Denali Borough: September 23, 2026 Special Assembly Meeting, Joint Work Session, and Regular Planning Commission Mee

That people want, kind of entertain any public input, and then we can go ahead to discuss as an assembly.

Okay, well, thanks. I will start it off. Just background: the Bear Creek Fire road repair project is underway in the June Creek, primarily the June Creek subdivision north of Healy, about 20 miles. So a contract was awarded by the assembly And what we've found, which is somewhat natural, is as the project has continued, they've identified some additional needs. So one need, Change Order Number 1, we, the borough, identified, and we'll get into that, and have already awarded that.

As the cumulative total of the change orders with the 3 additional that are before you, the cumulative total would bring that total change order above $50,000. And so we thought it best to go ahead and bring it to the assembly for action to award, you know, up to those additional amounts. By, you know, by way of additional background, the majority of the project, including the base bid and the alternates, which was more gravel for the roads that were heavily impacted by firefighting traffic, It was culvert, a culvert, and geocloth. Well, the base bid was additional fabric or additional base material and a culvert. The additive alternates that we identified in coordination with the residents were additional culverts, geocloth, and then this nice-to-have thing would be screening down some of the material from pit run to 3-inch minus.

Those 3 options were awarded. And we found out from the state that they were going to cover both the base bid, which that scope of work was developed by the state, and the additive alternatives. So where we're at today is that those— the base bid and alternates we know are covered by the state. We had an appropriation ordinance, Ordinance 26-11, And we're looking to basically spend down those borough, those already appropriated borough funds, you know, looking for the award from the assembly. So to the change orders specifically, the first one was a change order that addressed, uh, Kobe Road improvements.

It's kind of a carryover from the Clearfire Road repair. It will be—. The total amount of that change order was $32,044. That's going to provide 3-inch minus on the segment of Kobe Road from the Parks Highway to Rochester Way, which is about the first half mile or so.

That we've awarded that and we're paying for that out of a previous appropriation from the Clear Fire Road Repair Project. That'll close out that project.

Oh, no worries. Okay, so moving to the 3 before the assembly for action tonight: change order 2, 3, and 4. I'll kind of summarize what these different change orders will do. Change order number 2 is a substantial change order at $100,274.

That change order will add 1,200 cubic yards of material to Eisenhower Way. For those who aren't familiar, Washington Way turns off of the Parks Highway, kind of winds its way back into the June Creek subdivision, and currently tees into Eisenhower Way. I think it's Washington Drive and Eisenhower Way. The, um, so the purpose— what we found is that they basically ran out of pit run material And this change order would allow them to keep, maintain grade from the transition from Washington Way to Eisenhower and continue on to Hoover, which were the 3 roads that the state authorized this project to improve. Why do we need this?

What, you know, kind of, I think a natural question is what happened? And I think the analogy I would share, and we have Solid Waste Operations Manager Scott Wright here who also lives this area. But what I would say is that we, you know, awarded a scope of work, and it was a volume of gravel that we can picture a rectangle, and it was so many, you know, so many inches of material along that road corridor. Well, the road goes up and down and up and down and things like that. And so what this change order would do is smooth out the top of that rectangle that was awarded and bring it into a nice alignment.

And it was identified by the contractor, supported by the residents, and so look for your support on that. Change Order 2— 3, excuse me, would be improvements to Culkin Drive or Culkin Way, which departs the Bear Creek rest area, kind of wraps around. There's a little state kind of managed day-use area there. And it kind of ends in a cul-de-sac, and there was a lot of activity. There are water tanks based there during firefighting response.

So Change Order Number 3 would make some improvements, kind of bring up grade by 6 inches around that curve to that, that clearing where there was a lot of staging. Finally, Change Order 4 would be one additional culvert that's been identified after the improvements. Additional ponding has occurred, which is natural. You know, grade came up, and where water wasn't pooling before, it is pooling. And ditching, you know, there's not really a good way to ditch, and so they've identified this need for an additional culvert.

So the total of these 3 change orders is $130,710.

Borough Ordinance 26-11 approved by the assembly. Appropriated $178,000, so we do have the appropriation available. This is basically— we're seeking that support and approval to award these change orders to the, the contract. Happy to answer questions, provide more clarification. Thank you for that.

I think I'll open it up for public comment if there is any, and then entertain a motion for action. But any public comment tonight?

Sure, I, I've been on Washington Road where they're doing that, and, uh, it is a difficult job and far more difficult because we've—. We're almost having pretty high record rain. We're almost having flooding in this town right now, and, uh, it definitely needs the other culvert because Actually, Don went and looked at it. There's a major water flow when these rains happen, trying to cross, you know, through that road. And then, uh, looking at it, every yard of gravel that gets put on it, it's going to make it last longer.

It, it—. From the last time I've been on that road was probably 15 years ago, and it's really sunk all throughout there from the wind blowing, taking loose up. But That, that's the bottleneck, that, that road, that first one.

Thank you.

Um, I'll just say we did drive on that road and we're happy to see it, a lot of gravel, but due to the rain too, there's like, whoa, that rain, you know, just flows right over it. So perhaps the culvert and the extra gravel is going to fix this. I'm happy for those people.

I will say that Eisenhower, when they're talking about the center of that road, for the last 2 or 3 years, this is 6 inches below the ditches. The road becomes the ditch. After the fire this year, the water came down, there was a river. I mean, the ditches were dry, but it was running down the river, and it came through down around in through my barnyard driveway and out across my driveway or my yard. Man, it was literally standing water, running water at the base of my step.

I had to wear my waders to do my chores.

Thank you for, for comments. And then, uh, yeah, I'd entertain, uh an assembly motion here to, uh, approve or postpone? Make a motion to approve Resolution 26-17. Second.

Okay, so by Mr. Alexander to approve and seconded. Discussion? Good question. I have, uh, happy with the work of the contractor so far, so trust them to execute these change orders as accomplished what we, what we want them to do. I do.

Yep. Yeah, very, we're very happy with the work so far. They've been great to work with. They are working with independently with a number of landowners in the area, and I've heard just really positive feedback. I did, not to get into too many details, but I did compare the pricing of these change orders to kind of the per-unit pricing of the original award, and it's just right in line.

So this is very much just, you know, they've been very open with us. Like, we're going to— they're going to do the best they can with the materials they have, and that's what they're doing. So is that 1,200 additional yards screened? It's not, it's pit run. Worth clarifying here, in the original scope of work, as we wrote it, we subtract for the 3-inch minus screening, we subtracted that amount from the total.

So it was not 3-inch minus, 3, no, a quantity of 3-inch minus in addition to what we had identified was the, you know, kind of the basic need. It was subtracted from that total and we screened it down. And so that did really literally reduce the quantity of material that they had available to put out on the road. So this is going to just be pit run bringing up that, you know, basically the whole segment of Eisenhower that's constructed. Up by on average about a foot to 6 inches as you make your way down the road.

Not to branch off and get lost in the weeds here, but I just hope that everybody remembers these numbers when we're talking about our own road standards. We're talking $83.33 per yard per pit run to get it placed on there. So when we're talking about road standards, getting something built here is insanely expensive. You know, like last time I bought pit run down in Wasilla, it was $5 a yard at the pit. $5 A yard.

Um, obviously it's probably more than that now. Um, but you know, in other places, you know, $83 a yard would be insane. Um, so when we're talking about road standards, please keep this in mind, people. It is incredibly expensive to build roads here.

I was looking at the street map on the website and Bear Creek Road doesn't appear on that. Is it, is it a named road?

I don't think so, no. Area, the Creek subdivision, I guess, if you will, right? Yeah, well, and it's— it was the Bear Creek Fire, which impacted both the June Creek subdivision to the south and the Bear Creek subdivision to the north, which is adjacent to Bear Creek but has very few constructed roads in it. Bear Creek subdivision does, right? Because, you know, it says, whereas the Bear Creek Road, right there in the beginning, So I was looking for the Bear Creek Road.

Oh, thanks. Yep, that's a good catch. We need to— um, I was like, where's Bear Creek Road? Yeah, thank you.

That wasn't just me. We say roads in the Bear Creek subdivision. Uh, I think it would be— would say roads in the June Creek subdivision, uh, were damaged during the Bear Creek Fire response.

Is what we'd like it to read there. Okay, anybody want to make that motion to, to change? I'd like to make a motion to modify the resolution as previously stated. Move by Mr. Alexander to, uh, amend the language to reflect the road in the June Creek subdivision around Under Creek Road. Any discussion?

You want to oppose to amending? Okay, brings us back to the main motion to approve as amended now Resolution 26-17. There's no discussion. Ask for a roll call vote on approval.

Walt Warner? Yes. Mark Johnson? Yes. Dominic Nelly?

Yes. David Alexander? Yes. Jeremy Stanfield? Yes.

Jared Zimmerman? Yes. Unanimous. Resolution's approved.

Everybody, and thanks for bringing that to us here tonight so we have time to get that done before they go.

Well, that brings us to our joint work session. Thanks again for planning commission for joining us. And first up on our joint work session agenda, there's the Minnesota Housing Partnership update. I was gonna do a quick intro, um, if I can, for those listening online. I'm Stephanie Poor, Community Development Director, and we entered into a technical assistance agreement with MHP, or Minnesota Housing Partnership, last fall and have been working on a housing needs assessment.

Our engagement will continue with MHP to help us implement some of the strategies that are in the assessment. So we're looking at least through the end of next calendar year, so the end of 2027. And with us tonight, we have Jenny Jones from MHP, and we have Erica Brown. And Erica's gonna be giving us an update on the housing needs assessment. So we did community engagement throughout the course of the past year with some strong engagement.

Tied with our comprehensive economic development strategy for open houses in each of our main communities in the borough, and then a lot of analysis of data and trying to find data. You know, it's hard to find data for our boroughs sometimes, like what is the price of gravel delivered? So finding kind of that, that data for the housing, you know, side of things. And so out of that, we have a 115-page housing needs assessment. I'm not going to ask by show of hands who's read it because Erika is gonna provide you a high-level summary of that.

So she's gonna provide a summary of the key takeaways from the housing needs assessment and then look at what is the spectrum of strategies that we could look at exploring to help address some of our housing challenges, and then provide a little bit more information about, again, that continuing engagement with MHP. And then we were hoping that our presiding officer could help facilitate a discussion. Erika has some questions at the end that can help the borough, explore how the borough and our community partners might work together to solve some of our housing challenges. So I'll hand it over to you, uh, here. Sounds good.

Is the presentation being shared? Not quite yet. I'm really happy to be here. I appreciate you guys welcoming us. Um, I'm actually not from Minnesota.

I live in Illinois, Southern Illinois. Jen does live in Minnesota, but we are a nationwide nonprofit technical assistance provider. And I think I'll get into it a little bit later in the conversation, but our funding does come through HUD. Our contract with the borough is through HUD's Rural Capacity Building Program, and our purpose is primarily trying to work with communities to help them solve their own housing issues by building their capacity and hopefully helping get some funding and some development actually going. So, excited for the rest of the work that we're going to be doing together.

The needs assessment was just the first part. Excited to have that done, still open for public comment through the end of September on the borough's website. So I think we can go ahead and get started. Next slide, please.

So I think this is a really important place to start. As you can see, the permanent population is not rapidly growing here in Denali. In fact, It has generally been stable to declining. So when we talk about a housing shortage, we're not saying Denali suddenly has hundreds of homes that they need to build because a bunch of new residents are arriving. Instead, we're really asking a different question.

If the population is declining, why are residents and employers still telling us that housing is so hard to find? That question really leads into the rest of the assessment. Next slide.

One of the most important findings from the assessment is the difference between the total housing stock that you guys have and the housing that's actually serving your year-round community. So the census identifies about 1,300 housing units within the borough. Of those, 565 are occupied year— ground. You'll see that, um, 57% of units or 736 units are classified by the Census as vacant, but I want to clarify what that term means because it's, it's not what you might think it is. Um, it doesn't mean that there's 736 homes that are sitting empty, um, and available to rent or to buy.

Nearly 600 of those, as you can see in the yellow bar here, are actually classified as seasonal, recreational, or occasional use homes. So, um, that is generally your tourism sector, primarily whether that's second homes or Airbnbs, etc. So while Denali seems to have a sufficient number of physical housing units, if you're looking at that 1301 number, only a portion of that housing stock is serving the year-round population, and an even smaller portion is actually available on the conventional housing market at any given time. Next slide. Okay.

The second thing we learned is that there really isn't just one housing market. It's really two overlapping systems. One, like I said, serves permanent residents, families, year-round workers, retirees, people who want to put down roots. Those households generally need stable housing that works year-round for them. The other serves the seasonal workforce.

Employers are already housing roughly 1,950 employees, but that housing looks very different from those occupied housing units that are on the conventional market. It includes dormitories, bunkhouses, RVs, trailers, converted lodging, cabins, and there are a few number of conventional homes and apartments that folks are using, obviously, for seasonal employment.

The employer housing here is absolutely essential to the economy. Most, uh, but most of it does not become housing that a permanent household can actually have access to, right? Importantly, employers are telling us right now that even after providing all of those units, they still don't have enough housing. Next slide.

Based on an employer survey from a couple of years ago, as well as stakeholder interviews we've done for the assessment, we documented a need for at least 150 additional housing opportunities. Roughly 70 of those are associated with permanent year-round employees, and roughly 80 of those are seasonal workforce spaces, units, or FEDs. And I want to emphasize the word at least. This isn't a forecast of total housing borough demand by any— total borough housing demand by any means. It's a documented unmet need that employers identified today.

It also does not include planned projects that have been discussed but haven't actually been built yet, such as the 30 units that the National Park Service plans to build in Denali, for example. Separately, we also have a pool of existing occupied homes. That's that up to 120 number that may need substantial improvement, particularly plumbing and other basic systems. So really it's important to think about not just new construction as only one part of the housing need, but also Rehab and winterization and weatherization is also a huge part of that. Next slide, please.

So again, like, this is what I was saying. The other side of the housing collision is really that rehab side and using the existing housing that's already have. Some of Denali's housing need isn't about producing more units, about— it's about making existing homes safer. More efficient, and more functional year-round. Plumbing is the most visible example, I think.

