Lisa Phu

Juneau’s city manager is making changes to key leadership positions. Shortly after the New Year, Deputy City Manager Rob Steedle will be the Director of Community Development and Human Resources Director Mila Cosgrove will move into the deputy city manager role.

Steedle has been serving as interim head of community development since former director Hal Hart left in September. City Manager Kim Kiefer said after two rounds of recruitment, no one in the applicant pool was a good fit.

“Then I looked at Rob and he knows what is needed both internally and externally to continue to move economic development forward in our community,” Kiefer said.

As community development director, Steedle will oversee the department responsible for the city’s land use laws, including building and zoning codes. For Steedle, the job change is a voluntary demotion.

To fill the deputy city manager position, Kiefer appointed Cosgrove.

“Her skill set, her understanding of the departments – because she’s the HR director, she touches all departments within the city and she has a good understanding of our workforce,” Kiefer said.

The manager and the deputy city manager split supervision duties of department heads. The deputy city manager also assists the assembly, fills in as acting city manager when needed and serves as the city’s hearing officer for parking violations, among other duties.

Kiefer says Cosgrove will also help with the transition to a new city manager. Kiefer originally planned to retire at the end of this month, but extended her time through the end of April. The city has already gone through one recruitment period and is set to start a new one soon.

To fill the human resources director opening, Kiefer has the option to appoint someone or go out for a new hire. The city’s HR director is also head of HR for Bartlett Regional Hospital.

Kiefer also announced a brand new city job – chief housing officer.

“That person will be a very outward focused person, really working with developers and lenders and contractors to build housing in this community, a variety of different kind of housing and maybe bring in new ideas on how we can do it possibly different than how we’re doing it to bring more stock out there,” Kiefer said.

The chief housing officer job announcement is open until filled. The salary ranges between $92,000 and $98,000 annually.

Juneau filmmaker Lisle Hebert is making a film based on Harold Napoleon’s essay “Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being.” Napoleon gave Hebert his blessing to do the adaptation, but he says it’ll be a challenge to translate the message to film.

The beginning of Lisle Hebert’s film “Yuuyaraq” is a re-enactment depicting life on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta before Western contact. The narration stays true to Harold Napoleon’s original words.

“It’s verbatim because his writing is so poetic, and so I couldn’t do better than that,” Hebert said.

The re-enactment conveys what the Yup’ik word Yuuyaraq means.

“Their spiritual beliefs, the way they viewed the world, everything had a spirit. Everything was in harmony and it was kind of like a code of living,” Hebert said.

Napoleon wrote Yuuyaraq in 1988 when he was in prison for the death of his son. He says he was so drunk, he blacked out and doesn’t remember it. Without any memory of what happened, he couldn’t defend himself and so he pled no contest to second degree murder. He never went to trial and no matter how it happened, he blames himself.

He started writing to figure out why he and so many people he knew struggled with alcohol abuse.

Napoleon is Yup’ik Eskimo from Hooper Bay.

“I had been baffled for many years about why we knew so very little about our own history and why there was so much shame about our own culture,” Napoleon said.

Napoleon is 66. He said he grew up in a very confusing world, being neither fully Yup’ik nor white and Christian. There was suffering in the missing pieces of his village’s history.

“There was also a lot of disconnect between parents and children and that disconnect was not just personal, it was also cultural,” Napoleon said.

“As children, we were not abandoned literally, but we somehow ended up in nowhere land.”

Napoleon experienced abuse as a child and drank as an adult. While in prison, he read a lot about trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam War veterans.

“Having never been to war and never experienced war or witnessed war, I found it odd that I would have the same symptoms as Vietnam veterans. And not only me but all the other people in my village had the same symptoms,” Napoleon said.

After more research, Napoleon learned about the flu epidemic of 1918. In Yuuyaraq, he calls it the “Great Death” and wrote that it spread like wildfire, killing 6 of every 10 people and wiping out Alaskan villages. “It gave birth to a generation of orphans,” he wrote.

Up until then, Napoleon said Yup’ik people had resisted Christianity and white influence.

“But after ‘The Great Death,’ there was mass conversion and people began to abandon, in a sense, their own culture and in abandoning their culture, they abandoned themselves. There was also born in them a sense of shame and guilt because what they were being taught is that the way they had lived their lives had caused them to die in such great numbers,” Napoleon said.

He said the trauma, shame and violence he and others in his village experienced traces back to that time. And it still reverberates today.

