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Assembly, school board candidates make cases at televised forum before early voting starts Friday
Updated: Sep 24
3 candidates for 2 school board seats discuss AI in classrooms and absenteeism; 8 Assembly hopefuls in 3 races discuss trust in city government, ICE agent deployments
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
All 11 candidates in Juneau’s Oct. 6 municipal election got a chance Wednesday evening to air their positions on key issues to residents during a televised forum two days before ballots are mailed and drop boxes open on Friday.
Eight candidates seeking three Juneau Assembly seats and three candidates seeking two Juneau Board of Education seats took part in the forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of Juneau and livestreamed by KTOO. Information about three tax-related ballot propositions and how to vote in the election was also presented during the 90-minute forum.
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The school board candidates were featured during the first 20 minutes of the forum, answering questions on topics that included the district’s budget-driven consolidation two years ago, policies for use of technology and AI in schools, mental health support for students, and high absenteeism rates.
The three contenders — first-term incumbents Britteny Cioni-Haywood and David Noon, and challenger Christine Johnson — are seeking two seats. They are listed as a single group on the ballot. Voters are allowed to select two and the two candidates with the most votes will win the seats.
Assembly members made their cases during the final hour of the forum with a different set of questions, including citizen trust in local government, addressing future housing and landfill needs, imposing limits on cruise tourism, and whether the city should be supportive if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are deployed locally.
Two of the three races are competitive: The Areawide seat is being sought by incumbent Paul Kelly, and challengers Brad Sapp and James McCants. The open District 2 seat is being sought by Karla Hart, Malachi Thorington, Joyce Niven and David Morris. Mila Cosgrove is unopposed for the District 1 seat.
School board candidates discuss effects of consolidation, AI’s place in classrooms
All three school board candidates agreed the district is settling in after the consolidation of schools in 2024, but more work smoothing out rough edges remains.
"I think that the consolidation broke a lot of trust in the district," Johnson said. "I have heard that it happened really quick and that there didn't seem to be transparency around the plan, or that there was a really thought-out and solid plan."
She said if further problems involving consolidation arise while she’s on the board "I'd want to be able to show the transparency of why the decisions were made and what has come from consolidation, including financial as well as student success."
Cioni-Haywood and Noon, who were serving their first year on the board at the time, were the dissenters when the board approved a consolidation plan by a 5-2 vote. Both said Wednesday night they have accepted that decision and are now working toward making the plan work.
"I know high school students like to have all their friends in one building, so that's a positive," Cioni-Haywood. "I think there have been increased offerings as well. Is everything perfect? No, it's not. There's still more work to do."
Noon said priorities of the board as it deliberated consolidation were "class offerings, especially electives and exploratories at the high school and middle school, respectively," as well as preserving access to extracurricular activities
"So these were, as always, our highest priorities: student outcomes and student well-being, and despite the rough patches I think for the most part it's going OK," he said.
One of two questions from students was asked by Sabine Auger, a senior at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé.
"How do you think the district should respond to rapidly changing technology like social media, smartphones and especially AI?" she said. "And what do you think this technology's place is in schools?"
The question came during a week when AI is making global headlines with experts worrying it might end humanity. Cioni-Haywood acknowledged "we are in an incredibly disruptive moment with technology."
"I think students are most adept at it and the rest of us are catching up," she said. "I do believe that there is a place for most of the technology in the school system, but we have to make sure that we have guardrails on that technology. There can most certainly be abuses of those systems and I'm not sure that we fully understand all of those quite yet."
Noon said he headed a committee that oversaw the development of a new cell phone policy during his first term that "we thought met the needs of the district at the various levels and created some flexibility."
"So those are the kinds of priorities that as a board right now we're discussing as we consider possibly developing a similar policy related to AI," he said. "It is in utero — it has not fully developed yet, but these are going to be the top priorities."
Johnson said "I think that we all have to acknowledge that technology and AI is here. Students are using it, whether or not they have access to it at school."
"I think that we need to teach students how to use it responsibly and how to use it in a way that is assisting them and not doing the work for them," she said.
September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, which gained additional significance locally this year when two teens were found dead alone in the woods near the Dzantik'i Heeni campus at the end of August. The school board candidates were asked Tuesday "what more can the school district do to support students struggling with mental health and to destigmatize seeking help?"
Noon said he and Cioni-Haywood were part of a committee "that was responsible for meeting with community members, meeting with staff, meeting with students and stakeholders around the district to help a plan that, again, prioritizes student well-being."
