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Christine Woll sees a lot of plusses, some minuses as she departs Juneau Assembly
Finance Committee chair who guided city leaders through some of their toughest fiscal challenges says immediate future plans include pottery, a marathon and an African safari
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
Christine Woll won’t have to spend Monday evening debating regulations for e-bikes and farm animals. Instead, after a traditional ceremonial farewell from fellow Juneau Assembly members, she’ll be looking forward to a future that at least for the short term involves more personal challenges.
"I'm excited to have some free time back," she said in an Oct. 15 interview. "I'm taking a pottery class right now. I'm training for a marathon, and looking forward to spending more time with friends and family."
That time will include three weeks in East Africa in December — roughly the same time her former counterparts will be starting the grueling multi-month process to draft a budget for the coming fiscal year. For the past three years she has presided over the process as the chair of the Assembly Finance Committee.
Woll, who opted not to run again after serving two three-year terms as a District 2 Assembly member, will make her final appearance in that seat when the Assembly convenes at City Hall at 6 p.m. Soon after, newcomer Joyce Niven will be sworn in after prevailing in a four-candidate race in the Oct. 6 municipal election.
Ten days before her last meeting, Woll said she couldn’t say if she’ll miss discussing the items that will be discussed after her successor is sworn in.
"I don't even know what's on the agenda," she said. "That's part of my strategy here, is I'm trying to start to distance myself a bit."
Woll said she expects to remain engaged in local issues after an initial break. But she also said she spent three years as a leadership transition guide for organizations — and a key thing for people moving on from those organizations was to "develop some boundaries for themselves so they can let new leadership step up and rediscover other parts of their lives."
"Long term I definitely think I will want to continue to be involved in our community and what that looks like exactly I don't know," she said. "But I'm definitely planning on taking an intentional break between now and then in terms of being deeply involved in city politics."
That could include another run for public office at some point, Woll said.
Woll’s primary work for now will be continuing as executive director of the Healing Hand Foundation, a charitable organization assisting with unfunded healthcare-related needs of Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium beneficiaries and veterans. She moved to Juneau in 2012 to work for The Nature Conservancy, spending 10 years as a fish biologist and regional program director before beginning work involving other nonprofit organizations.
Woll said she hadn’t spoken to Niven during the days immediately after the election, when it appeared she would prevail, but is familiar with her experience as a longtime manager for the Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority and involvement as a board member for the Juneau Housing First Collaborative,
"One thing I'm really excited about for Joyce being on the Assembly is her longtime experience working on building housing in Southeast Alaska," she said. "I think I didn't come into my role with really any experience when it came to how to build housing and lower the cost of housing, but I've learned a lot and really feel a lot more passionate than I did coming in about kind of how much we need to focus on that issue, and so I think that excites me that she's coming in already with experience."
Housing was a big issue when Woll entered the Assembly and remains a big issue as she exits, but she said progress on the issue has occurred during that time.
"We have put our foot on the gas over the last six years when it comes to supporting a whole variety of different ways to incentivize housing, and some of that has paid off in lots of the building that we see," she said. "But we can't stop because the problem continues to get worse. Even though we have a shrinking population, the demographers will tell us that people are living in their houses with fewer people and so we still have quite a big gap when it comes to how many houses we would need to support the community in the way that we would like to."
There has been an expansion of permanent supportive housing for the economically disadvantaged, with plans for more, plus ongoing construction of other homes throughout town, Woll said. She said the city’s Affordable Housing Fund and some changes in city code have helped allow developers to pursue those projects.
"I think the only way we make progress is kind of continuing to invest resources, invest in multiple strategies, and be bold in our community's vision for what housing looks like," she said.
During the 2020 election in which Woll won her first term she highlighted three general goals at her campaign website: protecting Juneau's health and safety, building a resilient economy, and "moving forward, together" by "listening to those whose voices have not always been heard." She said six years later it might not be possible to ever completely check such goals off, but there were notable achievements on them.
"I will say on the first one, that at the time was really about the pandemic," she said. "And I'm very proud of how our community weathered the pandemic — both from a health and safety perspective — but also we were able to invest considerable resources to make sure our businesses and our nonprofits and our individuals most in need weathered the economic impacts of COVID."
