I'll tell you is it's really important, and it has been in the past 4 or 5 years particularly, you've got big projects, you've got a lot of big projects. Put some small projects in there. And on your big projects, if you can break it apart so you only need a couple million this year, put that couple million in there instead of the whole $15 million because you can get it started and get it moving.

And then it's easier in the next years to say, We've got this one going. And that's exactly what happened out in Ouzinkie with the internet building that they just built out there. My office, my staff, Matt, I think most of you have met Matt, he saw that money at 9 o'clock in the morning. We got a hold of Ouzinkie. And said, "We can get this money, but we got to get it by 4 o'clock today or it's gone.

What do you have?" And that's how that internet building— and we didn't know what to call it, but it had to be for the community. And we were working with Duncan at the time, and Duncan says, "An internet building, an internet building." And that's how it got— I mean, it's much more than that, but that happened in about a span of 6 hours is how we secured that money. And it was like, wow.

So smaller amounts on things that you can— I would keep that harbor on there because you've got a good kick in the pants with the federal money. And it's kind of like the Cordova Center was. They got federal money, and then it was like, well, do we finish this or do we do the harbor. They finished them both.

Anyone else?

All right, well, thank you so much for coming, and I'm sure we will see you in January— February for the fly-in. Oh, good. Yeah, look forward to it. If not before then. Thank you all.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks.

Yeah, don't forget to vote.

All right, before moving on into other business, let's take a 5-minute break. Good call. I know it. I know it. Oh, yeah, for sure, honey.

Thank you. Yeah, it's so great to see you. Let us know what we can do for you. Thank you. I will.

Right, you guys, are you having a fun time?

Well, you were on for a short time last before you got reelected, weren't you? I just got elected, man. I know, but weren't you on? Didn't you get an— weren't you appointed? You were appointed.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I thought. So you're getting to be an old hat. You're a veteran too. Exactly. Oh, it's so nice to see you.

Thank you. All right, good to see you. Nice to see you, Louise. Thank you. Nice to see you.

Good luck. What's the saying? Good to be seen? Yes, it is. Upright.

Good to see you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Tell Tony to stop by. Okay.

He left some meat right here. I told him a couple times, but he forgets. President Scott Cody. Very cute. Kodiak Island.

Kodiak Island. I haven't seen him in years. I like him. He's pretty funny. We got tied up against some of the problems.

We're like real close. So, and all three of those are good people. I don't know who we met. I'm Alex Sweeney. Yeah.

Nice to meet you. Congratulations. Thank you. What do you think so far? That was my first meeting with some of these.

Oh, okay. I was kind of getting schooled up, but no, I'm excited. Good. I always see that they have new people. Just happy to be a part of the process.

What's your background? I'm a commercial insurance underwriter. My dad ran a local insurance agency downtown. For many, many years. Oh, okay.

Okay. And that's kind of how that came around. Yeah, good. Well, it's always good to have a variety of perspectives. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I've been—. What am I, lucky? Yeah, I'm trying to think the number of years. Well, it's 25 plus, but anytime there's some questions or something you want to know about, Aimee always knows how to find me. Let me know.

No, I appreciate that. Yeah, we will see Maybe in June. Maybe. Yeah, it's worth coming down. And, used to do it quite a bit, but, changing the money, it's a little harder to justify spending a lot of time.

But, still, you know, on the transportation projects, it's good to keep after the department. And, you know, it just helps you pay more attention if you show up. Absolutely. Yeah, my wife worked for DOT for almost 10 years before leaving to go to the private sector. Oh yeah, she was a civil engineer.

Yep, in Anchorage. So yeah, we did firsthand to the—. She knows the tough retention and everything. It's just—. Yeah.

What year was the DOT convention? Oh, 2011 through 2020. Sabrina. Yeah. So a lot of people have seen— So I started with public highways in 1976.

Okay. And then became DOT. I was there until '91. But, it's small. With my municipal work, I still do a lot of project development.

Harbors, airports, roads. That's where the money is. And, now with South Coast, all my communities in the area. Part of sounding that. I represent communities out of the chain too, like Kingco or their parts of it.

But I've been able to keep my hand in watching what's happened. The department's worn out. It's gotten more tough. People make careers. Yeah.

Particularly through copper holes. Yeah. Yeah. And then what does that leave? You know?

Making some pretty important decisions. Well, and then you also realize it's the federal programs, both aviation and highways, there's just a lot of nuances and rules beyond just figuring out the engineering, in order to do the project, deal with environmental, and keep to a schedule.

Anyway, good to meet you. Yeah, it's great to meet you. Okay, anyhow, it's good to see you there. Glad you stuck around. Yeah, yeah, it was interesting.

Edward. Edward. Mark. Mark. Glad to meet you.

Yeah, you look familiar to me. I probably— yeah, I'm probably here a few weeks before. Oh yeah, a few ago. I've been here since '65, but I've done a lot. I was the CEO of Lesnar Industries.

Built the first high-speed— And when the Kenai Fjords were there, we were starting. Where'd you build that? Well, we had it built in Westport, Washington. Had 4,000 horsepower in it. I did it and sold it to Kenai Fjords, who then came back, built the Kodiak— designed it and built the Kodiak Round Bear Center for Kodiak Island.

Kodiak Island, that was a 311 helicopter lift. And then we got that down around Randolph, and I just got this Right on time.

Okay, we're resuming tonight's work session with our next agenda item, discussion of the Kodiak Island Borough motor vehicle registration tax. This is something that we kind of put on every year before the end of the year to see if it's something that we want to continue. So I will hand it over to Manager Williams. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As the mayor said, The last time we talked about this was December 16th, 2025, and we're like, well, we'll talk about it real soon.

And here we are at the end of October 2026, and time seems to fly. So in the packet tonight, you'll have a timeline of ordinance considering the motor vehicle registration tax. You can see it's something that was started in 1979 and has had changes throughout the years. I think the one of the most important changes to note is in 2019 when we changed the allocation of the revenue from the school system to the general obligation debt payments for the school. And we also added a junk car removal program.

In your packet tonight, there's, um, I think the thing that's going to stand out the most and why I brought my other glasses is the amount of revenue that has come in. You'll see there's a yellow highlighted square. That is when the new tax rates went into effect in January of '22. So you'll see the taxes, the monthly amounts that come in, change quite a bit.

And Dora printed this out for us on October 12th, so that is the money that we knew about in fiscal year '27 up to that point.

Some of the important things around this discussion, I think this is used as a form of revenue that affects people who own vehicles, are registering them in Kodiak, and it hits— so it kind of hits a different user group. And I think a lot of the discussion is around different people paying different taxes. Unfortunately, if you own property, you're paying this and your property tax, and if you don't own property, you're just paying this.

