Beth Weldon

What makes you a good candidate for the Juneau Assembly?

I think one of the things that I bring to the Assembly is my ability to build relationships. I get along well with the Assembly members, even the first time I was on just the Assembly before I was mayor. I think I’ve been a good catalyst for getting the different viewpoints together and able to work through solutions together, build collaboration.

And then outside the Assembly, I think I’ve been able to build relationships with a variety of groups of people, all the way from our state delegation to our federal delegation to the tribe. It was the first time last month that SEARCH [SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium], the city and BRH [Bartlett Regional Hospital] met together. So those are the kind of things I think I bring to the Assembly, along with six years of experience as mayor.

The city is asking voters to approve adding nearly $23 million to the city’s debt for public health and safety improvements. What are your thoughts on the two ballot initiatives?

I’ll deal with them one at a time. The first one for the public safety radio infrastructure – the radio system – and this is for public safety; this isn’t for KTOO or KINY. I think this is the public safety radio system, so the repeaters, the main radios at JPD, the fire stations and all that have been in place since before I started in the fire department. I had a 20-year career and I’ve been retired since 2012, so they’re pretty ancient, and for safety reasons, and just being able to talk to other agencies – that’s really important to fix that system.

And as far as the wastewater one, we’re going to have to pay for that somehow because we need to get a clarifier building. So we either pay through it for a bond or we pay through it for user fees. And both of these bonds will not raise the mill rate; they will be underneath our bond debt service.

Do you think the Ship-Free Saturday ballot initiative will benefit Juneau residents? Why or why not? If so, how?

I don’t think the Ship-Free Saturday will benefit Juneau. My main reason for that is we’re looking at building economies in Juneau, and the tourism industry is our only economy that’s growing right now, and I don’t see our other economies growing. Mining is stable, but it’s not growing. Government and state– I should say state and federal government isn’t growing.

Tribal government is growing a little bit, so that’s good news. But otherwise, you look at tourism because we’re kind of a three-legged pool. The other piece of this is it’s an economy that is for our younger generation. So, for those people that are retired, yes, it seems like Ship-Free Saturday would be great, but you’re taking away the ability for young people to make a living and to stay here. And I also think that taking away income is going to make these shops close on Saturday so that you won’t be able to go downtown and shop.

Juneau has now experienced record-breaking glacial outburst flooding events two years in a row. What role should the city play in mitigating damage to residential property in the future?

So we’re working currently, right now, on building a working group with Army Corps of Engineers, DOT [Department of Transportation & Public Facilities], NRCS [Natural Resources Conservation Service] and the federal delegation. In fact, City Manager [Katie] Koester, Mr. [Robert] Barr are going up on Sept. 6 for this first greeting, along with two of the tribal members. Just start the first conversations with the Army Corps of Engineers and say, ‘What can we do short term? What can we do long term? How much support can we have?’

The other thing that we just talked about is using some money that we had set aside for another position between the school district and the city to maybe have a project engineer to be able to help with these positions. 

The city is moving forward with a redevelopment plan for the Telephone Hill neighborhood in the coming years. How should the Assembly balance the need for more affordable housing downtown with the costs the city may have to shoulder to get those requirements in place?

I have a little different viewpoint than probably most of the Assembly members, and I’ve stated this on the record. My personal feeling is we should just let an outright bidding war happen and get as much money we can from Telephone Hill. It’s prime real estate. We would get prime costs. And then I believe we should turn around and then subsidize the heck out of Second [Street] and Franklin [Street], and do more affordable there. I know the Assembly won’t go that way with me, so the last I knew that we were looking at 20% of 80% AMI [Area Median Income], which is probably more likely, although we did have conversations of ‘can that just be in one building rather than every building?’

But I think we should get the most bang for the buck, and if we go that route of getting the most bang for the buck, then we don’t have to put any money into doing any project development or any landscaping or anything like that.

What do you think are the most important issues facing Juneau right now?

Well, the first one I think is flood mitigation. If we don’t figure out something or if we can’t get the federal government involved or figure out something local, our next year – could the flood be even worse? And that’s where our housing stock is in Juneau, is in the Valley. So that’s probably one of the biggest things.

The second thing is we just continue working on housing, but we’ve done pretty well, and there’s quite a bit being built this last couple of years. We have a lot of units available, so we also have to watch what that does to the market. 

Child care seems to remain an issue. The Icebreaker, we’ll be looking at working with the [U.S] Coast Guard on that. They had asked us to hold off on forming a group, a citizen group on them coming in, but now that seems to be getting closer. We’ll be looking at that. North Douglas crossing is a concern trying to get to develop the area and potentially an economic area, also.