Casey Kelly

Juneau runners took the top spots in the Capital City Invitational cross country meet this weekend (Saturday).

Sidney Browning finished the 5 kilometer race in 21:16 to best the girls’ field, followed by Juneau-Douglas High School classmate Martina Miller at 22:10 – one second ahead of Ketchikan’s Courtney Galloway, who was third. Katie Jones was the top Thunder Mountain girl, finishing 11th with a time of 22:57.

JDHS’s David Francis had the top boys’ time at 16:52. Sitka’s Niko Friedman was second at 16:57, followed by Juneau’s Jesse Miller at 17:01. James Steeves came in sixth for Thunder Mountain with a time of 18:38.

The Capital City Invitational was held Saturday at Savikko Park.

Juneau longshoremen will hold an informational picket Monday to protest the practice of using foreign workers to tie up cruise ship shuttle boats.

The picket will start about 1:30 p.m. in Marine Park, timed to coincide with the arrival of Holland America’s Zuiderdam.

When cruise ships anchor in Gastineau Channel, they use shuttle boats to transport passengers to shore and to pick up cargo and supplies. Longshoreman and Juneau Docks and Harbors board member John Bush says the practice of having foreign workers tie up those boats has been going on for years.

“As we read it, the longshore work is tying up and cargo, and the foreigners can’t do it. They don’t have Green Cards and they don’t have transportation TWIC cards, security cards,” Bush says. “One quote of one of my buddies is, ‘These are shovel ready jobs and we don’t need shovels.’ We’re Americans and we want to do this work, and we’re longshoremen.”

Bush says the longshoremen are working with Alaska’s congressional delegation and US Customs and Border Protection to end the practice. He says Monday’s informational protest will be the first of its kind.

Drew Green with Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska directed calls to the longshoremen’s employer, Southeast Stevedoring. Officials with the company did not return calls seeking comment.

The Coast Guard is monitoring the condition of a fisherman who suffered cuts to the inside of his mouth aboard the 98-foot vessel Shellfish.

Chief Petty Officer Kip Wadlow says the boat rolled while the 25-year-old crewmember was in the engine room with a flashlight in his mouth, causing cuts on his tongue and the back of his throat. The Coast Guard launched two helicopters from Air Station Sitka last night, but Wadlow says weather prevented them from doing a hoist.

“Coast Guard flight medics are keeping appraised of his situation. Right now, he’s kind of out of the danger zone. He still has the injuries, but they are non-life threatening,” Wadlow said.

When the call came in at about 6:30 Thursday night, Wadlow says the boat was about 270 miles west of Sitka, where it’s headed. At last check it was travelling about 7 knots.

Wadlow says the Coast Guard will attempt another hoist if the weather improves.

On Monday, the Juneau Assembly Committee of the Whole is scheduled to discuss relocating the Alaska Commercial Fishermen’s Memorial to Marine Park. But it will do so without a recommendation from the city’s Docks and Harbors Board.

When the assembly approved a floating cruise ship berth to be built in front of the memorial, it told the Docks and Harbors Board to work with the memorial’s board of directors, and if necessary recommend a new location.

The memorial board believes the monument should be left where it is – near Taku Smokeries on the downtown waterfront – but not with a dock there. The memorial board is concerned with how the floating berth might impact the annual Blessing of the Fleet, as well as the view of the water from the memorial. If the dock is built, the memorial board says it should go to Marine Park.

Last night (Thursday) the Docks and Harbors Board considered two completely different options for making a recommendation, but couldn’t pass either one and had to table the issue.

Chairman Kevin Jardell argued that the assembly directed the board to make a recommendation on a “mutually acceptable location,” and in his eyes Marine Park meets that definition.

“From a Docks and Harbors Board member’s perspective, it would be acceptable to me if they put it in Douglas,” said Jardell. “If they move it to Parks and Rec’s park, it really doesn’t impact me. I may have personal beliefs that it shouldn’t move, but from our perspective it’s acceptable to move it outside of our bailiwick, and if there’s only one that’s acceptable to the fishermen’s memorial, we wind up with only one mutually acceptable place.”

Jardell read from a lengthy letter, which he proposed sending to the assembly as the board’s recommendation. While it said Docks and Harbors finds Marine Park acceptable, it also encouraged the assembly and memorial board to give the current location a try with the cruise ship dock in place before ultimately deciding to move the memorial.

Earlier this month the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee unanimously passed a recommendation, saying the memorial should stay where it is until a plan is developed for Marine Park.

Jardell’s recommendation failed to get the five votes it needed to pass the Docks and Harbors Board. With three members absent, the vote was 4-2.

Board member Eric Kueffner was one of the no votes. He offered his own recommendation that the memorial stay where it is.

“For the very limited impact that this cruise ship construction would have on the memorial, it’s really not worth the trauma that it would cause to all the people who are so invested in it to try and move it anywhere,” Kueffner said. “Second of course is the cost of this, which we don’t really know the cost, but it strikes me that there’s no particular reason to do anything about it now. As three or four people testified tonight, we don’t have to do anything now.”

But Kueffner was the only board member to vote in favor of his recommendation, which failed 5-1.

