By Greg Knight, News of the North
The City and Borough of Juneau’s Assembly Finance Committee met on Wednesday night to work on key components of the fiscal year 26 budget.
The committee had been looking to propose a property tax rate of 10.19 mills, an increase of .15 mills above the current level, but they didn’t get to it at the meeting, according to CBJ Assembly member Christine Woll.
“We finished up around 11 p.m., and we did not end up getting to the mill rate discussion, so we ended up pushing that off to next week,” Woll said. “Next week we’ll start on the conversation about setting our mill rate. We did spend a lot of our time on other topics last night, we talked about new risks to the budget. We know there’s a lot of uncertainty about federal funding and state funding, and so we talked about some some of the programs that we’ve the city is typically relied on for revenue.”
According to Woll, discussion also centered around grant requests from local nonprofit agencies.
“We get a lot of requests from organizations in the community that are providing services to to our students and to the unhoused and providing economic development in our community,” Woll said. [There is a] diversity of different types of organizations that have some nexus with our city priorities.”
A significant focus revolved around Eaglecrest Ski Area, which faces a projected $3.3 million deficit. Wages are a major issue for the resort.
“The assembly approved the Eaglecrest board’s recommendation of a 40% increase in personnel,” Woll said. “It’s a pretty big number, but I think it’s going to make a big difference in making sure Eaglecrest can attract and retain quality workers.”
A decision was made to allow Eaglecrest to operate in the red for the foreseeable future.
“We made a decision to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to allow Eaglecrest to go into a deficit for a few years, knowing that when the gondola comes online, and we more heavily invest in summer operations up there, we can essentially pay that deficit back and begin to generate profit up at Eaglecrest,'” Woll added.
The next finance committee meeting is set for Wednesday, May 21.
The CBJ’s next fiscal year starts on July 1.
