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Dorene Lorenz: Juneau Assembly District 2 candidate
Age: 59
Occupation: Communications consultant
This is your second straight year as a candidate. What, if anything, would be different about the Assembly or city government if you had won last year?
There has to be more accountability. A lot of people have these really great ideas, but they don’t look to see if it’s feasible and reasonable. Telephone Hill is a great example. We would be so far down the road on Telephone Hill right now if I had a voice in this situation because I would say, “Hey, look, a feasibility report says in order for this to pencil out this wonderful idea of putting a lot of housing up there, at a minimum CBJ would have to subsidize $50,000 per unit with, I believe, it’s 34 or 35 units that are short-term (Airbnb) units, I don’t see that as being a reasonable investment of taxpayer money if we’re going to be subsidizing housing downtown. My theory is always fix what you got first.”
Take, for example, the (Gross 20th Century Building). There are 32 units that have water damage. The estimate I heard is $1.5 million to get them back in the city’s inventory. And 32 times $50,000 is $1.6 million so for that extra million we might even get our movie theater back. I’m not saying that we should give them $50,000, but if we’re going to do what we’re planning on doing at Telephone Hill, I think that would be a significantly better investment of our money.
A concern about housing work is being expressed by people affected by flooding from Suicide Basin who say the workforce and supplies to make repairs before cold weather sets in are lacking. What are your suggestions for addressing such concerns?
For the work that I’m suggesting it’s all private sector. But you can do things that we’re not doing. Currently the Anchorage School District has a lot of things they’re doing that the Juneau School District isn’t doing, which is weird to me. One is the Anchorage School District business partnership, so they get school credit for coming and working in your business year-round the entire time they’re in high school and they can learn skill sets. They’re basically interns. So not only is the kid going to work for a contractor, and deciding whether or not he wants to be in construction or one of the trades, he’s also giving school credit for that. Additionally, they have the (King Tech High School) career center where, same thing, you go in and you learn basics in how to be a plumber, how to be an electrician, how to swing a hammer, and they build tiny homes that they sell off as class projects.
It kind of also makes me wonder — and this is a private sector thing — why hasn’t anybody penciled out taking a big parking lot like the one that’s now U-Haul and setting up a thing there where they make prefabricated homes?
That’s the private sector — what role does the Assembly have in those decisions?
You can incentivize it. You can give me something you put on the table, for example, on the homes issue because affordable housing is a big issue. And another problem that we have is that our emergency services folks don’t have quality homes. A lot of them are still renting because they can’t afford it. I remember when we moved to Eagle River, my stepfather had just moved from being a patrolman to doing undercover work.…It was pretty much the boonies, but they incentivized people moving there. This city, if my recollection is correct, would give you a low-interest loan, a couple percentage points lower than what you would get at the bank and then they would help you with your down payment on your house as well. And then for a certain number of years they gave you a discount or no property taxes just to make it easier for folks to get in their homes and get set up.
The Assembly has been asked to help the school district and city-owned hospital with major financial crises, as well as providing additional support to city-owned entities such as Eaglecrest Ski Area. What do you see as CBJ’s role in supporting such operations when they are struggling?
You start out with essential services and do them solid. You don’t do them sketchy. Right now we’re doing essential services sketchy. Essential services are things that communities can’t do as individuals by themselves. I’m looking at police, fire, emergency services, making sure the roads are plowed, the water runs, those kind of things. Those are, to me, our essential services. School and education is actually a requirement of the state of Alaska, and the cities chip in.
Plenty of city and school district leaders have said for many years the state should provide more funding, but if that doesn’t happen what solutions would you suggest as an Assembly member?
I would want to see things looked at in a different direction. Going back to King career center: instead of renting out the Floyd Dryden I would look at how can we capitalize this to offer services that we can get funding from different revenue streams that would bring more students here. If we did like a King career center for all of Southeast — (UAS) is doing some stuff like that on the college level, but nobody’s doing it on the high school level — and you can make a residential charter school where kids come from Sitka, Ketchikan, whatever that come here, the trades would most likely help fund that to learn a trade and get started. So right when they graduate from high school they’ve already got a trade they can work in and make a good living wage. And they’re here in Juneau so while they’re learning they can work and after they’ve graduated they already have an established relationship with a local company and a job.
What about providing the financial support Bartlett Regional Hospital is seeking to continue some of its programs?
