Assembly reaffirms plans to demolish homes on Telephone Hill
- Mark Sabbatini
- 46 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Members vote 5-2 against canceling the teardown of residences in one of Juneau’s oldest neighborhoods, as city leaders eye moving ahead quickly on redevelopment
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
People hoping the Juneau Assembly might change its mind about demolishing the existing homes on Telephone to allow for redevelopment got a decisive reality check Monday night.
Assembly members voted 5-2 against a proposal to cancel funding for the demolition during a Committee of the Whole meeting at City Hall. Members also rejected a motion to put the demolition on hold until one or more developers respond to an official request for qualifications to perform the redevelopment project.
"We've spent years going down this path we chose from a suite of options," Assembly Member Christine Woll said when the proposal to not fund the demolition was made by Assembly Member Nano Brooks. "Do you have a sense of what financially it would take to choose another path and explore infill development? I imagine it would be a lot more cost to redo a lot of the work that we've done down one path."
Brooks, elected to the Assembly last fall with support from residents seeking to preserve the neighborhood with some of Juneau’s oldest homes, said he believes the cost would be less than the $5.5 million the Assembly approved last year for the first phase of demolition and site preparation. He also questioned the Assembly’s unwavering commitment to the redevelopment project in the wake of ongoing public testimony and other opposition expressed by some residents.
"There definitely is the will and desire to do some sort of development, but there is no desire from the community or the people to spend $5 million to level this area," he said. "That's something that we as the body have gotten into, but it's not the will of the public."
Voting in favor of not spending the funds were Brooks and Paul Kelly, who was the only Assembly member to vote against the project last June. Absent from Monday’s vote were Deputy Mayor Greg Smith and Assembly Member Alicia Hughes-Skandijs, both of whom supported the project during last year’s vote.
A proposed amendment to Brooks’ motion that would put the demolition on hold until developers were given the opportunity to present their qualifications for the redevelopment project was offered by Assembly Member Neil Steininger.
"What I'm looking for is allowing for that flexibility for all types of developments that could come forward with all different ways to do things, and creating the most units for the least cost to the city," he said. "If we spend the money on demolition now that precludes us from looking at options that may come in through this RFQ, should the demolition not have happened."
Steininger’s motion failed by a 5-2 vote, with Kelly again in favor and Brooks voting against having his proposal amended.
After the meeting, John Ingalls, a longtime Telephone Hill resident who was among the last to vacate homes there due to challenging his city-ordered eviction in court, said he doesn’t believe at this point his home will be preserved.
"I think they’re going to demolish the house and that will be the end of it," he said. "They won't be able to afford to do anything else."
Plans to redevelop Telephone Hill have been discussed since the 1980s, when the state owned the land and contemplated using it for a new Capitol site. The City and Borough of Juneau acquired the land from the state in 2022, at which point residential and business redevelopment plans were set in motion.
Residents on Telephone Hill have rented the homes there for decades, knowing about the redevelopment plans. The city last June approved a plan to evict those residents as of Oct. 1, but legal issues resulted in delays that mean the final home — the oldest occupied residence in Juneau — is now scheduled to be vacated by Feb. 28.
Lights were still on in at least four residences on Telephone Hill after Monday night’s meeting ended. A memo presented by City Manager Katie Koester to Assembly members states "all unoccupied residential units have been shuttered with the water pipes and oil tanks drained. Houses have been secured with updated locks to prevent any illegal access."
Koester told Assembly members on Monday the legal issues means demolition scheduled to occur either last fall or during the winter has been delayed by several months. She said the hope is to issue a request within the next month to companies interested in bidding on the demolition work.
A concern expressed by Koester and other city leaders is developers aren’t interested in proposing redevelopment projects until the area is cleared and ready to build on.
"No one has stepped forward and said ‘We would like to do infill development,’" Mayor Beth Weldon said while Assembly members were discussing the next steps for the project. "We've had other people say ‘Get rid of the houses and we'll look at developing that.’ In fact, we've even asked Telephone Hill neighbors that have come up with a different plan than us. That's what I keep telling them — come up with the developer that will support that and they can't. So I think it just delays the project further if we don't demolish the houses."
Among the options discussed during the meeting was offering the roughly four-acre neighborhood free or at a greatly reduced price to a developer willing to meet certain redevelopment conditions, such as provisions involving affordable housing.
Some supporters of preserving Telephone Hill said after the meeting local developer Wayne Coogan has expressed a willingness to buy the property, which he acknowledged in an interview Tuesday. He said he made informal comments to a group of supporters — but hasn’t discussed with city officials — "that if that opportunity arose, I would look at it very seriously and not with the intention of tearing it down."
"For the right price I would buy the whole parcel and renovate it for resale or hold it for rent," he said, adding he doesn’t believe that section of downtown is too risky marketwise for a large-scale development.
Assembly members during Monday’s meeting made it clear that leaving the neighborhood as is isn’t in their plans, but they are willing to offer developers some flexibility in what a redeveloped neighborhood looks like. A plan approved by the Assembly last year calls for four mid-rise apartments with up to 155 total units, but members said Monday they would support a lower number of "high-density" residences if a developer wanted to include some commercial buildngs in the area as well.
Woll noted Juneau already has a housing shortage and there will be additional demand in the coming years when hundreds of U.S. Coast Guard personnel are scheduled to arrive with an icebreaker whose home port will be downtown.
"This is a big opportunity to move the needle and, yes, that costs money," she said. "If it didn't we would have high-density housing all over this community."
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
