Kenai Watershed Forum officials hope a second try will mean success for an ordinance that would provide $100,000 in the FY 2009 borough budget for its culvert repair program that restores vital salmon habitat.
By a narrow 4-5 vote, the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly turned away Ordinance 2007-19-39 at its April 1 meeting. Opponents raised concerns about funding the nonprofit no matter how worthy its goals, and about the administration's expressed plans to include similar appropriations in future budgets.
After the vote, Assemblywoman Milli Martin, of Diamond Ridge, called for reconsideration. The issue comes up Tuesday.
Thursday, Martin said provisions of the Alaska Open Meetings Act generally preclude her from one-to-one meetings with her colleagues. Hence, lobbying them to change their minds outside of Tuesday's public meeting is pretty much out of the question.
She said she worries that if the Alaska Habitat Division came to the borough, inspected the 20 to 30 borough roads that currently have seriously problematic culverts, and ordered the borough to fix them, borough taxpayers would bear the cost.
The Kenai Watershed Forum, which is willing to reconstruct borough roads in any case, would not be using borough tax dollars, but rather state fish-tax revenues. Indeed, KWF didn't ask for the appropriation in the first place. That was Borough Mayor John Williams' idea after seeing some of the work the KWF culvert-restoration program had already accomplished.
Martin said she hoped her colleagues would come to see the wisdom of giving the nonprofit the money.
Ordinance 2007-19-39 proposed spending a portion of the average $647,000 the borough gets annually from the state in fish tax revenues.
In defense of the expenditure, Williams said rebuilding damaged stream crossings and restoring the connectivity of salmon habitat would pay off in the broader economy that depends so heavily on healthy salmon runs. Damaged or destroyed culverts have blocked hundreds of miles of streams on the Kenai Peninsula, he told the assembly earlier this month.
Assemblyman Bill Smith, of Homer, said many of the culverts and roads were the responsibility of the borough, and that it would be far more expensive for the borough to rebuild them only using borough funds.
Engaging with a nonprofit to attack the problem "seems like a very responsible thing to do," Smith said.
But opponents were uncomfortable appropriating so much to a nonprofit.
Gary Knopp, of Kalifornsky, said his objections were to handing taxpayer money to a nonprofit agency. Paul Fischer objected to the annual nature of the expenditure. Margaret Gilman, of Kenai, said she would rather see the Watershed Forum return to the assembly with a new request, one for money targeting a specific culvert restoration project, not the general program.
Kenai Watershed Forum Executive Director Robert Ruffner said Thursday he could present the borough with a list of at least 20 projects needing immediate attention. But he hopes the borough assembly will forward the money without tying it to a specific job so that Ruffner can use it to leverage other nonfederal grants.
He said testimony and comments by assembly members at the April 1 meeting demonstrated some misunderstandings about the watershed forum project that he hopes to correct.
"I want to make sure they have factual information. This doesn't help us out, it helps out the borough. We are not feathering our nest. This money goes directly into the ground and makes better roads," he said.
In partnership with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the watershed forum has identified some 350 roads crossing salmon streams. Half have been evaluated and 70 percent of those have collapsed or damaged culverts preventing salmon from migrating into several hundreds of miles of habitat.
The assembly must first agree to bring the measure back to the table via a reconsideration vote. If they do, they can then debate and revote on the measure itself.
Hal Spence can be reached at hspence@ptialaska.net.
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