I am confused as to why we look at the other healthcare providers in Juneau as competition and not as partners. That whole theory eludes me. In Seward we have a hospital too that is city owned, but we have Providence running it for us and they run it really well.
The people who sit on the city council are not experts in hospital management and our citizens who sit on the hospital board are not experts in hospital management. A hospital is a multi-million dollar company and you’re asking a plumber — no disrespect to the plumber — to make decisions for the livelihood of that entity.
Where does Juneau spend its money efficiently and inefficiently?
I have to say because I am a prideful person that all this winter I would videotape the snowplow coming around my little circle and leaving, and I was sticking it on Facebook and I would tag all my Anchorage friends because I was bragging. Our guys did an excellent job there on keeping the roads open in the wintertime. Public works seems to be doing a decent job. I would say that currently our police are doing the best they can with the resources they have. I think the fire is the same way. I think those people have been bubblegumming and rubberbanding things together for quite some time.
You’ve talked about police and fire as essential services. You have also said you are supporting a $12.7 million bond measure to pay for emergency communications upgrades, but are angry about doing so. Can you explain that?
It’s because I know for a fact there’s a lot of different revenue streams for that acquisition. We’ve known that we’ve needed it for over a decade now and in my mind there’s no reason why we haven’t been applying all these years to get funding to cover those things. Especially during COVID there was a lot of money floating around and it seems odd to me that we didn’t take advantage of that opportunity to grab a hold of some.
The city received quite a lot of COVID money.
We did, but not for this.
Are there any other efficiencies and inefficiencies in the local government you want to highlight?
I think that in terms of the police department it would make sense to me that if we did things like make the airport its own (police department) district so that when you get someone who is a retired officer coming back and serving that’s a place where they could be in that area. It’d be more attractive for them because they’re not going to be the car running around chasing after burglars. Another thing that we might want to think about doing is hiring administrative people who are civilians and don’t have to go through the academy, and are on a different pay scale, do the administrative things so that the officers don’t have to spend their time doing it.
Since you mentioned police working at the airport, officers have been quite busy in that area in recent months due to the city’s “dispersed camping” policy for the homeless. If you had been elected to the Assembly last year when campground and warming shelter policies were being discussed, what options would you have supported?
I have to say that my previous experience on the (Seward) Assembly did not prepare me for taking care of homeless people, because we don’t have any in Seward, or we didn’t during my term. It’s a small enough town that if somebody is being displaced we took care of it on an individual level ahead of time before they lost their home. I have watched different scenarios from different mayors in Anchorage. It seemed to me that opening up the old Native hospital land and allowing people to camp inside that area with essential services brought to that area so that if they needed help it’s right there. But they aren’t taking up the parks alongside the road and I think they just had an officer just camped there all day to mitigate issues there, which was much better than having half a dozen officers all over town mitigating issues from displaced people.
What solutions do you suggest to concerns about flooding from Suicide Basin, both for the coming year and long term?
We had our own Suicide Basin in Seward. What used to be Jefferson Street used to have a river that used to wash out the whole town. And 100 years ago they figured out how to drill through a mountain so that we have a diversion tunnel and then it comes out into a waterfall on the end of town. And that has saved us for 100 years. And people are saying it’s too expensive. Yeah, 100 years ago, when they were using picks and shovels, it was pretty expensive, too. And here we have people who have that as a living and expertise and machinery that does that that’s not that far away.
That’s a federal project that would take many years. What about short-term?
If I was doing it with my magic wand I would do what we did in my neighborhood. We have Resurrection Creek that comes and floods…and it would take out the entire neighborhoods. So we reinforced the bank. And we just kept reinforcing the bank all the way down until we got to where there was a plateau with wetlands, a marsh and then we let all the water go in there.
What else do you want voters to know?
I’m going to be Juneau’s Paul Revere, and I’m going to call out “The visitors are coming! The visitors are coming!” I was Alaska’s delegate to a convening of the states a couple months ago, and from 2026 — which is going to be the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the marshaling of our Navy, Army and Marines — to 2033 —which is the 250th anniversary of the end of the Revolutionary War — there’s going to be a huge national and international media campaign suggesting that visitors go to all 50 states, all state capitals, all national parks. There’s going to be an initiative while those visitors come that they make legacy investments in volunteer time, and also in philanthropy and all 50 states. What is Juneau doing to prepare for an extra million visitors a year?