Census data indicate that 42% of units lack complete plumbing facilities. I want to be careful with that number because I know a dry cabin isn't automatically considered inadequate housing. I know for some residents, especially folks we talk to, that's really an intentional choice that they're making. Also sometimes not an intentional choice. What we heard more broadly though were issues around heating costs, especially this last year, energy efficiency, moisture, winterization, and accessibility as folks age, as well as the condition of older homes.

So preservation absolutely has to be part of the strategy alongside new construction, and in some cases, depending on the situation, improving an existing home is actually much more achievable and affordable than building new, especially here. Next slide, please.

So, I'm sure you guys all know— excuse me— affordability is part of the challenge, but availability is equally fundamental either. I'm sorry. According to the census, less than 2% of the borough's entire housing stock was identified as available for rent or sale in the most recent data that we looked at. That's an extraordinarily thin housing market, extraordinarily thin. So the affordability pressure is also not evenly, not evenly distributed.

So you have the availability and then you have the affordability piece. Lower income renters are the group experiencing the most cost burden, which is defined for Housing Prosperity Needs to Find as paying more than 30% of an individual, of a household's gross monthly income on housing. So if you're paying more than 30%, that's considered unaffordable, generally speaking, in the affordable housing world.

Among renter households earning less than 50%, about 68% of those folks are paying more than that 30% threshold on their housing. Owners are a little bit different. Nearly 60% own their home without a mortgage, so that does make that relatively affordable if you're able to be someone in that situation who's likely established here long-term. But it doesn't necessarily help the person who's really trying to enter that homeownership market today, especially folks who are moving here. So there are really 2 questions.

One, can I afford the housing that is here? And two, can I find any housing anyway at all, period? In Denali, both matter equally, I think. This question, does that 30% of income include Utilities like heat, electricity. Yep.

So that all should include utilities. And then for— it's not just rent, but also for your mortgage if you have one, your pity payment, your taxes, which you guys don't have here, and insurance as well. So that's all of that. And then the next slide, which we'll talk about, is also focusing on transportation because that's a whole nother thing here. Yeah.

Thank you for that. Next slide. Okay. So, like I said, housing costs really shouldn't be looked at in isolation, especially here where transportation is such a high cost. So there's something called the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index that has data.

That's where this number comes from, that the average Denali household spends about 24% of their income on housing. But 29% on transportation. So folks are paying more than transportation than they are on housing in a lot of situations. So that's more than $25,000 per year in estimated transportation costs for the average household with nearly 3 vehicles per household and about at least 35,000 miles traveled annually. So that is a huge piece of the pie there.

So combined housing and transportation costs consume about 53% of a household's income. And the affordability mark, like I said, for housing, that's the 30% of income. Housing and transportation combined should be no more than 35% of your income. And you guys are at 53. And then depending on if you're lower income, that grows obviously more than 53%.

So that matters for our housing strategies because a home that looks affordable on paper may not be actually affordable if that requires significant driving and vehicle costs. It also reinforces why location, infrastructure, and access matter when we're talking about where housing should go in the borough. Next slide.

When we use the word attainable or affordable, we want to connect it to what households here can actually afford. Okay? So rather than leaving that as a vague term, I wanted to put that into some numbers for you. On the left-hand side here, you can see for a median renter household, which the Census says earns around $57,500 per year, 30% of their gross income translates to about $1,440 per month. So that would be for their— all their housing costs, housing and utilities.

And remember that, that 42% of renter households actually earn less than $50,000 per year. So many renters actually need something that's even below that $1,440 level. For ownership, we're using that same basic idea here. What purchase price— really, what purchase price can a household reasonably support once we account for mortgage costs and other costs of owning a home? So the— for the median renter income household, that's around $175,000.

A purchase price, which as you saw on the last slide, the average home, um, value here is around $275,000. So there's a big difference there. Looking overall at median, um, household income, which is on the right-hand side, that's for all households, not just renters. Um, affordable housing costs may be up to around $2,000 a month. So a little bit more.

Um, the point here isn't that every home should cost exactly these amounts. But it's really to point to the gap between what local households can support financially and then what it costs to produce housing here, which is significantly more. And we'll come back to that production cost problem here in a few minutes. Next slide.

When we looked at the existing housing stock and what residents and employers told us they needed, one of the clearest gaps here was between really the two ends of the market. So Denali has very basic housing options on one end, cabins, some of those dry, and shared employee housing being at one end. And then there are conventional single-family homes, often higher cost, at the other end. What's much harder to find here is smaller homes, duplexes, townhomes, and other relatively modest housing that can work for a couple, can work for a family, a year-round worker who doesn't need or can't afford a larger conventional home. So that's what we're calling missing middle housing here.

If we refer to that later, that's essentially what that means. It's affordable for folks who are kind of in the middle of that income spectrum, and it also looks a little bit different than a small or a very large home, both in size and in type. The takeaway isn't that Denali needs one, needs more of just one particular housing type. It's that there really needs to be more runs. On the housing ladder for all folks at different price points and different housing types.

Next slide.

So when we put all of that together, we don't end up, like I said, with one housing need and one production target in terms of how many units you need. We end up with 5 different pressures. There's preservation and adequacy, so that's— it means improving housing that already exists. There's year-round affordability, particularly for those lower-income households like renters. There's the missing middle and family housing gap.

There's the seasonal workforce housing, which is really largely employer-driven need. And then there's a smaller opportunity to bring some seasonal or short-term housing stock back into year-round use where owners are willing and the housing is appropriate for year-round use. Each of those problems requires a different response, and that's why we don't want the conversation to simply be Well, how many units does Denali need? Really, it's really which housing problems are we trying to solve and what tool fits each one. Next slide.

Before moving into the strategies that are in the document, I want to spend a minute on something that came through very strongly in all of our community engagement, whether it's surveys, open houses, or stakeholder interviews. When we ask folks why they choose to live here, the answers were primarily not about housing. People talked about the landscape and outdoor, outdoor lifestyle, privacy, the rural way of life, and the strength of the community here. And that matters because people also express concern about addressing housing in a way that change, that changes the things they value about living here. They do not want things to change in terms of the things they value about living here.

What we heard, though, wasn't simply a resistance to change. There was a strong theme around independence and property rights, but also around being able to stay here, raise a family here, age here, have the workers and services necessary here for a functioning community. So as we developed the strategies, an important question became, how can Denali create more housing opportunity without losing the qualities that make people want to live here in the first place. Those two goals doesn't— don't necessarily have to be in conflict. Next slide.

That leads to a broader way of thinking about the purpose of this housing work. Housing itself isn't really the end goal, which maybe sounds a little weird, but the goal is helping year-round workers Families and older residents remain in the community. It's supporting the employers and services that the borough depends on. It's giving people more choices than either a very basic cabin or a high-cost home. And it's doing that in the ways that fits the rural character and differences among Denali's communities, even within the borough.

So when we talk about housing strategies from this point forward, that's the lens that we're using. Ask yourself, does this help Denali remain a viable place to live and work? Year-round. Next slide.

We also asked the residents about their openness to different kinds of housing strategies. I want to be precise about these numbers. Um, these are not necessarily percentages of people saying, yes, absolutely, I strongly support this. This also does combine folks who said that they were comfortable with an option and those who were maybe on the fence about the option, but were open to it and at least open to the conversation. With that definition, about 80% were open to seasonal work— more seasonal workforce housing, 79% to attached housing such as duplexes and townhomes, 78% to some form of public investment in housing from the borough, as well as in infrastructure, and 74% were open to smaller lot sizes and smaller homes.

That is useful because it suggests there's room to consider a broad range of housing approaches. Than what necessarily just exists today. The community input also came with an important qualification. People want housing solutions that respond to real housing needs without changing Denali's rural character, as I said before. So I would interpret these numbers as an openness to that conversation rather than a mandate for any particular policy or thing that the borough and its partners need to do.

Next slide, please.

So at this point, there's an obvious question. If employers need housing, residents need housing, and people are open to different housing types, why isn't the private market simply producing more of it? A large part of that answer is development economics. Through our interviews, we heard local construction estimates in the range of $300 to $350 per square foot. For just the building itself, and that's only part of the cost.

That's after all of the infrastructure and everything. So before a house goes up, a site might need road access, as you guys know, it might need to be cleared, might need to have power meters installed. Depending on the situation, individuals also— either, I should say, depending on the situation, a well and septic system may need to be installed before, if it's for a community well or a septic system. Or obviously individual wells and septic systems. And on raw land, especially in Denali, those costs can be really substantial.

Then there is the financing challenge. In a small market like Denali, there's relatively few comparable sales, and the completed property, so the completed home, might not actually appraise for what it costs to build it because it's really expensive to build it. So a lender generally can't finance its way around this gap. They're not going to be able to lend the total amount it costs because they're not going to see that come back to them in the end. So this is where earlier affordability discussion becomes really important.

What a local household can reasonably afford and what it costs to produce a new home are very— two very different numbers. And that's the gap that many of the strategies, including in the report, are ultimately trying to address is that funding gap. Next slide. So based on all these findings, the housing needs assessment identifies a number of individual strategies, quite a, quite a number of them if you've read it. But for this presentation, I've grouped them into 4 broader areas.

So that includes first, creating more housing where new housing is needed. Second, making better use of housing that already exists. Third, improving existing housing, while also looking for ways to make building and repair easier broadly. And fourth, building and financing partnerships and local capacity that's needed to carry this work forward. So these are not mutually exclusive, and they are presented as these 4 things that the borough— and they're not presented as things that the borough needs to do immediately.

Think of them as 4 toolboxes. Different housing problems are gonna require different combinations of these tools, as I mentioned more. Next slide, please.

All right, so this first area is the most obvious. There are places where Tenali simply needs additional housing. But new housing does not have to mean one large development or one developer coming in and solving the whole problem. One opportunity is through borough land. The borough could potentially prepare land so that it's more development ready.

Particularly by addressing infrastructure and site conditions before the lots are sold, leased, or otherwise made available. That doesn't necessarily mean that the borough builds the homes. One potential role is to help get land to the point where a homeowner, employer, or private developer can realistically take that next step in, in building the homes, doing that vertical construction. Employers are another piece of this. Larger employers are already providing substantial amounts of employee housing.

But there may be opportunities for employers to partner together, particularly smaller employers that each have housing needs that aren't large enough to support a project independently. We know a lot of businesses have 1 or 2 units or beds that they need. They don't necessarily need to put together a 12 or a 20-unit project, nor do they have the capacity to. And we don't want to also over— overlook homeowner-led development, which I know is pretty popular here in Denali. You guys do already have a strong culture of people building homes for themselves.

So standardizing cold climate plans, looking into modular or panelized construction options, and appropriate financing could potentially make this pathway easier for folks who are wanting to pursue that. The larger point here is that no new housing doesn't require one development model. And there are definitely several pathways that we're interested in testing moving forward. Next slide.

The second area recognizes that not every additional housing opportunity requires you to build something new. So there may, may be opportunities to make better use of some of the existing housing that already exists. One example is voluntary lease to locals type of program where an owner who's interested in moving a seasonal or short-term unit into a year-round market could receive an incentive to do so. I want to emphasize that we're not suggesting that every short-term rental or seasonal home should become a long-term rental. Many, uh, one— many of those wouldn't be appropriate, and many owners we know would not be interested.

The question is whether there's a smaller group here where a voluntary program could unlock additional year-round housing. There are also relatively simple information challenges we may be able to solve. In a market this small, connecting someone who has an available unit with a worker looking for housing can make a really big difference. I know it works informally on Facebook here, um, but thinking about a centralized listing or better employment coordination could really help for this matter, especially for folks who are moving here from outside of town. And finally, collecting better overnight accommodation registration data would also give the borough a clearer picture of what that part of the housing market actually looks like.

So this strategy is really about asking, before we build another unit, are there opportunities to make an existing one more easy to find or available? Next slide.

The third area brings us back to the existing housing stock. Earlier we talked about plumbing, weatherization, energy costs, moisture accessibility, winterization. Those findings point toward opportunities for rehab and repair programs here. But there's another constraint that we've heard repeatedly, and that's that the same limited pool of contractors here and tradespeople are needed to build both new housing and repair the housing that's already here and do additions for people and, and, and. So there is a limited pool of folks who are able to do this work here.

So simply creating a funding program doesn't necessarily solve the problem if there's not enough capacity to do so, which is why you'll see where build local trades capacity, things like that are included in the strategies. Next slide.

Okay. So the fourth area is actually how any of this stuff gets done, right? So most housing projects are going to require some combination of resources, also known as a capital stack. That could include state or federal funding. It could include employer or private capital.

And, um, and programs like MHP's Rural Capacity Building Program. Where I'm not sure if you guys know this or not, but we are able to provide up to $50,000 in financial assistance for pre-development work associated with housing for the borough. Say that number again. $50,000. And then potentially borough resources where you guys decide that there's an appropriate public role to do so.

Borough resources don't necessarily mean having to own or operate housing. Land and infrastructure are tools in this situation. And the Land Management Capital Fund might also be relevant to, um, this— solving the situation in some circumstances. Revolving financing is also another option that we can be exploring. And partnerships are equally important, so that could mean bringing in development expertise, grant writing capacity on the, um, whether it's with MHP or with the Alaska Municipal League, which you guys already have a partnership with.

We could also be bringing in financing partners, mission-driven developers for specific projects. So we've intentionally listed several possible borough roles here. You can see at the bottom: land contributor, convener, facilitator, funder, or partner. And those roles can look really different based on the project that you're doing. So, from project to project.

The needs assessment is not recommending that the borough become a developer or become a landlord. It's identifying places where the borough may be able to help remove a barrier, bring partners together, or help a viable project move forward. Next slide.

So one thing that's very important to me and folks at MHP is that we're not just handing over a needs assessment and leaving the borough with a long list of to-dos, understanding you guys have very limited capacity to move them forward. So MHP will continue, as Stephanie mentioned, to work with the borough through 2027 and maybe beyond, and we're going to do that through, like I said, our Rural Capacity Building Program, which is No cost to you guys. It's funded through the federal government. And we're actually able to provide that $50,000. And really that assistance can look very different depending on what rises to the top in terms of what strategies you guys want to work on.

