Local Government

The Juneau Assembly tonight (Monday) is expected to approve an ordinance authorizing up to $29 million dollars in Port Revenue bonds.

That’s just a portion of the total cost needed to complete two floating Panamax cruise ship berths on the downtown waterfront.

The bonds would be issued for 19 years. The debt on them would be paid with a portion of the CBJ’s Port Development Fee.

The entire project is estimated at $88.1 million dollars, with just under $60 million of it coming from the local and state fees charged to cruise lines.

The Assembly meets at 7 o’clock and can be heard live on KTOO-FM.

Bartlett Regional Hospital has a new Chief Financial Officer.

Certified Public Accountant Ken Brough (pronounced Bruff) will start in October. He’s the second new executive to be hired by the city-owned hospital this year. Chief Executive Officer Chris Harff has been on the job just two weeks.

Brough comes from Wyoming, where he is CFO for Star Valley Medical Center in Afton. The non-profit hospital is a joint acute care / nursing home operation. Brough also has managed professional accounting companies and was a CPA in the Salt Lake City office of the financial services company KPMG.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Utah State University.

According to a news release from the hospital, Brough has traveled extensively to Alaska for work and play. His daughter and husband own a sport fishing operation in Southeast Alaska.

For more than two decades, Bartlett Regional Hospital has been run by an outside management company. Last year, the board of directors decided to hire its own CEO and CFO.

Many of the houses along West Juneau’s Nowell Avenue are well-maintained, two-story homes with manicured and pleasant yards. Sitting about a hundred feet above sea level, they offer a view of downtown Juneau across Gastineau Channel. But residents say one particular home has been a blight in their neighborhood for years.

Valerie Mertz and her family live across the street and about two doors down from the condemned house. She says they’ve been extremely patient, but she believes it’s long since become a health and safety hazard.

“We have a bear now that is pretty much a permanent resident in our neighborhood,” said Mertz. She worries about the children and senior citzens who may not feel safe in their own yards.

Lin Davis lives next door to the structure at 3101 Nowell Avenue. For 16 years, she’s had no choice but to watch over her fence as the neighboring house deteriorates.

“It’s been an experience of an expanding nightmare with health and safety issues really right from the beginning,” said Davis.

Mertz, Davis’ partner, and other area neighbors went before the Assembly last week frustrated by what they feel is not enough attention and action by the CBJ. They’re worried that it’s going to be left unresolved for yet another year. They called on Assemblymembers to view the property for themselves.

City Manager Kim Kiefer says they’re trying to get all the litter and junk cleaned-up that exceeds the 200-square foot maximum in city code.

“There is a definition specifically for what’s junk and what’s not, and trying to define what that is and what needs to be moved,” said Kiefer.

They’re also waiting for another opinion, a second engineer’s report, on the the house’s structural integrity.

“To find out what condition it is in, because we don’t know that,” said Kiefer.

The property is owned by 71-year old Ronald W. Hohman of Juneau. Twelve years ago, he was charged for having an unsafe residence. He was convicted of two misdemeanors, received a one-year suspended imposition of sentence, fined $3,000, and ordered to do 150 hours of community work service.

More recently, the house has deteriorated so much that police officers closed it to human occupancy in October and the CBJ Community Development Department condemned it in February.

Because of nearly $14,000 in unpaid water and sewer bills, sewer service was shut off. The CBJ charged Hohman with violating requirements for a public sewer and living in a building considered a public nuisance. Utility crews, however, severed an outflow line that served both Hohman and a neighbor with sewage backing up inside both properties. The criminal case was dropped.

City attorneys said they negotiated partial payment of utility bills and improvements bringing the building back up to code for human occupancy. Hohman is not allowed to stay at the house overnight, though he can make repairs during the day.

But it’s unclear whether any clean-up or repairs could save the structure and alleviate neighbor’s concerns.

“It looks like a third-world country back here in terms of the squalor and the debris,” said Davis who believes that it’s gotten worse over the last sixteen years.

Davis escorts a reporter through the brush and woods in a friend’s backyard that allows a view across the property line to Hohman’s house. She points to what appears to be unfinished and abandoned construction. Open doors and windows allow easy entry by bears, birds, and rodents, and personal belongings and debris inside are exposed to the elements. Tarps appear to cover all the roof surfaces. There are at least eight unused water heaters lined up against the side of the structure. Building materials are piled up throughout the yard.

Davis lives on the other side of 3101 Nowell. In her backyard, she says she found a paper towel with excrement that was either thrown over the fence by a former Hohman tenant or dropped by an animal. Her fence is braced with boards to keep it from collapsing under the weight of items placed against it on the other side. The exterior wood of Hohman’s house is visibly rotting or in disrepair, a corner of the structure appears to be settling, and the CBJ Building Official believes collapse is imminent.

“And you can see how steamy everything is, the windows,” said Davis pointing to condensation on a window near the front part of the house. “Even with an open door, everything is wet in there.”

Neighborhood residents have documented instances of what they believe were Hohman’s tenants leaving food stored outside in coolers and food debris left in the interior of the house.

A strong musty, moldy smell drifts over from the condemned home. There’s also the potential fire danger of a structure filled with clutter.

Capital City Fire and Rescue Chief Rich Etheridge says they won’t put lives at risk for a condemned building. Firefighters may enter the structure to attack an emerging fire or rescue a person. But if it’s a well-involved blaze, then priority will be protecting the property of neighbors.

Valerie Mertz says Hohman is a nice man. She is careful to emphasize that “it’s not an attack on him” and they don’t wish him any ill will. But she says they were assured by the city that the property would finally be cleaned up this year.