And so the— right before the assembly meeting started, I mentioned DEED came out with their numbers on what the max school district ask can be for next year, and it is $14.95 million. And so, um, with what we funded last year, we— for those of you new on the assembly, we have a maximum allowable property tax revenue that we can collect every year. Because we did not fund the school district to their full amount, that number will be quite a bit lower this year than it was last year, while the max amount the school district can be— can ask for is going up. And so I think that Even though we don't have those numbers solidified, I think that's gonna be an important part of the conversation as we talk about if we wanna lower that tax or not. This is one issue that I get several residents every year who ask about, um, that Kodiak has quite an add-on.

If you've registered a car lately, I'm sure you've seen it. So, um, one thing that we should know, any decisions that we make by December 31st of this year would not go in effect until January 1st, 2028. So there is a year lag. On any decision that you make. So you wouldn't see any tax rate changes until January of '28.

So any—. Yeah, if you have any questions specific, I'm happy to answer them. We try to include some history in there so you would know what it is. This is obviously going to be a consistent resident request that we reduce that. Yeah, uh, Mr. Smiley and then Mr. Arndt, Mr. Gardner.

It says here for 2026 that we accrued $721,671.

What was the severance tax for that year? Do you remember this? Like the FISH severance tax? I don't have that number with Mr. Well, there are a bunch of taxes that we collect that aren't regulated by MAPTR, correct?

Yes. And this is one of them. Yes. And severance is another one of them. Yes.

Okay. But it's somewhere in the same kind of ballpark, less than a million. It's more. Depends on the year. This year?

I thought it was less than—. We budgeted more last year for sure. I can absolutely find that number for you and let you know. I can send it to the assembly if you want to know. I'm not focused on the number.

Just the fact that it's another one that doesn't require MAPTR and it's somewhere in the neighborhood of this. So thank you. Mr. Arndt. Just to add on there a little bit, this year the price of fish, be it salmon, be it cod, be it halibut and black cod, the highest prices ever. We should be receiving more money than we projected.

On there. This— the motor vehicle tax I can speak to because I was one of the initiators on this. The idea was people were being hit with property taxes. Property taxes were paying everything, and one of the things that we did to diversify that— that's why this goes to debt service on bond debt for schools on there. So that's what helped facilitate us lowering the mill rate on the property taxes in the community, the entire island for that matter.

The, um, the other thing you have to mention at the same time was we raised the cigarette tax, and that goes into general fund on there. So, uh, you got your severance tax, your cigarette tax, your motor vehicle tax on there are all things that are helping keep and lower the the mill rate. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Gardner.

I remember this conversation from last year, and this is a pretty, this is a pretty heavy tax. And the problem with it in my eyes is that it, it can really hit some people that, you know, really can't afford it. Caroline had some really great ideas last year about adjusting this based on the age of the vehicle. You know, under the assumption that if I'm driving a 2026, I can afford the full tax. It shouldn't be a problem.

But we're hitting the same person that, you know, is driving a car that barely runs, and if they can even afford to pay that tax. So I'm generally gonna be in favor of lowering taxes whenever I can. And I really liked that idea because it took some pressure off of the people that were maybe having a harder go of it, especially in a year like this where I don't even want to tell you how much it costs to fill up my truck. And then the other thing too is I struggle to see, or I'd really like to know how much money is going into the junk vehicle program because I'm getting a little frustrated at that program. It certainly doesn't seem to be in effect at all.

I'm, I'm having a hard time with all the junk vehicles across the borough property. I saw you start to raise your hand. Mayflower Beach, there's one in the American River, there's one right next to my house that's been there for months. There, they just seem to be accruing over and over, and I know those aren't the only ones. I could go find you plenty of them.

So, um, That's, uh, my thoughts. Amy, did you have something to say about the junk removal program? Junk vehicle removal? I have some comments, but, um, the, the tax according to the age of the model year is actually in our code now. So the first and second years are $300, the third and fourth years are $240, the fifth and sixth is $200, seventh is $180, and then eighth and over is $140.

So we already do a step down for age, so So that's in there. Junk vehicles, we only remove off of borough property. So we won't— it's not off of private property. It's not off state property. I don't know who owns the American River.

I didn't know there was one in there. The bears. But the— right. So the junk removal, we will do one at the first part of the fiscal year, people who have cars. That, um, like one per family per fiscal year.

So we're able to help some of those properties that have a lot of junk cars on their actual property get off, but only one per year. So, um, that's always something when we do budget amendments we could put more money in. And so if you have a junk vehicle or there's a vehicle that's bothering you, we are complaint-driven code enforcement. So call your code enforcement officer because His name is Casey.

So, yeah. So, I mean, there's always improvements we can do to that program, but he doesn't actually drive around looking for junk vehicles. Usually they're reported to us, and if they're on borough right-of-way or borough property, we'll take care of them. Mr. Arndt. I was going to also address the sliding scale on the age of the vehicle, and Aimee did that.

Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else?

I'm like Mr. Gardner. I'm generally supportive of rolling the motor vehicle registration tax back to its previous levels.

I do think it's a meaningful way to provide some tax relief. But, you know, I think the financial circumstances, right, that justify that tax right now, unless until they change. Um, like, if you look— looking at the figures in the packet, like, we've gone from collecting roughly $220,000 a year, um, to more than $720,000. And that's a pretty substantial increase in revenue from our community. What interests me is how this relates to our school debt schedule.

Um, our projected net school bond payments, um, are declining, right, from $1.9 million in FY26, then we're looking ahead, $1.63 million, $1.39 million in FY29. So by FY29, basically that's a reduction of more than about half a million dollars compared to right now. So that doesn't necessarily mean that we have half a million dollars of new money, you know, available.

Some of those reductions will already occur. So anyway, I think— I do think that the overall trajectory later will give us an opportunity to consider that tax relief a little bit more responsibly. So I think I would, I would maybe have us take a look at this more seriously at a January 1st, 2029 effective date to restoring those previous rates. That So again, looking at an additional year that gives us another budget cycle to assess our debt service fund balance and take a look at the reimbursement kind of picture that will be going on in the legislature. I—.

Right now, I don't want us to eliminate that $500,000 in revenue only to discover with MAPTR issues that we are going to have to increase the property tax mill rate to make up for that. That is not— we don't want to do that. That just shifts, you know, the tax burden back to something that we don't want.

So that's what I'm recommending now. It's like, not yet, but yes, you know, yes, but not yet. When those school bond debt payments really start to go down in FY29, I think that's a kind of a more worthwhile um, goal. Um, it's more achievable, I think, for us. Um, so in the short term, I'd say, right, keep it.

