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Thursday marks the beginning of the 59th Annual Ski Sale in Juneau. The event is a fundraiser for the Eaglecrest Ski Patrol and Juneau Ski Club, which is the youth ski team.

Folks planning to sell their extra winter gear can check it in this evening, tomorrow afternoon and Saturday morning at Centennial Hall. The actual sale is 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday. For more information, go to juneauskisale.org.

Meanwhile, Eaglecrest’s new general manager is on the job.

Matt Lillard, his wife and two-and a half-year old son just made the move across America from Londonderry, Vermont, where he worked for Magic Mountain Ski Resort.

Lillard says the two ski areas have some similarities:

“Size wise they’re actually quite similar, 700 acres is where I come from, and two lifts as opposed to four here, but we both pride ourselves in having some great terrain and great community,” Lillard says.

He’s settling into the Juneau ski area, learning the lay of the land as well as the bureaucracy of Eaglecrest, owned by the City and Borough of Juneau. But Lillard says the biggest challenge in the ski industry is always the weather.

“The New England weather is different from Southeast Alaska weather so I think getting a good grasp of that and how that works will be the biggest challenge,” Lillard says, “and after that just a lot of learning curve to pick up in a short amount of time.”

Weather permitting, opening day at Eaglecrest is December 3rd. Snow is building up, with about 7 inches at the base and 41 inches on top on Thursday.

Lillard answers to the city and the Eaglecrest Board of Directors, which sets ski area policy. The board has contracted with a local research firm and international ski area planning company to write a 20-year master plan to guide its decisions.

The first of two public meetings on the plan was held last week, and as KTOO reported, a random telephone survey shows hiking and biking trails and summer tourist attractions to be very important to the future of the area. The telephone survey questions are similar to a current online survey (skijuneau.com), which will be live until the end of November.  Click on the audio for more on the master plan study.

Juneau City Clerk Laurie Sica has been named the Municipal Clerk of the Year by the Alaska Association of Municipal Clerks.

The annual award is given for outstanding contributions to the municipal clerk profession. It’s given for professionalism and growth in the job, leadership, community involvement, and elections.

The Alaska Municipal League and Association of Municipal clerks are meeting this week in Fairbanks. In a comment on Facebook, City Attorney John Hartle said “When Laurie finished her speech, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house!”

Juneau Representative Beth Kerttula has filed a letter of intent to run for re-election in 2012 — though the makeup of House District Three is still unclear.

When the Alaska Public Offices Commission asked where she would run:

“I put down all of the places that I know could potentially be in it. Petersburg, Gustavus, Tenakee, Skagway and Juneau. So wherever I wind up, I’m going to run,” she says.

The Redistricting Board has re-drawn the district to include those communities, but a pending lawsuit could change it. However it turns out, Kerttula says she is looking forward to an expanded district.

“I just think it is exciting to get new issues and new people and to think about in a holistic sense how Southeast itself operates,” she says. “When I think about what this district means it really would kind of be the glue to the whole of Southeast.”

Kerttula says it’s especially important for Southeast Alaska communities to pull together since the region is losing representation in redistricting.

“If we can get all of those communities working together we can be a little more powerful.”

Kerttula, a Democrat, is in her seventh term for House District Three, which currently is downtown Juneau; Douglas; Lemon, Salmon and Switzer Creek areas; and the Juneau airport area. She’s also in her fourth year as minority leader for the state House of Representatives.

A letter of intent is only the first step to running for office. She still has to file with the Alaska Division of Elections. That’s not required until next spring.

Alaska legislators hope to bid on the old Unocal building in Anchorage for legislative office space.

The Legislative Council on Friday voted 10 to 2 to authorize a bid on the building on West Ninth Street, along the Delaney Park Strip. It would replace the West Fourth Avenue building, long deemed cramped and inadequate, with little parking.

The council has been looking at the Unocal building for some time, but postponed a vote in August. Now it appears the legislature is second in line. Owners already have a bid, reportedly from an unnamed Alaska Native corporation. If the two cannot reach agreement by the end of the month, the Legislative Council has authorized negotiations to begin.

Juneau Senator Dennis Egan, a Democrat, is a member of the bipartisan group that represents both houses. He says most of Friday’s discussion was in executive session, as members worked through the issues. He says he reluctantly voted “yes.”

“We’re leasing the current facility in Anchorage – the legislative offices — and it costs us a lot of money every year, and for the state to own something just makes a heck of a lot of sense,” Egan says. “It’s just like the buildings in Juneau.”

The six-floor, 55,000 square foot Unocal building would have enough offices for Anchorage lawmakers and visiting legislators. Egan says he takes comfort in the fact that the utility corridor is straight up the middle of the structure, so it could not be renovated into a legislative hall.