"That is the very first priority," he said. "One of the metrics that we are going to implement is to create an inventory of districtwide well-being practices — what are the various supports that are available at all the levels of the district and how as a board — with the always limited resources that we have — provide supports where they are needed and fill gaps where we identify that they exist."
Cioni-Haywood said she favors "providing as much counseling support as we can across the district."
"We know budgets are tight, but this is so vital," she said, adding the district also should be focusing on partnerships with nonprofit, tribal and other organizations that provide such assistance.
Johnson said she believes school staff are in a strong position to help "given the amount of time they spend with our students, to notice when a student might be entering crisis and be able to start interventions early."
"We need to give teachers and administrators tools to be able to direct students to help using community resources," she said. "We have a lot of community partners that we could refer students to, and I think that the biggest thing to note is that teachers shouldn't be solely responsible for sharing this alone."
The second student question of the evening was asked by JDHS senior Kaycee Parady.
"Alaska school districts continue to face rising loss and uncertainty in state funding," she said. "How do you balance fiscal responsibility with the need to protect classroom instruction, and provide students with the programs and services they need?"
Johnson said that while examining data and determining needs for each of the district’s programs is important, there are legal obligations officials have to meet for some of them.
"But I also think that we can look at how we can share resources so that all programs are receiving the support that they need," she said. "I think in order to make an educated decision and an impactful decision we need to evaluate how our decision is going to impact students — what changing programs or shifting funding for programs is going to do for student success."
Cioni-Haywood said the board has struggled with the question, especially during the first year when consolidation was occurring.
"We now have a system that is more incorporated for finance and accounting," she said. "We need to make sure that our resources are distributed equitably. I do think that we need to utilize our funding very wisely. We have different pots of money and so making sure that those funds are being utilized for that funding…I think looking at if there's ways that we can get reimbursed for other things, making sure we're maximizing that, and then also working with our partners and seeing if there are things that they can support as well outside of the general funds."
Noon noted "we have a $94 million budget collectively in the Juneau School District, about $80 million of which is under direct board control, but none of which we generate." He said that while that largely leaves the district at the mercy of the state — which he asserts has failed to provide adequate funds — "we do have opportunities to be creative."
Assembly candidates discuss cruise tourism, ICE agents
As with the school board, the Assembly candidates early in their discussion confronted the question of whether residents have lost trust due to decisions made in recent years.
"That is a huge problem with what we are currently seeing in Juneau today," Thorington said. "The Assembly and the Juneau government as a whole has largely lost the public's trust, and we've seen a lot of the funding cuts as demonstrated by that."
City leaders are taking steps to build some of that trust back, but better outreach program is needed "starting with a more understandable website, more available meetings, and accessibility to Assembly members as well as our city managers' offices and representatives," he said.
Niven said an incident on Monday — when the Assembly tabled a long-discussed proposal requiring nonprofits to charge sales tax, largely because it was deemed confusing — shows city leaders need to improve how they proceed on such matters.
"I think we need to do our homework up front, get the ordinance in shape and ready to go, and so that it makes sense and it's understandable and explainable to the public," she said.
Affordability concerns are why many residents are unhappy with city leaders and "they're worried about their votes being ignored by the Assembly," Morris said.
"The people who voted down City Hall twice and now they're working on another one at $18 million," he said. "I think they need to focus on the core issues, and let the private industry and the (nonprofits) take care of all the other things."
Cosgrove said "it's easy to get a little tunnel-visioned" as a city administrator of Assembly member.
"I think better work on informing and educating is important," she said. "But I also think active listening is really important, and looking for ways where we can better understand the people who maybe don't have the time or the privilege to come and sit in a meeting, or maybe the skill sets to come and send an email, or know that they can testify about an issue. And I know there's lots of communities that struggle with that."
Representative government means elected leaders "must listen to you and then do the will of the people," Sapp said.
"There have been many examples of the city not performing their duty in this regard," he said.
Kelly said he’s tried to keep close touch with residents by holding regular office hours and sending monthly newsletters. He said he supports allowing public testimony at committee meetings, since he hears from people who are frustrated about having to wait until Assembly meetings when a final decision may get made that seems to ignore comments made at that meeting.
McCants said he doesn’t necessarily blame the Assembly if, for instance, 50 people in a community of more than 30,000 are voicing their opinions on a hot-button issue.
"At some point we have to take a little bit of accountability for ourselves and realize why we aren't showing up to voice our opinions to the government," he said. So it's not so much what they chose; it's what we did to make sure that they heard us."