But, um, once those bond debt repayments really start to go down, especially like half a million by FY29, then, then I think we can have a more serious discussion about it then. But those are my thoughts.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. There is a world where we don't have to go all or nothing, right? So we don't, we don't have to take it all away in one course of a year. We could decide now that, hey, we know that between fiscal year '27 and fiscal year— or fiscal year '26, what we're in now, and when these would take place, we could— we have some money go down. So we could just be cautious and take like 25% of that increase off or whatever and back it down slowly.

Um, I am the person who hears a lot from the residents about this particular tax, and so that could be something that we could think about. Um, if we— this would be an ordinance change, and so this is, um, if we are going to do this, this is something we would need to get on because we don't— there's not a lot of meetings in November and December. So if the assembly is interested, we just need to start moving on that. Thanks, Mr. Gardner. I'd just love to see us get a start on it, pull it back 10, 15, 20%.

We don't have to go back to the previous rates, but I hear this a lot too from the public, and I know that people would love to see a step in the right direction, and we can reassess when we have a clearer picture of what the new administration in Juneau is going to be up to. And yeah, I'd love to see us get a start on this. If we have some support, I would start a yellow slip on this.

All right, fill out the yellow slip. And I'm sorry, Mr. Arndt, did you have your hand raised? Well, if we're gonna, if we're gonna comment on it, we already know we have a lot of other projects to do on the schools. Where do you think the money's going to come for that? So if you're thinking that we can start lowering this very shortly, you're mistaken, because we've defrayed a lot of maintenance that's going to hit us.

And I see this as being needed to help pay that, to cushion that, so that it isn't on the taxpayer, directly on the property owners, which is where you're going right back to where you're going to get it. So you got to look ahead on I know we got at least $10 million worth of school work we need to do in the next— I'm going to say 2 to 5 years. So you got to look at the whole picture, and to order this now is not appropriate in my opinion, looking down at the funding that we're going to need on schools. Thank you. Mr. Gardner.

Mark was before me, actually. Oh, I didn't—. You're leaning back. Mr. Vizcocho, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

So this is kind of new to me.

Um, I understand Mr. Scott Arndt, I understand Mr. Gardner, but it's just being you, I'm trying— I want to get more information on this. I want to learn more about it because I see the two points, but it's just really hard for me to say or comment on something that I have little knowledge of, so I just need more information about it, please. But yes, it would be kind of nice to lower, but at the same time, we got to worry about the education that we have since, you know, there's a— there's another school pending, right, to be closed. So I'm kind of concerned about that one. So I'm Yeah, it's hard.

So thank you. Thank you, Mr. Gardner. Mr. Arndt, you're not wrong, and I can appreciate the pragmatism of, uh, wanting to, to think ahead and get a clear look at the fiscal picture. Um, but the argument when this comes out in the paper is going to be that it got pushed out another year. And you know, all the phone calls and whatnot that we'll get on the topic when the end of the year comes up.

I guess I'm being hopeful that I'm making some assumptions about who I think is going into the governor's mansion, and I'm hopeful for a better financial view next year. But I can appreciate where you're coming from in that Hopeful doesn't pay the bills. So I don't know if there's— if nothing else, I would like to see this definitely be tabled for like a specific date so that we could, you know, know that we're bringing it back up. I'd still like to see us start marching in the right direction, though. But I don't think it would go anywhere if I did a yellow slip.

Since Assemblymember Arndt brought it up, I do think that we need to have a discussion about entering into the state school bond debt replacement program for future projects. Hear, hear. Yeah, thank you. For sure. Okay.

Yeah, I agree. I've been a big advocate of that. You already know that.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyone else?

Okay, so the sense that I'm getting from the group is to— we'll look at this again next year. Can we pick it earlier in the year? Oh, just so we don't— I mean, I liked it when— I can't remember what topic it was that Bo had tabled, and, you know, we just made it for a specific date. If we could just Visit in July so that we are not talking about it once again at the end of the year because even if we did have a yellow slip going, we would be in such a rush to get it done before December 31st and it is just, you know, if we can look at it earlier. So Nova, is there a way that you keep track of these kinds of things?

I will put a placeholder for July. Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay.

Moving on then.

Is a review of Ordinance No. FY 2027-12, an ordinance amending property tax assessment method of assessment requirements for private interest and tax-exempt property. And this is an ordinance that we are discussing. It's not on a regular meeting agenda yet. This is— so it's not part of— it's a little outside of that process right now.

And so I'll hand it over to Manager Williams. But I think this is, uh, Mrs. Garoutte or Mr. Gardner. So, uh, this is an ordinance that was requested by Assemblymembers Gardner and Smiley to amend our code regarding the method of property tax assessment and reporting. And Seema is here, so I'll let her give you the particulars. But I think the important part is, is that we saw a problem and a code change is fixing it.

So We always have to stay inside of what the code says. And so the problem that we ran into was— is it the lawyer with the Alaska Aerospace that told us? So the Alaska Aerospace lawyer was like, I could tell you who my leaseholders are, but your code doesn't tell me that I have to. So we were working on the— the bill or the business personal property tax for Alaska Aerospace. And the lawyer was right, our code does not require them to disclose who is working out there and what business personal property they have.

And so this is a method to let everyone know that they are required to tell us so that we can access anyone who has business personal property on land or in a building that would otherwise be exempt. So if you are exempt because you're the state government or the federal government or for whatever other reason, Now you will be required to tell us, give us the contact information and a copy of what that lease looks like or what that information looks like so they can be charged appropriately. Seema, is there anything you'd like to add to that? I think Jeremiah—. Jeremiah, is there anything— sorry, Assemblymember Gardner, is there anything you would like to add to that?

I really hope this gets broad support from you guys. In a nutshell, what this does is give Seema's department some teeth. And yes, this This conversation got started because of Alaska Aerospace, but ever since then it has broadened substantially. And so for one instance, you know, some of you up here know when you have a business you get a fun extra property tax bill where you need to list out all your items of value and Seema's office sends you a bill. Well, then when the Coast Guard hires contractors from off island and they bring all their equipment down here for most of the year, and they're building houses and doing multi-million dollar projects out there.

Those businesses aren't being treated the same way, and they're taking all their money and running off the island. And, um, it is a way to properly tax people that aren't necessarily stealing work from locals, but in some cases they are. And then with this massive, um, funding that is going into Alaska Aerospace. I don't know what the calculation is on a $2 million rocket that Seema's office gets to tax, but it's substantial. And I think this will really, really add up.

And it doesn't hurt a single resident, and it still gives the borough a lot more revenue. So I don't see how you could not vote yes for this personally. All right, well, you heard it. Mr. Vizcocho. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

So thank you for doing this, Mr. Gardner, because I've been trying to figure out how to help Kodiak with tax and stuff like that. But I think with this one, I will— you got my support.

Anyone else?

