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Beth Weldon: Incumbent mayoral candidate
Age: 59
Occupation: Local business owner
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What should the Assembly do during the next year about Suicide Basin so people who are rebuilding their homes don’t have to worry about them again at this time next year?
People think we did nothing last year, but we did what we could last year with the duck bills in the drains and some other smaller mitigation stuff. But in the long run it’s not our river, it’s not our lake, it’s not our glacier. So you need federal permission for that, so it literally will take an act of Congress for us to do anything that touches the river. But we’re not giving up. It’s not that we’re not trying.
There’s a group (meeting) with the Army Corps of Engineers, DOT and (Natural Resource Conservation Service), and their question is what realistically can we do right now?…I found out I have a cousin in town that works for the Small Business Administration and he said “come on down.” And so I went over there and they had a media person with them from FEMA, and she was delighted that I showed up so I did an interview with her right there on the spot trying to tell our story.
(We may) add another person to our emergency response, some kind of title like that. I would like the idea that’s been suggested to hire an expert in the field of mitigation and see if they can go around and help people with their houses…How do we pay for that? I’m not sure. I can see that we might be able to do loans, but are we going to be able to do grants individually? No, we just don’t have the money at the city level.
We like the idea of trenching. I like the idea of moving gravel, or anything like that, on the river for a short term. But we can’t do that without two things. Number one, the Act of Congress that allows us to do it permitwise.
During the past year you’ve had the school district asking for a lot of money, the hospital is asking for a lot of money and there are now major flood costs to consider. So what is your assessment right now of CBJ’s financial health?
Our finances are solid. Our revenue covers our expenditures and this year we specifically brought down our fund balance to spend all good things for the community — not a City Hall — and so we brought our fund balance down to somewhere between five to six million in our general fund right now. Off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you what’s in our reserve budget, but I think it’s about 16 to 18 million.
So we’re good right now, but with the pressure of everybody saying “our property taxes are killing us” we brought our mill rate down to 10.04. We can’t do anything about the assessments, but assessments across the state have gone up 40%, 50%, 60% — so Juneau at 40% surprisingly is one of the smaller rise in percentages across the state. It’s absolutely tough to find housing, but we cannot control our assessment and our assessor by state law has to assess at the what is it the true and full market value, and that they do their job well. Our property tax revenue actually went down between FY24 and FY25 by $366,000, so somebody’s property tax went down.
Almost everything that for the river itself we’re looking for federal funding — we just don’t have the money for it. For the schools, right now they’ve done a pretty good job. So we will definitely, I’m assuming in our budget, we’ll be funding to the cap and a certain amount of funding outside the cap. Now, if they come back and ask us for three or four million we’re going to struggle with trying to fulfill that.
Where do you think the city spends its money efficiently and inefficiently?
I think we spend our money efficiently on keeping track of our FTEs [full-time equivalent employees]. We’re trying to keep people employed at the same time the directors are making sure their positions are all working up to their full potential…I think taking care of our employees we’ve done a pretty good job…I think the other thing that city, I think does really well is we hire top people in our organization. (City Manager) Katie Koester is a perfect example of that and (City Attorney Emily Wright I think should do really well. (Superintendent) Frank Hauser has been a really great find. Derek Bos, the police chief, has been a very good find.
It’s hard to come up with where we’re not spending our money efficiently because we’ve had to trim so much of our money. Every once in a while I think we should need some more coordination on things when we go to spend money.
Juneau’s population is projected to shrink during the coming years and, while homeporting a new U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker here will offset a portion of the predicted loss, what is your future vision for either a smaller Juneau or thoughts on how to reverse that decline?
We’re shrinking not because people are leaving more — we’re still losing about the same amount — we’re just not enticing people to come in…Some of that we may have control over and some of it we may not just because other places in the U.S. could be doing better in other things, especially lower-cost housing, for instance. We just don’t have in Alaska right now a huge employment opportunity for people to come up here.
