By WIN GRUENING
“Information is one thing, but weighing in on an election is another.” ~ Juneau Assemblymember Michelle Bonnet Hale, Aug. 1, 2022
During a specially held meeting on June 26, the City and Borough of Juneau Assembly unanimously set aside $50,000 to “advocate for and provide public information regarding the need for a new City Hall.”
This action follows the Assembly previously having signaled their intention to place a $27 million bond issue on the upcoming October municipal ballot to partially fund the construction of a new City Hall. The ordinance authorizing the bond issue is set to be formally approved at the Assembly’s next meeting on July 10.
The $50,000 for advocacy is included in the city’s budget approved weeks ago, the largest budget in Juneau’s history.
This latest approval maneuver was necessary because the municipality, by law, may not expend funds to influence an election about a ballot proposition unless funds are specifically appropriated for that purpose by ordinance.
While the authorization of both these ordinances gives the Assembly legal cover, it is an affront to voters who declined to approve funding for the new City Hall proposition last October.
First, the Assembly decided to re-introduce the failed City Hall proposal without engaging the electorate or considering any changes. The location, design, and estimated cost all remained the same. It is an identical project to the one voters turned down.
The only difference this time is that the Assembly appropriated an additional $10 million (after previously appropriating $6.3 million) in general funds that allowed the bond issue to be lowered to $27 million. In doing so, they have front-end loaded the $43 million project with over $16 million in public funds without voter approval.
City Manager Rorie Watt suggested that voters may have voted down the project because they objected to the size of the bond, his tenuous theory being that voters were ok with the project but would rather pay cash.
Next, to further insult voters’ intelligence and circumvent their wishes, the Assembly will fritter away $50,000 of taxpayers’ money to “educate” voters on the purported benefits of the project.
A municipal campaign is needed, apparently, because our Assembly believes voters were unable to grasp the necessity of this project in spite of the publicly available information provided.
Perhaps voters did not agree with the Assembly’s rationale for a new City Hall, or they objected to the cost, the location, or the design, or a combination of all of those. But without any clear explanation other than “obviously the voters don’t understand why we want this” and throwing more cash at the project, the Assembly has completely dismissed voters’ possible concerns.
Their intention to influence the election is even more aggravating given the Assembly’s reluctance just 11 months ago to employ propaganda such as this. In a meeting held two months before last year’s failed bond election , the Assembly voted down an ordinance that would have funded $25,000 to advocate for the 2022 City Hall ballot proposition.
In that meeting, according to a Juneau Empire news story, several Assembly members questioned the city’s role in advocating for a ballot issue to influence the outcome of an election.
Assembly member Maria Gladziszewski stated then that there were still ways for the Assembly to provide issue context to voters without advocating.
“All I want out there are facts, if we can just present facts, facts would be enough,” she said. “Putting out facts is not advocacy, and we have good facts.”
Other assembly members, such as Michelle Bonnet Hale, questioned the ethics of the city influencing an election.
Ultimately, that ordinance failed 6-3.
Today, voters must wonder how funding advocacy for a bond issue wasn’t ethical then, but the same Assembly can vote unanimously that it is perfectly ethical now. This is a perverse example of situational ethics, at best.
Adding to concerns, Juneau residents receiving property tax bills this week will be in for sticker shock. By my calculation, my taxes went up 24% over last year and 41% since 2021.
Taxpayers may want to ask themselves just who should be guiding our spending priorities – voters who have spoken or out-of-touch Assembly members who snub them?
After retiring as the senior vice president in charge of business banking for Key Bank in Alaska, Win Gruening became a regular opinion page columnist for the Juneau Empire. He was born and raised in Juneau and graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1970. He is involved in various local and statewide organizations.
Thanks Win for your keeping the electorate informed!
The faux Junta isn’t attempting an end run. They are flat out doing it.
They will continue to do so until we quit re-electing them.
It’s hard to “quit re-electing them” when so many run unopposed, like this past election cycle….
Part of my point.
Politicians equal snakes in the grass. No means no show the taxpayer a new way to do things without wanting more money. This cycle of false promises and ways to take more money from anybody but themselves needs to be challenged and the word no needs to be it.you politicians need to Learn how to manage with less and quit lying to us.
Classic case here where the City and Borough of Juneau Assembly members discount what the voters of Juneau concluded, i.e., they voted down the proposal to borrow a pile of money to build a new city hall. Having been rebuffed by the voters, the City and Borough of Juneau Assembly decides to use public funds to reeducate the voters, assuming somehow that the voters were ignorant.
It’s noteworthy that there was no sneaky or concerted campaign in opposition to borrowing big for the proposed city hall. Instead, the idea of borrowing to build was rejected by the voters based on the merits of the proposal.
