Following councilman Keggie Tubbs resignation, Mayor Ruby says she isn't sure how the council will vote Thursday.
DILLINGHAM: The general election may (or may not) be behind us, but there is another important vote scheduled this week in Dillingham. KDLG’s Dave Bendinger has more:
DILLINGHAM: After voting for a three week delay, the city council is set to decide Thursday whether or not to send the annexation petition forward to the Local Boundary Commission, and eventually to the state Legislature for final adoption.
Will the council delay the vote further? Mayor Alice Ruby said Monday she has not heard of any intentions to do so.
"The plan right now is that they'll take up the resolution, and hopefully take action on that and adopt it, so we can get the resolution submitted to the Legislature," said Ruby.
Still, how the council will vote, or whether the council will seek another delay, seems anybody’s guess going into Thursday, especially after the resignation of councilman Keggie Tubbs late last week.
Tubbs has spent some 14 years on the Dillingham city council and was just reelected to a full three year term after an unchallenged bit in October. Though it was Tubbs who asked for the delay vote in October, most viewed him as a supporter of annexation. His resignation leaves five voting council members, and the council will need four 'yes' votes to advance the petition.
"It's difficult to gauge whether there will be the votes there to pass it or not," said Ruby. "I know that the council members are struggling because they want to do what's right, and each one is coming from their own experiences."
In other developments, the Bristol Bay Native Association sent a letter to the city last week applauding the recent delay and offering to host a borough feasibility study. BBNA did not, however, offer to pay for the study, which in his letter President and CEO Ralph Anderson estimated would cost $117,000 to facilitate.
Ruby has long said that pursuing annexation and borough formation are not "mutually exclusive."
"There isn't any reason why a borough and a city annexation can't exist at the same time, if both are feasible," she said. "Also, the borough feasibility research can continue while this annexation petition is in process."
The city has been dampening its expectations for how soon it might begin collecting the 2.5 percent raw fish tax again. If the council does adopt the annexation this month, and the local boundary commission takes a full year to review it, the petition may not end up before the legislature until the 2017 session.
The regular city council meeting is scheduled for 7 pm Thursday at city hall.