Juneau plans to expand its temporary levee along the Mendenhall River, in part by using money originally intended for a new arts and culture center.
An ordinance passed unanimously at Monday’s Assembly meeting will allow the city to help protect more homes and businesses from annual glacial outburst flooding by pulling $5 million from the proposed Capital Civic Center.
The current levee is made of HESCO barriers — steel and mesh baskets filled with sand. It protected hundreds of homes from flooding by a slim margin during the record-breaking glacial outburst flood in August.
Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said at the meeting that $4 million of the reallocation will go toward Phase 2 of the levee project.
“These funds would contribute toward ongoing overall protection costs like site preparation, armoring, environmental installation and legal for HESCO barrier installation along (parts of) the Mendenhall River that do not currently have barriers,” Barr said.
Phase 2 would expand the levee both upstream and downstream, so it would stretch from Back Loop Bridge to just before Juneau International Airport. The city estimates the expansion would cost around $19 million to build.
The other $1 million pulled from the Capital Civic Center will be used to repair and maintain the existing stretch of HESCO barriers, which leaked, slumped and lost sand during the flood.
The Capital Civic Center is a proposed project that would replace the current Juneau Arts & Culture Center. Juneau voters rejected a ballot proposition to fund the new civic center in 2019, but the city appropriated funds to a slightly altered version of the project anyway.
Barr said those funds were meant to be a match for a federal or state grant, which hasn’t materialized. He said that money was originally allocated from the hotel bed tax fund and the general fund.
The Assembly will discuss how to fund the rest of the HESCO barrier expansion at a special assembly meeting on Thursday.
