Voters in Juneau likely will be asked in October to extend 1 percent of the local sales tax for another five years.
That would help raise about $47 million for capital projects. But first, the Assembly’s finance committee will meet Thursday to decide which projects would receive funding.
The Juneau Assembly has been sifting through 26 project requests totaling more than $126 million.
But they’ll have to pare it down as the sales tax extension would generate less than $47 million.
In the meantime the public has been weighing in on which projects make the cut.
“Our emails have been alight with comments,” Finance Committee Chairman Jesse Kiehl said. “Lots and lots of folks writing in.”
The Assembly has heard a lot of competing proposals and this month ranked their top 12 projects by ballot.
The finance office scored the results.
“We had staff put this together from weighted rankings just to give us a unified starting point,” Kiehl said. “From here, the committee may go a dozen different directions when we get down to the voting. But at least we have one place to start from.”
The full list of rankings was released on Tuesday.
Assembly members highly ranked upkeep of city-owned buildings, maintenance for the downtown swimming pool and the city’s water and wastewater treatment plants.Other projects that performed well were upgrades for Centennial Hall and the Rainforest Recovery Center at the hospital.
Those that didn’t rank at all included a city-subsidized child care initiative.
They also passed over sales tax funding for the city’s downtown seawalk that’s been funded mostly by marine passenger fees.
Finance Director Bob Bartholomew said the finance committee is expected to tackle that task when it meets Thursday.
“They’ll definitely need to have committee votes on which projects they want to move to the ballot and then how much money they want allocated to each project,” he said.
The Assembly will hold a public hearing before it finalizes its list. Then it will be up to voters to decide in October whether to extend the 1 percent sales tax.
The Assembly is expected to propose the ballot question later this summer.
