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Nathaniel (Nano) Brooks: Juneau Assembly District 2 candidate
Age: 30
Occupation: Laundry/entrepreneur
You said during a recent candidate forum Juneau is going to boom in the future, which contradicts a Juneau Economic Development Council study presented last year stating the city’s population is expected to decline in the years to come. On what basis are you making your claim?
Actually, I’m getting it from the JEDC information. So we have a 20% to 25% conversion rate of population in Juneau. We have no problem getting new people here. We have a problem keeping them here. So if we work on the resident retention, then our population will start skyrocketing, because we actually are getting a quarter of new people in so 30,000 almost 10,000 new people every year. But we’re also having almost 10,000 people leaving every year.
Aren’t many of those people working short-term or temporary jobs?
That’s why I’m big on the things that focus on supporting resident retention. The land lottery is a great way to entice someone and be like, “Hey, I actually have a chance at owning a little piece of this town.” And it’s a good incentive to try and make it work here. Because what I hear from a lot of these workers, and it’s not all just traveling workers, because they’ll come out and have anticipation to live here full time. But after working for a few months and seeing the conditions or not being able to find housing that’s what initially gets them to be like, “OK, I can’t do it here.”
You’ve discussed the land lottery extensively as a candidate before, but since there seems to be no movement toward such a policy by the Assembly is it worth being a point of emphasis for you — and a risk it’s what you’re mostly known for — if you can’t get five votes for it?
It’s already part of the city charter. So they could literally start doing it tomorrow if they put two staff on the project. The framework is already there. It’s not that that’s all I care about. I actually care about every facet of the community, education, healthcare and just the quality of life for all people. And that all boils down to finances to make all this stuff possible. We need more money. And when the city wants to do a new project or some new program, it goes to two avenues. Either we’re going to pull more taxpayer money out of the people, or we’re going to try and get more revenue from the passenger fees from tourism. And it’s like all the while they have over 5,000 acres of undeveloped land just sitting around doing no benefit to anyone. With the land lottery, you’re getting land in people’s hands for close to nothing.”
You’re talking about large-scale development, but a concern of many people right now is there aren’t enough builders or materials to repair homes damaged by flooding from Suicide Basin before cold weather sets in. How do you suggest handling that short-term problem, as well as the longer-term issues of workforce and supply shortages?
I would tell them that the city needs to buckle down and support the people. I know that where the flood originates from is federal land tied with the Forest Service. The city’s going through every step it possibly can to make sure that things are getting done on that scale, but the Forest Service doesn’t own (land) down the river. There are things that could be done tomorrow such as diversion channels making sure that it flows out into areas that aren’t populated, like forest areas, and then a lot of things that can be down done downriver to reduce the risk of the impact to those homes to make it to the where they will make it through the winter.
And I would be interested to see the source where we don’t have enough supplies or tradesmen, because every contractor I know is out helping people right now, and all the supermarkets that sell building supplies are offering discounts to make sure that people can get the stuff they need. And I haven’t seen one person say that we don’t have enough to help you.
What needs to happen is that they need to exercise every option available to try and address the mitigating factors of it. And right now they’re doing what is historically done — Army Corps of Engineers, Forest Service, you go through this permitting processes — but that’s not the only option for mitigating factors. So they need to be looking at everything. And like I said, down the river they can start doing levees and dikes.
Where does the city spend its money efficiently and inefficiently?
I think that the city spends its money efficiently in some of the enterprise boards. The airport is very efficient with its operations. You’ve seen the expansion from them, they don’t have much deferred maintenance, they’re doing a good job of making the most out of the taxpayers’ money along with their enterprise funds, and that’s an excellent area. There is always a lot of work being done on utilities, wastewater and other utilities.
I would like to see more streamlined efforts in that. A prime example is how the (capital improvements projects) list is done for deferred building maintenance. And every department has their own idea and their own way of how they want to do building maintenance, but we’re all the same community. So having all the deferred building maintenance departments under one roof would save all those departments money, save the city money and our facilities would be up kept in a fashion that we’ve been lacking lately.
The Assembly has been asked to help both 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 and, if you support providing significant additional funding, where does it come from?