“The utilidors, the elevators, the restrooms, all that stuff, is in the middle of the building,” he says.

The $6.7 million building is 40 years old and in need of renovation. It was previously owned by Chevron Corporation. About 18 months ago the legislature put in a bid, which failed. Now it’s owned by a limited liability corporation headed by Anchorage businesswoman Janice Ellsworth.

Egan says the owners are currently doing abatement of asbestos and other hazardous materials.

Millions of pages of Exxon Valdez oil spill litigation will be organized and permanently archived in the capital city.

The state archives office has received a federal grant to make the documents accessible to the public.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission, commonly called the National Archives, has given Alaska $109,000 to catalog the material from the case, which took five years to litigate.

Project director Larry Hibpshman says two full-time archivists will evaluate and appraise the records, dispose of extraneous material, then organize and put it into the state archives electronic catalog. The catalog will be uploaded to a national bibliographic utility so the material is available wherever anyone needs to use it.

Hibpshman says the project will take about two years to complete. He expects the work to be done by September 2013. He’s already begun the evaluation.

“There are lots and lots of witness interviews, some of which are probably depositions. There are exhibits, particularly the ones that support the interviews. There are the daily documents the lawyers filed as they went through to keep track. There’s a great deal of discovery material both from the plaintiffs to the defendant and from the defendant to the plaintiffs,” Hibpshman says.

While most of the material is paper, there are also recordings and some microfilm.

Hibpshman has assembled a seven-member Oversight Task Force to review project activities and advise the archvists on matters he says historians usually don’t deal with, including legal issues, the science and technology of the spill and cleanup, regional concerns, and public information.

The state’s lead oil spill litigation attorney, Craig Tillery, is on the task force as well as Barbara Hendrickson, the state’s lead case paralegal; Jennifer Schorr, Department of Law Environmental Section Assistant Attorney General; and former Environmental Conservation Commissioner Kurt Fredriksson. Other members are Andrew Goldstein, Valdez Museum and Historical Archives; Patience Andersen Faulkner, Eyak Tribal Council; and Carrie Holba, Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustees Council Librarian.

Hibpshman says others closely associated with the spill and litigation will provide advice and information.

Developing hiking and biking trails and summer tourist attractions are very important to the future of Eaglecrest Ski Area, according to a random telephone survey of Juneau residents.

The survey is part of the long-range master plan being prepared to guide area development over the next 20 years.

A study of the Eaglecrest market, the survey, and examples of successful summer activities at other ski areas were presented last night (Wednesday) at a public meeting on the master plan.

Jim Calvin of Juneau research firm McDowell Group is leading the work. He said the single most important component of the master plan study is community input.

“The market assessment is important, understanding of what goes on in ski areas across the country is important, the economics and financial feasibility are important, but first and foremost we have to know what is acceptable,” Calvin said. “What kind of future development is consistent with what current users and the community overall really value at Eaglecrest?”

Calvin said the telephone survey results are statistically representative of Juneau as a whole – both ski area users and non-users. But when he analyzed results by those groups, they were quite different. While 50 percent of non-users wanted summer activities, only 32 percent of skiers and snowboarders viewed them important.

Tapping into Juneau’s hundreds of thousands of summer cruise ship visitors may be a way to generate additional revenue for the ski area, but Calvin said it isn’t easy to break into that market.

“It’s not just build it and they will come. The main cruise lines each offer more than 40 different opportunities to see whales, see glaciers, flightseeting, you name it, so there’s a lot to do and there’s really stiff competition for the visitor dollar and visitor time,” he said. He says most people come to Juneau to experience Alaska, such as whales and glaciers. They purchase their tours in four-hour blocks and there’s little time to visit a ski area within the confines of the already limited day in town.

Calvin was careful to note the city-owned ski area is not planning to compete with private-sector operators.

“With respect to the master plan, it’s identifying those kinds of activities that might be compatible with community values,” he said. “Then when a private-sector operator comes to Eaglecrest management or board and says ‘I’d like to do X,’ they will have the plan, the documentation, the measure of community attitude to know whether that’s compatible with what we all think is the right way to manage Eaglecrest,” he explained.

McDowell Group is working with SE Group, an international ski area planning firm. Resort Planning Director Claire Humber has helped many areas build master plans, considered “working” documents.

“It’s not ‘here’s the answer, do it.’ A master plan should never be that,” Humber said. “A master plan is a process as much as it is a document. This is a way of evaluation as you move into the future.”

An online survey asking what types of development Juneau residents would like to see at Eaglecrest can be found at ski.juneau.com until the end of the month. Public comments also can be sent to facilitator Jan Caulfield at janc@gci.net.

It will be several months before the master plan is complete. A draft is expected in February, when another public meeting will be held.