By Jake Dye

Special to the Homer Independent Press

A pair of information technology capital projects will be funded using leftover dollars from a 2023 state grant, after approval by the Homer City Council on Monday.

Upgrades to the city’s emergency communications recording system and an upgrade of the city’s Windows Server operating system from a newly obsolete model based on Windows 10 to a newer model based on Windows 11 will be funded using a total of nearly $45,000 from the State of Alaska Community Assistance Program. 

The money comes from an original pot of $205,000 appropriated by the city and directed to a slew of technology projects in August 2023. 

The current dispatch recording system, per a memo by Homer Chief Technology Officer Bill Jirsa, is five years old and “at the end of its reliable service life.” Jirsa wrote that a recent hardware failure caused a 24-hour downtime in the system that captures and records 911 calls, radio traffic, phone lines and interview rooms. 

“Gaps in recordings like this could potentially undermine the integrity of evidence, hinder after-action reviews and compromise compliance with data retention laws,” he wrote. 

Similarly, the operating system being used in Homer’s Windows servers is outdated, Jirsa wrote. Support from Microsoft for the current system will conclude in October, when Homer will lose access to some security updates and other services. 

There was no discussion on the ordinance during the council’s meeting on Monday. There also was also little discussion on an enacted ordinance authorizing the purchase for around $277,000 of a new Mack dump truck to replace a 26-year-old truck originally scheduled for replacement in 2020. The city will enter into a four-year payment plan with Mack Services to acquire the vehicle, and the ordinance also amends this year’s capital budget to add the first of four $75,000 payments. 

At the next meeting of the Homer City Council, on March 9, ordinances will be considered to align Homer’s election day with the new Kenai Peninsula Borough election day in November; to authorize a spend of $1,550 to purchase a tax-foreclosed lot of land from the borough for conservation purposes; and to appropriate $25,000 for purchase of timber to repair the spare fender for Homer’s deep water dock. 

Homer Mayor Rachel Lord, speaking as the election ordinance was introduced this week, said that while there was some discussion about retaining an October election date, the city would face significant costs in holding its own elections — where historically the city has shared the burden with the borough — and that having a Homer specific election day would likely reduce voter turnout.

“Not everyone is as excited about local governance as we are,” she said.

A memo by City Clerk Amy Woodruff attached to the ordinance also outlines a possible modification to the way the city calculates the number of votes necessary for a candidate to win election in races with two seats available — like in elections for city council. Jason Davis, a member of the council, said he supported the change because “it does confuse people” when candidates win seats on the council with small percentages of the vote.

During a public testimony period, two people — Mary Griswold and Heath Smith — spoke against the possible change, and urged the council to leave it out of the ordinance when it is up for action next week. 

Chief Changeover

The council on Monday also welcomed Homer’s new police chief, Michael Scanlon, who was confirmed to the position via a resolution on the council’s consent agenda. 

Scanlon, member Shelly Erickson said during the meeting, comes from Bellingham, Washington, where he started in law enforcement in 1993, working in a variety of departments and disciplines. He’s had experience training other officers and also has a commercial driver’s license. Scanlon moved to Homer in October 2023.  

“All police departments have a reputation,” Scanlon said during a committee meeting ahead of the council meeting. “Homer’s is one of the best, it truly is … that’s what you want to hear, and that’s what we’re going to keep up.”

Per the resolution, Scanlon meets the qualifications to serve as Homer’s chief of police, and will be appointed to the role “no later than March 19.”

A second look at short-term rental sales tax

Also discussed during the council meeting on Monday was a memo by Davis about his meetings this month with Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche and Borough Finance Director Brandi Harbaugh about options for collecting taxes from short-term rental platforms like Airbnb.

Specifically, Davis wrote in the memo, “there is a widely shared belief that the only consistently reliable point to capture tax is at the moment of booking,” because those platforms are so frequently changing, decentralized and hosted online. The borough, he said, was not supportive of a policy that would have Airbnb or other platforms collect taxes. 

Davis said that Airbnb representatives told council members that they could collect city and borough sales tax at the point of sale, similarly to Amazon and other digital companies. 

The Kenai Peninsula Borough, who collects Homer’s sales taxes on the city’s behalf, rejected the idea, Davis said. He reported during the council’s meeting and detailed in his memo that Micciche and Harbaugh pointed to varying jurisdictions and other sales tax complexities as making such an effort “a big undertaking.”

In his memo, Davis wrote that the borough mayor was “skeptical” about big tech companies “correctly” handling tax collection. He said the borough officials could make their own arrangement with Airbnb independently, or suggested instead using systems like those already implemented in Seward and soon to be implemented in Soldotna where short-term rental operators register with their city governments. Per the memo, Harbaugh said the borough uses software to identify operators “who appear not to be paying sales tax,” and that Seward is the “one” municipality with “near-perfect compliance.”

Those two proposals, developing an agreement with Airbnb to collect tax and creating a system for operators to register with the city — taken either separately or both together — might be worth exploring, Davis said. 

Several members of the council said they were interested in further exploring the ideas, with some noting that the idea of a registration system had been considered unsuccessfully in recent years. 

Brad Parsons said he was encouraged that the city could now look to Seward and Soldotna as models “so we’re not reinventing the wheel.” 

Donna Aderhold said she was “intrigued,” but wary of the amount of staff time it might take to develop such proposals or systems — she suggested providing guidance to the city’s Economic Development Advisory Commission to tackle short-term rental policy more broadly. 

A major challenge, Lord said, is that the city doesn’t currently collect taxes.

“We don’t have any structure set up, to my understanding, to collect taxes,” she said. “My anticipation is that it will be expensive to do it in house … to create a new function of city government.” 

Davis said that his understanding would be that, if an arrangement with Airbnb were implemented, the platform would collect the tax before making monthly payments to the city and simply transferring the funds.

“If it’s simple like that, cool,” Lord said. “Most things aren’t that simple.”

No formal action was taken in response to the memo, nor official guidance to city staff to pursue development of either proposal, but members of the council indicated their desire to see the conversation continue, when asked by Lord.

“I’m seeing nods,” she said.