By ANGELA RODELL
May 13, 2026 – At the Assembly’s recent budget hearings, person after person stood up to testify in defense of the pools, the field house, the programs that make Juneau the kind of place people stay. I don’t fault them for that and understand why those programs are so important. But not one of those speakers mentioned the flood.
Juneau is in the middle of a budget debate that has its priorities upside down. We are talking about cutting Dimond Park Field House. We are not talking about whether the Mendenhall River will take Dimond Park Field House out. The Mendenhall glacial outburst flood (GLOF) is not next year’s budget problem; it is the biggest problem this city will face this decade, and we are still treating it like one more line on a spreadsheet.
Here is what makes that silence so striking. CBJ’s own engineering page describes what Phase 1A of the HESCO barriers was built to protect: two schools, a pool, a library, and a field house. Many of the residents who testified at the budget hearings came to defend those very facilities. But they were speaking as though the primary threat was money to operate. The city itself had already identified a more immediate danger: the river.
And those are far from the only things at risk. The 2024 flood damaged approximately 290 residences. Phase 2 of the barrier project, currently under construction, extends past the Mendenhall Wastewater Treatment Plant, the facility that serves roughly 20,000 people who live in the valley. Voters approved a bond in 2024 to primarily replace a 50-year-old structure at the downtown wastewater facility. The Mendenhall plant, the one in the river’s path, sits behind temporary barriers. The threat reaches the airport, the roads and bridges that hold this town together, and the shared tax base that funds everything else. The river takes whatever is in its path.
The GLOF is not a valley problem. If the airport closes, you do not fly out, no matter where you live. If a school is condemned, the displacement reshuffles the whole district. Anyone who does not live in the valley still depends on what is in it.
When we frame this as “cuts to recreation versus everything else,” we have already accepted a premise that does not hold up. The choice this spring has not been recreation versus a balanced budget. It has been recreation versus pretending the flood won’t cost us more in the future than anything we could cut today. Pretending is expensive. We are paying for it right now by using everyday operating funds to cover long-term costs. That works once. It does not work when the bill grows to $225 to $300 million.
There is a way forward, but it means using the tools we have as they are meant to be used.
The Assembly is already preparing two bond proposals for the October ballot — a school bond and a water-and-sewer bond. Each is worth doing. But neither addresses the threat that could swallow both. A flood-mitigation general obligation bond (GO Bond) for Phase 1 barriers and help cover some of the city’s share of matching federal funding for the flood, is the missing third question.
I helped collect signatures for the property tax cap last year, and some readers will assume I have changed my mind. I have not. The cap was never about refusing to fund what we need. It was about requiring the city to ask voters specifically when it wants to spend our money. A GO bond is exactly that. The debt service sits outside the cap by design, because we understand that a city sometimes has to do big things. It also puts the right money against the right problem. Paying down a bond through property taxes keeps sales taxes and other revenues free for the day-to-day services people came to defend – the pools, the field house, the programs that are valued.
Juneau voters know how to do this. The same voters who said no to a new city hall — twice — said yes to bonds for water and wastewater, for the public safety radio system, and for the airport terminal. When the case for an asset is overwhelming, Juneau approves. There is no example in this city’s history of voters refusing to fund a real response to a serious threat to the community.
The flood is that kind of threat. It is the kind of threat that makes the rest of the budget conversation look small. Dimond Park Field House is not a budget villain. The river is. And until the Assembly treats the flood like the first priority instead of just one of many on a long list, we will keep cutting things we love to pay for a fight we have not yet been willing to fund.
I want a Juneau that is still here in 50 years. I think most readers want the same thing. That is a budget conversation worth having.
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