SITKA, ALASKA
The program took almost an hour and fifteen minutes to get through. No one at the well-attended presentation left early.
Public Works is the city’s largest department, with thirty-eight full-time employees and six seasonal hires. It plans, builds, and maintains the city’s fourteen buildings, the harbors, airport terminal, park areas, and streets. A huge part of the department’s responsibility is mostly invisible: forty-eight miles of water mains, 35 miles of sewer, underground lift and pump stations, and 450 hydrants.
Harmon has divided capital expenses over the next five years into “Ongoing Projects” and “Construction.” Work on the water system is budgeted at $500,000 next year, and at $4-million by 2015.
“We’re kind of at a turning point both in water and sewer. A lot of that was built in a similar era, and we’re nearing the end of its life cycle. So you’ll see a lot of our projects focusing on upgrading water and sewer, and luckily streets get to benefit from that too.”
Street paving is also due to get more expensive over the next five years. The assembly has budgeted $100,000 next year for paving. Harmon would like to raise another $450,000 for work next year, and then in 2012 spend a whopping $2.3-million. The 2012 paving – like much in the five-year plan – remains unfunded. Pulling together that much for roads will take effort. But, as Harmon pointed out, it’s really only a starting point.
“Most of our roads were built in the early eighties through state funding, so we’ve never really had to pay for our paved roads. Now we’re facing an era when we’re going to have to pay for them and take care of them.”
Harmon said that half of Sitka’s twenty-three mile road system is at the end of its service life – at a replacement cost today of $30-million. If Sitka postponed work for another five or ten years, that cost could rise to $60-million, since many streets would have to be rebuilt from scratch. He encouraged chamber members to look for a dedicated revenue source for streets.
Harmon was more upbeat about projects where the funding was more certain. He was excited by the prospect of a Sea Walk from the O’Connell Bridge lightering dock all the way to Sitka National Historical Park, with a possible extension along the Indian River, under the highway, and ending at the Raptor Center. Harmon’s clinical assessment of the “poor connectivity” around Crescent Harbor earned him a genuine laugh.
“The poor visitors walk to the end of the tennis courts and the sidewalk just ends, and their highly confused, and they don’t really know where to go. I’d encourage you to go out and watch – it’s not really what we want to do to our visitors.”
The first two phases of the Sea Walk are slated for construction beginning in 2012, at a cost of $3.6-million, with funding coming from the state’s cruise passenger head tax.
The state will likely play a role in funding other big-ticket items in the department’s plan. Harmon said Sen. Bert Stedman had created a revenue stream for the state’s rural libraries. His support will be critical for the largest single expense in the next five years: Doubling the size of Sitka’s Kettleson Library is in the plan for 2013, at a cost of nearly $15-million. A deepwater dock at Sawmill Cove is the next most-expensive at $12-million dollars. It’s on the plan for 2012. After that is a new police station, at $10.6 million dollars in 2014. A new facility for seaplanes is on the 2013 plan at $7.5 million, as is the replacement of ANB Harbor at $5-million.
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