I dig into questions about the forces and institutions that shape Juneau, big and small, delightful and outrageous. What stirs you up about how Juneau is built and how the city works?
Haven House at 3202 Malissa Drive. (Photo by Greg Culley)
The Juneau Assembly agreed last night to hear an appeal that could block a transitional home for female ex-cons from opening in the Mendenhall Valley.
In its appeal, the Tall Timbers Neighborhood Association asserts that the Juneau Planning Commission erred in its decision to grant Haven House a conditional use permit to operate on Malissa Drive. The association also says the underlying ordinance the decision was based on is unconstitutional.
The Assembly opted to handle the appeal itself. Assemblyman Jerry Nankervis will preside over the appeal hearing.
Haven House wants to operate with a live-in residence manager and take in as many as nine women for up to two years at a time.
Forrest Dunbar is challenging 21-term incumbent Don Young for Alaska’s only seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)
Democrat Forrest Dunbar is challenging Republican Rep. Don Young for Alaska’s only U.S. House seat. Young is a 21-term incumbent who has literally been the 30-year-old’s congressman his entire life.
Dunbar stopped by KTOO recently to talk about his campaign, policy and why he thinks he should replace Young.
You can listen to Casey Kelly and Jeremy Hsieh‘s full interview with Forrest Dunbar here. It was recorded Oct. 16.
Dunbar says there are a lot of nonpartisan, Alaska-specific issues he and Young agree on, like fighting the Interior Department to allow a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge for King Cove residents, trying to increase oil and gas development in Alaska, and working with the State Department to protect Southeast Alaska from upriver Canadian mines.
The big differences, Dunbar says, are on social issues and in their interpersonal styles.
Dunbar says he’s prochoice, disagrees with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case that let some corporations deny its employees contraceptives through their health care plans, and is strongly on board with Democrats on LGBT rights.
“My sister happens to be LGBT, and so that also sort of firmly aligned me with the Democrats, for the time being,” he says. “And I know there are some younger Republicans that are sort of letting go of that as an issue, but I remember very distinctly in 2004 when I lived in D.C. that they were using it as an issue to try and drive people apart. And now that the tides have turned, there’s a lot of people pretending like it never happened.”
Dunbar says he plans to be collaborative and to work across the aisle, while he characterizes Young as aggressive, bombastic and counterproductive. Dunbar says he had met Young several times while he was in college and working in Washington D.C. and has seen those aspects of Young’s personality intensify over time.
“He was always perfectly nice to me, perfectly polite, had no personal animosity towards him when I started to run. But during the course of this campaign, I’ve realized that, sort of the–the legend is true!”
Dunbar says in the last six years especially, Young has become stranger and a little bit angrier.
“He’s just very different than he was back then.”
The Alaska Dispatch News has reported a number of recent instances of Young’s behavior, including with Dunbar backstage before an Oct. 1 debate in Kodiak. Dunbar told the Dispatch that Young gave him a hard time about his roots. When Dunbar touched his arm, he told the Dispatch that Young said the last person to touch him “ended up on the ground dead.”
Campaign Finance
Dunbar says one of his priorities that gets less attention is campaign finance reform. He says the contrast in his finances to Young’s illustrates why reforms are needed.
In recent filings, Dunbar says, “We had 306 individual Alaskan contributors, which is about, I think between 80 and 85 percent of our total campaign contributions. He had 33, right? Which is less than 20 percent of his total contributions. … It’s been coming almost exclusively from individual, small contributions. … I haven’t gotten the huge, sort of piles of corporate lobbyist cash that my opponent has.”
That difference, Dunbar says, is representative of a concentration of power and lobbyists’ influence.
“We can’t seem to stop that revolving door between the lobbying firms that provide campaign donations and the Hill. So my idea was to use term limits to sort of clog that door with a flood of bodies, lower the individual value of each of one of those people, and then, thus reduce the appeal of the lobbying profession.”
This American Life has reported that members of Congress spend several hours a day cold calling potential donors. Dunbar says that’s why it’s so appealing to accept lobbyists’ offers for fundraising relief. He says he won’t self-impose term limits or fundraising prohibitions, though.
“I’m going to play in the rules of the game as established. I want to change those rules, I want to change that structure,” Dunbar says.
Dunbar says he’s also in favor of legislation that would create a system where candidates for federal offices can opt out of traditional campaign finance in order to earn “patriot dollars” – small, publicly financed vouchers that individuals control and can be spent only on campaigns.
Health Care
Dunbar readily acknowledges there are problems with the Affordable Care Act, which created a mandate that all Americans purchase health insurance.
But he says the heart of the act is requiring insurance companies accept customers with pre-existing conditions.
Dunbar said when he finished law school, he sought health insurance on the private market.
“Turns out, I have a pre-existing condition. I didn’t realize it till I started to apply for quote-unquote private health insurance. This was before the Affordable Care Act went into effect. And I was rejected by everyone.”