But while Juneau’s economy clearly has moved forward since the pandemic, there are also serious and unexpected financial concerns due to the disaster-level glacial lake outburst floods that began occurring in 2023 and are expected to continue annually, Woll said. Of all the challenges the Assembly faced during her six years, including the pandemic, she said the floods were the biggest.
"There are so many layers to it," she said. "It is an imminent threat to the sustainability of our community, so it's scary. People's lives are being uprooted, and so folks are understandably angry and distressed. So that just takes the tension up a notch. And the actual policy decisions were really hard — it’s very expensive."
"And then there's a lot of unknowns, so you're making decisions without all the information. I have a science background and so I would love as a policymaker for folks to give me a ’There's a 60% chance that what you're going to do is going to work,’ and we didn't really have that for a lot of the decisions we had to make around the mitigation."
However, after getting through this year’s flood with minimal damage due to protections put in place, Woll said "I'm happy to see our community kind of pulling together and doing our best to figure out short-term and long-term solutions there."
The third goal of reaching out to people whose voices aren’t being heard is one where "I don't think we've made as much progress as I would have liked," Woll said.
"I still feel like those we hear from the most as Assembly members are the folks with the best access to the system, and it's much harder to hear from folks that don't have that same access," she said.
Woll said the city has recently expanded its communications staff, which she believes will help provide more information about official actions occurring and opportunities for public participation.
"I think one of the things that made me feel like that is starting to work is when we did when we went through the budget process this year," she said. "We did a community survey to get input and it was not perfectly representative, but it did about as good a job as anything I had ever seen from the city in terms of how many people we reached and the diversity of people we reached."
Economic worries were a foremost issue during the past two municipal elections, with voters passing sales and property tax cuts last year, and then implementing a seasonal sales tax this year to offset some of the revenue lost with last year’s votes. Woll said the cut last year exempting food and utilities from sales tax was one she supported, but with the provision that something fill the gap — which the just-passed seasonal tax will largely achieve.
"I think they do go a long way towards making Juneau a more affordable place to live," she said.
City leaders, however, are likely facing another difficult budget cycle with somebody else chairing the Assembly Finance Committee during the coming months, Woll said. The reason is the Assembly used most of its discretionary reserves during the past budget cycle to cover a deficit and for other purposes such as repaying a loan to Goldbelt Inc. for an abandoned agreement involving a gondola at Eaglecrest Ski Area.
"We always had some wiggle room for key priority projects, or to be more conservative because we knew we had some funding in the back pocket if something cost more than we were expecting," she said. "That cushion is now gone because we used it this last year. And so I think that's probably going to lead to some real conservative decision-making on behalf of the Assembly."
Woll, while among a minority of Assembly members who opposed the purchase of the gondola in 2022, said it nonetheless is one of her biggest regrets of her time in office.
"There were more points along the way," she said. "There was that initial decision to purchase the gondola, which surprised me and I voted against. But could we have asked more questions when we were engaging in the agreement with Goldbelt? Could we have asked more questions about why we were so behind on schedule, and what was going to happen if these cost estimates and timeline weren't as they said, what the risks of that were? So I don't know if I would have been able to change the outcome, but it's certainly I think a true embarrassment in terms of how that project ultimately ended up."
Woll was also in the minority on several key votes this year about cuts to the city’s budget, along with Assembly Member Alicia Hughes-Skandijs who is also stepping down Monday after declining to seek a third full term. But Woll said one of the novel aspects about serving on the Assembly the past six years was the lack of a clear partisan pattern among members when it came to votes.
"I think people see other bodies and they think it's as simple as there's a majority and a minority, and you're in the majority or you're in the minority, and you're either on the losing end of a vote or you're on the winning end of a vote," she said. "And I think there were no voting blocs in the six years that I was on the Assembly. There was never a predictable pattern because I think folks showed up to the table just looking for the best solution. And that doesn't always go your way. But I have a lot of respect for the people that I got to serve with as a result."
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
