The Sitka City and Borough Assembly met on Tuesday, May 13, 2025, at 6:00 PM in Assembly Chambers. The meeting began with special reports, followed by consent agenda, unfinished business, new business, public comments, and reports. Key actions included approval of a lease for the Sitka Community Gardens Association, first reading of ordinances for an EV transit van and onsite marijuana consumption facilities, acceptance of a scoreboard donation from Holland America Line, and a lease amendment for the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society.
The meeting adjourned at 7:30 PM.
Uh welcome everybody uh to the regularly scheduled meeting of Tuesday, May 13th, 2025. Please join me for a flag salute. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. The Assembly of the City and Borough of Sitka would like to respectfully acknowledge the traditional first people of Sheetka. With gratitude, we proceed on Clinkit Ani. Sarah Roll Call, please. Mayor Eisenbeis. Present. Mr. Pike? Here. Ms. Carlson? Here. Mr. Yestad? Here. Mr. Christensen. Mr. Mosher? Here. And Mr. Celine. Here. Thank you. Correspondence or agenda changes this evening. Seeing none, there are no ceremonial matters that'll bring us to special reports. We do have a couple scheduled special reports this evening. We'll start with the Sitka Community Land Trust, please. Ladies and gentlemen of the Assembly and Administrator Leach, Attorney Jones. I'm Randy Huey of the Sitka Community Land Trust to give you a quick update on what's happened in the past year since the last time I gave an update. With regard to the buildings in the Suze Hini Shock neighborhood, House number 11 is dried in and will be complete in September. House 12 starts in June out of 14 homes. We will go vertical on the three duplexes in June also. That's fully funded by a HUD grant. We'll complete that neighborhood at the end of 2026 or early 2027, and there'll be 20 dwellings there at that time. Our first resale happened in the summer of 2024, and this is where we got to see if the uh in fact the community land trust model of home ownership preserves affordability. And short answer is yes, it did. So a home which sold at 275,000 in 2022 sold at 35,000 two years later. And the seller of the home took away 25,000 of the increase in the appraised value. So they did fine on the investment, and the next buyer got a good buy. That's the way it's supposed to work. With regard to funding, we now have grants from the largest funders in the state of Alaska. The Alaska Housing and Finance Corporation, the Nali Commission, HUD, Alaska Community Foundation, the Rasmussen Foundation, and First Bank and Hames Corp. So we have sort of broken into the ranks of the larger funding entities in the state. We've learned how to do that, just as the federal money is now going to be tougher and tougher to get. Perhaps that comes back in the future. We've worked to reduce the cost of a construction loan. So each of our last eight homes, the home buyer had to pay $22,000 in home uh construction loan costs, 10 and three quarters percent per nine months.