What may be in play here is the phenomenon of preference falsification, where the chatter around town is about needing a new city hall and everyone kind of goes along with the sentiment. Pretty soon the Assembly members are convinced that the new city hall is necessary and everyone supports the borrowing scheme to build the new city hall. There was a certain “everyone knows we need a city hall” vibe among most of the CBJ Assembly members and especially so among the vaunted senior management staff down at city hall who have been pushing for construction of a new city hall for at least five years. After a while, there was a baked-in assumption among the senior staff and the assembly members that a new facility was essential, that the citizens were willing to borrow big for a new home for the bureaucracy. Surely the voters were going to rubber stamp the proposal to borrow, right?
Wrong! So now we’re spending public funds to reeducate the electorate. My guess is the public is not going to buy this little excercise in political reconditioning of a proposal that may be unnecessary and expensive.
It’s also worth pointing out that the cost to build the new city hall are very likely significantly higher than price tag supposedly attached to this project. The current CBJ Director of Engineering and Community Development provided the CBJ Assembly with information that suggested the final tab for the new proposed city hall might well be higher given inflation and other issues. The CBJ Assembly elected to ignore this cautionary advice and plowed forward with the borrowing scheme to finance the new facility. And, don’t forget that the borrowing scheme is only a portion of the total funds supposedly necessary to build a new city hall. The total costs for the new facility are significantly higher than the funds to be financed because the Assembly and senior city manager have been squirreling funds away and holding the funds in various accounts that will ultimately be used to build the new facility, seemingly in an attempt to make the total costs for the new building and parking garage appear less burdensome.
Other opportunities exist to house municipal staff that would likely be less expensive. Use of existing buildings owned by the City and Borough of Juneau has been ignored or glossed over. The rush to borrow and build is on. Public expressions via the ballot be damned.
Time will tell if the voters of Juneau will put up with the kind of misguided and fundamentally undemocratic management that is at work here. One supposes the electorate deserves what they will get if they go along with this charade but it’s clear to the adults observing this situation that the citizens of Juneau deserve better treatment from the individuals they elected to represent them.
I agree with nearly everything posted, except the last line. This is exactly what we deserve.
Hell, as mentioned earlier, often they run unopposed. They routinely ignore us and we can’t be bothered to challenge them. Why should they care what we think?
People get the government they deserve.
Masked Avenger, I agree with everything in your reply, except the last line. You say, “people get the government they deserve” when you mean to say, we (including you) get the government we deserve.
Way to be pedantic. Sadly pedantic at that.
I stand by my point.
Seems like a repub move….
Limit taxes…. oh looky here- a sales tax
Limit govt size… how about two new Task Forces that do nothing to solve the problem
Thoughtful and well-said Joe. If “no” votes exceeded “yes” votes by 240, but they still refuse to abandon the idea, how wide of a margin would it take? Would they give up if the no votes exceeded the yes votes by 500? 1,000?
.
Isn’t it true they should abandon the idea with a margin of only one vote?
I wonder if ANC & Juno switched assemblies if anyone would notice?
Would have spent more time learning about the Soviet Politburo if I’d realized one day AK would have them also.
I had more faith in local (Juneau) elections back when ballots were counted on election day, by local citizen volunteers, upon closing of the polls, under the supervision of the public assembled at Centennial Hall, with local TV station, local radio stations, PBS TV and radio, and the division of elections determined the results before midnight! There was no secret transport of the ballots to someplace in Anchorage, no waiting two weeks for more unsolicited mail-in ballots to arrive, no waiting for RCV logarithms (which no one understands) to replace simple math (which everyone understands). Before you blame Juneau for electing these tyrants, make sure they aren’t electing themselves through a purposefully flawed process?
I like how Maria G. just wants the facts out there. Maria G. and facts go together like oil and water. What the assembly wants is a palatial city hall. It will be their castle, probably with a moat, where they can rule and control the serfs of Juneau. Perhaps they should start/finish the new tram before spending more money?
Yet another reason for a long overdue forensic audit of the CBJ by the State and/or Fed’s to see just how and where our taxpayer dollars are being spent.
Every government office/agency is required/mandated by law to produce a CAFR (Comprehensive Annual Finance Report) which should (by law) identify where every dime of public money is stashed, invested and/or spent, CBJ included. This report is public, and open to anyone who wants to view it, and supposed to be readily available at any public library or government office it is associated with, on demand. The people who generate these reports, however, know that the general public never reads them. There isn’t a single high school in our state that requires graduates to understand, or be able to interpret, a CAFR. (I “suspect” that was purposefully omitted from the curriculum, so no government agency could be held accountable?)
Have you ever heard the Mayor, City Manager or Assembly members “invite” the public to scrutinize the CAFR for the City & Borough of Juneau?
The operative word here is forensic. While an annual audit provides us with the arithmetic that property tallies,a forensic audit examines the underlying individual expenditures themselves and allows us to see the propriety of those expenditures.
Comments are closed.