Rosemarie Alexander

The Juneau Assembly on Monday will take up an ordinance to create one board to run both city-owned swimming pools.

The idea was first floated by the city’s Aquatic Facilities Advisory Board and Glacier Swim Club when the city proposed closing the downtown Augustus Brown pool to save money. Supporters say a single empowered board could operate Augustus Brown and the Dimond Park Aquatic Center more efficiently and cheaply.

The empowered aquatic facilities board would be similar to the Docks and Harbors and the Airport boards. It would have to be established in the City and Borough’s Home Rule Charter, which requires voter approval.

Voters also may have a chance to authorize the Eaglecrest Ski Area Board of Directors to oversee Treadwell Arena.

A proposed ordinance before the Assembly would put a charter amendment on the October municipal ballot giving the Eaglecrest board authority to manage the city ice rink. Eaglecrest already manages the non-profit Wells Fargo Dimond Park Field House.

Both ordinances require approval of at least six of the nine Assembly members.

The Assembly meets at 7 p.m. in city hall chambers and can be heard live on KTOO Radio.

A downtown Juneau cleanup is set for July 25. It’s an effort by of a coalition of business and property owners, and others that have joined together to tackle problems in the city’s core.

Bruce Denton has had an office in the Senate building on South Franklin Street for about 30 years. In May, he spent a lot of time outside painting, watching over downtown.

“I had no idea how bad it had become.”

Now he’s a man with a mission.

A video

Denton asked filmmaker Pat Race to produce a short video of some of the things he’d seen from his perch.

“My marching orders to Pat was that I didn’t want it to be an indictment of any one group. I just basically wanted the bad and the ugly of what was going on downtown,” Denton says.

The bad and the ugly?

“It’s everything,” he says.

The video starts at Front and Franklin streets and pans the burned-out Gastineau Apartments.

“You look up Franklin Street and think why would I want to go there?”

Pat Race calls his short video a snapshot of downtown.

“I filmed everything from like puke and poop and people passed out on the doorsteps of businesses and broken windows and busted up sidewalks. It really ran the gamut,” Race says. “It’s just a deterioration of attention.”

It even picks up the north wall of Denton’s Senate building.

“It looks horrible,” Denton says. “I thought, ‘Pat, why did you do that to me,’ and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is what we’re talking about. We all need to take ownership.’”

Race deliberately shot the footage over a short period of time.

“It’s not cherry-picked, it’s not all the greatest hits from the last month. It’s everything that just happened within a few days,” he says. “And it’s pretty pervasive.”

Race also owns a business downtown. He says he wasn’t surprised at the images he saw in his camera, but at how long he’d shut them out.

“I think the thing that surprised me was how much I had my blinders on now,” he says.  “I think once you start looking around it’s pretty appalling how many cigarette butts are on the ground, and how things haven’t been painted in quite a while and just what we let people get away with in a public space.”

Denton calls it “just a lot of obnoxious activity, a lot of people operating below polite society.”

An informal coalition

For the past month, Denton and Race have taken their concerns and the video to small groups of business and property owners, a few CBJ staff and a couple of elected officials. Even the Downtown Neighborhood Association has joined.

Juneau Police Chief Bryce Johnson dubs the informal coalition DIG, for Downtown Improvement Group. Earlier this month, Denton and Race met with Johnson and Lt. David Campbell. They don’t need a video to understand the issues.

“Typically, what we encounter in the downtown area is a lot of public nuisance-type complaints. Alcohol is a contributing factor to it,” he says. “A lot of people are consuming alcohol.”

Downtown Juneau consumes a lot of police presence, especially on nights and weekends.

When he steps out of his police lieutenant role, Campbell admits downtown is sometimes an unpleasant place to be.

“As a citizen and a parent, I don’t know, there’s just an uncomfortable air about it,” he says.

Campbell says Denton is on the right track. He points to a study done years ago called Broken Windows.

“You have an area that’s got broken windows and graffiti, it gives an unconscious message that nobody cares,” he says.

And such problems grow. The reverse, of course, is well-cared for property, an inviting downtown.

“You keep places clean, you know you have the impression that somebody cares about it, is watching it. And as you’re able to get ownership and get back, it actually has a positive effect toward these low-level, quality-of-life issue crimes,” Campbell says.

Cleaning up is a start

As Denton spreads his message, he says peer pressure is the way to start cleaning up downtown.

“If your neighbor on both sides of your building cleans up their act, it kind of puts a lot of pressure on you to do the same thing,” he says.

While a general clean-up may be the best way to start addressing the issues, Denton and other members of the downtown group know it’s superficial; the tougher solutions may take years.

Those conversations are just getting underway.