Okay, oh yeah, Mr. Gardner. I just want to thank Seema for all the help that, uh, her and I worked on this quite a bit, and, um, she's a, she's an awesome part of the organization that we have here, and I'm really happy to be working with all you guys, but Seema is a special treat to work with.

Mr. Mayor, would you like to set a date that we do an ordinance for introduction?

Yeah, we can put it on— consider it on the agenda setting meeting on Tuesday and put a date. Yeah. Yeah.

That will give us, yeah, a work session to look at it and— yep, yeah, 19th. Yeah, that seems appropriate. Perfect, because we send out personal property—. It is on. Thank you.

We send out personal property information on the 15th, and I'd love another letter to be going out to all of these people too. Thank you. Sooner, better.

Okay, that brings us to packet review for the November 5th meeting.

Awards and presentations. I just signed a proclamation supporting Operation Greenlight for Veterans. That's supporting veterans as they move from service to civilian life. Two public meetings. The first one, Ordinance No.

FY 2027-01A. Amending Ordinance Number FY 2027-01, Fiscal Year '27 Budget, by amending budgets and appropriations to account for various revenues that are over budget, providing for additional expenditures, and moving funds between projects. Madam Manager. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Uh, this ordinance presents the net changes for additional funding requests which occurred during the current fiscal year for items of circumstances not known or expected during the initial creation of the fiscal year '27 budget.

We have 9 requests. Would you like me to read through the— I read through those last week at some of your first meetings. Do you want me to read through those this week? We definitely will during a public hearing, and I'm happy to do it tonight if you'd like.

Okay, that makes my life easier. Thank you. And so this is something that we do. Um, we don't budget for projects, and so this is how we account for projects and move money around. So if there are questions, I'm happy to answer those.

Yeah. Any questions for Aimee?

Okay. Seeing none, moving on to the next public hearing item, Ordinance Number FY2027-10, Rezoning Cliff Point Estates Oceanfront Edition Number 1, Tract B and Tract C, and Cliff Point Estates Oceanfront Edition Number 3, Tract D, from RR2 to C Conservation. Aimee. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Planning and Zoning held a public hearing on this case, which was their 8th one of this fiscal year, at its regular meeting on September 16th.

The Commission voted 4-0 to forward a recommendation of approval to the Assembly. You can see by the picture of the little map in your packet what Tracts B, C, and D look like out there in Cliff Point. The rezone is to move them from RR-2 to Conservation. The Commission recommended approval of those requests based on the Conservation Land Use Designation of the Future Land Use Map. The rezone request is in the Public Necessity, Convenience, General Welfare, and Good Zoning Practice, and it's in compliance with the future land use map.

The large residential lots is a common type of use inside of that zone. These folks are looking for lots that are over 5 acres, and that was the easiest way to get them there.

And I—. Not related, but I just saw on Facebook that they sold more land out there. So this is good. They are moving forward. Are there any questions about that rezone?

Any questions?

All right. Thank you, Amy. New business that we will be looking at next week. The election of the Deputy Presiding Officer. Nova Javier.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the assembly. The code dictates that at the November meeting you elect a deputy presiding officer who will serve for a whole year. Um, and so what we're going to do is that next week the mayor will open the nominations. I will distribute, um, little sheets of paper, and we're going to collect those and then tally. It requires a majority to vote for or to elect the deputy presiding officer, and in case of a tie, the mayor can break that tie.

Okay, and most of the— so one of the responsibilities of the deputy presiding officer is that they attend the agenda setting and they coordinate and facilitate the evaluation of the manager and the clerk and any other duties that may be assigned to the deputy in the absence of the mayor. Okay, I'd be happy to answer any questions. Running meetings. Yes. Any questions for, uh, for Nova about the DPO?

Okay, thank you. Okay, we'll look for nominations next week.

Um, okay, uh, next is what we're really here for, uh, contract number FY 2027-03, the solid waste collection contract of the Waste Connections of Alaska Incorporated, doing business as Alaska Waste. Um, Manager Williams. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Um, this contract is a very large contract and not what our normal contracts are like. We've started this one almost 18 months out to be prepared for when our current solid waste contract, um, ends on June 30th, 2027.

This new contract will start on July 1st, 2027. Um, a little bit of history: back in 2020, going into 2021, um, that was my first project on when I was on the assembly, was a— the first amendment to the solid waste contract. In 2023, when I started my job as manager, we went on a year-long project for the second amendment to this solid waste contract. It did not pass. Um, it was very long and we decided instead of doing that second amendment, we would put all of those changes into the new contract that started on July 1st, 2027.

So there are some links that you have here, um, that you could link to and read the bid postings, the, um, code changes that we did that will take place on July 1st. I think we can summarize the code changes by, um, just saying we took a lot of the contract language out of the code and put the contract language back into the contract. So it's— the code is a lot more generalized. We worked with a solid waste contract committee that was made up of 3 assembly members throughout that whole process. Unfortunately for Mr. Smiley, he's the only one that remains on the assembly, um, Steve Ames and, um Bo Sedillo-Whiteside was on it.

Dave Johnson was on there on and off for a while. So we've had a lot of people work on it, but we have had some assembly members weighing in. When the contracts went out, we had a pretty good team review all of those, and there was one, so it wasn't really hard to figure out who was going to win. Kodiak's here tonight for specific questions. There are 80 pages in the packet about this contract.

The contract doesn't actually start until page 46. I think some of the main things that the community will focus on are the changes in price. There's a really good executive summary that our local representative wrote on page 79 and 80, which isn't the normal location of an executive summary, but it came in after, so it's kind of in chronological order in there. Um, the contract remains mostly the same as far as the services that we're getting, but I think that executive summary kind of explains some of the price, um, how the prices are going to go up. Um, Cody's here and he's dressed really well in his Halloween stuff back there, so if you have questions, um, for about specifics, we're happy to try to answer them.

This is a big one just because it's worth so much money over such a long period of time, although this contract is for 5 years instead of the last one that was for 7, so a little bit shorter time with the option to extend.

Okay, questions? Mr. Arndt. What page is that executive summary? 79. The very end.

79. Thank you. Mr. Smiley. I was on the committee for this, and the changes are hard to describe, but were driven in part by conflicts in the community that we had and definitions that seemed logical at the time but turned out to be problematic over time. We tried to straighten those out, um, and we had a good working relationship with Alaska Waste doing this.

I have to compliment them on how well they handled themselves in trying to move this forward. Also, Kodiak and Patricia Valerio were instrumental in making cogent changes, and particularly Patricia's ability to manipulate red print and blue print and black print in all those ways that she did was really helpful. And trying to clarify the changes and how they would ramify on things. Prices are up, but so is everything else in the world. That's not an unusual thing.

