Theo Noomah took the oath of office Tuesday, along with the other newly elected assembly members and Mayor Peter Micciche. Noomah will replace Cooper in Homer’s seat. Assembly President Ryan Tunseth said new members take office the first Monday after the election is certified, and the assembly certified the results at the same meeting.
Before the oath, the assembly passed its whole consent agenda in one vote, with no objections. That included five spending ordinances that were up for public hearing. Members moved all five onto the consent agenda, and no one testified on them.
One adds 500 thousand dollars in grant money for a mobile shredder at the borough’s solid waste department. That’s on top of 800 thousand the assembly set aside earlier. A memo from Solid Waste Director Scott Griebel says the first estimate came from machines not built for this kind of heavy-duty work. He writes the shredder will cut waste mass by more than 70 percent, and the vendor plans a price increase in January.
Another sends almost 10 thousand dollars in insurance money to the school district for a Homer High School van. According to a memo from the borough’s risk manager, an employee drove the 2020 Ford Transit into an automatic car wash in May, and the clearance was too low. The van was a total loss.
The other three add capacity to a stormwater basin at the Central Peninsula Landfill, pay for heating and ventilation work in the North Peninsula Recreation Service Area and cover the extra cost of an audit of the Nikiski Senior Center after quotes came in high.
Also on the consent agenda, the assembly backed a ranked list of transit projects that nonprofits will send to the state for grant money. Seward City Transit’s year-round service tops the list. The Independent Living Center’s ride voucher programs in Seward and Homer come second and third.
Members gave the borough and Central Peninsula Hospital six more months to rework their operating agreement before it would renew automatically for five years. The new deadline is June 30.
And they introduced an ordinance to accept about 12 thousand dollars in grant money for Bear Creek Fire Service Area, outside Seward, to buy a cardiac monitor. A public hearing is scheduled for the next meeting.
The next regular Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly meeting is December 1 at 6 p.m. in Soldotna.