So if the priority is a development opportunity, we can help with site planning, developer engagement, pre-development work, obtaining construction bids. If funding is the barrier, we can help identify grant opportunities. We can work with you to develop grant applications and work through financial models. So looking at development budgets and running numbers for you, we can also help design programs around rehab, weatherization, homeownership education. We can also help with more administrative stuff like developing procedures and guidelines needed to administer those programs.

And again, some of the financial assistance can support specialized pre-development work such as engineering. Infrastructure analysis, environmental work, designs, and specifications. And it can be more broad than that. Just really just depends on what you guys need specifically. So the next step doesn't have to be, how does the borough staff implement all of this?

A better question is, what does the borough broadly want to advance first? And what outside capacity can we bring in to help, whether that's in-house or with a contractor? Next slide.

So I talked a lot here, but I'm going to stop there because I think the most useful thing obviously is to hear from you guys. We're obviously not asking you to make decisions, the work session, but what would be helpful to understand is really where the assessment aligns with what you're seeing, if there's something missing. So first, as you look at the finding, what feels consistent with your experience in Denali and where do you think we haven't captured something important? Second, what, where, sorry, when you think about different housing pressures we've described, which ones feel the most important to begin working on for you? That could be year-round housing, seasonal workforce housing, improving existing homes, something else.

And then the question that's particularly important as we move forward for implementation is, what role do you think makes sense for the borough in all of this? We've talked about several possibilities for that. That might be contributing land, in many partners, facilitating projects, providing some form of funding, or partnering with others. And those roles are not mutually exclusive, and they don't have to be the same for every project, like I said. So what we're hoping to understand tonight, at least from my perspective, is where you see the borough really fitting into this work and what additional information you would need before moving any of these ideas that I presented forward.

And I'm stuck there.

Wow. Just that.

That's it. Yeah. Well, to tackle kind of the 3, 3 general topics, kind of one, one at a time, but to each of them, which of these findings match what you see? Can you help me define a complete kitchen? Yes, I believe it's both.

I think I'll probably look this back up. Is it census defined? It is both like a sink and a cooking stove and a refrigerator. So I think it's like all of those things. So like, do you have to be able to make a turkey for it to be a complete kitchen or it's just a range top?

We'll have to check on it. Yeah, I'll have to double check on that for you. I don't have it off the top of my head, but it's definitely not like just a like, like one-burner camping stove. Um, yeah, I know you, you identified that, um, a lot of the Airbnb overnight rental style units are just— were never built and intended to host a Thanksgiving dinner. So absolutely, same with the water.

I'm, um, you know, I know there's a lot of hauled water, there's different versions of, you know, the tote on top of the fridge gravity bed versus plumbed system with pumps, but still limited capacity versus, you know, there's a bunch of in-betweens there. So, absolutely. And one thing I didn't mention, if you remember about when I was talking about the up to 120 homes, that is of the existing, like, vacant recreational housing that I was talking about. And those are only counting the, like, conventional homes that are included in that. So we didn't count like RVs or campsites or hotel rooms or anything like that.

We looked at the overnight accommodation registration data and identified those units that are seasonal that may be able to be year-round. Can you say that number again? 100— Up to 120. That number surprise anybody, or is that in line with kind of what we thought coming into this.

Number of units? Yeah, needed.

And that there are about a, about 120 units that could support that, that are overnight rentals.

Well, as far as my input, I, I think you guys nailed it from my perspective as far as painting that picture that kind of resonates from what I have seen over the last 15 years for sure.

Definitely highlighted that it's a multifaceted approach. I think from my personal perspective, if I was going to prioritize, I would push towards year-round housing first. And as far as the role for the borough, I think The low-hanging fruit there is contribution of land, but I could see us, you know, in any number of those, but into year-round housing.

As far as what I didn't see, or I guess just my— maybe the reason why I throw year-round housing up towards the top is it's a lot of the seasonal businesses are used to kind of fending for themselves. They provide for their employees, the worth needs they make, the war housing that they put up, and they have those resources or prioritize those resources to take care of themselves. But as you mentioned, it's all summer. The infrastructure is there, you know, kind of bare bones just to get it through, and that's vastly different than what the year-round housing So those are just, I guess, my quick two cents on it.

Now, um, one of the problems in the area I live in, when a unit, year-round housing unit, becomes available, there is a limited number of people with enough money to buy it at a higher price and turn it into a short-term room and make a lot of money off And I think some kind of maybe even a deed restriction to prevent that from happening on certain subdivisions might be a good idea. Another thing that would help cost in some subdivisions with the borough, if they're not only supply the land, if they want to put in a community water system that's metered for anybody. Can go there and get potable water by putting a credit card in. The landowners in the subdivision would get a special card that would allow them water either free or at a reduced price. Um, that's something— that's one way the borough could afford to help.

Another is, uh, expandable designs for houses. Start with a small house but with a design that allows you to build as the family rooms. So you weren't looking for different places to move to all the time, that the house actually was built so that it could go two directions, you know, out each side or whatever. And those things would help development, but it would require some kinds of restrictions on the developing of especially borough property by the borough.

I was just going to say all of those are things that— the metered well, I, I would say maybe is not in the assessment, but those other options are things that we have done before at MHP and/or are in the assessment, and we hope to work on with the borough, especially the, the idea of covenants or deed restrictions to support year-round housing options if it's going to be on borough land. We have talked about that as a possibility, but again, just a possibility.

I was just going to flag that your report actually puts together of those units, those single-family homes and, you know, overnight rental conversions from housing. They've actually broken it down to owners that hold one such unit or 2 to 5 such units or 6+ units. And, and, you know, one of the questions I had for the Assembly and Planning Commission is, you know, at what point, you know, what's the difference between someone who might have a second house that they rent out on these platforms versus how many of those you have and you're kind of a, you're doing something different. You're, you're running a business with single-family homes and that might, you know, if the borough was going to gently lean on these operators, then I don't know where, where would we put the line. Hey, from my perspective, a single overnight, if you want to build something, that's fine, but why should you be able to take something off the market that doesn't need and turn it into something that isn't necessarily good?

I think one thing I'd add, and I think we've talked about it yesterday, is like, that based on those, the pricing, like those homeowners who put that extra unit or ADU on, it's for, it's for a financial need as well as, you know, they want to, there's a decision there, but there's the financial piece too. So I just, that came up and I think that's worth balancing between where it's more of a business versus this is just folks, you know, paying down these really high—. Okay, it's pretty well established that in the short-term rental market that 5 units or more, one person cannot manage that. You have to start having people come help. And I think that's even pushing it.

And that's, that's pretty much a— those people who are doing that understand that that's changes at 5 units, changes. Depends how many kids you have, you know, short-term rental, that's not really— yeah, well, I said you have to do the long-term. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. How many, how many years are you going to get away with that?

I guess just on that, to continue talking about short-term rentals and just the impact on homeowner prices, where to buy a home, you're not only competing with other people looking to own a home, but you're looking at the, the commercial value and like the, the, the profit and income potential against that. So just driving up the, so the overall cost of ownership. Going through the roof. Absolutely. Well, I guess one overall comment I had, I didn't see much distinguishing kind of as a borough-wide plan, but with like 4 distinct communities, it seemed really relevant to me, kind of the Healy and McKinley Village area.

But I think the situation in Anderson is very different now, and in Cantwell maybe a little bit, a little bit in between, but certainly different. So to have a borough-wide plan or to think about, you know, what we, like, what the borough's role would be could be pretty different across the board. Yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry, you were saying? No, I see you have the report there.

I did not include it because I didn't want to be super overwhelming, but in the report itself, there are specific strategies for each community. Based on what we heard from them and what we identified as their needs. Yeah, Anderson was a very interesting one, and it was jumping off to something I wanted to mention. Um, you had your, uh, calculation of housing and transportation, and I wonder if you had that broken down by community. Probably not off the top of your head, but, uh, Google it for you real quick.

Yeah, but that's, that's a findable— okay, that's, that's something I'm curious about. Also, you know, I mentioned Anderson. They stand out in this assessment as the one that has a decent amount of housing but is desperately in need of skilled workers to maintain and fix and upgrade. You know, I saw that was one of the things you identified that maybe the borough or maybe the Chamber of Commerce or maybe volunteers could be involved with is just knowing where to hire someone to help with the water problem or the plumbing problem. Well, we actually met earlier today with Eliza, the new director from the— oh, yes, and we talked about that.

I apologize. And we did talk a little bit about that. Both— I know I mentioned in the presentation, like, a centralized listing platform for folks looking for homes and folks wanting to rent homes. But I think a very similar thing is, is identified within the report related to identifying skilled tradespeople and projects. And we did talk to a little bit about, you know, if you are unable to find somebody here locally, the idea of bundling a few projects to be able to attract someone who might not be local, because it's a little bit hard to get somebody to come up to just do one or two things.

So having more communication about what the needs are and what the demand is for some of that stuff, I think would be really helpful too. But I don't know. Yeah, we just kind of use like the, the well company that came up from Wasilla and was in Healy all summer long drilling wells is like, as far as bundling, like what it's going to mean if there was a home renovation need, or if there was, you know, some specific need where the company would come up from Anchorage and just kind of be here for the summer working on houses across the borough. Absolutely something that the chamber can also help facilitate and help with the communication, I think.

Yeah, from being in this business for a long time. It's not coming up from 230 miles from Anchorage or 120 miles from Fairbanks. It's having somebody local that is skilled enough to do that. And there's plenty of labor-type people, but there aren't very many really skilled technicians in the trades in this area because there's not enough demand to keep them busy. And we have to solve that problem someplace.

I'll say anecdotally, I, uh, I talked to a local electrician and he said, yeah, he'd definitely be very interested in working with me, but he is very, very busy and encouraged me to seriously look at other quotes, other people. And, uh, you know, I think that's very good that he's busy.

Also, it'd be nice to hire— yeah, yeah, we don't have a lot of learning opportunities. I have— you have?

Yeah, yeah, I'll be there.

So, uh, I do want to focus on— kind of had 3, 3 questions at hand. Um, the first one was kind of what in the needs assessment kind of resonates with us. I think we've heard some good things on that. It's not up in front of me anymore, but if I remember, it is kind of in terms of kind of the needs identified in terms of kind of the higher priorities, like which ones float to the— are important and want to float to the top. So any discussion on that specific point?

Yeah, I'll follow Mr. Stainfield's chat that, you know, these large businesses, these commercial operators, these the largest employers in our area, um, have a very strong incentive to prepare some housing. And I'm on board with the borough maybe providing some land, maybe entertaining some ideas of how they could use— but I, I think I would, I would want them to put up the money and, you know, do the work. And, you know, we can talk about a lot of ways to help them with that, but I would be more interested in the year-round employees bringing families in, staying long term. You know, I don't want Healy to turn into a, uh, place where people stay for a week while they work at a plant and then go back to where they actually live. I want them to move here and stick around for a while.

Let's say, um, in terms of which which priorities to tackle first. I think, I think you had phrased as using existing stock better was the bucket, and that to me seems like there's the shortest— there's a shortest distance from where we are now to getting there. Like, the houses exist in many cases, the, the roads, the power, maybe the well, it already exists. So if there's ways for us to access that existing housing or improve it That's, that's like our quickest pathway. And, you know, it sounds like there's, there's a number of different ways we could do that.

You know, folks have been talking about short-term rentals, and maybe there's ways that we can encourage some of that to be opened up. Similarly, um, I know that there's a lot of, um, properties that I would consider like truly vacant. Um, you know, there might not be houses on them right now, and they're not vacant livable structures, but properties with driveways, with power, that, you know, there's like an absentee landowner essentially who doesn't even live in the borough. And I don't know if there's ways that we can incentivize or provide some other encouragement for those types of properties to also become available. But I think Working, looking at what we've got first.

And using it, trying to access it better seems quickest to me because, you know, we think about the borough, we've been thinking about trying to make land available and absolutely we should do that. But man, there's a long road to go, including building roads and getting power in there and, you know, all the other things that you talked about being hurdles, which aren't insurmountable. Which we should definitely look at. But, um, the lower-hanging fruit to me seems like that, um, improving the way that we use, sustain properties and housing.

One of the easiest ways to do that is with a tax break here and there, but we don't have taxes, we don't have property tax, so we can't give a break in that. So we have to look at a different way of doing it, and what that is, I'm not sure. The plan mentions a lot the borough's ongoing GIS project. Are we imagining that that will help us identify the vacant landowners in the area of such a state that holds just these— those spots? Potentially.

Speaks a lot of One, we have to get that platform up to speed. You know, we're working on it. It's a work in progress, but it's a lot of investigative work as well. You know, as we don't have property taxes, you literally are going parcel by parcel, owner by owner. So we would definitely need to look at that.

I mean, yes, it is something that we could definitely utilize. And I think how I'm seeing it on that front is like less of it provides information to the borough. It's more of a marketplace facilitator so that me as the neighbor of that vacant lot, I can more easily, rather than calling up Trina, who has experience and can help navigate the recorder's office, like, I can just go and information is more available. And I think that's kind of how we see it as like a low-hanging fruit. If we can get that technology there, it's a tool that's available to everybody, borough included.

There is incentive on my part to make that happen a little bit quicker because the calls are coming in more and more. It's me turning into an education piece of how to utilize the recorder's office. In fact, we could put that product out and go, go for it, find it. You know, that, that help, that resource. Now, do you, do you get folks asking about a specific lot?

And then do you get folks just generally curious about What's out there? Both. Yeah. Okay. And, and again, and to even add to that list, it's, is there a place that we have where it's all in one place?

Do you guys have an ongoing list of people that you bring together, that buyer, you know, that seller and that buyer to the same place? So that definitely is something worth looking into. Absolutely. There's, there's a lot close to where I live that the guy hasn't been there for over 30 years. I used to know his address, right?

Right. So he's not there anymore, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And, you know, it's just sitting there.

You know, if there was some way of contacting him, he might be willing to sell it for sure. He's too old to move back here. I've actually had some folks inquire about, can, can you print me out a big map? Can I look at the big community map so that I can drive around and see this vacant lot or that vacant lot, and then they've got the list and then they go through the recorder's office. So there is a lot more activity happening than I think we know of.

