OPINION: City and Borough of Juneau doesn’t have a revenue problem

Published 5:30 am Saturday, March 7, 2026

Last October, Juneau voters overwhelmingly directed the City & Borough of Juneau (CBJ) Assembly to reduce discretionary spending and get on with providing essential local government services in a cost-efficient manner. The citizens adopted measures calculated to make Juneau more affordable and rejected an alternative proposal floated by the Assembly to maintain taxation levels designed to keep contemporary spending practices in place.

Now, confronted with the obvious need to pare down spending and focus on providing essential services, the Assembly and CBJ management have embarked on a quest to perpetuate past practices. Many members of the public have come to believe the CBJ’s efforts are fraught.

Apparently, the obvious message conveyed by the voters calling for concentration on essential services and cutting some of the fluff built into the CBJ budget is not being taken seriously. Instead, the CBJ has embarked on a public relations campaign by first hiring additional bureaucrats (“engagement specialists”) to find out what the public thinks about CBJ finances. This effort is problematic for obvious reasons.

The survey put out by the CBJ purports to seek guidance based on “values” but then presents respondents with a variety of false choices. Essentially, a citizen is asked questions suggesting cuts must be made to libraries, schools and other essential services. The survey conveniently avoids pitting obvious niceties like many of the grants handed out like Halloween candy to various organizations and comparing those with critical tasks like police protection or snowplowing.

The choices are not whether to help fund Juneau’s spectacularly good symphony or skipping sewage treatment. The real task for the CBJ Assembly is halting discretionary spending on “fluff and feathers” that are not required to maintain Juneau’s core government or that add genuine value to the community.

The decisions to plow forward with the twice-rejected City Hall project and the expenditure of millions of local taxpayer dollars to demolish Telephone Hill when there’s no redevelopment plan in place indicate a significant systemic spending problem. This is why voters do not trust how the CBJ manages our money.

For far too long, the CBJ Assembly has treated various pots of local funds within the annual budget like slush funds, capable of reallocation without genuine and transparent public input.

A responsive CBJ Assembly would halt embarking on large-scale systemic projects that yield no appreciable benefit to the community at large. Think of the millions CBJ spent trying to develop housing on Pedersen Hill which was a major bust, resulting in the eventual transfer to a non-profit that continues to clamor for more public funding to bump along the ill-fated attempt to provide “affordable” housing. These kinds of activities, along with the Telephone Hill demolishment, the manner by which the flood-control in the Valley was implemented and the acquisition of the City Hall in the face of obvious citizen opposition are the kind of systemic financial mistakes that are crushing affordability in Juneau.

The citizens of Juneau spoke last October indicating a preference for affordability and delivery of essential services. If there’s extra money lying around, forget the fluff and feathers and deal with the sewage treatment plant and the (nearly full) landfill. And while you’re at it, take better care of our infrastructure so we don’t have to regularly borrow funds via bonding for deferred maintenance of our public facilities.

The oddly designed “budget survey” combined with the limited forums where the public can participate and provide input on community priorities suggest a campaign designed by bureaucrats and politicians to placate a public they apparently believe is incapable of figuring out how to implement spending priorities.

Juneau’s local government has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Until the CBJ Assembly tumbles to this reality and gets serious about reducing discretionary spending and even eliminating non-essential projects, the citizens of the Capital City will continue to clamor for cuts, not opaque forums where the implication is that they don’t understand how local government needs to operate.

Joe Geldhof has been a resident of Juneau since 1979. The local initiative eliminating the CBJ sales tax on groceries and utilities that passed last October was a project he worked on with other citizens of Juneau.