I think the important thing is to have a good, solid working relationship with this company, and I think we do, and I think this contract is going to be appropriate for that relationship. Thank you.

Mr. Arndt. For myself and for the public there, I just got this at 5 o'clock this afternoon when I got back, so I'm wondering From a 3,000-foot level, what are we looking at in increases on the basic rates?

Depending on what kind of service you get, anywhere between 15 to about 35, depending— and that's for if you have an 8-yard container that is getting picked up 6 times a week. So I put together a similarities comparison contrast thing with Patricia. Patricia was instrumental in like the original RFP development and the role of the project manager as we transitioned from this approach. So if the assembly would like to hear that, it will take about 5 minutes to go over that. I would like to hear it.

I'm fine with that. I probably would too. Okay. So there are several important similarities between the existing proposed agreements. First, Alaska Waste was the only qualified contractor that was interested.

We initially had two, then we quickly realized during our pre-proposal meeting that there is severe competition in that industry, and so they excluded themselves. So we had two parties that were interested, but only one continued through the process. I think that's an important clarification to share to the public as a whole.

Second, the basic service structure remains substantially the same. Residential roll cart collection collection, commercial dumpster services, residential and commercial roll-off services, and cardboard hauling, um, components of the agreement are all fundamentally the same. So there'll be no disruption or changes to services outside of the cost, which we'll get to in a second. Third, the contractor remains responsible for providing and maintaining the collection equipment and containers, managing the customer accounts, billing customers, and providing collection services Both agreements retain provisions addressing the emergency collection of services. Environmental compliance now will transition onto the contractor and the waste hauler.

Customer service, insurance identification, and contractor responsibility to maintain reliable operations all fall onto the waste hauler themselves. Finally, the proposed contract continues to recognize the importance of bear-resistant containers with a substantial substantial change being that now there is an actual Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee criteria that's outlined in this contract. That was guidance and support from our other stakeholders on this project, which were the ADF&G folks. So that IGBC will be a new development that'll be a little different than what we currently have, but the containers that we will be getting will be modified to meet that requirement. Now, major operational changes.

Um, there's significant changes that I think are worth bringing to the Assembly and the public's attention. Um, first is the residential self-haul and roll-off program. The proposed agreement that you have before you establishes a requirement for Alaska Waste to provide 24 public access residential roll-off containers and including 45 total hauls per week at no additional cost to the borough. Additional hauls above that threshold are billed to the borough. Historically, that's been the same.

The number has just been smaller. We had some negotiation in the RFP process as as opposed to the ITB process. And one thing we saw was we're being billed for 100% full capacity of containers, which is not an accurate assessment of what comes across the scale. So we increased our, um, free hauls per week, if you will, and those are our dump pad roll-offs that will come to landfill. The existing contract also provides residential roll-off service, but the new agreement establishes a more explicit container quantity and weekly haul commitment to the residents the customers in the community.

That was due to some transition of responsibilities and accountability, that the contractor will bear that responsibility no longer than the borough being kind of like the middle person between those agreements between the waste hauler and the customer. And that just aligns with best, best management practices. Under the proposed agreement, curbside bulky items is something that you'll see in there. It's a significant cost. It's an additional $30,000 per month or $360,000 annually, but it is not a requirement of the contract.

We just asked that that service be available to see if it could offset the cost that the staff in my department currently go out and do that work anyways. So it's not a requirement, but it's just something to be aware of, and it's in Exhibit A of your packet tonight. Okay, and the The other substantial change to this— this agreement allows commercial customers to supply their own containers subject to compatibility, safety, and borough requirements, which is a new change, but that was one that was requested by a lot of community members.

Item number 4 here, some major financial and contractual differences. The most significant contractual changes Madam Manager spoke to— we realigned the code stripped the contract language from the code, required it in the proposal to be in the contractor's contract. That makes it legally binding when you enter into a contract and keeps everything kind of consistent. And so we've— the last financial change to this contract was the March 2021 amendment. All the other amendments, from my understanding, had failed past that.

And so the contractor bared the burden of that financial CPI, PPI increase per the contract terms. So what you're going to see in your packet tonight is an adjustment basically that carries the CPI-U and the CPI-U index all the way through 2028 of what that looks like of a percentage-based 15 on up to— jump to that real quick— 15 to 37.6%. Change. Um, there's no change. Residential roll carts, 5% change.

Extra bag, 11.2% change. Senior discount, no change. 2-Yard, 20%. 3-Yard, 15.4%. 4-Yard, 17.9%.

6-Yard, 31.5%. And 8-yard, 37.6% change. And so, um, those adjustments are made to catch up from the 2021 adjustment to the 2027 implementation. And so that's what the contractor quantified to us. We went back and forth, negotiated the rates the best we could, and they supply the information that landed where we're at today.

Um, the— so, uh, the big change of cost in ownership too is these disposal fees, regulatory costs, governmental charges, um, mixed load fees, things like that are now all in the responsibility of the contractor. Currently, the way that that process works is flawed in my opinion, and a lot of people that have worked here a lot longer than I— the mixed load comes from Contractor XYZ, gets delivered to the landfill, landfill staff have to deem it a mixed load, they then bear the burden of sorting the load because that's part of our DEC compliance where we'll get hit with a notice of violation if we allow it to be be a mixed load or if it's got hazardous materials. And then we send a nominal fee to the, uh, contractor who may or may not pay it, and then the waste hauler just keeps bringing the trash. The transition in this proposal will actually be the contractor's responsibility to inspect the waste, deny the load, transfer the fees, process the fees. It all stays with the entity that manages the customer, which again aligns with best management practices that we've seen in other landfills and other contracts similarly across the state.

And then, um, the final, the final main changes, uh, contractually, because we didn't do an ITB, we were a little limited in what we could put into the requirements of a contract, but we were very strict in making sure it aligned with the expectations of the Solid Waste Contract Committee, our external stakeholders like ADF&G and the requirements outlined by ADEC. But with the proposed contract compared to the previous contract, there was detailed liquidated damages schedule in the previous contract. You won't find that in this new contract. There are protections there such as like 30-day compliance, corrective actions, and things like that that are enforceable by the owner. But no longer are the days that you can enforce liquidated damages on a services contract this way.

We, to the best of my recollection, I searched everywhere, I never saw that we ever did, so it was kind of a moot point. No longer is there a borough termination for convenience clause in there. That was one thing that we had to modify just to get people interested in bidding this. A lot of people weren't even— in most of our contracts, that's becoming a requirement. Reoccurring theme.

Material breach and written notice and a general 30-day cure are our provisions for default. In lieu of that, liquidated damages. And so there's still elements in there that we have mechanisms to lean into legal and get things corrected. From the contract administration standpoint, the previous contract was heavily the responsibility of like the ENF secretaries and things to manage that. We're pushing that back back onto the customer who manages the customer service accounts, or the waste hauler who manages the customer service accounts, as it should be.