 

Editor’s Note: This story is the first in a series on downtown Juneau issues. You can read the second part here: Bring your brooms and scrub brushes; downtown cleanup is Friday

A Michigan man charged with verbally assaulting a Juneau woman has been sentenced to a year in prison.

In Juneau Superior Court Friday afternoon, Alexander Libbrecht, 32, changed his plea from innocent to no contest on an assault charge for yelling racial slurs at a black woman and threatening to beat her with a baseball bat.

He had been scheduled to stand trial in September.

Superior Court Judge Tom Nave sentenced Libbrecht to 365 days in prison, with 185 days suspended. He is expected to serve 180 days then be on four years’ probation. He also has been fined $1,000.

He currently is being held at Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau. The court has ordered that Libbrecht undergo a mental evaluation at Juneau Alliance for Mental Health when he is released.

Juneau police say Libbrecht accosted the alleged victim earlier this month when she was smoking outside a boarding house on the corner of Gold and Fourth streets.

At the time, police described him as pacing up and down the street in a rage.

His behavior was similar to a man who yelled racist slurs, grabbed a flag from an Alaska Native veteran, then ran, shoving and knocking people down during the closing Celebration parade in June.

Juneau police are still investigating Libbrecht for that incident.

He also is under investigation by the U.S. Secret Service for verbal threats against President Barack Obama as well as a New Jersey attorney, who represented him in a previous case.

Libbrecht is wanted in Hawaii on charges of terroristic threatening.

A new assistant principal has been hired at Juneau-Douglas High School.

Kimberley McNamara currently works for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development as a Special Education Program Manager.

She also has been a high school teacher in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

In a school district news release, JDHS Principal Paula Casperson calls McNamara a “high energy, solution-oriented person.”

She was selected by a hiring panel representing JDHS teachers and staff, the district administration and JDHS Site Council.

McNamara has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Master of Education with Special Education Endorsement from Keene State College in New Hampshire. She’s working on her Graduate Certificate in Education Leadership from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her internship for that program was at JDHS.

She begins her new job on Aug. 4, 2014.

Longtime Alaska reporter Bob Tkacz will be remembered Thursday at the state capitol for the years he covered the Alaska Legislature.

Tkacz died in May at the age of 61. For years he covered state lawmakers for various Alaska media, most recently the Alaska Legislative Digest and Alaska Journal of Commerce. He also wrote about the commercial fishing and seafood industry in his own subscription newsletter, Laws for the SEA, which he established in 1994.

Tkacz was known for his tenacious style of questions, especially with politicians he was covering.

Fittingly, the House Speaker’s chambers in the state capitol have been reserved at 3 p.m. for a time to share memories of Tkacz. Younger brother Tom Tkacz says it will be followed by a reception at St. Ann’s Hall on Fifth Street, which begins at 6 p.m.

“As Bob wanted, he didn’t want to have a lot of moping around, he wanted to have a party so that’s what we’re going to have,” Tom Tkacz says.

He has been in Juneau to close up his brother’s office stuffed with years of covering the issues and events of Juneau and the state.

He says he’s heard a lot about Bob’s determined journalistic style.

He’s been described as a bull-dog reporter; a tenacious pursuer of honesty and the truth.

But he says his favorite memories of his brother are the times they shared outdoors, including hiking and climbing.

 

Another telephone scam hit the capital city Wednesday — this one threatening to turn off electricity unless the customer paid up immediately.

According to Juneau police and Alaska Electric Light and Power, a number of local businesses and residential customers received calls from a man claiming to be a representative of the power company.

Spokeswoman Debbie Driscoll said AELP received well over 20 calls from customers who were told their power would be turned off because their account was past due. Then he gave them a toll-free call-back number for payment.

He was saying that his name was James Pearce and that he was demanding payment, otherwise power would be cut off in 45 minutes. He was telling customers to go to Walmart or Fred Meyer and buy a Green Dot card – I believe a prepaid credit card,” she said.

Driscoll said the scam is similar to several in Juneau over the last few months. The last one targeted downtown businesses, another hit AELP customers with Spanish-sounding last names.

“Obviously, we would never make those type of calls. Customers would get notified in writing and a friendly phone call if they were behind. And those calls come after not having paid in 60 days,” she said. “The other thing is we don’t take prepaid cards, we take cash, check or money order in the office.”

Lt. David Campbell said the Juneau Police Department also got numerous phone calls about Wednesday’s scam. He said citizens should always be suspicious of such calls and never provide personal identification or account numbers to callers.

Campbell said telephone fraud can be a lucrative business.

“You’re talking about very little effort on the scammers’ part,” he said, “and all they have to do is be successful on a very, very small percentage of the time in order to make it profitable for them.”

The FBI offers more information on common fraud schemes.