Writing Yuuyaraq, Napoleon said, helped him to understand his village and his family, the past and the present.

“With understanding there came forgiveness. I had found a trail of truth through our experiences as Native people,” he said.

Napoleon said Alaska Native cultures are going through a reawakening and he hopes Lisle Hebert’s film adaptation of Yuuyaraq will contribute to it.

“If the young people become interested in their own stories, in their own history, then I think it will have done a good job,” Napoleon said.

As a young man, Hebert said he spent time in Hollywood and used to be egotistical about filmmaking, but Yuuyaraq is about something else.

“I’m hoping that people will be moved by it and have more compassion and also realize what (Alaska Natives) have been through, and try to look at people like people,” Hebert said.

For Hebert, Yuuyaraq is a meaningful film, and that has given meaning to his own life.

Parents have called the placement process for the Juneau School District’s optional programs cumbersome and untimely. For Juneau’s charter school, the placement process may also be illegal. Now, the school board is in the early stages of changing it.

The goal of the placement process is to help balance the enrollment of the optional programs to mirror the diversity of the district’s population.

School board member Barbara Thurston is part of a subcommittee looking at how to change the 10-year-old placement process. During Tuesday night’s work session, she said the board needs to establish defined goals of the process before changing it.

“It was put in at a time when there was a fair amount of concern around the district about equity and our alternative programs, equity in terms of availability, equity in terms of some teaching issues, but most particularly a desire to have these programs reflect the population of students in the district. These were not created to be programs for the elite. These were intended to be programs for Juneau’s children across the spectrum,” Thurston said.

Juneau Community Charter School, Montessori Borealis K-8, and the Tlingit Culture, Language & Literacy Program are free and open to all students in the district regardless of where students live. The district provides transportation.

Within the placement process, diversity preferences are given to students that have been traditionally underrepresented in the programs.

“For example, if a program had a lower than average number of low-income kids, then low-income kids would get a preference until that program hit the district-wide average at which point, they would no longer get that preference; they would just be in the same pool as everybody else,” Thurston said.

The same is true for low academic achievers, English-language learners and students with special education needs. Preference is also given to siblings, and children of optional program employees.

Parents must fill out an application to enroll children into optional programs. School board member Emil Mackey said just that can be a barrier.

“Anytime you have an application process, it’s going to disproportionately hurt those that don’t have the resources. And then the more complex that is or the more intrusive it’s viewed, the more people are going to not participate in that process and self-select out, whether actively or passively,” Mackey said.

Over the years, the placement process has improved diversity within the programs, but none of them completely fulfill the enrollment goals. This fall, city attorneys pointed out the district’s placement process is probably illegal regarding Juneau’s charter school. Alaska law requires a random lottery for charter schools.

The board subcommittee will continue discussion before bringing suggested changes to the full board. One possibility is implementing a separate placement process for each optional program.

The Juneau-Douglas High School art club is sending 10 students to Art Fest in Skagway, despite a fundraising setback last month. Some money went missing from the club’s booth during Public Market.

The booth was in the Juneau Arts & Culture Center and featured student-made pottery, comic books and holiday cards. Prices ranged from $3 to $15. Art teacher Heather Ridgway and art club students ran the booth.

Juneau-Douglas senior Hal Turman was the last person there the first evening of the three-day market.

“Ms. Ridgway told me to put the cashbox under the table and so I did that and, I don’t know, it wasn’t there the next day,” Turman said.

Turman felt terrible, but Ridgway said she takes the blame. Normally, Ridgway would close the booth and take the cash box home, but she left the market early for a family obligation.

“I was embarrassed. I can’t believe I did that to my kids. I felt awful,” Ridgway said.

She told Public Market employee Thomas Beierly Sr. that money had gone missing.

Beierly told the other vendors about it as a warning to be extra careful with their sale items and money. But then Beierly, along with a couple others, went a step further.

“I went to all the vendors and I asked if they could help donate a couple of bucks that we could help the kids, and everybody agreed and I think the smallest I ever got was $5. The vendors were throwing, like, $10, $20, $20 …” Beierly said.

Beierly said all the vendors at the JACC pitched in. He was able to give the art club more money than what was lost. Ridgway “couldn’t even stop hugging me,” Beierly said.

“I was beside myself with gratitude,” Ridgway said. “We had some cards we were selling with student designs on them and one of the parents that came brought a bunch of Hershey’s Kisses, so we put chocolate kisses in cards together and went around to all the vendors in the JACC and gave everybody a card and chocolate kiss and thanked them.”

