Melinda Munson: So Tuesday’s meeting should be exciting with the election canvass at 6:30 p.m. and the assembly officially certifying election results.
Will Steinfeld: Yeah, we’ll have a new Assembly with former assembly members Craig Loomis and Kevin Forster ending their terms. And they’ll be replaced by the newly elected Anne Marie Palmieri and Beau Bradley.
And so one race that is still undecided is the Planning Commission.
There’s one seat there where the two candidates are separated by a margin that’s smaller than the total amount of votes that could be counted at this election canvass … So there’s 36 total ballots that could be added to this race, so theoretically, if every single one of these 36 votes went to Planning Commission candidate George Campbell, the results could flip. But if things stand as they are right now, Nick Szatkowski will be planning commissioner.
We’ve talked about our two new assembly members. We have a mayor who is familiar.
Doug Olerud. He’s back. He was the mayor before Tom Morphet, who’s outgoing now. So there will be a kind of, I guess, a new but old face presiding over the assembly meetings for the next three years.
It looks like a lot of this meeting could be focused on the Port Chilkoot dock and offers to manage it. Tell us what’s going on in that area.
That’s definitely one of the big pieces of new news here. I’m not sure how much time they’ll actually spend discussing at the meeting because the timeline that’s been laid out is pretty long. So I think this is going to stretch for weeks and months going forward.
But basically, we’ve been waiting for a long time, for the better part of this year, for offers from these companies that want to come manage the Port Chilkoot dock and bring in cruise ships and take over those management responsibilities. And finally, we have it.
The borough put out its public request for qualified proposals. So now that the bid period is closed, we have the final set of possible candidates, and it’s what we expected. We knew that there was this company, Global Ports Holding, that initiated the whole process. And then the other party that had submitted a bid or an offer was this kind of consortium of Hoonah Totem Corp. and Survey Point Holdings, which both are players in the regional cruise ship industry and have partnered together for an offer opposite Global Ports here.
And so, included in this week’s assembly packet are those two proposals from the companies. They’re detailed. They’re pretty complicated. They both offer multiple kinds of revenue models, and so I’ll have more reporting out on that. But we’ll also hear the assembly’s take, I would guess, this week at the very least, in terms of how they plan to decide on one or the other.
And what we’ve heard in the past is that it’s not necessarily going to just be choosing one offer or the other. The assembly could choose to take one of these offers and then use it as a starting point for negotiations.
The child care task force met recently, and one of their recommendations was the transfer of the preschool building to the Chilkoot Indian Association. Tell us about that.
Everything is kind of up in the air right now with early childhood education and preschool in the borough ever since Chilkat Valley Preschool shutdown. But even before that, because there’s been this general agreement that the business is expensive to run, it’s expensive for parents to afford. So this task force has been discussing things like what if the Chilkoot Indian Association takes over this building or these responsibilities.
But that body, the child care task force, is not a government body. It’s not an assembly committee. It’s just a kind of informally organized group of stakeholders. So parents, child care providers, Mayor Tom Morphet was one of the people who organized it. But they still have to take their ideas to the borough assembly to get any actual traction, get any actual movement on these proposals. And so that’s what’s happening here. The assembly hasn’t yet considered something like transferring the borough-owned Chilkat Valley Preschool building to the Chilkoot Indian Association. So we’ll get some discussion of that.
And one of the reasons this is pressing and why the CVP building is relevant is because the borough has this $1 million federal grant to do improvements or build a new child care building. But many people have said, child care providers have said, what’s needed is funding for services and providing the child care, not necessarily a building. Because there is this CVP building as is, and so doing improvements and then transferring it is one discussion about how this grant could unfold.
But meanwhile, the Chilkoot Indian Association has its own plans and is moving forward with work on a Main Street building that it says will become a child care center open to the community.
There’s a lease on the agenda for the Four Winds Resource Center. What does that look like?
This one is, I think, notable because Assembly member Mark Smith, in particular, raised last year the idea of selling off the former Mosquito Lake School, where the Four Winds Resource Center runs a community center now. And it got a lot of traction.
There were assembly members and members of the public who said, ‘You know, this makes sense. Get this infrastructure off the books and in the hands of this nonprofit that’s actually running it.’
And last year, when those conversations were happening, leadership in the nonprofit said we would actually be amenable to taking over the building, but we need some time to get ready financially, gather grants and raise money, and be ready to take this on. And so, what they asked for was kind of a gradual transition.
The borough has been negotiating with the nonprofit ever since, and this is the lease proposal that has come out of that. It would be a six-year lease. I would imagine we’ll get more details about exactly how that transition would work, or if the transition is or isn’t explicitly part of this lease agreement at the assembly meeting.