The Juneau Assembly has stalled on deciding whether to disempower the Eaglecrest Ski Area’s board of directors until a joint meeting in March.
Earlier this month, Mayor Beth Weldon proposed an ordinance to reduce the status of the city-owned ski area’s board from an empowered board to an advisory board. She cited the recent leadership turnover at the mountain and ongoing financial challenges.
At a committee of the whole meeting Monday night, Weldon further explained her reasoning for the proposed ordinance to the Juneau Assembly and the roughly 20 members of the public in the audience.
“I’m literally trying to save Eaglecrest, and I think with the empowered board making the decisions, I don’t see the status quo changing,” she said.
Right now, as an empowered board, Eaglecrest has its own set of laws, rules and responsibilities. But, if it became an advisory board, members could only make recommendations to the Assembly. It would lose the authority to establish policies or make decisions without Assembly approval.
At the meeting, Weldon argued the ski area needs more oversight, given the high amount of funding the city has funneled toward it in recent years, specifically on a new gondola project.
“If we are investing large amounts of money on things such as the chair lifts or maybe even the gondola, we want to have more of a say in how that money is spent, and currently, we don’t,” she said.
In the coming years, the ski area is slated to run into a multimillion-dollar deficit. The deficit is a part of a plan to repair some broken and aging infrastructure while boosting pay to employees and preparing to operate year-round.
Its expansion into summer operations relies heavily on the success of the gondola, which the ski area hopes to get up and running by the summer of 2028. However, many city leaders are worried the timeline — and cost — of the project will run far over what the board projected.
The Assembly agreed to hold off on any decision-making until it holds a joint meeting with the Eaglecrest board on March 4. Assembly member and Eaglecrest Ski Area board liaison Neil Steininger said he thinks that’s the best option.
“I think we owe it to everybody in the community to have a joint meeting with the Eaglecrest board to actually hash this out,” he said.
The Assembly will then vote on whether to move the ordinance forward during a committee meeting on March 16.