His pre-existing condition was sports-related, and it forced him into a high-risk insurance pool run by the state.
“It was $250 a month with a $10,000 deductible. And no–basically, catastrophic only, no preventative care. It was not good insurance and it was not sustainable. I basically, as I’ve said before, I had to get hit by a bus in just the right way for it to be useful for me.”
He was 27 at the time, and a nonsmoker.
“I can only imagine how hard it is for someone who’s in their 50s or 60s, but not old enough to for Medicare who had cancer, for example. There’s no way they’re going to get private insurance if we (repeal the Affordable Care Act) that Don Young and Dan Sullivan support.”
National Guard
Dunbar has been in the Alaska Army National Guard for about a year and serves as a judge advocate, which is a military lawyer. He says he’s working some of the cases and may be involved in prosecutions for sexual misconduct in the guard, detailed in a federal investigation report released last month.
He couldn’t talk specifics, “But in general, it does look like, and, um, it does look like there were some very serious issues in the Guard that went undealt with for a very long time.”
He says Gov. Sean Parnell should have taken stronger action sooner.
A map of gale warnings and small craft advisories in Southeast Alaska for Oct. 31, 2014. (Image courtesy National Weather Service)
The National Weather Service has received a report of a waterspout sighting near Sitka at noon today and predicts more are likely.
Tim Steffen is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Juneau.
“Well, a waterspout looks a lot like a tornado. The thing is, it’s not as powerful. … It does have enough wind to capsize a boat and cause definitely a lot of danger out on the water. But it’s not gonna, you know, come on land and destroy a house or anything, which is what a tornado does,” Steffen says.
“We think that they’re confined to the Gulf of Alaska.”
A gale warning is in effect across the entire stretch of the outer coast of Southeast Alaska, meaning winds are forecast at 35 knots or higher. A small craft advisory is in effect for inside waterways across most of Southeast, meaning winds are forecast at 25 knots or higher.
The weather service asks that severe weather be reported to the Coast Guard or local law enforcement.
As of 2:20 p.m., Coast Guard Sector Juneau reports no active calls today.
Police say this worn, extra-large leather jacket was one of the items found in the stolen van. (Photo courtesy Juneau Police Department)
Juneau Police suspect a drug user or a small group of people in multiple recent thefts around Industrial Boulevard.
The latest theft police are highlighting was of a gray, 1992 Toyota minivan with a hatchback parked on Brandy Lane that contained a lot of personal property. It was taken between Oct. 17 and Oct. 20. It was recovered on Oct. 21, with multiple syringes inside. Police are analyzing fingerprints and DNA.
You can report tips to JPD at 586-0600 or at juneaucrimeline.com. You may be eligible for a reward.
Michele Elfers listens as Wastewater Utility Superintendent Samantha Stoughtenger describes options for processing and disposing of biosolids at a Juneau Assembly Committee of the Whole meeting Monday. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)
The way the City and Borough of Juneau disposes of its sewage sludge isn’t sustainable, and the long-term solution consultants are recommending will be expensive.
“I don’t know that I have any good news for you in all this,” City Engineering Director Rorie Watt told the Assembly last night.
Hired consultants recommended in September that the city build a 7,100 square foot facility at the Juneau-Douglas Wastewater Treatment Plant off Thane Road. The new facility would dry sewage sludge, burn it as fuel in a furnace, then feed heat back into the drying process. The only waste would be an inert ash.
The consultants estimated such a facility would cost $28.7 million to build. Meanwhile, the city is bracing for another year of budget deficits.
Mayor Merrill Sanford pointed out that the city plans to request some $22 million in grant money from the state for the project, “Which is probably not necessarily feasible, or not necessarily … going to happen with the shortage of funds at the state level, too,” Sanford said.
The Juneau Assembly Finance Committee intends to hear from the city’s sustainability and planning commissions about the proposal, and examine options for paying for the new facility. The finance committee’s next meeting is Nov. 12.
For now, Waste Management is shipping the sewage sludge to a landfill it owns in Oregon under a tenuous 5-year contract.
“We, as efficiently as possible, want to drive towards moving forward to not loading shipping containers full of sludge for lots of obvious reasons,” Watt said. “We really need to move beyond our current solution.”
In a memo, “perilous” was the word Wastewater Utility Superintendent Samantha Stoughtenger and Engineering Project Manager Michele Elfers used to describe the status quo.
Waste Management was reluctant to be in the sewage sludge business after its last contract ended in 2013. The stopgap worked out earlier this year left Waste Management with the option to walk away at any time without consequence.
This week, the Juneau Crime Line is seeking help figuring out who messed with a father-son fixer-upper project.
“Someone stole the door off the pickup the two had been fixing,” says Lt. Kris Sell of the Juneau Police Department. “During the incident the windshield of the truck was also broken. The total cost of the damages is $3,500.”
