For residents wondering what their local government has been up to, the 59-item agenda for Monday night’s Juneau Assembly meeting is a pretty good overview.
Hearing public testimony on a new police bodycam policy and the school district’s budget before voting on them, a vast range of upgrade and repair projects to public facilities, and resolutions to support public broadcasting and continued public ownership of the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area are on the list.
Other items include registration rules for people offering services through platforms such as Turo and Airbnb, proposed increases in dock fees, and wrapping the night up with an executive session to discuss collective bargaining on contacts for city employees.
Yet all that may merely be a warmup for the Assembly’s subsequent meeting since the agenda also includes the introduction of 19 ordinances that may be set for subsequent public testimony and final votes. As of now those would occur at the June 9 meeting when city leaders are also scheduled to hear testimony and vote on the municipal budget for next year and increasing the mill rate.
“We only have 14 items for public hearing (this Monday),” Mayor Beth Weldon said Sunday, which arguably qualifies as “only” as a relative reference to the overall list.
Weldon, now in the first year of her third three-year term as mayor, said while it’s a long agenda, it’s not uniquely so. Also “we just are doing our agendas a little bit different than we have in the past so we actually count up the items differently.”
Among the notable public testimony items is a proposed ordinance requiring the Juneau Police Department to release bodycam footage within 30 days of an officer-involved shooting. Current policy has no defined time period and JPD released footage of two fatal officer-involved shootings when the state Office of Special Prosecutions released results of their investigations months later showing the officers were justified in their actions.
Residents will also get a chance to comment on several major funding ordinances including the $95 million school district operating budget and the sale of $22.75 million in bonds voters approved last fall for utility and public safety projects. Smaller items that people can opine on include an extra $10,000 needed to order an aircraft rescue firefighting truck for Juneau International Airport and $150,000 to further evaluate options for future use of the Marie Drake building — which could include demolishing 80% of the former school’s classroom wing to make room for parking spaces.
Some of the notable resolutions, while meaningless in their legal impact, take firm stances on some highly controversial political topics of late. The resolution supporting KTOO and other public broadcasting is in response to President Donald Trump declaring he’s ending federal funding for public media such as NPR and PBS. The resolution on the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area comes after officials stated they’ve heard the U.S. Forest Service site might be among the federal lands the Trump administration tries to sell to private buyers.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