In the end, the art club raised about $1,400, enough for all 10 students to take the ferry to Skagway for Art Fest in April.

About 3,200 people in Juneau do not have health insurance, according to the nonprofit Enroll America.

Through grant funding, Juneau Alliance for Mental Health, Inc. has a dedicated navigator to help anyone in Juneau sign up for health insurance, Medicaid or Medicare.

Jessie Menkens with the Alaska Primary Care Association said the navigator provides assistance for people from all walks of life.

“We get a sense of what opportunities are available to them, what are their options and then we answer questions along the way. We do not ever encourage someone to go one direction or another. This is free, impartial support,” Menkens said.

The largest uninsured age group in Juneau is 18 to 34-year-olds.

Open enrollment goes until Jan. 31. You must be enrolled by Dec. 15 to get coverage that takes effect Jan 1.

If you don’t have health insurance in 2016, you can be fined up to $2,085 the next time you file a tax return.

Call 463-3303 to schedule an appointment with the JAMHI navigator.

The Alaska Primary Care Association and JAMHI are holding an enrollment information session Saturday from 2-4 p.m. at the Mendenhall Valley Library.

Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium and Enroll Alaska also offer free enrollment assistance to the general public. Alternatively, you can sign up directly on healthcare.gov.

As Juneau’s mayor, Mary Becker is establishing regular office hours at city hall, attending meetings scheduled by the late mayor and educating herself on her new role. At the same time, she wants to follow through with some of Greg Fisk’s initiatives.

Since Tuesday, Mary Becker has been going to city hall every day and working in the office of the mayor.

“This is Greg’s office. This is the mayor’s office. And now that I’m in this position, this is my office now,” Becker said.

She hasn’t moved anything around. She’s barely touched anything.

Becker was re-elected to serve as deputy mayor by the Assembly in October. Per city charter, that position succeeds as mayor in the event of a vacancy

“When you say yes to being deputy mayor, you know that it’s always a possibility,” Becker said. “It’s not just a title. It comes with a responsibility.”

A lot of her time as mayor so far has been spent talking about Fisk. His death on Monday attracted national attention and for a couple of days she had reporters from all over the country calling her from 5 a.m. to midnight.

When Fisk was elected in October, Becker said he was a breath of fresh air for the community.

“It was a new regime,” she said.

One of Fisk’s new ideas was how to run the annual assembly retreat, which will still take place on Dec. 14.

“Greg wrote such a well-thought-out method for us to use … . We’ll be honoring his memory to be doing this process,” Becker said.

In a Nov. 25 memo, Fisk wrote that he wanted the assembly to identify a big picture “common vision” for the community to work toward for many years to come. He didn’t want to just focus on current issues facing Juneau or to look only at the upcoming year.

In the past, City Manager Kim Kiefer said the assembly retreat has focused on 10 to 15 different priorities. This year, she said, Fisk wanted the assembly to establish just a few overarching goals.

“It was just a different way to approach a process that’s happened in the past, and put it more into the – let’s look at where we want to go and figure out what the steps are that we need to take now to get ourselves to that point,” Kiefer said.

Along with the memo, Fisk provided links to websites of cities that have established visions, goals and ideals.

Kiefer said she was excited for the changes Fisk had planned.

“He was also very respectful of the process that was set in place already. He made the determination not to change up committees because he knew he was the new person on the assembly,” Kiefer said. “So he wasn’t into ‘This is Greg Fisk as mayor, (this is) how it’s going to happen.’ It was, ‘How do we bring everyone along to that new vision?’”

Prior to becoming mayor, Fisk was co-chair of a NOAA Task Force formed by the assembly in 2014. The goal of the task force was to lure federal research jobs to Alaska. He had a meeting scheduled in a few weeks with local NOAA staff; Kiefer said that meeting will still happen.

“We need to continue to move that forward. Because of his expertise, he added a lot of knowledge, so we will miss that knowledge definitely. But we need to have that meeting. We owe it to him,” Kiefer said.

As city business continues to move forward with Becker as mayor, the assembly needs to appoint someone to the now vacant assembly seat. Then, the assembly can opt to call a special election for mayor or wait until the next regular election in October when both seats will be on the ballot.

Becker said she’s comfortable being mayor till October. A special election would cost the city about $35,000, Kiefer said.

The assembly’s next regular meeting is Dec. 21.