I'm not sure exactly how productive that is or successful that's been. It's a, it's a hard call because you can find that owner and potentially buy that, and then you're right back to can they afford to put something on it? So it keeps circling back to some of those same questions. I would agree that, or kind of on your point of like, where is that the shortest distance? But where there are vacant lots in areas with developed roads, like kind of to me, like higher priority for development and you lead to higher density housing.

Sure, like those vacant lots, if those vacant lots become populated, it's, you know, erode that rural lifestyle a little bit if you've been used to sitting next to a vacant lot for 30 years. No, I've sat there longer than that. He hasn't been there since. There's a difference there. Yeah, but because we know, I mean, the cost, the cost of roads and, and all those other things, but to encourage development, you know, in more affordable areas, like the places where that stuff already, that stuff already exists, it's another avenue.

So your report had a lot of, uh, this is a little change of subject, um, a lot of, uh, cold climate housing build templates, some, you know, just citing some truss builders and prefab manufactured housing builders. That's something that seems like a pretty low-hanging fruit is if somebody wanted to put an accessory unit on their house next to their garage or something that they could just— I don't know that they'd want to come into the borough office. I don't know that we would want to take that on, but some central place to say, hey, there's a smart way to do this and You don't really have to design it yourself. There's templates, and you just have a semi-truck drop off a single-bedroom studio with a little sweat equity. So there is a place in Fairbanks that will do this?

There's a few. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cold weather. Yeah, but I mean, they've been doing this for a long time.

I mean, they, they'll answer a lot of questions. They also have online free seminars at lunch that are available year-round, stuff like that.

I was just gonna say, um, I think like especially the ADU idea that you were talking about, uh, we actually also talked about at the chamber meeting earlier, um, the idea of like maybe a tiny home situation, um, but basically allowing folks who already own their homes but might want to create an option for an additional unit for somebody in the community to be able to rent. I think that's very doable, especially if you have, uh, builders who are ready to do that, like, all day long. And if they have enough people who are interested, then they definitely can establish themselves in the community and make that available. Um, so I think that's a, it's a good idea. There's a reason it's in the report.

But, um, yeah, I think that is one option that is not talking about building a brand new stick-built home on raw land. That could be a lot closer to a shorter-term solution than a longer one. So we, we did a subdivision in Fairbanks. That's a condominium subdivision where the people own individually a small lot, but in the community they own a large parcel. And instead of like having their RVs at their house, they have a fenced-in area that they can leave their boats and RVs and stuff in so that it's not cluttering up their view and everybody else's.

So it took us 2 and a half years to get the permission and the ordinance written in Fairfax in order to do that in the borough there. So it, you know, we could do some kind of an ordinance like that first, and then it opens up another possibility for a developer to come in and, and do that kind of thing.

I think it's a good way to— that, that rural lifestyle, like boats, toys, snow machines, and like all that stuff that's important to people that want to be here in the outdoors, but it conflicts with smaller attached units and, and whatever that is. And especially in kind of that starter home category, like it's hard to get that all at once. So that subdivision also has a community water system So one well for 15 watts instead of 15 pumps, that kind of thing. Do you have a community septic there, or— No, each house is on 1 acre, so they could each have separate, um, septic system. One small drawback is that, um, when you were talking about tiny homes and things like that, I do know there was a couple of burn parcels where they actually ordered the little cabin from— I think it's Palmer or Wasilla, I don't want to advertise for them— but, um, they actually bought the little cabin already, kit cabin, all ready to go, and they brought it up and put it up.

So those are definitely doable. Yeah, it's definitely an option. Um, and I think it really just depends on what the end user wants to do with that property, and, you know, But I, there was one, one thing I wanted to, to note. I appreciated you bringing up the expandable home option. That's something that we've worked on with developers in Minnesota, and it's really nice because you don't have the money necessarily to build the home or purchase the home that is size you would want eventually, but you might be able to get into a starter or smaller space and do that.

Definitely something that we could look into as well. But I, yeah, I think all of these options that are not traditional development are more viable just based on looking at the cost for traditional development, separate and apart from the infrastructure and like servicing the lots themselves. So I think if you are thinking about looking at other options that could be more shorter shorter term, it would be worth identifying some possible partners who do some of this stuff already, especially maybe if it's in Fairbanks, for example. In terms of kind of borough, borough role, like what, what, what do we feel, you know, capable of, or where we prioritize our, our time and resources, or what are things we want to do that we can't do?

I think we pawn it all off on the chain of commerce.

Land is big. That is a big one. So I think we could— if we could find a way of getting our land entitlements conveyed to us, that would help a lot. Maybe friends in the legislature could push some buttons and help that out. I don't know, anybody's going to Juno, that's one of the things I'd look for.

And, and Mr. Sheldon, don't you?

Um, you know, we, when we're talking about the, uh, the Lake Night subdivision, we spend a lot of time talking about how expensive the roads are. Um, I saw what might be a passing reference in here of just, I mean, the transportation cost where I wonder if some of the high transportation costs some people report is living down some sketchy roads. Maybe they feel like they need something that can navigate that, but that's really the only place I saw in this, in this report where road quality, road type was the bottleneck. Am I reading that right?

You know, I think, yes, so I would say that for new construction, it's definitely going to be a very large bottleneck set, like, in part, not just constructing the roads, but also figuring out a way to maintain them that's affordable. And I know you guys have talked a lot about that road maintenance and the role of the borough and, you know, such, but, um, yeah, I mean, I think the real bottleneck with the road situation is the cost of each of them. Um, and so I was excited to hear about the subdivision conversation. Um, you know, we've been looking a lot at the Lake Knight subdivision and what those costs might look like. And comparing that to a situation where the road cost could be significantly less feels a lot more tenable.

Not that they would be cheaper, but they would be not the same. And so that's what I would say. There's 4 to 7 lots depending on how you look at them in that subdivision that can be built without building roads. Yeah, a developer could build those, get access to those first, and use some of the money obtained from that and phase build another 15 lots with Phase 1 up to completing it on Phase 4 off of the profits that it made with the first— our first development part of it. I've looked at that a lot.

If I were younger, I would be pushing to do that.

Your report spent some time on the lot next to the school and the community center and talking about sort of building up some employee housing for, you know, clinic, school type of stuff. Um, you know, I was wondering if you could expand on that. Is that just a central location? Is that—. I think it's a central location.

Um, I will also say, you know, we did do a stakeholder interview with the previous superintendent. Um, we haven't yet met with the new one, but, um, speaking about just how difficult it is to find housing for teachers and thinking about that location being really prime for something like that, um, in part it is in the report because there are also passive funds to support housing development, not just there, but, um, for professional housing through the Alaska Finance Housing Corporation, through their Rural Professional Housing Program. And thinking about having partners like the school district on an existing piece of land that it— that is already has site control from a partner, um, is really exciting for that. And also thinking about um, other grant opportunities that could be opened up if you're talking about having funding for local workforce. So I think the idea that it's centrally located, that there could be partners who are already involved with that piece of land that would be interested in doing something, um, that all feels a little bit more doable in a shorter amount of time than than a larger subdivision development or anything like that.

So that was highlighted in the report, and I think it's definitely something, you know, depending on if you guys are interested in us moving forward to having those conversations that I see as not low-hanging fruit, but maybe middle-hanging fruit, and something that we, you know, have experience doing similar types of things like this, especially going after grants from the state finance agency to support something like this. So, you mentioned teachers, I'm imagining the professions that might usually have the grant opportunities, maybe preschool, maybe medical. Yes, maybe troopers, fire, first responders type of stuff. So really any of those type of options are very attractive to funders. So I think definitely considering something like that.

Would be suitable. Definitely anything in the medical field as well, like you said. And I know you guys, you know, you already have— Stop, Prop Doc, yeah, that you have that program to try to attract folks to the community to provide those services. So I think something like that makes a lot of sense. But, and also you could consider constructing something like a duplex or fourplex where maybe one unit is for the school, one unit for the first responders or fire folks, um, one for, you know, medical clinic, something like that.

Doesn't have to necessarily be just one partner, um, but a lot of things you could think about depending on who would want to be involved, who might have capital to contribute. And who would really benefit from housing there and for the communities. Yes. Yeah, I think that's a big one for me in terms of like what's appropriate for us. And like, we have money and we have— someday we'll have land, but, um, pretty limited in terms of to deal with rental issues and what people are doing with on private property.

Like, that's a long, long ways away from where we, where we sit now. But like throwing money had a problem, if there was a good path forward. So in terms of like, what would we like to see from you guys, is like, oh, it's like, are we going to be the landlords or is the school going to be the landlords? And stuff like that. And it's like, to have all those discussions, but to kind of move through this, like, okay, we're going to try and, you know, offer, you know, rent-controlled housing to, um, public employees or people that serve the community and kind of qualify.

Like, what do we, what do we need to know in terms of like, yeah, we can get it paid for, but from long-term management of that. Like, what does that management structure look like, and how can we, how can we outsource that so that, um, yeah, the mayor's, the mayor's not going knocking on somebody's door, someone be quiet looking for the rents. Imagine that's the first. Yeah, yeah, no, I hear you. That would absolutely be part of the development, like, um, process is figuring those things out.

In addition to the capital, we've got to figure out the long-term process and maintenance of that. So whether that's any one of those partners that could take that role on, who maybe already offers some tickets with employee housing, that could be as appropriate for them, but definitely worth, you know, exploring that.

I think the last thing I kind of was wondering is, you know, I don't know that I would want to spend all of my time on employee housing, big complexes for summer seasonal tourism. But I think it might be appropriate to, uh, imagine there are some borough landholdings that are far away from any real viable short-term use. I think Slate Creek, where it's kind of not that far from town but not really in the middle of things, you could imagine brainstorming with some of the larger groups to see if they'd even be interested in, you know, if there was free land, but they have to build the road and then, you know, install a housing unit. I know your survey was very clear that folks are not thrilled with having that housing complex in their neighborhood. They maybe would prefer it in someone else's neighborhood or further away.

So I wonder if we got lots of land where —follow that. Yeah, that's also something, um, depending on who the employer is, you know, it might not necessarily work for like coal mine employees who make a lot of— a lot more money than some other employees. Um, but for example, again, the State Housing Finance Agency does have programs that help offset the cost of development and also help reduce the cost for folks who would be renting, um, if they are sort of income qualified, and that doesn't mean low income. It does mean working and just cannot afford the regular market rent. So if that's something where there is a larger piece of land and it's suitable and would, um, you know, you're competing against other projects for these funds across the state.

So it needs to, like, be competitive. We could help identify pieces of parcel or parcels that would be more competitive in a rural application like that. Again, maybe more suitable where it's not right next to a bunch of existing homes or something like that. But that's a lot of what we do is we help, you know, identify those parcels, identify the funding sources, find the partners who would be able to say, We absolutely have employees who would meet this income threshold who we would like to see in this apartment. And then we kind of move forward with that.

And so that's definitely something I hope we can identify, especially with some of those larger employers who probably do have more access to resources to contribute to something like that. Yeah, so it's definitely on the table in terms of things that we're capable of helping you guys think.

Well, I got that property. We have— oh yeah, go ahead. Getting back to the, like, the lower hanging fruit with bringing, you know, maybe taking some of those Airbnbs that are— given that we have no property tax and are limited, but you in your presentation alluded to, you know, different kinds of strategies that we might— and, and I'm just trying to like, what kind of strategies? I, I, I can't imagine. So a couple of things, and this kind of came up through some of the community like engagement open houses that we did, but folks were like, um, I know people who maybe don't want the hassle of having a lot of, um, different visitors rather than one longer-term tenant.

And maybe they just need a little bit more education on what the difference in, like, cost and cost both for them in running the Airbnb and then how much they can get in return. Basically more education around, is this a right— is this the right fit for you to consider moving away from short-term rental market? Is this something more year-round? There are also programs. In other parts of the state, under both parts of the country where, like, the municipal partner or the county, what have you, would be able to provide an incentive for— and it's basically an incentive to the Airbnb operator to transition to long-term or year-round rental.

That might be a one-time thing and— like a cash payment in exchange for commitment to do that for a certain amount of years.

And I have also seen— there are a couple of platforms like companies that do this type of thing that help basically like maybe the borough would work with that company to set up an incentive program and that company would be the one to manage the enforcement of those longer-term rentals to manage the that exchange for like an incentive cash payment rather than the borough getting in the business of running a program like that because it could be more difficult and more time-consuming to administer. So you don't have to necessarily do that on your own, but yeah, those are—. And there are places, you know, that have done this successfully. Absolutely. Yeah, I think it also— there also generally needs to be I think a broader, like, campaign around— you do this because it helps your community, you know.

It's not just— it's hard for people to make that decision into it. Well, yeah, I mean, if you want that in your community, yeah, um, and you want to have places where people who, who work in your community can live, you know, I think that can be really helpful. Um, it's, it's definitely part of a bigger picture. But it's not going to be every single person who wants to sign up to do that, obviously. But there are some folks who might want to not deal with the hassle of that, and they're on the fence, and just a little— you might get to kick them over.

Exactly. So that's what we're hoping a little bit. There are, um, what kind of like cash incentive, like amounts, amounts to doing that? Yeah, so I looked up on, um, one of these platforms, these companies' website, to see a little bit more about the range of that, and I think it's in the report, but it's something like anywhere from like $5,000 to in some places $20,000 depending on the situation and how limited their housing market is. Um, but something like that, uh, could be helpful as well.

So, I mean, we have land and we have a certain amount of cash.

You know, those are things that we have to offer to all this.

Yeah, I was— we have somebody online here, Mr. Sheldon, if you wanted to speak up and comment. Yeah, thanks, guys. So I want to kind of tag on to what was just last said. So I run both you know, short-term and long-term rentals in Talkeetna. And one of the things that I think that a lot of people don't realize when they do short-term rentals, kind of again, tagging on to that last comment, is you could almost run a campaign being like, hey, did you realize that, you know, a lot of platform fees are 15%, you know, you're paying for cleaning fees.