It's their business, not our business to manage their business. But we're going to have audit rights, perform periodic audits, administrative dispute resolution, which would start with the manager and then get escalated as needed, and then an assembly appeal process. And so that would be like if the customer has an issue Currently, the customer goes out and they hire an attorney or they take it to court and it's between them and the waste hauler. There will be an actual appeal process where they can come before the Assembly, voice their concerns. We can manage it at a business level instead of having to go through that litigious process.

But that's it.

That's it. Mr. Arndt. Wait, I'm so sorry. I had Mr. Gardner. Okay.

No problem. Thank you. First of all, you guys did an awesome job. I know how much work went into this, and this has been a long process. I'm surprised at how little you managed to negotiate a raise for residential roll carts, and that's fantastic.

But was there no— is there no way to wiggle with them on the commercial rates? And can you Um, can you enlighten me as to why when I go from 2 yards to 4 yards, I drop about 5% and then start climbing back up in terms of the raise? Um, and, uh, you know, looking at this, I know we don't have a lot of 8-yard customers or whatever, but, you know, going up 43%, I don't care how much your business makes, that's gonna hurt.

Yes, so we did our best, I would like to believe, to negotiate costs, um, down, but ultimately the contractor set the cost and then they provided us some scenarios on how that works. There's a lot of things, uh, from the previous contract. For example, um, Madam Manager and I were discussing, by coincidence, the last review processes occurred in February. Well, fuel prices historically drop in February So then it's kind of just by happenstance that that's how it's worked. Um, in the scenarios provided to us, and I will be completely honest and transparent, I don't understand how they run their business because it doesn't make sense to me, um, personally.

But essentially, as they, as they explained it, is the more frequency that they can haul, the more money they can make. And based on the volume it's the same, essentially the same price to them, but they make money different ways, um, bringing it to the landfill. And we are one of the most expensive landfills. And then, uh, maintenance of all the different types of equipment is a little different, but that's essentially where we ended up saving the money on the, um, dumpster pads, the roll-offs there. That's getting— that's the residential savings.

And the commercial haulers are the ones that in our experience are the ones, kind of like some of the other comments tonight, are coming here and they're constantly the ones that are doing the mixed loads. They're constantly the ones that are having the issues, and the intent is to kind of correct that. Um, will it work? I don't know, but that's, that's their business. Well, again, thank you.

I know how much work you and Patricia did on this, and both of you, I mean, good job. I think it's pretty rough on the commercial end, but I mean, I know how much it costs to run fuel through a dump truck, so I get it. Mr. Arndt. Thank you.

I see the bulk item pickup says 3 times a week, and then it's a monthly charge of $30,000, and we don't do that. Right now. What we used to do years ago was it would be like the first week or second week in the month. They only did— it was not done 3 times a week. Yeah, you had to make the arrangements.

It's— that's an optional thing, um, completely. And we, we currently don't have bulky item pickup in our current contract. And so for, for what this is speaking to, so that's like dump pads, that's all of the things that our current maintenance department takes care of. And we ran the numbers. I did a presentation quite a few months back on that, but maintenance is spending somewhere in the $10,000 to $15,000 doing that per month anyway.

So it's substantially cheaper to keep that in-house and manage that work. And then we occasionally hire the service area contractors to do our end of season and preseason cleans when we have the people that abuse the dump pads. Currently Dark Lake has tons of trash and tons of timber and yard clippings, and so we're going to have the Road Service Area 1 contractor come and clean all that out. And no matter how we looked at it, it was always cheaper than the $360,000 per year. We did try to talk to them about a more reasonable rate for that so we could clear our maintenance people to do actual maintenance instead of cleaning up.

And they said it was because they would need to hire new employees and purchase new vehicles in order to be able to do that, so they were not willing to come down to a rate below that.

Thank you. Anyone else?

Okay, we'll be taking a look at this again, um, and voting on it next week. I would ask, as you— you'll probably look at it more this week. If you do have questions in advance, please let us know. We're happy to answer. The way that it works is if we get questions from a single assembly member, when we answer, we'll send it out to everyone so that everyone has that same information.

And then if we have a list of questions that we've answered during the week, we'll put that— give that to the clerk, and she can put it in supplemental materials so that the public has access to those questions as well, but that's only for stuff that comes in after the packet has been published and before Thursday at noon. Mr. Smiley. Um, a lot of this was taking stuff out of code where we had all of the contractual requirements in code. Is there a way to summarize what we took out quickly with numbers or something? I don't have any numbers prepared for that, but the, the way that the code was set up before was excessively specific to the contract that we had and not the general rules of, of disposal.

So I was just thinking that the assembly would probably want to see how much we changed code. We could go back to those packets and Pull out the red line. If you could find Patricia's printouts of that stuff. I'm sure we can find that. That might be useful.

Thank you. Sure. There is a link to the new code in your packet tonight, so you can see the new code. And if you wanted to look at the old code versus the new code, you could. You'll see it's a lot shorter.

But we'll see if we can find that redlined version.

Okay. Next contract we'll be looking at next week, contract number FY2027-17, change order number 1 and 2. 2, KFRC BAS and sensor replacement with Long Technologies. Manager Williams. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

The borough awarded Contract 27-17 on August 10th. Since that time, the contractor has ordered materials needed for the project and coordinated with KIB for a project schedule. During a site visit, they were informed of the need for confined space training, adding additional 8 hours of labor to the project. During the site visit, it was also noted that mounting brackets would be needed after initially not anticipating the need for them. Um, there's two change orders tonight.

Change order one is for the cost of the mounting brackets, and due to the sensor design, only one manufacturer is able to provide the materials. That is for $4,657.94, which is 19% of the original contract amount. And the second change order is for the additional 8 hours of labor that went towards confined space training. That is a cost of $1,680. Or 6.9% of the original contract.

The original contract was $24,067.73.

The total new contract cost will be $30,445.67.

Um, that is a total increase of 26.33% over the original contract, and borough code requires the change orders of that magnitude be approved by the borough assembly, which is why those are in front of you tonight. Mr. Gardner.

I just kind of want to make a note here because it, it makes me mad. Um, change order 2, it's, it's only $1,680, but, uh, I've done confined space training for OSHA and you can do it in about an hour to an hour and a half, but, uh, charging is 8 hours. I think that's a dirty trick and I just wanted to say it.

I don't think anyone's going to argue. No. Yeah, yeah. To be clear, I own that. That's my problem.

There was poor communication between staff and the contractor, and we typically don't dictate the work of others. And so the confined space requirements between them and their operational requirements within their organization, however, and we're kind of playing general contractor for these, these types of contracts. And so when they're using our equipment and our staff are doing like the safety and oversight, that's where the requirement came in.

