Searching for fairness<\/span><\/p>\nThe ideas of equality and fairness have been at the center of the discussion about the project. Though 20 of 25 homeowners who responded to a survey in April said they were in favor of the plan, those in the minority have cited unequal benefit.<\/p>\n
Some homes are experiencing much more erosion than others, and the ones that are further away from the erosion are less inclined to pay the large sum of money. At Thursday night’s meeting, Assembly members proposed one factor that could divide the costs in a fairer way: property value.<\/p>\n
City Manager Rorie Watt said that judging costs based on property value would likely be the fairest way to go about this.<\/p>\n
“You’re looking at the ultimate benefit,” Watt said, “and the ultimate benefit is gonna be the best you can quantitatively analyze the value of the home. …the benefit would be the protection of the asset of the home.”<\/p>\n
The committee unanimously approved a motion for city staff to divide the estimated cost based on property value and then present those numbers to the homeowners. The homeowners will then have another informal poll on their thoughts. There’s also an option that if the homeowners can meet with each other and come up with a solution, the city will consider that.<\/p>\n
According to the CBJ Assessor’s website, property values vary greatly in the affected area. Of the 27 households that were polled in April, there’s a range of $196,100 to $623,372 in property value. Fourteen of the homes are assessed at between $400,000 and $500,000, but five are valued at or below $315,000.<\/p>\n
Jones pointed out that these property values are suffering because of the eroding banks of the river, and that if the city doesn’t figure out a way to help stop the erosion, the situation could get much worse.<\/p>\n
“As I understand it right now, most of those homes, if they were put on the market, are not sellable,” Jones said. “I think on one hand, the value of the property for resale or refinancing or whatever is pretty negligible just because we don’t have a solution to the fact that those homes may not exist in three or four years after a major flood, and I don’t think that’s acceptable.”<\/p>\n
\n• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at alex.mccarthy@juneauempire.com.<\/b><\/p>\n
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For the first time, the City and Borough of Juneau offered to commit funds to battling erosion on the Mendenhall River — in a way. Erosion on the Mendenhall River is threatening houses, particularly on Meander Way. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has been putting a plan together to install siding along the river […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":428,"featured_media":31837,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-31836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/428"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31836"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=31836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}