And a lot of this time, especially when me and my wife run the numbers, like when we transition to do long-term housing, sometimes you can even argue that you will end up making more more because there is significantly less overhead associated with having just a long-term tenant as opposed to a short-term tenant. And so just wanted to chime in real quick and mention that because I'd be happy to work with you guys too on kind of, you know, crunching some numbers for even— I don't even know if you wanted to provide it as almost a free service to people being like, hey, we can crunch the numbers for you and help you identify if you even would make more doing long-term long-term housing as opposed to short-term. And so just wanted to throw that out there. I'm happy to be a resource as well, because I do have both sides of that kind of, you know, perspective. But yeah, that's all I've got.

Happy to take questions if you need to clarify anything there. So yeah, that's exactly—. That's the kind of thing I heard from some of the community engagement open houses was I'm sorry, I don't have a video right now. My computer died, but was that sort of thing. And, like, it's really just this education piece in part for folks who may or may not be on the edge anyway.

You know, maybe they have— a lot of folks do this in addition to their regular jobs. So, at some point, to your point, there becomes a time in which it's just too much for one person to handle. And then you have to think about outsourcing it to another company, which costs money to manage those Airbnbs, and it might not be worth it at that point. So I do think, right? Yeah, exactly.

And just to sum it all up real quick there too, I just— protecting the borough's cash on hand, right? You're at— you're talking potentially if you did a cash incentive and whatnot, like, I really do believe that there is a case to be made for their own financial benefit outside of providing some sort of a cash benefit from the borough side to saying, hey, look, we'll help you make more money, or, or, or we'll help you equate that into more money without having to reach into your guys' own coffers. Because it's, you know, it's nice to consider, but the best case scenario here, right, is saving you guys money on the long run and not having to dip into your coffers to provide those incentives.

So, like, a tiered approach, try to soft touch, and then maybe offer a carrot. Small carrot, little baby carrots.

I was going to open the floor to— we've got a lot of members of the audience and some folks online. And Mr. Askin, I see you here. You want to share a thought? Yes, one thing that hasn't been brought up in this— we are next to a national park, and we are very definitely having a park effect on this community and all the surrounding area.

So they— when a building does come up, they have the pocket to go in and suck it up.

It's true, absolutely. Makes it really difficult for nor— like normal folks who might need a mortgage, which takes some time to do rather than just having to be able to purchase a property. So that's a huge—. Folks that we heard, and a lot of that money is coming from private equity at this point. Unfortunately, I'm seeing a couple firms just buying everything they can get their hands on around— it's true.

Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely true. I think, you know, folks who are selling their properties, it's hard to compete. It's hard for It's hard for anyone else to compete unless that person wants to sell it to somebody local who's not going to necessarily do that. But if you can get the highest number, it is difficult from a private equity firm to be able to compete with that and not choose that option as somebody who is trying to make the most money they can on their property. So it's difficult.

You know, I know a lot of folks up in Anderson. Were recently selling their houses and folks were working at Clear, like contractors wanted to buy the houses cash in hand right now as a place for their electricians and plumbers to stay. And great buyout and good money and you're free and away and it's no longer in the public stock of available housing. So hard incentive.

We've talked some about the limited capacity for local contractors to provide support for building and also renovating homes. But I know we have a lot of capable people in the community that aren't a part of businesses, and I wonder if there's a way to connect residents who are interested in building homes with empty lots or available land with like contingencies, you know, maybe it's hard when it's private land, you know, oh, here's an empty lot that you could buy from this person, but if it's borough land or some way to connect, to add in like a, this, you know, build for a long-term rental or to sell as a single-family home or whatnot. We have able-bodied builders in the community who are interested in potentially, you know, serving as that landlord for a long-term rental and maybe just don't have the land in a place that has road access, you know, that has road access to be able to like, oh yeah, well, I'm just gonna go build a house there. It's not that easy, but maybe there's a way to like advertise, advertise that to residents who are interested in helping them.

Well, you know, right before the meeting started, we were talking about, uh, Toyo repair and who actually is certified and has experience doing it. And there's a lot of people that do, but I personally didn't know that. And if we just had a library of skilled people who might not be necessarily 40 hours a week as a skilled person in that trade, but maybe they own earth-moving equipment and are available for a driveway install, you know, a couple weekends in a row, and then they go back to their regular life. And maybe there's a liability to, like, the borough, you know, hiring a non-licensed person for that type of situation, but maybe it's just a pathway to, like, here is, here is land, and, or, or here is— I, yeah, I don't know beyond that, but I mean, I understand that there's a liability with that, but maybe just being able to find the resources that are available in our community and also find the, the land, you know, make it a possibility for them. Not to throw it back in your court, but is that something that the chamber could potentially look into?

Meaning like a, a directory, if you will. I mean, you've got more— you've got a basis of businesses in the borough, so they know that, yes, I want to be published on this directory. Yeah, so we actively have a directory of our members, um, which include— for the Chamber of Commerce, that includes a lot of the local contractors. And, um, it does not include community members who have skill sets. Okay.

Another thing We're looking at invade land, a developer might take on long-term management, uh, for his buildings under and use, uh, land pending that we have management authority on, as opposed to land we have titles in, knowing that eventually it will become titled and he would get title. I mean, that's, that's an option that, as far as I know, has not been explored.

That is a possibility. Put it on my way. Put it on my way. Well, there's— I mean, there's income coming over to the developer, and Burrell doesn't have to put anything into it except land.

Other folks, maybe here in the room, maybe online, wanting to contribute to the conversation?

I think with just the last minute before we move on to the next agenda items, what are our next steps? I know you, you mentioned that we've got you on the hook for another year or so. Is that— yeah, yeah, that's the case. Um, the next steps really are hearing from you guys right now, you know, uh, what some priorities are, working then with staff to kind of consider, um, really weigh the risks, the time frame, the cost of some of those strategies. And then if we can identify a couple of them, well, basically I'm hoping to go back to Illinois and work with folks in Minnesota and create, you know, a 6-month, 12-month, 24-month implementation plan for some of those strategies.

Um, you know, it's going to look different depending on what that is. I imagine we'll probably reasonably be able to choose 2 or 3 things, um, you know, and that we can work on with the borough or with its partners. And then I'm hoping some of the other lower-hanging fruit things folks, you know, from the community, the chamber, etc., can pick up. But that's really our plan. And I think probably once we have a couple options that are suitable based on what we heard from tonight, we can probably share that back with you guys and hear your thoughts and keep moving forward.

I think we've talked a lot during this site visit about about incremental improvement, incremental changes, incremental implementation— say that— of this report to the extent that we can. But I certainly see, you know, being able to actually move on some of these strategies certainly within the time we have left with you guys and at least set you up to be able to keep pursuing those things long-term if it's not with us. So, um, those are my next steps.

And Erica also let us know that they've applied, um, to HUD for the next round of the Rural Capacity Building Grant. And that's kind of the, the federal funding funnel where we have our technical assistance agreement. Erica called it a, a contract, but as she mentioned, the technical assistance is free to us and we have a memorandum of, um, agreement. About, you know, what roles we all play. But if we have a particular project that we wanted to move forward with that might be longer term, we could reapply, or an entity that's a 501 in our community that would like to take that on is also eligible to apply to look at implementation, you know, over a longer term.

Because, you know, we've been talking about some of these short-term, medium, and then we've got the long-term gains. So You know, I'm thinking kind of in the background, like 5 to 10 years ahead too, you know, about, you know, we want our 6 to 12 to 24-month action plan, but we really don't want it to stop there. You know, either I think that we're in the long game, you know, I am at least, you know, and it's for raising a family and wanting to make sure that we continue to have housing for people who want to stay here and be active members of our community. Really, as you said, Erica, it's not about housing. It's about making a viable community that we can all live in.

Great.

Right. Um, thank you so much for making the trip up here. I think you picked the best time in the year to do it. Beautiful. Beautiful.

Thank you, guys. We have, uh, comments open until end of September, so any members of the public, assembly, planning commission, submit through— I think there's a survey monthly link. Yeah, I know I have to, uh, have to hit go on mine, so link soon. Uh, thank you. I think that'll, um, pop us over to the next work session item, which is, um, quota subdivision land nomination update, which I feel really is a very nice segue to, to their presentation because we were able to get some updates in this, in this time frame to be able to come to the Zoom with them.

And I do feel like since they've been here, I'm a little more excited for what we, we do have potentially coming down our property pipeline. And then with the help of the assistance they're going to be able to give us, there's some things that just are out of our scope or out of our— it's not— we don't have knowledge of all of these things. So I really am enjoying this partnership more and more.

So just to— Chris and I, if I may piggyback on this quota update, you know, George was one that brought this quarter subdivision lots to our land nomination process. And so, and another thing I'm tickled about, we were able to find an appraiser that took on a couple of our projects and got back to us way quicker than he originally gave us the timeframe for. So, like, I wasn't expecting this. Quote, a subdivision appraisal to come back until January, February-ish, and we just got it now. So, um, it's exciting, exciting to have the participation a little bit more quicker than we thought.

Anyways, long story short, this is kind of just a small update to let you know we did get the appraisal back. Um, I did include in the packet what those 8 lots actually appraised at, um, kind of the map of where those are located Um, obviously, we— our next step in the process— Chris updated the best interest finding and the timeline on that, um, and then kind of what our next steps and decisions are going to be. And I hate to use— overuse the word— we need to decide if we're going to put roads into these properties before we sell. If yes or no, if we do that, then our next decision would be how are we going to sell. It would, you know, it's going to be an option basis and, uh, what's it called, a seat dividend, over-the-counter.

Like, there's all this terminology of how we could set up these. So we just have to start answering some, some questions before we really, really put our package together before to bring before the Planning Commission for action, and then of course the Assembly to get that finalized. So there's some steps still that just Again, the update, just to— he was excited about it. He was not— and the Planning Commission, I think, has seen the nomination packet and the best initial— excuse me— best interest finding. And so we wanted to kind of share in this forum, like, with the assembly now that, you know, the process by code is that a nomination— any member of the public can bring this goes to the Planning Commission first.

They need to pass a resolution with supporting the plan with any concern, you know, all the key details should be identified in that resolution. Then that would go before the Assembly for passage with even more details, method of sale, minimum bid price, things like that. So, yeah, like Trina mentioned, really looking to keep momentum going, keep awareness going. But also capitalize on the things we just heard about to inform. I think a couple of key things we were hoping might be discussed here was more about access for the lots, and maybe we could pull up the map, Amber, if that would help.

So discussion about access and then discussion about land use protections based on what we've heard and based on location and based on the favorite— some of those key details. And I will say, I think we had the best interest finding in there. There is a very rough road construction cost estimate, and we can talk about what that was for. The back of the attachment was not attached, but that's on the table here. And so that very crude spreadsheet, for those in the room here, we can look at some of the numbers that made— that inform that road costs.

And just to clarify, I don't think that the— there was any of the appraisal information in the online packet. Oh, there was that. Thought there was. But the bottom line, what I'm looking at right now, I don't—. I haven't seen a copy of that, so we can add it after the meeting.

But I just wanted to clarify that's not there. This sounds like it worked. And the key detail from the, the appraisal was that each of these 8 lots. What was that? Um, what was the appraisal on?

Anywhere from 9 to 14. There we go. Yeah, so it's about $11,000. I think it was like $11,800 is the average appraised value for the 8 lots that are on the screen here. That's borough-patented municipal land entitlement land.

Um, so the light green kind of in the middle of the subdivisions. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. That was 8. And can you— can you, um, you point that out to me so I can point at it online? You're on.

I can't see what you're pointing at.

Those late 8 lots were subdivided by the state and then deeded to the borough, but never put up for sale. I believe so, because there were lots in the Bangini Creek subdivision that were deeded— that were subdivided by the state, given to the borough, and then the borough sold them. Yep. And there's some still on the market today. Yeah, very, you know, very remote, very difficult access.

Is that how June Creek came to be as well? I don't think any June Creek lots were ever deeded to the borough. We didn't claim them as a municipal land entitlement. In this quota subdivision that was very common for a UAF, the university, they did, the state parceled them out to the university and then these 8 to us in that actual quote-unquote quota subdivision.

Is it Rochester, right? Yeah, yeah. So Kobe Road is the access to Parks Highway there at like 275.5 maybe. And then Rochester, just a little ways down, is the north-south artery off of which these lots would access. And the blue— the blue on there is conveyed but not— okay, and hasn't been nominated to be put up for sale.

It's not patented, and I don't believe we even I don't think we have a boundary survey in the hopper for that area. Yeah, I don't know where some of that's listed as, uh, pipeline stuff, laydown and man camps and stuff, and uses but not disbursements. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's a good point. A very good point is that like we have this intended, um, the dream of maybe a natural gas pipeline in this vicinity.

That right-of-way is not on this map, but it is directly adjacent to this subdivision. And the developer has expressed interest in some of our municipal lands in this area, has not submitted a lease application. And it would not be these residential lots they are interested in. They're interested in the larger tracks. And we identify this in the best interest finding— this, you know, these are the land management plan updated in 2022, proposes a residential classification.

So we feel like this is certainly a compatible use.

So I guess next steps are like, it's in— it'll become a resolution at the Planning Commission level and then come to the Assembly. Mm-hmm. Um, where the, uh, it would be an ordinance to, to dispose. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And we really want the— I, I mean, I think we want the feedback on, um, building access, constructing access or not. Um, I think, um, is, is Rochester is an actual— it's a road, right? And none of these have access to that? What's in between those parcels and Rochester? So here there is some— so this is developed, yes, Rochester, Rochester, and then there's, you know, these little red squares on there are homes, right, um, that have some of their own constructed access that they created for themselves.

Um, the ones in the, in the middle portion do not have this one's got a little bit heater, right, potential. And then these ones would potentially be the ones we would have to talk about for sure, right? But I mean, what's, what's in between them and Rochester, that land there? 100% Technically public right-of-way, right? And so can't they, can't they just have a driveway right from there?

Yeah, sorry. At least, I mean, those four and that fifth one, right? We would—. And we would have to develop a right-of-way easement for those drive— those driveways. That's a lot easier than building a road, right?

Well, we got the price of the roads. Yeah, so the, the 3,700 feet, where, where is that supposed to fit in? That would be like finishing Leslie Loop. Where's Leslie? Yeah, finishing construction of Leslie Loop, which is on the southern end and accesses this Oh, right there.