Anyone else? Okay, all right.

And third contract, FY2027-39, Landfill After Hours Management Services with Wildlife Safety Services. Manager Williams. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. The borough is continuing to face requirements from the Alaska Department of Conservation— Environmental Conservation at the landfill. Part of our notice of violation requirements was to obtain non-operational hours, so all the hours when the staff wasn't out there.

Hazing protection by a professional hazing organization. And so we put out an RFP on September 11th with a due date of October 2nd. We had two firms that put in proposals. The evaluation committee consisted of four borough staff members. The proposals along with a blank rubric sheet were provided to evaluators.

Once the results were compiled, the Wildlife Safety Services LLC had the highest cumulative average score.

Um, we were told 60 days, that's 8.57 weeks. It's kind of a weird, you know, not divisible by 7 number. Um, there's 114 hours a week that are quote unquote non-operational. Um, there's a couple more than that, but we didn't require services between the hours of 5 and 6 because from our observation no bears were coming out until well after 6 PM. Um, that would make the total of this contract $263,784.60, which was cheaper than the other option.

On Tuesday, we had a meeting with ADEC and the Department of Fish and Game, and they have taken this requirement away. So we do not need this contract anymore. Thumbs up. However, due to Alaska procurement rules, when we bid something like this, and if we were like, okay, we don't need this, let's cancel all bids. If we're required to bid like something like this in the spring, which is something they have told us we might need to do, we would have to substantially change it in order to be, um, stay within procurement rules.

So we would like to not cancel it. We're hoping that you will vote it down next week so that if we have to rebid this, we can use the same, um, process that we did this time. However, I will say in that meeting we talked about The exact notice of violation language calls for professional hazing organization. I think we're falling away from the need of that. I think DEC is realizing that it doesn't need to be that.

Right now, Fish and Game is able to go out there. They've been out there a few nights during non-operational hours, just from like 7 to 11. We haven't had any bears in the landfill for— today would be day 9. Um, which is— you should clap, that's amazing. Um, and as I mentioned earlier, that's that perimeter fence relocation that Cody came up with.

We actually proposed that months ago and it was turned down, and it took a few months of, of, you know, time going by and people becoming less emotional. And then when I proposed the exact same thing with the exact same map that Cody proposed months ago, it was accepted. So like an interesting relationship, but the important part is this is not a requirement. So that's really good. But because of the way state procurement rules work and how much we would have to substantially change, we'd like to go through the process and just have the Assembly vote it down next week.

And we can tell the people that it, you know, so they're not waiting anymore, that our plan is to vote no on that. There is a— the D.C. and Fish and Game are still concerned about what's going to happen in the spring. Ring, and we're— I still owe them an update, and we're talking about that notice of violation. I think we've met all the marks and we should be out of violation. You know, like, good job, Kodiak Island Borough.

But DC wants to keep us in violation until the end of next summer, and I don't— we're going to still talk about that. So the— so yay. Please vote no. Is that clear? Any questions on that?

Okay. FY2027-08, resolution of the Kodiak Island Borough Assembly and the Kodiak Council rescinding Borough Resolution Number FY 2007-38 and City Resolution 07-17, officially dissolving the Joint Kodiak Fisheries Advisory Committee. Madam Clerk. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the assembly. Uh, the advisory— this joint advisory committee was originally, uh, put together in 2007, and the last meeting held was in December of 2011.

2013. It was— we had a contractual agreement with the Chamber of Commerce, and they staffed and provided administrative support to this group, and that contract was terminated in 2014. Since the committee has not met since, or 13 years— for 13 years now, I think we should take it off our books We— I talked to the city of Kodiak and they also adopted a similar resolution, so it's before you for you to adopt so that we don't have to maintain rosters and keep updating it year after year. Thank you. Any questions?

Yeah, all right, great. Thank you, Nova. One item that I'm going to ask to put on the agenda for next week, you have a legal opinion in front of you. I'm going to ask the— with the clerk, the lawyer, to prepare a public version of it, and I would like the Assembly to vote on releasing a public version of that opinion during the regular meeting next week.

I'm not sure how long it would take for her to draft a public opinion or a public version. Um, we just want to make sure that she gets it done by Monday at 3:30 PM before I release the package, and we just need at least one assembly member to agree, um, to add it to the agenda for next week. Okay. Okay, thank you. So we'll, uh, so you'll get that and take a look at it, and then we'll vote on releasing that to to the public next week.

All right. Going back to the work session agenda, we are at Clerk's Comments. Thank you. I'm going to keep it really short. We're still doing absentee voting here in the assembly chambers.

We're going to have it tomorrow from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and the last day is on Monday from 10:00 a.m. 4 PM, and then Tuesday is Election Day, and the precincts will be open from 7 AM until 8 PM. So I encourage everyone to go out and vote on Tuesday. And I just want to remind the assembly that once you're done with this, please give them back to me, or if you're planning to take it home, please make sure that the— there's a confidentiality in place. Not to distribute it or make sure it gets returned to me. Thank you.

I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have. Any questions for Nova?

Okay. All right. We're ready. Okay. Assembly members' comments.

We'll start at the end with Mr. Sweeney. I'm just excited to be here for my first meeting, to be a part of the process and the team. Lots of reading, lots of catching up, so I appreciate your patience and again, just excited to be here. Welcome. Mr. Arndt.

Thank you. A few things.

First off, the process— I'm going to read it off so the public hears it too. Assemblymember research/records request. During a work session or a meeting, any 2 or more or 4 members of the Assembly may request research projects/records requests from staff. Results of these requests will be distributed to the entire Assembly. So this is the first meeting since we were sworn in and members last Monday of the Assembly.

So at this time, I'd like a second supporter, but I'd— I am requesting the attorney's opinions, two phases, attorney's opinions for the last 60 days and the attorney billings for those. I'd like to see those because I understand there's been some information that's related to this and not just this. One that we have here tonight. And then I would like to, um, then it's kind of a second phase, is get the legal opinions and the billings for the rest of the last year, last 12 months. So 2 months right now, 10 months following.

I realize take a little bit of time. Um, there's gonna basically— there's 4 new members on the assembly is what we'll have, and I think it, it helps bring everyone else that's new up to date on what has gone on. So it makes everybody on— basically knowledgeable on the same plane. So at this time, I'd like to request a second. Okay.

And Mark raised his hand too, so no problem. With them. So then second, I'm looking for support, and it also takes the, the mayor's support too, and that is to looking at wanting to introduce for first reading at the meeting, which would be the November the November 5th regular meeting is an ordinance change that would change it from all borough contracts to basically— it would awarded competitive process. If you— if it's an awarded competitive process that comes to the assembly, it doesn't keep you off of the assembly on there if you've got a non-competitive. Originally, I voted for the— for the, um, what was it, 2013-2014 ballot initiative, because there was severe corruption within the borough in regards to a professional service contracts, multiple purchase orders at the $25,000 level that were big.

