Neil Steininger

What makes you a good candidate for the Juneau Assembly?

I have a lot of experience in the public sector, finance and budgeting and administration. I spent about 12 years at the state. Most of that time I spent at the Office of Management and Budget working on fiscal issues for the state, state finances, as well as working on kind of that back end of how government works.

I’ve learned a lot about what policy decisions are effective in functional government. And I think I can bring that viewpoint to the Assembly, and work with the other Assembly members to kind of bring in some of those ideas and concepts and knowledge that would help as we try and move the city forward.

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?

Looking at the projects that they cover, the Alaska Land Mobile Radio is a pretty critical piece of infrastructure for public safety. I have some experience with that program at the state level getting funding both for tower replacements, as well as just operations for that program at state level. And I have seen how vital it is for our public safety officials. So I’m very supportive of figuring out how to fund that for the use for public safety here in Juneau. And I do understand that there’s a mix of responsibility and funding between state, local and federal sources.

The other project for wastewater, obviously, it would be great if we could have funded all those improvements through putting money away over time to pay for that maintenance. But at this point, we need to make sure we have functioning wastewater. So while issuing bond debt isn’t necessarily the ideal way, I think we need to be supporting those projects.

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

I do not think it will benefit Juneau residents. Ship-Free Saturday, I see it as kind of a knee-jerk reaction to an issue that all of us feel, and that is the balance between living in Juneau and sharing Juneau with visitors.

I think that cutting Juneau off from visitors one day a week is fairly punitive and won’t really be helpful for a lot of the things that Juneau needs. Moving forward, we need to see jobs that can bring in young people into Juneau and cutting off an industry that employs most young people in town, that’s going to really harm our ability to attract people that will come and build families.

A lot of the problems Juneau’s facing in the future really come from that demographic shift and the lack of families coming into town. And so that’s why I don’t support Ship-Free Saturdays. I think there’s better ways to manage that.

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?

I actually have some pretty first-hand experience with this. My parents live on Meander Way. They’ve been pretty lucky in the fact that the damage to their home is very minimal. But looking at that problem, it’s definitely something the city needs to be involved in.

We have a housing crisis already. Taking 300 houses off the market effectively – if nothing is done about this issue – really, we can’t handle that within the market of housing. I think there are a lot of interesting concepts and ideas to mitigate the damage. Some of them are on city land and so, of course, the city would be the prime entity working on those projects. But I think at the end of the day, it’s going to be a partnership between the city, the feds and the state. 

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?

That’s a great question. My time since I moved back to town in 2012, there have been many, many housing units lost downtown. The Gastineau apartment building burning down — we’ve lost a lot of density in the downtown district, and that’s something that we really need to figure out how to replace.

The Telephone Hill project, I walked through the neighborhood yesterday actually, and there is space available for additional dense housing that could be built if it’s gotten into the hands of a developer willing to do that work. But there’s also that question of, ‘how do we balance those buildings that are currently occupied in the space that’s available?’ And that’s really going to be a sticky challenge because it is a group of residents there that have been living there for quite some time.

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

To me, it’s really the kind of demographic issues that we’re facing. We have a really strong senior population, and it’s awesome that folks like my parents can spend their retirements in Juneau. But we really need to be thinking about how can we attract young families to town. And I think that really comes down to things like figuring out our housing issue, figuring out our child care issue, and also protecting the jobs that bring in young families, like tourism, like government jobs, things of that nature, that are bringing in families and have supported them in the past. We need to figure out how to enhance that and really try to make sure that 20 years from now, Juneau doesn’t continue to have these demographic issues.