What do you think is the most important issue facing Juneau right now?

Jeff Jones

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

Obviously property taxes. Everybody I talk to, their first thing is “what can you do about property taxes?” That goes back to responsible spending within the city. How are we spending our money? Having a little transparency there to where the people know what we’re spending money on. Granted, I know it’s out online, but nobody wants to go dig for it, they want to have it laid out in front of them. So we definitely need to curb our spending, figure out what our priorities are and focus in that direction. Property values are out of hand, so we need to get that in check. I know it’s expensive to live here, it’s a beautiful place, it’s safe for the most part, but we sure pay a premium for it.

Nano Brooks

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I would say that that’s housing, cost of living and high property taxes. There are many, many other issues that are facing the community right now, and a lot of them take equal importance, but the way that you can really tackle all the issues in a more widespread manner is by tackling these core issues that make it so that people want to stay here, live here, raise their families and continue in our workforce. So if we focus on the people, and make it the best possible scenario for the individuals in the community, then all other functions of the municipality will thrive as a result.

Ella Adkison

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I think that the current issue we really are facing is our education issue, and making sure we can fund our schools as much as possible. We’ve had some attacks on our ability to fund our education system by the current administration, and it’s really important that we educate our kids. It’s important so that families will come live here, so young people come back and start work here. People aren’t going to start up new businesses in a place that doesn’t have a good education system. And we’ve done a really good job up to this point to funding our education, and it’s really great the relationship we have with the school district and the assembly. But we need to continue that, we need to fight that, and make sure that that continues.

JoAnn Wallace

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

For me, the most important thing, and one thing I feel very strongly about, is we have to make it more affordable to live here. Our property taxes are so high, and it’s making it hard for the young kids, my kids, my grandkids. It’s making it hard for those middle-income folks to live here between property taxes, utilities. I really want to look at how we can lower some of those costs to keep young families here.

Paul Kelly

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

What I’m running on, and what I believe are my top three priorities are supporting public education, reducing homelessness and helping to grow our economy and diversify our tourism industry. To do at least a couple of those goals, there are I think two major issues that we need to focus on. If we want to bring professionals here into town to help people who are unhoused when they’re in a stable housing situation, they’re ready to ask for help, they need to have somebody to go to, and we don’t have enough mental health or addiction treatment professionals. If we want to attract those kinds of people here to Juneau, I think it’s important that these young professionals see opportunities. They see a housing market where they can afford to live and they have affordable child care.

Emily Mesch

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

There are so many issues facing Juneau. We have school funding issues because the state has gone back and forth on what they’re going to give us. We have housing issues. We have, across the board, staffing issues, both within the city and in private industry. We need to have more, better-trained people living in Juneau in our workforce. We know we have challenges here, they’re meetable challenges, they’re solvable problems. But there’s so many little things we need to be looking at, and taking a hard look and saying, ‘Okay, practically, what’s the right solution here?’ That’s what I want to bring – I want to bring thoughtful analysis and look for the best solutions to our problems. And then also what are the solutions that Juneau wants, because those aren’t necessarily the same things all the time and you need to have something that does both.

Laura Martinson McDonnell

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

That one’s easy for me – it’s the economy. Our economy is dynamic. It’s changing quickly. We are not the same city we were 10, 20, 30 years ago and neither is our economy. I think if we are very mindful of that, we can help maximize the changes in our economy, but if we aren’t quick acting, we’re going to find ourselves left behind from economic opportunity. The economy to me is everything. If we have a healthy economy, that’s how we take care of the vulnerable people in this community. That’s how we fund education. That’s how we solve our child care crisis and our housing crisis. We can’t meet the needs of this community without a very strong economy, especially with state funding dwindling away as it is. So for me, the number one most important thing we need to focus on is a vibrant and sustainable economy.

Ivan Nance

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I think it’s how to take the assets that we have and transform, develop the future in such a way that we maintain the assets we have and capitalize, market or bring businesses here that appreciate those assets. I have a quote from one of my favorite people, Will Rogers. Will Rogers said, and this is back in the ‘30s, ‘Be glad you don’t get all the government you pay for.’ So we’re talking about, with this city Assembly, one of the things that I’m interested in is making it as productive and efficient city government as it can be. All the issues that you brought up, they’re specific, but overall we need to give people a good value proposition for their taxes.