And you'll notice when you look at the appraisal, those two have the highest appraised value because, um, um, access is basically constructed almost to the property line. The, uh, you know, the, the mileage was based on going down Magan Loop, um, departing Rochester Way, going west down Magan Loop, and then hitting Yancey Court and going north on Yancey Court and putting a very an access road in there, and then also building a portion of Magin Loop on the north end that would access— provide access to this northern—. Those two northern parcels.

So the rest of Magin Loop, there's no construction, there's no road? No. That— you see that there's an address point on the— off of Magin Loop on the southern end. That person has I think put in some access, and I believe it is in the right of way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's essentially, um, really the only ones that don't have any— well, really only got the, the one lot up there. Two, these two trapezoidal ones, right? So bottom right there. But Leslie, it sounds like that, that is mostly constructed. Mostly, that's mostly constructed.

Yeah, yeah. Um, it's just the, the ones that— so even, even the, the first one off of Magin or whatever, that one is— it's got some— that's got some access. So really we're talking about building access for mostly just one lot, like all those, those four, you know, that's, that's just a right-of-way.

Right, that's right. I, I, you know, consider the whole Yancy Court option as well because it's flat. You know, we, we keep trying to not be hypocritical on going off of what's flat. You're talking— they're not— the road is flat for a reason. For a reason.

So do we go off the flat or do we just create easy access easy driveway access. Permit easy access, which changes the character of that road for, for those residents and everybody who lives beyond it, right? They're going to pass— they're going to go from passing a road, two roads, to passing, you know, the potential for 4 or 5 more driveways, basically. So it's, it's kind of a character thing, right? Um, and I guess, I mean, the age-old question, the The lots themselves are worth about $100,000.

Yeah. And the— to build the roads would be $700,000. Yeah. So if we're going to sell those lots, they're $80,000 lots now. They'd become $80,000 lots instead of $12,000.

Right now they're appraised with limited road access, but we, you know, they were appraised at once. If we talk about putting the road, you know, more access in Right, we honestly would have to get them reappraised at that value. But, but the odds of them becoming $80,000 lots is basically zero.

The odds of them selling as $80,000 lots? Yeah, that's what I think. We could advertise them for $10,000 and sell them, right? Or we could put $700,000 in roads out there and we could own a $700,000 call it road and some lots. Yeah, but see, the university could sell their lots for $10,000 after they put in a road.

And that is like, of those other lots, like we have those 8, how many of those other ones are in private hands and how many of them are in unsold? Like, that's a good question. And if they would want to partner on a development project to make them more attractive or not, like And we need the majority of them. University. Yeah, yeah, they very—.

University owns most of them. Yeah, every once in a while they'll open up a couple, apparently. Well, so they own them, but they're not currently for sale. That's the problem. During, during COVID they, they got really popular, they sold super fast, and so the university shut it down.

They're like, oh wow, these are selling really fast. Maybe we need to look at how much we're selling them for. And then, you know, the interest in homesteading in interior Alaska dropped precipitously. And now I think we're back to kind of how it was before. But that's what it was because I know people who bought a lot of land out there and like one person I know bought like 15 lots, um, and the university said, well, you're the last person, we're shutting it down right now, um, because people are buying way too much land for way too cheap.

Any idea what they were selling them for? Uh, the 5-acre lots, I believe, were selling $6,500, and the 10-acre lots were $10,000 or $11,000, something like that. It was pretty cheap.

So how big are those lots? Average 4. I, I, I, I think, you know, just, just reality speaking with where we are right now, I, I think just allowing access just makes so much more sense. I mean, if we're, if we're talking, you know, the cost of the contractor to come in, we're talking $83 a yard for pit run. 8.

That's a— that's like $105 per foot of road. And, and, and the price that we have there, that $675,000, is even more now because we're talking about clearing right-of-way and everything else as well, not just laying down rock. Prices are assumed to be minimum. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is a lot of money.

Yeah, either we're—. They're talking about the the locals up here, seeing as it's just around my corner, you know, to get, you know, someone privately to put that road in with the neighbor helping them out or, you know, providing the service, it's going to be $1,500 to clear it out and build it, build it up a little bit. What the last one ran for. Nobody had to move equipment miles and miles. They just drove out of their driveway, cleared it, built it up.

And then they started building, and then we—. You start talking about that, we actually talking about short a lot longer. We decide to go Rhodes route, reappraisal route, versus kind of giving an opportunity for 8 quick sale lots to give people an opportunity to potentially buy, buy some land and potentially start building something a little more quickly. And I feel like where we're at, just for the type of buyers that are buying out there, are still, I believe, more the, the off-grid mentality, the homesteader mentality. You know, the people who are trying to buy property here in Kiwi, um, you know, it's, it's a different mentality still And maybe that's going to change, but I think that's where we're at still.

Um, that's how I— and maybe my pers— my perception is off, but I know a lot of people out there and I know a lot of people here, and I think I think that tracks. Yeah. Um, so you're saying no votes? That's a slam. I, I, I think so.

It's the fastest, quickest, easiest, cheapest Makes no sense. And actually might actually get somebody to live out there, right? I mean, if it's cheap enough, then somebody might actually say, okay, fine. And it's, it's not like there's a— if there's a road, either we're gonna subsidize 8 places and bear the burden of, you know, the financial burden of building this road, because we obviously can't sell the lots that expensively.

And it's not the same thing as Pangini subdivision where you've got to build a mile of road across swamp to get there, right? Like, this, this already has road that we just spent a lot of money, you know, between the state and us making into decent road. Yeah, you know, it's right there, right? I, I, that— I know, maybe let's just say let's just sell lots and hopefully somebody can do something with them. My only question, I question the appraised value, like knowing the cost of road construction and knowing that they have road access, you know, that it seems wildly underpriced if essentially those lots do have road access or—.

Some of the, as you go down the list, I mean, like the, some of them did, they did them individually with some of that road access evaluation. And some didn't. Some actually have closer, um, electricity poles, so that came into play on some of those lots. So that was just the average. Yeah, you know, some of the, the, the least expensive is 9, the most expensive was 14.8.

So I know some of that road-ish access came into play with the higher value.

I mean, I'd say sell the lots, take the $80,000, give everybody $5,000 if they turn their Airbnb into an actual year-round rental, and it's a win-win, right? I mean, then, then, you know, we'd have, you know, potentially 16 Airbnbs and potentially 8 people living there, 8 families living there, and 16 additional residences and doesn't cost us anything. Problem solved, just like that. Thanks, Dave. So maybe speaking of—.

You guys haven't tried to get out of here after during breakup though. Even there, that's a nice—. Out of the tourism circuit segue, if we could, I think, um, talk about land use protections, if any. I think the current— currently a new landowner in the quota subdivision would need to commit to being a part of the quota subdivision HOA if one exists, kind of thing. It's— remind me, George.

I know they have—. The state set up an HOA and they automatically renew it. It doesn't mean the people have to use it. Right. Yeah, they got to vote the HOA in.

So say that's the minimum currently. Anything additional would— there is no other covenants.

There could be, you know, I think things to think about would be things like setbacks, height restrictions. There is setback. Use, you know, use limitations if any. So install a cabin farm for 25 Airbnb rentals. That's, that's allowed unless we say that.

Okay, I mean, I don't know, this is, um, this is a generally residential area, but it's also relatively out of the way area. I mean, if you were going to let people have more freedom to use their land the way that they want to, then somewhere a little outside of the central area might be— that might be the appeal of one of these spots. I, um, I'm not sure that I'd like that, but is that— there's a restriction that we've talked about, that restriction in, in a lot of the subdivisions and land sales. Do we want to prevent them from overnight rentals?

Do you currently have any restrictions on—. William, another one would be ability to subdivide. So I think, you know, whether or not they can be subdivided I don't know if there's currently— if it speaks to that, but it's worth considering. Like, is any one of these lots currently— code says up to just above an acre, like you can't go below an acre. So are we okay if each one of those along Rochester turns into kind of like a 1-acre sliver of a rectangle with 20 cabins per?

I mean, the—. It is part of a broader subdivision. So we would be imposing covenants on 8 lots in a bigger subdivision that would be unrestricted. That seems weird to me. That's, that's restricted.

That they would, that they would have different, different land restrictions than other neighboring lots in the same subdivision, potentially in the same HOA. So I wouldn't—. Well, none of these people is all our subdivision in a unique place, and it was all together, I think I'd consider it more, but one small protection could potentially be, you know, if that does happen, they would have to come to the Planning Commission for the replat. So hopefully that would be another authority. None of these lots has neighbors right now, right?

I can see a couple. There are some, yes. The one, the two there. Yeah. Okay.

The corner of Megan Loop and then across the street, there's a couple. Yeah.

I, I'm with Jared and James both. I don't see a need to put any more restrictions on. I'm not saying I've considered all the restrictions, so somebody has something, but I mean, I'm not really worried about a cabin farm out there. And, you know, I, I, I think you're fine. No, but, and again, this was an update, so we'll definitely go back to the drawing board with all of your thoughts.

Kind of put something else down on paper that we can present to you, and he will be forward with it.

Great. In the interest of time, uh, are we near the end of the quota? We can— let me add two more, two more quickies. So Lignite, I have been— the Lignite parcel, the MLE parcel— I have been consistently saying to the state, where are we at, where are we at, where are we at, you know, with the on this title review queue, and then as soon as they title review, we get patent. It seems we were about 50 on the list.

We kind of got pushed down farther because of some— I don't know what the terminology was—. Where they were instructed by executive order to focus on the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation business, and they're understaffed. Because there's been a hiring freeze. So there was a pause, some other, other, uh, packages were put before ours, so we kind of just got stalled out for a little while. But we were at 50, and then just a couple weeks ago she emailed me and said we're at 30.

So we're making a little bit of progress. I'm just going to keep being the squeaky wheel, I guess. I don't know if it'll make it go any faster. She'll get sick of hearing from me. But do you know, and when did we submit the application or the, the paperwork?

That was pretty neat. I mean, it's been a while. Yeah, the state's timeline on this is pretty egregious, and I'd be morbidly curious to put a real number. I will say, when I started, I, I learned quickly about the whole patent request process, and so at that time I pushed it in that much quicker and So I feel like since I started a year and some change ago, we've made quite a bit of progress even with the state of Alaska. Yes, I think I read today that they ended the state hiring freeze, so maybe that will—.

They could hire somebody and speed it along. Yeah, so maybe, maybe a year. I mean, I'm hoping we can keep pushing it through. There's a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel on that one. Also on our Denali download, We did kind of put the link for the State of Alaska Hilltop subdivision concept.

They had put it out for public comment a while back. They did come up with their preliminary final finding. And they did make some changes to some of that. And so I think their next step is to have their survey and planning, and then they'll come into the Planning Commission to have their plat.

Approved. So that's kind of their next step. So we'll see what they come up with.

Are they going to build the roads then? Do they need to wait on the size test? They need more current—. Well, the current— what they just— this new preliminary final finding is that they're going to use Dora Vista, which was one that Jeff Forsyth's new subdivision that he actually put that road in. So we are going to use Dorvis, but although there was Salmonberry, I believe, was another potential road extension that they talked about.

And then—. But based on the number of lots they would be required to fill, put in the roads, it's about 5. There's some more public comment process for them. And then again, with that whole plat review.

Who knows, that could be another year out as well for more lots to come open there. So we've got a little more land momentum than we need to do. Beautiful. Year by year.

I see COTNO land swap update. Oh, big time. Data centers. Oh yeah, I see data centers too. Just get past that, let's change the subject.

There we go. As far as, you know, maybe order of operations, we could— it is your, you know, it's your joint meeting. So if you all want to table one of these or both, you know, we'll defer to you. I think the big thing here, we don't have anything to present, or maybe we can pull up code, but it was just to start a discussion about data centers. There's been a lot of talk with the Clear Space Force Station, Department of Defense seeking proposals to put data centers on military bases.

Um, so there was a public comment kind of in support of proactively thinking about this. So, Mr. Johnson, I know you've provided— we've kind of gone back and forth a little bit on some ideas of things to consider when we're generally— we're zoned generally unrestricted. Um, how might we think about, you know, guiding data centers if and when they were to come. So just wanted to throw it out there for some concern, you know, what are you all hearing, concerns folks are having, consider our code, we might change it. Yeah, well, I can say I talked to some folks who've lived within Anderson for a very long time, and they're curious and maybe a little concerned, and they, uh, I, I think There are often questions about the humanity-scale concerns of AI, and I'm not sure that much of what we talk about here will affect that.

But there's also concerns that are really zoning and yet conditional use and the noise that these things make and the emissions that generators might emit and, you know, changes in the local population.

You know, changes in the water table. Some parts of the borough have a near infinite supply of water. Some parts are a little less so. Some parts are right next to the landfill, and maybe we don't want to siphon water away from that in the wrong direction. But I've heard a lot of questions and maybe some interest in at least having a public conversation, and I've heard some folks want maybe more than that.

But, um, yeah, it's, um, our conditional land use permits. I'm trying to think offhand of the stuff I can think of. There's liquor stores and adult entertainment and marijuana shops, things that are just commercial businesses that might not be appealing next to an elementary school. I think prisons was in there. Prisons is in there, yeah.

Hotels is a closer example to these because I think it's drawing enough water and using, installing a septic system. There might be, you know, noise from their operations. That's, yeah, gravel pit, you know, uh, think about a large gravel pit being put in during the middle of your, uh, little subdivision. You might be a little upset to hear that amount of equipment making noise and building stuff and changing the water table. That's really— that's the same kind of question you see that for a data center.

Yeah, sorry, I can help give some input because I've built some— helped to build some ugly ones and some— a few clean ones across the planet.

Um, they definitely should be some type of some level of regulation, but with a balanced approach, especially here in Alaska. We— because of our weather, the cost and the equipment required for the cooling is significantly less. Um, with the proper equipment, we can— you can keep the noise and the EM, um, radiation down. Um, there's a lot of limitations because of where we're at, and because of the fiber optics that run up the two main highways. And so if there's not redundancy, then it's, you know, the location is questionable.

