The river isn't the problem, Affordable Juneau is

Juneau Assembly members and city administrators discuss the proposed municipal budget for next year during a Finance Committee meeting at City Hall on Wednesday, May 13, 2026. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Independent)

By Emily Mesch

A recent opinion piece by former mayoral candidate and prominent member of Affordable Juneau, Angela Rodell, made an assertion that our focus, as a city, should prioritize the annual floods that have caused incredible amounts of property damage to Juneauites, and have necessitated incredible feats of engineering to mitigate, rather than prioritizing those services and facilities that CBJ may need to discontinue due to a sudden decrease in revenue.

And on one level, she's not wrong. I hope our city never looks as shell-shocked as it did after the 2024 event. And even if the HESCO barriers work exactly as expected, we still don't know what our long-term solution is going to be, and we don't even have a short-term solution for those living on View Drive.  

But the river has been here far longer than any of us have, and it will be here long after we're gone. It is indifferent to our mortal concerns. Saying that the river is the problem is like saying that the winter is the problem. Or avalanches. Or our geographical remoteness. These are not things that you can fight or change. They are a part of living in Juneau. They are things that you adjust to and compensate for. And while a flood that has the potential to inundate half the homes in our city is nothing to dismiss, it is yet still one thread in the tapestry of challenges that Juneau faces every year.

So what are the things that we can change? Well, there's a lot that we can change if we're willing to look at our challenges as they exist, and not through a dogmatic filter that solves all of its problems with the same solution.

Affordable Juneau's solution, in particular, seems to always be smaller government, but this can apply to any philosophy. In fact, I think all of us fall victim to this type of thinking at some point or another, based on our own philosophical preferences. Humans have evolved to take shortcuts in our judgement calls, so that we don't end up frozen in a crisis. It's how we've survived. But it has its shortfalls, and we are better when we are aware that we have this tendency.

Because when we decide on our solutions first, before we look at what the problem is, then we shut ourselves out from better solutions, and we miss the important side effects of the one that we've pre-determined. When we think only about the theory of smaller government, we don't consider the actual human beings who will live with the practical consequences of smaller government. It's not only the fact that CBJ will be ending some services, it's that our entire community is now embroiled in a bitter argument about what services should be cut.

It's that our city officials (both the elected ones and the career civil servants) are now additionally burdened by the stress of deciding who gets to keep their job, and who's out of luck. Program managers who don't know how much funding they're going to get next year. Residents who hear that the things they rely on may go away. And even if the odds are small, the fact that they're not zero makes life just that much more fearful.

And when we are overburdened, and stressed, and fearful, it's harder to make good decisions. For the people of Juneau, and for the government of Juneau.

The savings we see from lower taxes at the check-out aisle could very well be cancelled out because anxiety over the field house potentially closing, or the Douglas fire station potentially closing, or the City Museum potentially closing, or anxiety over any of the dozens of items that have been up for consideration, causes us to stress-eat and buy more food than we would have a year ago. I know that's definitely happened to me.

How much time have our city officials spent on figuring out how to manage a newly-reduced budget, that maybe would have been better spent researching, brainstorming, and working with our state and federal partners on a permanent fix for our annual floods?

See? The river isn't the problem. The river is a thing we have to somehow figure out how to live with. How to protect our homes and our livelihoods as we live alongside it. The problem is when we make things harder for ourselves in the name of dogmatic philosophies.

• Emily Mesch is a Juneau resident and information assistant for the Legislative Affairs Agency.