Michele Stuart-Morgan

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

We do have climate change. We have erosion. We still have our addiction problem. Fentanyl is still killing many of our residents, and it’s rampant. It’s going up, it’s not going down. In 2015 and ‘16, I tried to help and worked with a lot of people to get Narcan – with our nonprofit Juneau Stop Heroine Start Talking – and we got that bill passed and we got Narcan, Naloxone, out in people’s hands. And that helped save lives, but that fight is not over. The dignity of our people, we need to make sure we address that. Our tourism. I think Centennial Hall and JACC, there’s many, many things. I’m the kind of person that wants to focus and break them down and look at them one-by-one, not just glaze them over and push them under a rug. I think that’s something I’m good at doing. Our seniors, our schools, our housing, you could go on and on. I don’t have the answers. I would work with other people – federal, city, everyone – to break those down and address them individually.

Dorene Lorenz

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

Responsibility and transparency in our government. I think a lot of things are done behind the scenes. A lot of deals are made that the public is unaware of. I think a lot of discussion that should be going on in public isn’t. It’s behind closed doors, and that’s not cool for anyone. It makes the actual agreements shady, so people don’t have faith and confidence in them. When you see the rules apply to some groups of people but not all groups of people, there’s this sense that there’s no fairness. And if you don’t have faith and confidence in the process, you’re not going to have faith and confidence in your government, and that’s a fundamental thing. That, to me, is something that definitely needs to be changed.

David Morris

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

The thing that hits everybody that I talk to is taxes. Everybody is really upset about the taxes. If we build more houses and opened up that avenue, we would be able to lower the mill rate because there would be more, and it would also lower your taxes.

The landfill is a problem, and there’s been lots of advancements in that. I think we need to go back to a furnace, a clean-burning furnace.

And transparency. I think the Assembly – that’s kind of what prompted me to run – is they have spent a lot of their time behind closed doors and in executive session. You can’t talk to anybody if you’re in executive session about what went on. There’s only a couple of reasons to go into executive session, and that’s if you’re going to harm somebody or it’s extremely sensitive information, and all these things are not that when they’re going into session. They’ve made deals, they say, ‘Ok, you can talk,’ and they go, ‘Time’s up,’ because they’ve already made their decision. They’re not letting the people voice their opinions, I think. So that’s part of the reason why I’m running.

Christine Woll

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

It is definitely housing. I think housing needs to be the number one priority of our city. I think we have a lot of levers to pull to build more housing in Juneau. When you don’t have enough housing, you can’t grow your economy. I know a lot of people who are struggling to hire right now because the people that they’re hoping to attract to Juneau to work can’t find a place to live, and we have people living on the street, unfortunately. It affects everything that happens in our community if we don’t have enough houses for people to live in.

Alicia Hughes-Skandijs

Candidate for District 1 Assembly

I think it’s housing. I really do. It’s something we all agree on, it’s something we have been working on, but it’s something we need to turn up the heat on and do even more to affect it. It affects Juneau in so many ways. Right now, we have a situation where people can’t find a place to live. That affects every employer. It affects the hospital. It affects cruise ship excursions because they can’t staff because they can’t get anyone to move here. It’s affecting the state. It affects our economy in a real way. And then just from the quality of life perspective, it’s affecting – if you can’t stay here, we’re not going to be able to keep young families here, and if we do that, we’ve already got an aging demographic. It will solve a lot of Juneau’s long term issues if we can fix our housing problem.

Joe Geldhof

Candidate for District 1 Assembly

The overarching issue that’s facing the City and Borough of Juneau in terms of local government is coming up with decision-making that’s crisp, that makes sense, that actually accelerates the goal of getting things done, and that is done in an open and transparent way. It’s actually remarkable, even shocking, that this particular Assembly, which surprisingly claims they’re making decisions, they’re doing it in an opaque way. They’re meeting in closed meetings, executive sessions, where they don’t have to be. And that has got to stop. The business of the public should take place in the open. There should be an explanation, and there’s too much go along, get along and straining mightily to get consensus on issues. That’s doing a disservice to the people who actually live here, pay the taxes here, and want government but they want it done efficiently and right.