Fairbanks North Star Borough budget passage bolsters education funding, restores monies for rec center

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTUU) - At Thursday night’s meeting of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly, members passed a budget for the coming fiscal year, with that budget restoring funding for the Mary Siah Recreation Center and putting an additional $2.7 million into local education.

The assembly voted 9-0 to keep Mary Siah open, despite having voted 6-3 to close the facility on April 19. Members Mindy O’Neall and Barbara Haney had voted in favor of the closure at that time.

O’Neall said she has consistently been against funding for Mary Siah, but changed her mind for various reasons.

“There’s a lot of chaos in our world,” she said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, and it’s affecting the most vulnerable populations of our community.”

She heard from people who utilize the rec center, she said, calling their testimony “moving” and “compelling.”

“I think this is a real example of how testimony works, and how the public process really does influence how decisions are made,” she said.

Haney, meanwhile, said after her April closure vote that she looked back over the numbers and determined that it would be more expensive to close Mary Siah than to keep it open.

The borough also voted to increase user fees at the facility, which Haney argued would help keep the facility viable.

Referring to Mary Siah as “low-hanging fruit” in terms of keeping it safe from future budget discussions, Haney said she feels “very strongly that seniors deserve better.”

“I think with the right management, it should be viable,” she said. “And I think we just need are in the community that cares about it, with the degree of passion that you don’t see really at the Borough Assembly.”

An increase of $2,786,410 to the borough’s local contribution to the school district budget comes in addition to FNSB Mayor Grier Hopkins’ proposed $2 million increase, bringing the total local contribution to around $62.7 million. That’s nearly $5 million more than last year.

This increase passed in a 6-3 vote, with O’Neall, Scott Crass, Kristan Kelly, Liz Reeves-Ramos, David Guttenberg, and Nick LaJiness voting in favor, and Haney, Brett Rotermund, and Tammie Wilson voting against.

“From the savings that we had from cutting the budget, we swept that into education funding,” O’Neall said.

Haney, meanwhile, said she would have been happy to pass the $60 million contribution proposed by Hopkins, 00:18:20 and wanted to wait to see what funding the state comes up with before adding more.

“Rather than giving it to the school district, I thought we should hold on to that money and use our new CIP (Capital Improvement Program) process that we just changed to allow us to have a better handle on what we’re doing with that money,” Haney said.

O’Neall, on the other hand, discussed what she sees as a challenge local governments face when state leaders do not fulfill their funding duty.

“It’s unfair to local communities and local government that we are making up the difference in that,” she said, “but I do think that our community has said over and over again that we value education and, certainly from where I sit, that’s what I’m hearing from the community. I feel like that’s what they expected us to do.”

Meanwhile, Joy Community Center was cut from the budget in a 5-4 vote.

The facility, created when Joy Elementary School closed in 2022, housed materials and services from Noel Wien Public Library during its renovation, eventually being utilized by a variety of organizations, including Fairbanks Native Association, Camp Shriver, and the Interior Girls Softball Association.

“Unfortunately, I think there could potentially be nowhere for them to go,” O’Neall, who voted against the closure, said in part, adding that those programs will likely need to either find a new home outside of the borough or could end up being dissolved.

Haney voted in favor of closing Joy Community Center, arguing that there are still many facilities around the borough that can serve some of the same purposes.

“We just needed to reduce the number of buildings that we have in our books,” Haney said. “We keep pumping money into it, and we don’t really have a huge number of programs compared to other facilities.”

It is unclear at this point what the fate of the building will be. The budget ultimately passed 6-3, with the vote divided along the same line as the education funding increase.

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