The issue was tabled until the board’s next meeting, even though the assembly is scheduled to discuss the matter on Monday. Deputy Mayor Merrill Sanford was at last night’s meeting, as was the assembly’s Docks and Harbors liaison Ruth Danner. Sanford said it’s possible the Committee of the Whole will still make a recommendation to the full assembly on Monday.

The Docks and Harbors Board is expected to make a recommendation to the Juneau Assembly tonight on the location of the Alaska Commercial Fishermen’s Memorial, now that a floating cruise ship berth is to be built in front of it.

The memorial’s board of directors believes it should be left where it is, but not with a dock there, citing concerns over impeding the annual Blessing of the Fleet.

Port Engineer Gary Gillette says there would be enough room for fishing vessels to pass in front of the memorial once the dock is built, though it will be tight. But Juneau commercial fisherman Dick Hoffman told the Assembly on Monday the new dock will make it difficult for commercial fishing vessels that participate in the May blessing ceremony.

“We all gather, we’re drifting around out front. We’ve got the whole harbor to float in,” Hoffman said. “That’s now going to have this dock in it. The area that we’re going to be allowed is going to be very limited. We’ll have some little keyhole that we can look through to see what is being performed right in front of the memorial. And we’re going to have wait our turn to go into that cul-de-sac, instead of having a sort of a parade of vessels following fairly close together and keeping a continuous flow going.”

The memorial board says if the monument does move it should go to Marine Park. But the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee recently recommend the memorial stay at its current location.

The Docks and Harbors Board meets at 7 o’ clock tonight in Assembly Chambers.

The Assembly will make the final decision, probably at next week’s Committee of the Whole meeting.

To most people it probably seems like an odd arrangement, but it’s fairly typical in the health care industry. Bartlett Regional Hospital is owned by the City and Borough of Juneau and governed by a board of directors appointed by the CBJ Assembly. The board hires a professional management company – Quorum Health Resources – to run the day-to-day operations of the hospital.

“The board I think can rely on us to make sure that those aspects of the operations are being addressed. Allowing them to focus on the strategic decisions of how do we better meet the needs of the local community,” says Bill Donatelli, Quorum’s Vice President of Western Operations.

As the nation’s largest hospital management company, Quorum works with about 150 facilities nationwide. Contracts vary, but usually a local board will hire a Chief Executive and Chief Financial Officer who are also employed by Quorum. Donatelli says the legal term is “borrowed employee.”

“We assume some responsibility for their performance as our employee, so it gives the board added protection in terms of making sure the job gets done,” Donatelli says.

But in its next contract, the Bartlett board wants its CEO and CFO to be independent from the management company.

“We want ensure that Bartlett Hospital’s interests are the primary interests, and that there’s no confusion about whether the management company’s interests are in any way taking precedence,” says Board President Kristen Bomengen.

Bomengen says the desire to have more control shouldn’t be seen as a sign of dissatisfaction with Quorum, and it’s too soon to say if the board will seek to change Bartlett’s leadership team.

“We’re going to take up the contract negotiations first, and it will become more apparent to us just what direction to follow once we’ve completed that,” Bomengen says.

One of Quorum’s selling points in its pitch to the board was the stability of senior management during the 23 years the company has worked with Bartlett. CFO Garth Hamblin has worked at the hospital nearly 25 years; and while CEO Shawn Morrow just came to Juneau in 2007, he’s only the second CEO during Quorum’s tenure. For his part, Morrow says he’s not too worried about the board’s decision to exercise more control.

“You can’t be a successful CEO if you’re looking at the job through the eyes of self-preservation. It just doesn’t work,” Morrow says.

He says he intends to stay in Juneau as long as the board wants him here. Morrow admits to being impressed with the board’s process for soliciting management contract bids.

“What I’ve learned over the years is just let the process work. And if the process is a good one like ours was, whatever the conclusion, whatever the decision, you can live with it, because it’s been thought through from the standpoint of what is in the best interest of the hospital,” says Morrow.

If negotiations with Quorum aren’t successful the board has a second choice – PeaceHealth. But officials from that company explicitly said Bartlett would get a lower level of service if the board chose to hire its own executives. Quorum’s Donatelli says the company will try to work with the hospital regardless of the arrangement.

“I think the hospital has done a great job of serving the local community, I think we’ve done a great job supporting the local board in making those decisions that have allowed them to serve the local community and provide quality health care here,” Donatelli says. “And we’re proud of that and want to continue that relationship.”

Bomengen says the decision to stay with Quorum came down to other services offered by the company. The hospital’s management contract also covers purchasing supplies, which are discounted through Quorum’s hospital network. It also covers physician recruitment, and leadership training, strategic planning and consulting services for managers and board members.

“So there’s a range of management services that are particular to the health care industry that we are able to benefit from and that we would otherwise have to seek individual consultants for if we did not have a management services contract,” says Bomengen.

Quorum is currently paid between 350- and 400-thousand dollars a year depending on the Consumer Price Index. That’s separate from the CEO and CFO salaries. The company is seeking a similar amount in its new contract.

Bartlett Regional Hospital is a self-sustaining enterprise fund of the City and Borough of Juneau. It makes money by charging patient fees.