A handful of changes are on deck for Juneau’s docks and harbors after multiple ordinances proposed by the City and Borough of Juneau’s Docks and Harbors Board were authorized at Monday night’s Assembly meeting.
The four separate ordinances OK’d included the go-ahead for the city to appropriate $500,000 to go toward the third phase of the Aurora Harbor project, an approval that requires vessels in the CBJ harbor display their name or other state or federal identification, along with an ordinance that amends nearly a dozen Docks and Harbor regulations — most notably including a daily fee for vessels at the Don. D Statter Harbor that do not move every 10 days during the summer.
The new regulation means from May 1 through Sept. 30, vessels must leave the harbor for a minimum of six hours every 10 days or be assessed at a daily rate rather than a monthly rate, which is around three times the cost per day.
The requirement to move every 10 days during the summer is not new to Statter Harbor and has been a regulation since 2011, however, according to Port Director Carl Uchityl, not all harbor patrons were following the rule, and the new regulation is meant to encourage more turnover.
“We see more and more demand for people wanting to keep their boats there year round and it really keeps weekend boaters squeezed out, so we want to encourage this turnover,” Uchityl said.
Harbormaster Matt Creswell said at the Assembly meeting there is potential for certain vessels to be exempt from this regulation but the exemption must be OK’d by him.
The ordinance also requires that reservations for more than seven days at CBJ docks need to be paid in full, the allowance for inactive vessels to moor at the National Guard Dock and permitting free use of the kayak launch ramp at Statter Harbor.
According to Uchityl, the $500,000 appropriated will go toward the next phase of a $4 million project at Aurora Harbor that will add an additional main float to the harbor and allow for another 30 vessels to moor there.
Uchityl said the appropriation adds to the already existing $1.5 million toward the project allotted in 2017 from the 1% sales tax, $500,000 from the Harbor Fund balance in 2017 and a $2 million matching harbor facility grant from the Alaska Department of Transportation.
He said the project is in the design phase, and he estimated that the project will begin construction around May 2023, and finish during July of that summer.
At the meeting, the Assembly also threw a bone to residents by passing an ordinance that allows all pedestrians without boat ownership to walk dogs — or other domestic animals — on the harbor docks as long as they perform clean-up duty on behalf of their animals.
“If people want to walk their dogs we want to be a community facility,” Uchityl said.
• Contact reporter Clarise Larson at clarise.larson@juneauempire.com or (651)-528-1807. Follow her on Twitter at @clariselarson.