There's not enough power at this time to open a data center of any significance. And I know people are throwing out the words AI a lot, but there's a lot of data centers that have nothing to do with AI, even though some of them use AI. Um, Alaska USA is one of the last ones I helped— Global, excuse me, Global Credit Union now is one of the last ones I helped build, but it's private. They've got one here and one down in Glendale, Arizona. Um, so yeah, we need to protect the water.

We want to, you know, protect our— we use the word ambiance— that we don't need the noise pollution. The light pollution is generally not a thing, but the EM and the water. But again, because of where we're at most of the time with the new technology, they literally can be air. And as long as they, you know, you can keep the air noise down, you know, the fans and the, uh, the coolers, you know, releasing the heat, that kind of thing, it doesn't have to affect the water table. So it really comes down to design, you know.

When you can talk about intent, that's You know, I'm— everybody knows I'm anti-big government in 101 ways, but, uh, you know, so what the business is and what it's being used for is a different question than what it's doing to, you know, to the borough. And that's really where we should focus, is protecting, protecting our ambiance or lifestyle, but not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Be my, my thoughts on that. And I can answer any questions about data centers and buildings and electrical and options, that kind of stuff, if anybody has questions now or later.

I guess in general, in general terms, I think we just pulled up a list of specific things that would require a conditional use permit. I mean, if data center doesn't fit neatly in any one of these, I would certainly think it'd be worthwhile bringing it up just to add it, add it to this list. Um, brings up— I do have a lot— I was involved in the crafting of the conditional, and I voted to, to approve the, um, the conditional use permitting of that. But in the years that we've had this on the books, I don't think anybody's ever applied for a single commercial, so it's not going to be a pretty process in terms of if somebody does want to apply for one of these, in terms of like what kind of teeth is actually behind this. I think it gives us a voice in the conversation to, to help do that.

But I think for this to be meaningfully implemented, I don't know what kind of, what, what real teeth is, is in there in terms of what types of stipulations we would be able to to put on a conditional use in something that is otherwise unrestricted. So, but for starters, would at least say that you need a conditional use permit. We at least say that. When I look at the other things on that list, data center certainly seems like it would be appropriate. Yeah, I would think so too.

And just including it on this list doesn't mean that it's off the table, right? It's just you'd have to apply for a permit. We have to consider the permit. It gives us an opportunity to thoroughly consider these types of, of uses. And yeah, it seems to me that data centers might, might fit pretty neatly.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think it'd be pretty easy to just say it's one of the things that you need one for.

I mean, personally, I would rather do that, you know, if the comment was let's think about this proactively. I think that's one thing that we could do proactively instead of getting steamrolled by this, um, you know, without having that ability to be like, wait, let's have a seat at the table and talk about this use, um, before something just happens before we're ready for it. Because just adding that would be a piece of cake, and then determining what that entails, what kind of teeth we have, all that stuff, we, we can figure that out as we go. But at least putting it on there, that's quick and easy. That's They should just do that.

We need just a little bit of research on how large of a data center defining, you know, I mean, when you look at that list, you know, commercial, like, how big is your, how big is your hard drive on that gaming computer? You mining Bitcoin over there? Does that count? Maybe.

Yeah, I mean, some of these are like large-scale commercial businesses, pretty broad and undefined. Some of these bus barns are large-scale. They do have definitions. I think my, from my standpoint, the biggest, my biggest concern about enforceability is the more the The less defined these are, the harder it is, obviously. And the large-scale commercial business, I think that's the biggest one that's like a—.

Just tricky. Because there's a lot of large-scale businesses who are constantly moving and shaking, and that's what we want. And what, what's, where's the threshold? But I think in general, we've heard, I've heard, like, we're in agreement this would be a good thing to work on, and now is maybe a good time to start. That work.

So yeah, I think it'd be easy enough to put it on there, and it would be a good idea.

I guess maybe one of the— there, there's talk, I think this is kind of spurred by a specific proposal, um, related to the Space Force Station. Is that proposal to be on Space Force property, or is that to be in the area? Yeah, if it's on Space Force property, does any of this— no, no. No. Yeah, the proposal was to enter into an enhanced use lease for military lands.

And it was in response to another executive order, like military to go out and see if, you know, better utilize underutilized military land. So I think this is not kind of in response. Yeah, it wouldn't influence that, but it's a good thing you talk about.

Sorry, distracted by— no, I have something. Yours? Where is it? It's not mine. Turn— everybody have a radio?

Can't hear it. Oh, that's— it's yours. It's yours. Maybe it is mine. Your hearing was that good?

Go just a little bit one way and you can hear it. If you just go turn it like a fraction and then disappear, you called in for a clean answer. Well, right. Well, that entertained the— could have been mine too. Yeah, I think, um, the last thing I would note on, on this conversation is that, you know, if, if the main barriers are fiber and Power.

Well, we have a very, you know, the, the natural gas pipeline is power, and fiber is already a bottleneck for a lot of other things. There's proposals all over the state to install fiber, so it could go from definitely not something to think about at all to, you know, daily conversations in a few places around the borough, you know, just overnight really.

Step forward on that. So any further comment?

Otter land swap update. I'm excited about this. Couldn't wait to get to it.

We do have some things to look at here, so maybe let's pull those maps up. This is, this is kind of preliminary. Informational. There has not been a best interest finding. This is not a formal proposal.

It's more like kind of gauge, um, it, it was a proposal from ATNA received by us. I've kind of issued a counter proposal idea and also I'm seeking more information. So let's, we'll kind of go through what they originally proposed to us. And so the initial proposal We're looking at a map on the screen. The initial proposal was for a municipal land entitlement parcel in McKinley Village area, right?

Just south of Milepost 231 on the west side of the highway. It's a triangular parcel, about 7 acres. Swap that for what was a 14-C-3 parcel in Cantwell, which currently hosts the Cantwell Rifle Range. Also is about 7 acres. And so I think, Amber, maybe our second one, second map might have that Cantwell.

There it is. So for those who aren't familiar, this is Cantwell, north end of Cantwell, milepost 213. The, the, uh, transfer station is that southern square, and then the northern light green is the parcel. So that was the initial proposal for Montana. Um, the background is, and we I was going to— we were going to give a little bit of update.

The 14 lands, without getting into too many details, those due to federal changes, those were able to revert to the Native village or going to the corporation or organization. And in Camwell's case, those flow through to Ahtna. And so this parcel, while it was selected for the future city of Camwell, is now going to— And so they recognize a liability associated with owning land under a rifle range. I think we both recognize the potential community benefit of a local government owning that land. I've asked the Cantwell Sportsman's Club about this proposal and haven't gotten any feedback yet, but we want to get that feedback.

Do they, you know, I think they're under a 50— they're under a long-term lease from ONNA for the use of that rifle range.

So that was the additional proposal, and we own the land with that, the next to it, that the transfer station is on.

Uh, is that—. No, that's, that's a 14 parcel, also a 14 parcel people that we're working through the, um, the process with on that currently, they see value in those going to the Denali Borough because our facilities are on top of them, right? And have offered them to us with some reversionary language. So if it ever doesn't— stops becoming a transfer station, or in the case of the school, if it stops, you know, if we stop using it as a school, it would revert to Onna. And so that's We don't have a— you know, we want to provide that to the Planning Commission and then the Assembly in the future, but that's kind of the brief update of those two other parcels, okay, which are also 14 C3 units.

So the counter proposal was, um, addressing the liability piece. Amber, if you could go back to the first one for a second. The counter proposal was capture some on-the-land that's in McKinley Village that maybe is more appealing from an economic development or community development standpoint off of the old Parks Highway there, just south of the McKinley Park Community Club and Fire Hall. In part thinking about these separated pathways projects that we're talking about working on, ideally that, you know, that pathway would end at some public land or it's going to need a parking lot. You know, we're talking about the parking limitations down in the village.

And so that, you know, from a number of— for a number of reasons, that parcel is appealing in my mind. So our counter proposal was include that 15-acre parcel from Ottena to the borough. And then let's go to the map 3, Amber, for a comparable 15-acre parcel. This is off of the Denali Highway, Route 118. So approaching the borough boundary, there's a large area of selected borough lands, but these are not patented.

And we just, I think, recognize the key barrier in that it has to be patented land for us to be able to transfer it to Ona. So this is kind of a proposal. This would not be immediate. If there was general support for it, we would need to pick a parcel that is patented. Interested, but wanted to kind of gauge interest in this and if there's, you know, support or—.

Yeah. So I guess, is it kind of like the, the, the, the proposal that came to us, 7 acres for 7 acres? Yeah. And then is your thought, at the same time, if we're going to do a land swap, should we do a little bit more, clean it up and add another 15 acres on each side? Yeah, and administratively it could be convenient to do it all as kind of one fell swoop, or since we're having that conversation, just clean up some other things at the same time.

That's exactly— and so the initial proposal is still valid and could be the easiest way to go about this. Could be Phase 1, Phase 2, like those are both patented parcels that, yeah, could, could, could be— yeah, could, could move forward out of just kind of the conceptual handshake phase or whatever. So they don't necessarily have to be all happy all at once. They don't, yeah, they don't have their—. They don't have to be contingent.

It can just be part of the discussion. This Hank lot is where the normal put-in for the upper float is. There's a couple put-ins. I don't know The put-in is actually, and Amber, I'll try to describe this for those online. So you'll see the red highlighted area, which is the area of the proposed transfer.

APTNA owns this area right here. The put-in is where the river bends down right here, and you see it kind of just touching. The DOT is actually going to do a revetment project to stabilize that bank. OTNA has also invested, and this like looks a little swampy here, but I believe last time I was out there they have put in a gravel parking lot in that area that's just, um, south of the highway, um, and there's a fee station there. So they've already made some improvements to the area, and I did put in a comment to DOT that this is a very important recreational boat launch, so please make sure there is access, hopefully, when you are stabilizing the highway near the, the bank here.

Um, but you could, you know, so again, no action needed. Happy to take comments, ideas, um, or it can just be as simple as informational. And we'll, we'll keep kind of working, um, with Aetna and have appreciated their partnership immensely. And, um, they, yeah, are helping educate us along the way. And we want to have the gun range as— yeah, yeah, I mean, that's what we want.

Has the court weighed in on that at all, or— they're having rifle range talks. They are having rifle range talks. Yeah, yeah, that's a good, good point. We could bring this before the court. Feedback.

And I guess, you know, part of like, you know, if we look at equitably at all of our communities too, you know, if we're talking about the borough playing a hand and facilitating in some way, uh, a rifle ranger shooting area in Healy, do we consider that, you know, for Campbell? There are liability concerns, you know, that we've tried to think about. You know, of course, right, maybe don't want the borough taking the liability, but like a nonprofit to run it that absorbs that liability and that management. Like, I don't want to be running a rifle range for 20 years. I've learned a lot about vaulted toilets from just our small toilet at Antler Ridge.

So, you know, I think having an existing nonprofit partner, you know, is a strong case for this. But we can definitely—. I mean, my concern would only be that, okay, fine, if they're want to do it and they're running it and that seems good and it's a good asset for the borough and the community in general. But if they decide that they don't want to do it anymore, then, then what? We're stuck with running a rifle range.

Who pays the insurance?

Good question. I assume the nonprofit. I mean, that like Stephanie mentioned they are active, they have a board, um, and we again reached out. But yeah, good question. And they have an active—.

They have a lease, a 50-year lease with Otter right now. Yes. So I guess just not a term of a lease, but they do have a lease. Yeah. So I guess one thing we should figure out is, does— if we acquire that land, does it come with a 50-year lease or whatever it is?

Yeah. So you know, just know that, know that going in. And then that question of like, if the Sportsman Club dissolves and they no longer want to operate a gun range, can we do whatever we want with it at that point then? Yeah. And, and just out of curiosity, I know with former, um, gun ranges, like, contamination can be an issue.

So, you know, while it's a gun range, it's an asset to the community potentially, if it ever stops being a gun range, it might be the opposite of an asset. So I'd like— that would be, in my mind, that's like an additional component of like the what we'd be taking on. And these are all good questions too, as we're considering a potential Keely shooting range project, you know, if it were to use borough land, you know, what, what are some, you know, You know, things that we might want to consider, you know, in the best interest of the borough. Why? I mean, do they have a— do the Aetna folks have a particular interest in that little triangle next to the Parks Highway, next to McKinley Village?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think we could pull that back up. They do have a unique interest in McKinley Village. They've put in a driveway just south, I think it's just off the map. Um, yeah, and their plans to build a hotel there.

Yeah, yeah. So this would complete their property, so be a buffer or add to their existing parcel. On the Wind is to the south. Yeah, I, I— you, as you're driving south, you can see their signage at that horizontal line, that east-west line. So makes access to the lower— their lower property easier.

Uh, maybe. I mean, I think when we've talked to their vice president of lands, it's really about a buffer, right? You know, the bluff— I don't know where the bluff line is, but there's some terrain features that we're not seeing on the map. So they're not— I don't think they necessarily see this as like, put the— a terrace or huge hotel right there. It's more like just It's a buffer, but the land ownership is everything south of our, our current parcel is on the own, but everything to the west is unknown.

To the west of that, is that also— I think that's state. That's state as well. You're seeing the little, the little rectangle adjacent to it. Yeah, I think that might be. That's, uh, there, because they wanted They've wanted to lease that wedge from the borough in the past, so they have a larger area to develop.

I show it as state land in the, um, land management plan from Department of Natural Resources. 2023, This one's labeled 2009. I also just This is— there's a little bit of state land, and then it's green, which is the national park, of course. The other side of the river is the— I, I don't recall for, for both of those parcels, like that small wedge I think has come up a couple times, but then the piece out the Denali Highway, I don't think there was strong, strong vision for uses for that. Yeah, no, I don't remember any.

Good parcels to consider for swapping if we can get more, more studies with the community. General support for that general direction. Yeah, great, thanks. Some good feedback, good questions to keep answering. Take to the court too for awareness and feedback.

So is that gun range, does that need a conditional use?

Permit? No, on the list. On the list. Oh, although a recreation center is— what's a gun range if not a recreation center? It's a commercial activity.