So what we can do I think — and this has to with (Ship-Free Saturday) — the growing industry is the tourism industry and we need to embrace it. With that being said, we need to juggle very carefully with our citizens’ concerns. But people don’t realize when I say the five-ship-a-day limit is a big deal. People don’t realize that that’s the only (such agreement) probably in the world when it occurred. Maybe there might be times now that you got all these cruise lines to come together and agree on something so between (that agreement), and the ship’s capping at 16,000 a day with 12,000 on Saturday, our numbers are already shrinking just a little bit, and we can they’re going to continue to shrink. So we need to find some way to help the citizens be relieved from some of the pressures. We’re looking at more commercial trails so people aren’t running into tourists on the trails that they’re going on. I’m a strong believer in the gondola at Eaglecrest. I think that will pay off in time and be a way to have a destination for tourists to go — that may affect some people up at Eaglecrest — but it still will pull people away from other things.
Mining, there’s not much we can do for them other than stay out of their way and hopefully find more recreational opportunities. We’re hoping that the off-road vehicle park out the road will help with that because that’s one of the complaints of some of the miners. They like their toys and we have nowhere for them to play with their toys. And then the government workers, generally we’re still losing workers, but we’re losing them in state and federal. We’re staying about the same in the city with a few added. But the tribal government is going gangbusters so, again, stay out of their way and let them bring people in.
What is your assessment of Juneau’s homeless situation?
The answer is it’s doing better. It depends on who you’re talking to. Do we see a few more homeless or unhoused people on the sidewalks? Yes, we certainly do. But have we gotten rid of a place of congregation with illegal activity including extortion of women and possibly minors? Yes, we have. And I was just talking to (St. Vincent de Paul’s) Dave Ringle and he said we have gone from 100 bad actors to about 20 to 25, and we are doing well housing people. I mean, people don’t realize that Juneau is looked on as a success in supporting their homeless population. We’ve given money to the Glory Hall, we’ve given money to St Vincent de Paul, we’ve given money to AWARE, we’ve run the warming shelter. We give about $5 million a year addressing all the homelessness. But what you see are the people that aren’t complying with the rules. They’re a very, very challenging population. And if you compare us with other towns we have a less of a challenging population because we have it so done well.
Is there anything you would have done differently during the past three years as mayor?
It’s been unfortunate because the first year was a lot of fun and a lot of creativity, and that’s where we came up with a lot of childcare stuff…and then COVID happened. To be honest, I don’t think we would have done much better with COVID. Again, Juneau was seen as a shining beacon in the state on COVID. A couple of things we did right off the bat that nobody else, even in probably the nation, did is we gave a million dollars to keep childcare places open so people could go to work and we immediately did a loan for businesses…We got more vaccinations than anywhere else in the state when they first came out because we were so efficient.
I’m probably the fiscal conservative when it comes to the budget, so whenever we go to the budget on the things we add I vote no more often than not. I think our retreats have changed tremendously since I first started and it’s becoming more Assembly-owned per se instead of just the mayor staying up there and addressing everything. So I like that a lot. I think we’ve tried to work very hard to get our mill rate down. So nothing’s coming to mind.
What are the most important things the Assembly needs to tackle in the months to come?
We are working very, very hard, trying to make something happen with (flood) funding, with mitigation. There’s just no easy answers there. The other thing that we deal with every day is the homeless population. People call us all the time and we’ve gone nationally to places and talked about what we’re doing for childcare. And the other question, again, is housing. But we’re finally seeing the wheels turn, so to speak, between our grants, our loans, our tax abatement, you’re seeing housing coming up all over the place…one of my big things is to have a 55-year-old (housing) community, but I haven’t really had a developer get excited about that.
What else do you want to tell voters going into this election?
The Childcare Task Force was one of the first things I did as a mayor and it’s done well and we followed the recommendations. So I’m pretty excited about these two schools (acquired by the city after they were closed) opening up and giving us a chance to see what will happen if we put childcare there.
