Monday’s City and Borough of Juneau Assembly meeting will be the first one in a month, and will get right to business.
The meeting will feature the transition from District 2 incumbent Debbie White to new Assembly member Rob Edwardson, who defeated White in the Oct. 3 election. The Assembly will thank White for her service and she’ll give her seat to Edwardson.
After that, the Assembly will vote on new roles for the upcoming year. The members will elect a new deputy mayor, which happens annually. Mayor Ken Koelsch will also assign new liaison and chairperson roles.
In early October, Koelsch sent out an email to the Assembly members asking them to list which committees they’d like to be on. He’s reviewed those lists and will be assigning the new roles at Monday’s meeting.
The Assembly will run down a number of issues as well, including changes to the senior sales tax exemption.
An ordinance open for public hearing would expand the senior sales tax exemption, but negative feedback from local businesses could delay a vote on the expansion. When the Assembly voted in 2015 to restrict the sales tax exemption for seniors, it wrote the ordinance so that seniors would still not pay sales tax on so-called “essential items,” including food, fuel and utilities.
The ordinance under consideration at Monday’s meeting would tweak the definition of “essential items,” CBJ Finance Director Bob Bartholomew said.
“This expands that definition to be expanded to include prepared foods instead of just groceries,” Bartholomew said, “and you go to paper products and household supplies. It’s not a finite list.”
Local businesses, including the Juneau Chamber of Commerce, have reached out to City Manager Rorie Watt’s office recently, saying that this would not only create for confusion and inconvenience as seniors checked out but it would also require some businesses to file exemption reports with the city that they didn’t have to file before.
Watt will present these concerns to the Assembly on Monday, and said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Assembly members voted to delay a vote on the ordinance
Bartholomew said there will be some confusion at checkout counters in Juneau if this ordinance were to go through. The definition of these exempted items is far from simple, though, as factors including the number of “food ingredients” in a dish or whether or not a food is sold with “eating utensils supplied by the owner” would come into play.
For example, if a senior were to go to Fred Meyer and buy groceries, the senior would not pay sales tax on those. If a senior goes to Fred Meyer and gets a hot food item from the deli, the senior would pay sales tax on that. If the Assembly approves this ordinance, seniors will not pay sales tax on that hot deli item.
Other items that would become defined as “essential items” (and would therefore become exempt) include toilet paper, soap, laundry detergent, toothpaste and deodorant. Bartholomew estimates that this change will reduce the city’s sales tax revenue by between $30,000 and $90,000. In 2016, Bartholomew said, the narrowing of the senior sales tax exemption as a whole netted the city $1.8 million.
The bigger issue down the road for the Assembly is whether or not to restore the full exemption. Since the Assembly voted to narrow the exemption in 2015, the makeup of the Assembly has changed dramatically. Each new person elected to the Assembly since then — Koelsch, Edwardson, Norton Gregory and Beth Weldon — spoke in favor of restoring the full exemption while campaigning. Mary Becker, who won re-election in 2016, voted against narrowing the exemption in 2015.
Whatever the Assembly members choose to do Monday night, Watt said the issue in the back of everyone’s mind will be much larger than whether or not deli food at Fred Meyer is served with a fork or not.
“Looming in the background,” Watt said, “is that big structural question.”
Extending the West Douglas Road
Construction on the road leading to West Douglas is nearly complete, according to a memo to Becker (the Public Works and Facilities chairperson) from Chief Capital Improvement Project Engineer John Bohan. The 2.3-mile road runs from the end of the North Douglas Highway around the back side of the island toward Middle Creek.
The Assembly will vote on Monday whether or not to commit funds to extend the road even further.
The Assembly will vote on a supplemental agreement that would increase the road construction contract by $600,000. This increase would allow ENCO, the project’s contractor, to extend the road an additional 1.1 miles all the way to Middle Creek.
A $3 million legislative grant through the Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development (DCCED) is funding the project, and those funds are set to expire in June 2018. Currently, about $730,000 of the grant money remains, and CBJ Code 53.50.040 requires Assembly approval for an extension of a contract that amounts to $250,000 or more, even if it’s not city money.
Bohan’s memo proposed that the city extend the contract by $600,000 and $130,000 of it be kept in reserve for inspection costs or unforeseen construction issues. The memo estimated that this next phase of the project will finish in May 2018, which meets the DCCED deadline of June 2018.