No, which— that parcel next to the school and the community center, I think that should be a rec center. I'm, I'm just kind of with you on that, but, uh, uh, any— um, the time is now 8:45 and we have the regular meeting to jump to, uh, so anybody who wants to stay for that is more than welcome. We're going to get a couple of reports and we have a road name change. I call to order this, uh Planning Commission regular meeting at 8:45 PM on September 23rd.

And we have a roll call vote, or, um, form. Um, is everybody here? Everyone?

Steve Jones? Mark Vinkie? Here. Master Wright? Here.

Yes, here. There's a—. All right, well, um, public comments. Um, our public has— actually, we have a couple of public online. Anybody who wants to make a Planning Commission public comment has a moment to do so.

Okay, takes us to approval of the agenda.

Motion. All right, we have a motion to approve. We have second. Thank you. And seconded.

Any comments on the agenda discussion? All in favor of approving the agenda by show of hands? Unanimous. Takes us to minutes of the previous meeting from July 15th. Have a motion to Move those.

We have a move to approve those. Is there a second? Second. Seconded. Any discussion on the minutes?

Show of hands, all in favor of approving the minutes? It's unanimous. Communication and appearance request, showing none. Takes us to reports from the borough planner and mayor, to your interest given the conversation we've already had. Floor is yours.

Who's first? First, I guess. What are you doing? I just like to keep it short and sweet. I feel like we, we've talked about a lot there.

As you can see, there's a lot going on in the planning world right now. So, um, thank you all for all of your feedback and your weigh-in on all of these topics, and even just the work session portion of it, so that we can go back and continue our work to bring it back to you again. So we're getting there. So thank you. That's all I got.

All right. Thanks, Mary. I would verbally highlight, though I'm going to cross— I'm actively crossing things off my written list here— just highlight a few things from my earlier report since this is— you know, you won't meet again until November. A few things I wanted to highlight: borough elections, the ballot is set. Early voting for, um, borough election starts October 19th.

Uh, mail ballots will go out, um, on, on or around October 12th. Call the borough office if you want to verify if you would like to request a mail ballot or want to verify where that's going to get sent. I believe we're going to send—. You don't need to request them, they're getting sent to everybody. If your address on file is going to be different, call the borough office.

And the process for the state is online. Check that out. Moving to emergency planning, I wanted to just give a brief update. We had a fire and EMS meeting in Camwell on September 1st. It was a public meeting.

It was, I guess, in part to recruit volunteers, in part to share kind of the current status of the department. Chiefs Tess Moran and Chief Megan, Chief Megan goals from McKinley and Tri-Valley were there. Other members of the departments were there. It was really, it was productive. I think overall is also hard to talk about, you know, fire and EMS and, um, and just the struggles that Cantwell faces trying to remain an all-volunteer department in an era where the average ambulance call for Cantwell is every bit of 10 hours from the moment the call goes out, as we've heard tonight, to the moment that ambulance gets back.

And so I think the big takeaway for me is the model that's gotten us here when it comes to fire and EMS service in Campbell needs to change to relieve that burden on volunteers. So more to come. And if anybody's interested in getting involved, happy to talk to them. Marge and Dale Moore down in Campbell are also looking to, you know, would be happy to chat about obligations. There.

And that's Cantwell. Is that also McKinley Village and Healy area, or—. No, just Cantwell. And they, they have an ambulance. There's a, you know, the very real threat that the ambulance will be decertified, for lack of a better term, with the state of Alaska if they don't have volunteers to staff it.

It's currently staffed at a paramedic level with Marjanor there, and You know, if Marge and Dale step away, as they may, they've tried, you know, then that ambulance may need to be, you know, out of commission. So that's the risk. You know, it's almost intolerable, intolerable during the summer with, you know, the volume of visitors. And we've been in talks with the Matsu Burro. Like, they recognize that the northern end of the Matsu Burro is very much uncovered.

By their services, and so there's a mutual, you know, need for service along the northern Park Highway there, southern Denali Borough, northern Mat-Su. So we're going to keep up on that conversation.

Fall flu vaccine, save the date, October 22nd here in Healy. This will be a free vaccine clinic offered from 3 to 6 PM on Thursday. October 22nd here at the Tri-Valley Community Center. Housing Needs Assessment, we spoke about that. End of comment period is the end of this month, so for— yeah, let's get our comments in.

The Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy is ongoing, and we hope to put that document out for feedback starting October 1st, so stay tuned, especially Planning Commissioners, for that opportunity. Me. Speaking of shooting ranges, there's going to be a court work session on, uh, at 7 PM on October 13th to talk about a potential Healy shooting range, um, the need for that. So if you're involved or interested, that's— it's be a good meeting to attend. And, um, last but not least, I announced we, um, we made an offer, it was accepted, and we've hired a new emergency manager, um, Nate Grimes, who lives in Anderson, has started, is wrapping up his service on base as a Security Forces member, but we're really happy to have him on board.

And he's worked 2 days now, and it's going to be a great fit for the borough. He currently serves as fire chief at the City of Anderson, grew up in Ninana, background in community health as a health aide. So we're, we're looking forward to having him join soon.

That's all I got. Thanks. Great, thank you. On to Plats and Conditional Uses. Uses showing none.

Unfinished Business showing none. That takes us to New Business, and I'll entertain a motion to approve this resolution. So moved. So moved to approve the resolution. We have a second?

Second. And seconded. For discussion, and I wonder if you can give us the first. Um, yeah, so the 3 applications that I received were basically, um, primarily for commercial operators that would like to name their, their driveway so that they can address different commercial structures, whether it be housing or, um, commercial structures, um, so that they're more easily identifiable. Um, they met the criteria with, you know, I guess the fun of it or the beauty of it is that they get to pick their first choices of naming as long as they fit, and, um, bringing them to you for approval.

That middle one is an excellent choice. Which one? Uh, Alexandra.

Are there any other properties affected by these? No, they're all pretty much private property parcels that go directly into their properties, and again with multiple structures that need code to be addressed. Are they driveways or are they technically roads? But they're driveways, but it does meet, meet our code requirements of regardless if it's a road or driveway, as long as it meets the two-track criteria with more than the three structures. And I shouldn't say and, if you read it a little bit closer, or a 1,000-foot driveway.

So, and there's a couple of them, you know, there's always caveats in there, like that particular one in the middle, he's going to be putting in more cabins. So for them to go ahead and create that road name, if you will, so that way he can sub-address all the cabins. So for an EMS standpoint, I'm pro that. So if someone calls that address and they're at whatever cabin, they'll be easier to find.

The first one is off of Doravista Court, and I believe that is just a little bit north of Ely. Is that right? Where is that? It's up on Hilltop. Off of Hilltop.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, the middle one is, uh, near a Crux Avenue, off of Stampede. Okay, so that's the top-down road of Stampede. Okay, and the last one is off the Parks Highway, whereabouts? Just past—.

Just before you get to Midnight if you're heading north. Oh, oh yeah, okay.

What's happening there? Well, it is a, um, housing owner that they call— it's employee house and basically part of what they call Castle Top LLC, but it's, it's part of Kyle Gates's compound of LA TV and That whole south 351, and it was— okay, yeah, yeah, sorry, thank you. Had to reorientate myself with the mile marker.

She's the process. It's like a stone's throw from the Lake Night Stampede intersection. Is that But yeah, if you look, I think the next—. I cut my picture. If you come across, go across Dry Creek going north, look, the first driveway you find that's on the right-hand side, that would be— yeah, two entrances in there.

One's kind of just dirt, the other one's actually— at least we have some big cement cylinder blocks in there in front of gate.

I guess they've always called it Parkway Drive. So we are historically naming it Drive, their first choice.

That fits.

Any further discussion?

Okay, well, um, guess we can do a show of hands on this one, can't we? So just show of hand. Oh, we have to Let's, uh, let's call a vote. Then Johnson? Yes.

Susan Brown? Yes. Baxter Mercer? Yes. Steve Jones?

Yes. Mark Minky? Yes. James Ward? Yes.

All right, very good. That takes us to public comments. Just a couple of seconds if anyone online wants to share a public comment.

Okay, Commissioner comments. Anybody want to start?

Yeah, um, last assembly meeting a week ago, had a presentation from couple attorneys about borrowing money. Little history, we spent 2 and a half years once or twice a week with a DNR representative. Well, actually, uh, DCNR, something like that, Division of Regional Affairs. They supplied the go-to person while we were trying to write the code for the borough. But we made it as difficult for the borough to borrow money as possible.

We didn't make it impossible, we just made it extremely hard to do. And this presentation was how to abolish money. And one of the, the thing that hit me is there could be situations like a, a major catastrophe that causes the borough maybe to borrow money from the state for funds, which is the most logical place for them to find. Um, but to do a road for a, uh, residential development and stuff, I think that's a really poor idea because if they default— borough defaults on that the state takes any monies coming from the state to pay off— from— to the borough for paying off that loan, which means school funding is something that would be on the block, grants and other monies. And I listened to this thing and watched it twice just so I and have a fairly good understanding.

And they were saying it would be hard but not impossible. And if you want to do it, you can hire us to help you. So I think it's a really poor idea. I think— I don't think the borough should go that route unless there is a really compelling reason to do that. I mean, that's— and if you haven't watched that, it's available online, and it's definitely worth listening to and watching.

That's my comment.

I'll go next. I was reading that they think that they have the first through hiker on the Alaska Long Trail. What? A former Marine who likes to do long trails and decided this one would be a good last one for the short term and I, um, I sure would like to hear what he has to say about our local area. I think we have a lot of potential, but right now I think we have a big gap of walking along the side of Parks Highway for about 60 miles.

And, uh, wow, there's a lot of cool stuff we could do. But, um, yeah, I'd just be curious, um, what he thought, where he went, you know, how he how he felt about it. We'd love to do, um, you know, a northern version of the, um, Kazumi Ridge and just cross right there at the, uh, Bibble Bridge, or, you know, one of the existing crossing points, and climb up that hill and ride those dirt bike tracks or those trails all the way up to Clear. I think that'd be fantastic. But, uh, just Something I was thinking about over the last 2 months since we met.

So just, did you listen to him on the radio? I did, yeah, yeah, I read his interview in Outdoor Magazine and I listened to his interview on, uh, Alaska Public Media. And interesting, it's compelling. Yeah, it sounds fun. Sounds like maybe I should— maybe you can invite him to the I thought that might be kind of a fun idea.

I know I, um, I listened into their previous court meeting. They had an agenda item for the Long Trail, and I think that the, um, the Long Trail representative had a conflict at the last minute, so, um, didn't hear that briefing. But I, I think that's coming soon. I don't know, I sure don't direct their work, but I, I think that'd be kind of fun. Um, well, we had somebody on earlier from the quorum.

But anyway, that's all I had to say right now. Thank you. Um, I just want to say I appreciated having a work session with the assembly. I think we were able to go through a couple, uh, meaty discussion topics and identify some, some steps forward on some things. So I, um, I thought that was great.

We should get the gang together more often. No, I don't know, it was, it was good, and I feel like some good progress was made on on a few, like, not small items. So yeah, I appreciated meeting with the assembly also, and having the Minnesota people seems great. Appreciate their help.

I think the Minnesota Housing Development— Housing Needs Assessment was a lot of good information, a lot of information, 115 pages worth. I think it'd be good for us to continue monitoring what the State of Alaska does with their proposed subdivision on Hilltop, 20 potential lots, which could alleviate a lot of what we're doing. And if we incorporate that with a potential, you know, maybe redesign of the Lignite subdivision where a few shorter cul-de-sac roads accesses some lots, would, uh, significantly reduce road construction costs. Um, but yeah, a lot of good conversation tonight. Thanks everybody for attending.

So I'm in favor of the forward, you know, just the road, I mean, access. I think they're putting the road in there. I agree the fact that there's waste room, I think that'll change, but the current data centers in on our list here.

So much as I think we gotta go forward with Steve's idea of bringing up those locks on late night some way and get started. We've been working on this for 3 or 4 years now. Excuse me, I'm starting to sing. And so in Cantwell, You know, for several years there was 3 guys from Anderson that were running the ambulance for the ambulance fire department. They were all— they weren't even EMTs.

They were— they would do it wherever they would go, as far as they could, for EMTs or ETTs, such as— and they'd immediately call for help before they even left. So it was quite a while before a couple or three of us in the fire department realized that these guys didn't have any EMT training, but they didn't— they weren't breaking the law. They're still on there, and they're using— the only thing that wasn't on their ambulance, it was still written down as ALH, advanced life support, on there, which Eddie had to take off. So there is still a possibility Somebody that— I think there are still some EMT-1s in Camaro. Marge is a paramedic, which is really, really— that they could make a deal probably of running with that, but they would just have to get anything above that.

For example, here, you know, let's say they're just EMT-1s, they're running ambulances, as long as they didn't go above their scope. But everybody still be affected. Everybody's expecting EMT-3s or paramedics. But it is another possibility. But you know, still, that's taking a lot of, you know, grab the patient, do what they can, head north, and hope somebody else, you know, meet somewhere else.

But the first place they're going to have to go to if they want ALS is going to be Healy because they're here. We're the only ones around 50 miles anywhere. But that is— no, sir, they still have—. Now, they, um, there's a lot of training out there. I think it's, it's almost free training sometimes.

I mean, I, I think whoever's putting on the EMT training, it, it costs money to have that supervisor. But I've seen when a training is put on, they put out the call to neighboring communities to—. Marge has still been, uh, coming to training. And then there's, uh, Megan and a couple of the others are certified. Brad was when he was here.

But, uh, thought there is a possibility. And Rupert was up there. It was a couple years before I realized who that was on the radio all the time. Wow, sweetie. He was in there.

Anyway, just nothing. Otherwise, great meeting there.

That will take us to our next agenda item. Time and place of our next meeting is Wednesday, November 18th at 6:00 PM here in the Canoga Borough office. Now, that is— November is Thanksgiving month, but that's not Thanksgiving week.

Before Monday night, I'm making pies. So you're gonna bring one? Is that what you're No, no, it's a week before. I have it ready. Yeah, okay, that will take us to item P, adjournment.

We are going to adjourn at 9:07 PM. Waiting for the second hand. Second hand. Thank you. It was, uh, was one of our longer ones.

Long, yeah, but we, uh, we do it every.