City and Borough Look at the Best Way to Approach Consolidation Research

logo-w-sunburstKayla Desroches/KMXT

Kodiak residents voted for the borough and city to explore possible consolidation, and that’s what members of staff and the elected bodies are doing.

Borough Mayor Dan Rohrer updated the Kodiak Island Borough Assembly and Kodiak City Council on their progress at a joint work session last week.

He explained he, Borough Manager Michael Powers, City Mayor Pat Branson, and City Manager Aimée Kniaziowski have been discussing how to move forward in their research of consolidation.

“It’s specifically for the two managers what they’re willing to commit their staff’s staff to spending time on, but again [this] would be a step back from that, but just looking purely right now at what would be the baby steps forward to start us in a direction of a better understanding of what it would even look like and feel like.”

Rohrer said they’re sorting out how to allot their resources.

“Both the managers mentioned this at the last meeting, is concern over – it’s not like they have extra staff sitting around with nothing to do, so the challenge is how to accomplish that with current staff. I also am concerned that we just don’t go out and hire a consultant, because that’s taking us down a path as a community especially on the borough side where we haven’t liked the outcome of that.”

The Kodiak community has looked into consolidation before, but never gone through with it, and Rohrer said as part of their talks, they’ve been looking at a consolidation report from 1989. He said they’ve been familiarizing themselves with that document, and part of their task is determining why consolidation failed to move past that 1989 report.

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