Nano Brooks

What makes you a good candidate for the Juneau Assembly?

I’m a lifelong Juneauite and was born and raised here, and have devoted my entire life to doing everything I can in the community to make sure that everyone has the best possible quality of life. I’ve worked in very many fields around the community, anything from child care to trades to service, and it’s given me a diverse experience for providing the best possible representation for the community.

The city is asking voters to approve adding nearly $23 million to the city’s debt for public health and safety improvements. What are your thoughts on the two ballot initiatives?

I think they’re extremely important things for the community, directly impacting the health and safety of all the residents here. I would just like to have seen the funding come maybe from reallocated sources.

We have a lot of savings for projects that either haven’t been approved or haven’t had much forward progress. So before placing a greater burden on the people of the community, I would have liked to have seen the consideration to maybe use funds that are already available.

Do you think the Ship-Free Saturday ballot initiative will benefit Juneau residents? Why or why not? If so, how?

Well, it’s all dependent on whether it passes or not. It’d be a great benefit to some community members, and it would be a detriment to other community members, so you have to look at it in the big picture of things.

My personal opinion is just, we’re at a point right now where we can’t jeopardize foundational revenue sources, and I think that it opens us up to a position to where there could be litigation brought against us by the cruise line agency. So, it’s something that you want to try and keep out of the courts as much as possible, but at the same time, the fact that it made it as a ballot initiative means that there has to be a solid, considerate discussion to do what’s best for the people in the community.

Juneau has now experienced record-breaking glacial outburst flooding events two years in a row. What role should the city play in mitigating damage to residential property in the future?

Well, it goes even beyond residential property. That also plays directly into the health and safety of the members of the community and the people of this community come first and foremost. And this issue now being a reoccurring disaster that’s affecting hundreds of homes and people needs to be one of the highest, if not the highest, priority of the Assembly right now to address the issues and do whatever they can to put into place mitigating factors and programs.

You know the easiest thing to do right now is a basic alert system and evacuation program. The second thing to do is that you can build levees or dams to divert the water when we do have the next potential overflow or outburst. And that’s going to take coordination with the Forest Service and the state as well.

The city is moving forward with a redevelopment plan for the Telephone Hill neighborhood in the coming years. How should the Assembly balance the need for more affordable housing downtown with the costs the city may have to shoulder to get those requirements in place?

So, this has been a hot topic in the community. There are a lot of mixed feelings and emotions on it, and the sentiment that always seems to shine through is that people want and need affordable housing. And it’s a very subjective term. You know, what is affordable? And, how can you ensure that that is what’s available when a project is started?

With Telephone Hill, it’s something that is in the most prime real estate of downtown, one of the most historic areas of downtown, and to try and force affordable housing into there is a really hard thing, especially when monies have already been exchanged for the development of these plans, even before community input.

So work is already being done on it, but the focus should definitely be a lot more on how to get more units quicker and more affordable, as opposed to refining something so much that it’s a flawless diamond, because then nothing will ever get built.

What do you think are the most important issues facing Juneau right now?

Well, it’s a couple of things that kind of cover a wide basis. But the most pressing issue for me is the glacial outburst and the hundreds of families and homes that are getting impacted on an annual basis now. That needs to be addressed like yesterday or more, so like last year, is when the planning should have started for mitigation factors.

But also we’re still in a financial pinch. Bartlett [Regional Hospital] and the school district have a lot of shortcomings when it comes to the finances, and we really need to diversify our revenue streams, and that’s why I’m still pushing hard for the land lottery and land raffle. And, that would bolster our general funds so much that we could really tackle these issues that the community are facing, and then also put programs in place that’ll make it to where future generations can thrive.