2022 Juneau Municipal Election
What do you hope to accomplish in your next term?
- Why are you running for re-election?
- What are you most proud of from your current term?
- What do you hope to accomplish in your next term?
School Board
Deedie Sorensen
Candidate for School Board
I would hope that we are able to gear back up and continue moving towards better outcomes for reading. And also, we’ve used some of our pandemic relief monies to help upgrade social and emotional learning staff — not upgrade, but increase social and emotional learning staff to really help students who lost a lot of opportunity to develop, you know, those groups social skills that are so important in real life, both in school and in the workplace. And while children lost ground in academics, they also lost ground in a lot of the social learning aspects that you need, you know, like a group to kind of develop.
Emil R. Mackey III
Candidate for School Board
We can’t continue to face flat funding by raising PTR (pupil-to-teacher ratio). I would like for us to find other efficiencies, even if that means consolidating schools potentially, or finding other efficiencies to where we can get more bang for the buck with existing resources, because the state is obviously not going to step up to that and do adequate funding for schools. We’re going to be stuck with with flat funding from 2006 levels as far as the eye can see.
District 2 Assembly
Wade Bryson
Candidate for District 2 Assembly
I’d really like to see us move the needle on housing. It’s the most important factor in Juneau right now. It’s either going to help in the community grow, help bring new employees here, help bring the new population base that can contribute to the economy, or we’re going to drive people away if we don’t solve the housing issue. So I would say that that’s probably the number one topic that this Assembly will be tackling in the next couple of years.
District 1 Assembly
Greg Smith
Candidate for District 1 Assembly
Housing has been difficult and I mean, it’s complicated just due to Juneau’s geography and a number of other factors, but we need to continue to keep focus on it. We’re devoting resources to affordable housing. We have a grant program. We’re creating a tax abatement. Anyway, continued focus there clearly. I think we’ve done a good job so far of supporting child care, we might need to continue to do more. There’s some smaller things that I’d like to do — continuing to try to get more federal jobs to Juneau, including kind of increasing our Coast Guard presence here. I mentioned sales tax off food, climate change and sustainability and energy efficiency and those type of things I think are ways that can win for us as a community in terms of saving resources but also helps us be good citizens and stewards in our world.
Areawide Assembly
Carole Triem
Candidate for Areawide Assembly
Like I mentioned, housing is our big priority. We’re making progress on that. I think we still have a lot of work to do on that. But we’re trying lots of things. And I think we’ve got good momentum. But outside of housing, I would like to focus on our budget process. I think we haven’t had a very disciplined budget process in the last few years. And it has been crazy, so I won’t ding us too much for that. But I’d like us to get back to a process where we are on a more scheduled way of appropriating money and we are taking a more holistic view of what we’re spending and how and where, so that we can make better decisions about what we’re doing with people’s money. Because it isn’t our money. It does come from taxpayers. So I think if we can be better at planning that out, we’ll just have better long term results and we’ll see bigger impacts in the long term.