Hart said she also supports allowing people to testify at committee meetings.
"The Assembly is locking themselves into decisions before they take it to the community for a chance to testify," she said. "We write letters, we write emails and we have zero way of knowing if they're ever read."
The candidates were also asked about the three ballot propositions that A) Extend a 3% temporary sales tax that votes have renewed every five years for decades, B) Raise the property tax cap to 12 mills, after voters lowered it to nine a year ago, and C) implement a seasonal 1% sales tax from April 1 to Sept. 30.
Hart, Niven, Thorington, Cosgrove and Kelly said they intend to vote yes on all three propositions. Morris and Sapp said they intend to vote for the 3% sales tax renewal and against the other two measures. McCants said he plans to vote no on all three, saying Juneau should sell its two cruise docks and "all the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property in West Douglas" to fund its budget.
A question getting a wide range of responses was "Do you think the City and Borough of Juneau has a revenue problem or a spending problem, and what proposals do you advocate to address your point of view that balances core services such as police and fire; quality-of-life services such as grants, libraries, museums, and recreation; and emergency reserves for unforeseen emergencies like the glacial lake outburst flood?"
Kelly, answering first, said "I think it's primarily at this point a revenue problem, but I think also we can always look at more ways to be efficient."
"I think if we need to do cuts I support going back to the people again and kind of bringing forward again ‘What are your priorities?’" he said. A previous community survey "indicated recreation was one of the top taxpayer-funded services to be cut, but I think especially after all the discussion we had last year people would think differently."
McCants, reiterating a stance from previous answers, said the local leaders should address "government-imposed scarcity" by selling off the city’s cruise docks and public land.
"If I'm elected we will start necessary movement on disposal of those properties and this will not be a problem," he said.
The city has "made a couple of expensive glitzy errors with the Eaglecrest gondola and the Telephone Hill project, but in general I think it is a revenue problem," Hart said.
"We have 1.7 million cruise ship passengers coming to Juneau and yet we are not optimizing our revenue return from those 1.7 million people," she said. "We should be getting more."
Thorington said "rather than just a revenue or a spending problem, that CBJ has found themselves in a bit of a trust problem, which then has led to a revenue-cutting problem, which is looking like it's going to go on to another trust problem."
"It's a bit of a spiral that we need to figure out how to break because the consequences are pretty catastrophic at the rate we're going," he said.
Niven said the city had a spending problem and lost residents’ trust, which resulted in tax-cut measures approved by voters last year that created a revenue problem.
"The first thing I think we need to do is focus on efficiencies," she said. "Look at all of our processes. It's not necessarily spending and/or revenue problems. It's ‘let's look at efficiencies and find out ways where we could cut money, save money by doing things quicker.’"
Trust issues and the resulting tax-cut measures were also cited by Morris, who also stated the city has $300 million in investments that it gets $15 million in interest from.
"So I think they're having a spending problem and not allocating the resources they have responsibly," he said. "They can open up a lot of land and get more money, but they're sitting on a lot of money that they don't tell anybody about and that's not good for the people. They don't need any more resources. They need to learn how to stay in their lane and spend their money properly."
Cosgrove said the issue is "a little bit of revenue and spending, but I also think budgeting."
"I think the city could do a better job of honing in what the budget currently looks like and make sure that we're reflecting projections based on accurate trends and making sure we have that budget number honed in," she said.
Sapp said "we had a spending problem that resulted in a revenue problem."
"Money lost on the gondola, money lost on Telephone Hill, money lost on the giveaway of the city building, money lost on Peterson Hill," he said. "You go on and on and on. It's money lost, money lost, money lost. It's mismanagement of the people's money. We need to properly budget. We need to project very accurately, and we need to spend. Wisely, open up land, allow private development and it'll solve a lot of these issues."
A question near the end of the forum that stirred some reaction from the audience was "What are your thoughts about ICE agents operating in Juneau? Would you consider restrictions on how JPD and other city services interact with federal agents?"
Hart, Thorington, Niven and Cosgrove said they don’t see cause for Juneau officials to cooperate if ICE officers were deployed locally. Morris said he agrees there are no known gang or similar activities from refugees in Juneau, but if ICE agents are sent to Juneau "our law enforcement people should support them." Sapp, similarly, said "if they come here it's going to be for a reason." Kelly said policies for potential situations should be established. McCants said he did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and expressed support for "a core immigrant community that's really near and dear to my heart."
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
