City Manager Kim Kiefer talked to KTOO’s Casey Kelly this week about a variety of issues facing the city and borough.

Topics included Saturday’s Gastineau Apartments fire, budget issues, and two ongoing city projects: The West Douglas road extension and the whale sculpture for the downtown waterfront.

Listen to an unedited version of the interview and read the highlights below.

Does this weekend’s fire at the Gastineau Apartments lend a greater sense of urgency as the city explores its options for cleaning up the downtown eyesore?

I think that given that people are getting into the structure that’s supposed to be secure, and obviously isn’t, that the Assembly wants to try and move. We keep hearing the same stories that everybody else does that there’s a buyer out there that wants to buy it. But that hasn’t panned out, so we need to step in and do something.

A year ago, the projected deficit for this coming fiscal year was about $9 million. Where do we stand now?

We have made up a lot of that. And some people don’t understand why we could have a $9 million deficit a year ago, and we’re not there now. And the two big reasons for that are, one, we’ve done reductions in the actual operating budget, and we’ve also looked at the other side of the ledger, which is to bring in additional revenues. So, the Assembly went forward and looked at tax exemptions and determined (they would adjust) some tax exemptions, and they also looked at tobacco tax. So, the combination of those two alone are almost $3 million. When we look at the reductions that we have made from last year and additional reductions we made this year, that’s also close to $3 million… That’s two-thirds of what we were looking at last year.

How much cash on hand (fund balance) does the city expect to use to balance its budget for the coming fiscal year?

Anywhere between $2- and $3 million we’ll probably take out of fund balance. Our preference is to have that more in the $2 million range, that’s more sustainable.

Will there be layoffs?

Part of what we did in December did impact employees … That was the reorganization of engineering and public works, and some changes at parks and recreation. So there was a loss of a position in that reorganization … I don’t at this point see that there will be any addition to that.

The Juneau School District will request the city fund to the cap next year. That’s about $25 million, with another $700,000 outside the cap for activities. Does the city have the means to do that?

We will put that request forward as we do every year. The Assembly will look at all the requests as they look at the ’16 budget to determine where the funding will go. As I said earlier, we brought in some new revenues and some of those new revenues may be able to be redirected to the school district. But we don’t know, and we also don’t know at this point what the dollar amount is for the cap yet, until the state passes the budget.

Finally, a couple of big city projects are nearing some development milestones — the whale sculpture and the West Douglas road. Can you talk about where both of those projects stand?

The West Douglas road … has been on our radar for a number of years, and we’re now in the process of working on getting the permits for it. We’ve talked about a number of different routes, and so basically it takes from the end of North Douglas and continues around the west side of Douglas. The route we are looking at and moving forward with is all on city property … Because we’re going to be impacting some wetlands, they (the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) want us to set aside about 4.5 acres of wetlands that won’t be disturbed in the future, and we’ve got some locations that we can easily do that, that we wouldn’t want to disturb.

The whale, there’s sort of two pieces … There was a big push for a number of years by former Mayor Bill Overstreet to create a whale for Alaska’s 50th. Lots of people donated to that, lots of organizations donated to that, and the whale is being built as we speak, and is due to be delivered to Juneau later this year … The location that was agreed upon was (next to the bridge). Then what we want to do is build up the seawalk on that end. We’ve been focusing on the seawalk pretty much on the south end, from Marine Park down … So now we’re going to focus on the bridge end of it, the north end of the seawalk.