There are things associated with that tie into kind of the principles of representation that I want to be. People have heard me say that I’m all about accountability, responsibility and transparency and municipal functions. And you know, the city doesn’t have an issue bringing in money. It has an issue with how it likes to spend it and in the processes. The prime example are the ballot initiatives that are happening right now for the wastewater and police communications, and they’re coming to the people being like “we need to pull $20 million from your tax money so we can do these things.” And those two things, as far as bond obligations go, are some of the most important ones that have ever come up. The health and public safety of the community is extremely important and should be a very high priority. What’s disingenuous and not a good service to the people is that they’re asking us for $20 million and, in three CIP projects on the list, there’s about $17 million in savings, collecting interest, all for projects that were voted down by the people. So they’re holding savings, playing around with money already, but they are asking us for even more.
What are your thoughts about the city’s property assessments and mill rate?
Just a simple reallocation of savings into priority projects would make it to where we wouldn’t have to raise the mill rate in the ways that it was done and the assessments we should have gotten a standardized method of assessments a long time ago as well. I’ve dug into it and it seems like they’re usually using a national metric for measuring assessments selectively. Neighboring properties having drastically different assessments, regardless of whether they had a bunch of renovations or not? So it’s like it the city can look at areas and then project their anticipation of value and attribute that to assessment. So you saw a lot of neighbors that had wildly differing assessments, even though they hadn’t changed anything on their properties for decades.
I’m always for lowering the mill rate and actually I think that this community could operate just fine with a mill rate well below 10, maybe in the eight or nine region.
If you want to lower taxes that much, can you cite historical examples where it worked?
Yeah — the way that Juneau was built. Land was given away to people with stipulations to build within a certain amount of time and now that’s all the most valuable real estate in the community. Juneau is the example and we just need to do it again.
What are your thoughts on how the city is handling the homeless issue?
We are not in a position to be able to offer the types of resources and facilities that these individuals need, and they are dying. They are dying in the streets, dying in the woods and the city isn’t letting anyone know about that. That’s why I’m like we need to get these people to a safer place that’s more conducive to survival if they are actually homeless, rather than letting them sit here and die on the streets.
Are you suggesting sending the homeless out of Juneau and, if so, how do you pay for it?
We already see some of that. (Some organizations) do get plane tickets for individuals, but they can’t force them to use it and that’s where it’s really unfortunate to see that the behavioral health programs and the crisis care got removed the day that Steven Kissack got shot. It’s very sobering and unfortunate, and we need to make sure that we have care facilities that address the root cause mental health, distress and substance abuse. That’s where you start addressing the issue. And we need to focus on doing that. We definitely need shelter space to just to get out of the elements. But everyone is thinking of this, that and the other, and nothing has the capacity for the influx that we’ve been seeing.
A recent economic study says the two biggest areas of local economic growth are tourism and Native corporations. Are there other industries you believe can be economic cornerstones?
I very much think that Juneau could be a leader in the renewable energy production and manufacturing realms. I would like to see a level of manufacturing come to Juneau because if you look at it on a larger picture, on the state level, our state has zero GDP. We don’t produce and sell anything. People will say “but mining and fishing and oil” — we don’t own any of that. That’s not our GDP. That’s some other companies that don’t have state residency here. So I want to see us start creating industries to give Alaska GDP.
We have the Coast Guard icebreaker coming in. We have all these cruise ships. If we could refine steel and shape steel, we could be fixing and producing these things for these companies in a way that no one else in the world can do, and that right, there could be a new industry that could within a few short years support thousands of people.
What else do you want voters to know?
I’d like to speak from the heart to the people, and what I’m seeing being perpetuated more and more in this community is an us-and-them mentality, and it spreads to many areas. Valley and downtown, city versus private, union versus non-union. We’re all the same community. We’re all friends, family and neighbors, and it’s like we can have differing opinions. And it wasn’t that long ago that, especially in the political sphere, people could have wildly differing opinions and still go get lunch or dinner together, because people’s lives weren’t consumed by politics. And I think everyone needs to take a step back and look at the people on the right and their left, and look into the future and be like “what can we do to make sure that everyone can thrive, that everyone can come up together? And that’s that’s why I am so hardline on that land lottery because there’s nothing quite as good of a social equalizer as land ownership.”