“We take pride in our homes and we pay our bills, and we expect our neighbors to do the same,” said Mertz. “I thought that was the minumum standard set by the city as well.”

Ronald Hohman declined to do a recorded interview with KTOO. But, in a long conversation off tape, he suggested that a divorce, a job out of state, and previous tenants who did not take out the garbage or pay utility bills all contributed to the property’s decline and $220,0000 of damage.

He admits he hasn’t done as much as he should. But he says he’s doing the best he can and making progress on cleaning up the front of the house even while working as tour driver full-time. He says he even had friends come over and help out recently.

Good weather and corroded water pipes have caused a delay in the city’s annual water line flushing. Water Utility Superintendent Dave Crabtree said work will not be completed until September 14.

Water crews this summer also have been painting reservoirs in the Mendenhall Valley and Lemon Creek, so line flushing stopped last week when Juneau’s snotty weather finally got better.

“There was a break in the weather. We had to get the water out of the east valley tank for the painting contractor, so we had to re-evaluate our priorities and get them painting on the tank, which put the kibosh on our plans to perform our flush of the distribution system,” Crabtree said.

When road work on Second Street in Douglas revealed a corroding water system, water utility staff also had to resolve that issue, which took a couple of days, Crabtree said. So line flushing begins again on Monday at the area of the “hospital to Cohen (Drive), airport distribution area, and a core part of the mid-valley and Back Loop.”

The flushing may cause some water discoloration or minor disruption in service. If water is discolored, wait until crews have finished their work, then run the cold tap until the water runs clear.

Meanwhile, replacing the Douglas water pipes will cost the city $375,000. The original project was roadway resurfacing, replacing fire hydrants, culverts and a sewer manhole. But a crew working on a fire hydrant found a severely corroded water main made of different materials than city records show.

It was built in the 1980s and expected to last 50 years. But according to CBJ Acting Engineering Director John Bohan, even the state-of-the-art ductile iron pipe is beyond its useful life.

“One of the pipes we found in Second Street in Douglas was cast iron, which was the original old style pipe,” Bohan said. “We had a cast iron and a ductile, which our as built showed the location but not the material correctly. They called them ductile iron pipes. The ductile iron pipe was actually being eaten away by electrolysis as well. So aside from the as-built issue of the mid-80s we have a bigger scenario of electrolysis on the newer pipe, so we’re going to have to react, or we’re going to have problems.”

Bohan explained the problem to the Juneau Assembly earlier this week, which approved the funds to replace the water system. The discussion prompted member Ruth Danner to ask a key question:

“How much of our water system is in this state?”

Bohan said the Douglas Island water system appears to have more problems than other parts of the borough. He said city engineers don’t “have a good handle on what’s causing the corrosion.”

“We know a lot of the materials that went in in the mid-80s and we’re finding our problem areas,” he said. “We’re not in trouble per se, but we do have to start thinking about water infrastructure as it’s coming up to its useful life span.”

Admiralty Construction has been awarded the contract to replace the Second Street water main.

Water Utility Director Crabtree says homes and businesses hooked to the system will not experience any disruption in service while it’s being rebuilt.

Juneau City Manager Kim Kiefer says she’ll develop a comprehensive list of deferred maintenance needs at city facilities.

Individual departments maintain their own lists, and projects get prioritized every year as part of the city’s capital improvement plan. But Kiefer says there’s no “master list.” So, she’ll work with Engineering Director Rorie Watt to develop one.

“Because it really feeds into the long-term CIP plan. What’s out there, and when you start looking at the miles of roads, the water the sewer, all those pieces, it adds up,” Kiefer says in response to Assembly and public comments about the need to better manage city assets.

The Juneau Assembly this week approved putting two capital project funding measures on this fall’s municipal election ballot — a five year extension of the city’s temporary 1-percent sales tax and a $25 million dollar bond proposition. Together, the measures include more than $8 million for city-wide deferred maintenance. Centennial Hall would get $3.2 million for long needed upgrades, including a new roof.

Assemblyman Carlton Smith supports both funding measures, but says the city needs a better maintenance plan.

“These projects have to be funded one way or another,” says Smith. “But what I’d like to see fairly quickly on the horizon is a plan for asset management that would include all the deferred maintenance issues.”

Asemblyman Randy Wanamaker was the only member to vote against both measures. He says issuing municipal bonds at this time is not the best way to build and maintain the city’s infrastructure.

“This community is facing serious financial uncertainty and adding to public debt is not what we should be doing,” says Wanamaker

He worries the bond issue will cause property taxes to rise. But the plan is to use $10 million dollars in sales tax to pay bond debt, and avoid any property tax increase. If voters reject the bond measure, that $10 million would be used for two of the projects — Centennial Hall and Aurora Harbor upgrades.

Municipal Election Day is October 2nd.

Capital City Fire and Rescue is lending a helping hand to one of Juneau’s neighbors.

On July 10th, a Skagway Fire Department ambulance crashed on the Klondike Highway, seriously injuring four volunteer paramedics.

The wreck also totaled the community’s only ambulance. So, Skagway officials turned to Juneau, where Fire Chief Rich Etheridge offered to loan out a backup emergency vehicle.

“What we were able to do is ship them our ambulance, with an agreement through the attorneys office, so that they can get back in service providing medical service to their community,” Etheridge says. “And we didn’t lose any response capability to our community because Auke Bay Fire Station is undergoing renovation right now.”

Etheridge says it could take Skagway up to six months to replace its ambulance.

The four paramedics hurt in the accident are all recovering. Two of them were medevac’d to Juneau the night of the crash; another was flown to Seattle with more serious injuries.

Mayor Bruce Botelho thanked Etheridge at this week’s Assembly meeting.