Juneau: neither boom nor bust, holding steady.

• Author: Bohi, Heidi
• Position: Towns in Transition

It has been a busy couple years for the City of Juneau. There are major airport improvements, the hospital expansion, the completion of Kensington Mine, a new high school, swimming pool and the downtown transportation center. Add to the top of the pile ongoing road construction and maintenance, community-wide beautification efforts, and public construction projects--and it has meant solid work for hundreds of locals.

And that's one thing that worries Rod Swope, Juneau's city and borough manager. As most of these projects wrap up, it means the work that has been sustaining the economy is also going away.

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While Juneau puts the finishing touches on these recent accomplishments, Swope and his colleagues are filling in the calendar with new developments that will again mean some new employment for locals, along with improved quality of life for 31,000 residents.

Although the high cost of living continues to be a factor, Juneau-ites are committed to the community and customarily vote to assess themselves new local taxes if it means investing in an improved quality of life.

After years of struggling with the issue of inadequate parking in the area surrounding the State Capitol, this month the city will complete the three-story Downtown Transportation Center, which includes the 240-spot parking garage--some of which will be reserved for legislators when the Legislature convenes--a police sub-station, and protected areas for locals to wait for mass transit. In this same area, the Seward and Main streets revitalization projects resulted in landscaping, brick sidewalks and pocket parks that improve the look of the downtown area.

WATERFRONT IMPROVEMENTS

To avoid ending up with a waterfront area that is a hodge-podge of happenstance developments, the city and borough has adopted The Long Range Waterfront Plan that proposes a series of improvements taking place in phases over the next several years, focusing primarily on the seawalk area that runs the length of downtown. Ultimately there will be two new cruise ship docks to accommodate newer, larger ships that will make summer stops in Juneau. The docks are expected to be completed by 2013 and will be constructed around the summer visitor season.

The cruise ship industry continues to be Juneau's largest and steadiest area of growth, which is the largest private-sector employer and draws more than half of the total Alaska visitor market. When the economic...