Juneau’s top local elected official has a new award for a lifetime of public service and the city’s top administrator has a newly increased salary following a performance review of her first year.
Mayor Beth Weldon won this year’s Vic Fisher Lifetime Service Award from the Alaska Municipal League, which she served as president of for the past year, during the league’s annual meeting in Anchorage last week. She was congratulated for the award — the organization’s highest, established 24 years ago — at the beginning of Monday night’s Juneau Assembly meeting by Deputy City Manager Robert Barr.
“The fellow mayor who nominated her cited her 20 years of service to Capital City Fire/Rescue and over seven years on the Assembly, including playing key leadership roles during the pandemic, championing the importance of a sustainable childcare sector, and her substantial volunteer service to the Alaska Municipal League, the Glacier Valley Rotary, and student athletic clubs,” Barr said.
Weldon, the second Juneau mayor to win the award after Bruce Botelho received it in 2011, thanked Barr for the recognition and then sought to move the meeting on to the public comment portion without further comment.
“We don’t get to shake your hand?” City Manager Katie Koester asked.
“No,” Weldon replied, moving on to the next agenda item of a meeting that ultimately came within three minutes of its four-hour maximum limit.
Weldon received the award following a challenging year professionally and politically. In addition to dealing with two record glacial outburst floods since August of 2023, and record-level financial crises involving the Juneau School District and Bartlett Regional Hospital, her husband Greg died in a motorcycle accident in April. She was reelected to a third three-year term in October with about 60% of the vote.
The end of that meeting was an executive session that included a performance evaluation for Koester, who took over as city manager in September of 2023. At the very end of the meeting the Assembly came out of executive session and Christine Woll officially proposed Koester’s initial salary of $210,000 be increased to $214,217.95 retroactive to the start of the fiscal year on July 1 and $221,715.15 as of Sept. 9, a year after her hiring.
“Additionally, I move that in recognition of her outstanding performance Miss Koester shall be paid a lump sum payment of $2,000,” Woll said.
The Assembly approved the increases and bonus unanimously.
Koester, originally hired by the city in 2020 as the director of the Public Works and Engineering Department, also has had a challenging past year professionally. In addition to working with federal and other officials on proposed short- and long-term solutions for glacial flooding, she has overseen a large-scale shuffle of municipal employees and buildings they are working in.
Monday’s Assembly meeting included a public comment period about flood protection that lasted more than an hour. Koester and Weldon — along with other top municipal officials — were singled out both for high praise and withering criticism by some of the residents commenting who had widely varying opinions about the measures currently being proposed.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