That's what was originally, uh, there. It got a lot more convoluted than what I realized on there, but I'd like to, to clean that process up. And what it involves is, is requires one more person to 2 of us to initiate that and the mayor to agree to put it on the, on the agenda. Because what it would be, what I'd be, what I am requesting is first reading on the 5th, November 5th, and a special meeting with a public hearing on November 12th is what requesting for this. And so I'm asking for that tonight to let us publicly discuss that and, and let the public weigh in on it, because we have somebody that was legally elected, the election has been certified, and being told that they can't sit.

So this would help clean up that situation. So that's my request on there. So I guess the first thing would be, is there a second to my request? Mark just raised his hand. I second it.

So that's my request, and if, if you agree to it, then we'll get that in the packet for Monday.

So your thoughts, Mr. Mayor? Um, I think, uh, do you have, do you have the ordinance change language here? For us to look at? No, staff doesn't want to spend the time on it, and I can't blame them, on there without having some direction from the assembly. First off, I have to have a second, which I've got, and then it calls for the mayor to then allow this to go on the agenda and then the special meeting and public hearing.

I think I will address that in my mayor's comments here in a minute. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. That is all I have at this time.

All right. Thank you. Mr. Vizcocho. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just want to say before the month ends, I just want to say happy Filipino American Historical Month that has been happening.

I know I missed the 4 meetings to greet the field lamb community, but I just want to say thank you to all the field lamb communities, not only in Kodiak but throughout Alaska. Thank you for what you do for the field lamb. Also, football's done, basketball season happening now. There's basketball games going on right now at the middle schools. I ask everyone in the community to go out and support the Kodiak Grizzlies.

They still got games tomorrow and Saturday. And since it's wintertime, please be careful out there, especially when you're driving out to the base in the morning. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Smiley?

No comment. All right. Mr. Gardner? Another long night. Mr. Sweeney, you'll find out these are, at least with this version of the borough, the way it's been at least for my last year, the work sessions are when everything really gets done, and a lot of the regular meetings you just breeze through.

Um, in regards to the topic that my colleague Mr. Arndt brought up, I almost seconded you. I wanted to see what other support there was. I almost seconded you, and I somewhat support this idea because it gives it a chance to go to public hearing, not because I necessarily support the end goal. I struggled with this topic a lot today, and for the public listening, it's in regards to Jeremy Williamson's election and the circumstances regarding it. Um, I like Mr. Williamson.

I think he'd be a great addition to the assembly. However, the job up here isn't about what I like. The job up here is about following the code. And, and doing what's best for the community. Um, I'm not sure how I feel about that situation.

I'm really not. And the one question I was asking myself today as I was really tearing into the language surrounding the code was the contract that AIM Maintenance has is with the service district. And the service district is part of the borough, or is the contract with the borough to accompany the service district? And I couldn't answer that to myself. I don't, I don't know how I feel about the situation.

I could be swayed in either direction, but currently as it sits, it's a, it's a tricky situation. But, um, that being said, uh Everybody have a great night.

Thank you. Mayor's comments before we, before we adjourn. I had a good conversation with John Oberst, the Alaska Aerospace CEO, yesterday. We're talking about education connections. There are some educational aerospace education programs and organizations that want to come to Kodiak and do some, and do some work here with our students, which I think is really cool.

And there is an aerospace facility in Japan on a remote rural island in Japan that is interested in perhaps doing some student or teacher exchange programs with us here. So that sounds, that sounds really cool. This morning, Sam Hurt, the new Kodiak College director, is in He's in town today looking at homes. And so he had a little public get-together, public meet and greet. And so I was there to meet him and their family will get here in January.

And I believe Dr. Hertz's wife will be taking over the auditorium director position, which is really kind of cool. There was a really interesting article that just came out today from Grist, G-R-I-S-T. They do reporting on science and technology. Their main story today was about Kodiak and aerospace and putting it into a national and global context. I think the headline said something like, "The Cold War is coming to Kodiak," something like that.

So it was really kind of interesting. Let's see. Yes, don't forget to vote. Have a safe Halloween. A lot of cool things things happening.

We will look at a public version of the legal opinion next week. And then in response to Mr. Arndt's request, we should talk about that code too. Like Mr. Gardner, I think it has taken up a lot of headspace over the past couple of weeks. And the Assembly absolutely has authority to reconsider borough policy, right? If our members believe that our conflict of interest code is too broad or that competitively bid contracts should be treated differently or, you know, some other amendment is warranted, those are 100% absolute legitimate policy questions for us to consider.

But I think to consider through the normal legislative process. What I do not think is that we should change the rules in the middle of a pending qualification matter in order to affect the outcome for one particular person. And I think that there is a fairness issue for the electorate and for potential candidates also that goes beyond the individual.

The rules that are there in that code, 2.35.015, they were in place before anyone filed for office.

Candidates and potential candidates were entitled to rely on those rules when deciding whether to run, whether to maintain borough contracts, whether they were willing to make the choice that service on the assembly might require. We cannot know whether someone else with a borough employment or a contractual relationship decided not to run because they understood that the existing code would create an incompatibility. We also cannot know whether another potential candidate made business or personal decisions in reliance on that rule. And so that is the one reason I think that changing the qualification rule after the election during the qualification period is problematic. It would mean that— it would mean that one candidate ran under one set of rules, won the election, and then received the benefit of a different set of rules after the votes were counted, while anyone who relied on the original rule never had the opportunity to make that same choice.

And to me, that's an election integrity issue. That is not an argument that the ordinance shouldn't be changed. It's an— I think it's an argument for changing it prospectively. Um, if we, or if the assembly concludes that the current rule is poor policy, we can amend it for future candidates and future elections when everyone knows the rules before deciding whether to seek office. Um, I think that's the fairest approach.

To, uh, to everyone, and especially to the electorate. Um, if the Assembly wants to take a broader view of the, uh, the ordinance, again, I'm obviously very open to that discussion, but I believe that that review should occur deliberately with, uh, with normal public notice, with legal analysis if needed. And with any change, again, structured prospectively rather than as an intervention in a matter that we're already— that's already underway.

So, so for that same reason, I am reluctant. I'm not entirely unconvinced. I'm always open to good arguments, but I'm reluctant to use an expedited agenda process to introduce an ordinance on November 5th. Whose immediate purpose or effect would be to change the rules governing a current qualification issue. We have a legislative process, and I think on a matter this significant, we should use that process.

So that's my decision on that. And with that, our meeting is adjourned. Thank you, everyone.