Unalaska city officials will travel to the nation’s capital next month to speak with legislators about the island’s top priorities, and this year, they’ve named a years-long paving project as the city’s primary concern.
The city has asked councilors to focus on some of the usual priorities, including the Captains Bay Road paving project. The “critical commercial corridor” is a roughly three-mile bumpy gravel road that runs by one of the island’s processing plants and numerous commercial docks.
The city also said Unalaska’s geothermal energy project at a nearby volcano needs investigation and testing. Groups have been attempting for decades to tap into geothermal potential at Makushin Volcano, which sits about 14 miles from town. The latest venture tapered off about two years ago.
Interim City Manager Abner Hoage said the city also wants help with port infrastructure improvements, including the replacement of a ship-to-shore crane on the Unalaska Marine Center Dock.
Hoage said there are some new priorities on the list as well.
“The council wanted to focus some on health care for the community, and they asked that we work with the clinic to see if there's anything we can support,” he said. “And they've asked for support on a mammography suite equipment purchase.”
Because mammograms are a specialized screening procedure, they require specialized machinery and technician training. Right now, any patient in Unalaska who needs a mammogram has to travel off-island or wait for a mobile unit to come from Anchorage.
According to a city resolution, the mammography suite equipment request for Unalaska’s Iliuliuk Family and Health Services would expand preventative care and reduce travel costs for residents. The city said the request would help with “the purchase and implementation of a mammogram machine, initial technician support and radiology cross-training for installation in the city-owned IFHS clinic facility.”
It would also help the clinic meet certain requirements for its ongoing facility expansion, which is expected to be completed this year.
The city puts the mammogram project request at $700,000.
The ask for the Captains Bay road project comes in around $5 million. Another priority — to address coastal erosion across the island — comes with a $1 million request, according to the city’s memo.
Those priorities all have price tags or specific projects, but the city also wants federal support for a range of other programmatic priorities.
Hoage said those are “things that are important to the community, that we may not have the solution for yet, or are just more generalized.”
That list includes things like air service reliability, environmental cleanup of contaminated lands, fisheries priorities, and public broadcasting and emergency communications.
The city will send the mayor and three council members to Washington, D.C. in early March to discuss the island’s priorities with legislators.
The city council will finalize the federal lobbying priorities at its meeting Tuesday night.
