The long-planned paving of Ballyhoo Road could start as soon as this summer. Tuesday night, city council approved a $380,000 contract with PND Engineering for design of the project. As city manager Chris Hladick told council, the design will replace an earlier one by the state of Alaska that city staff determined was too complex.

"We’re just trying to get this thing paved. It's long overdue,” Hladick said.

Hladick recommended awarding the contract to PND without putting it out to bid because of the company’s experience with Unalaska’s road system. Councilor Roger Rowland said he supported that logic, but he questioned why the proposed paving only extends to the Kloosterboer cold storage facility and not all the way out to the Icicle dock and North Pacific Seafoods. Hladick said the city could study that option, but he suggested that it might be difficult to find money for the extra paving, especially since city revenues are projected to stay steady in coming fiscal years while expenditures on capital projects increase. The unamended contract passed unanimously.

City finance director Tonya Miller presented a preliminary revenue outlook for fiscal year 2014 at the meeting, as a way of kicking off this year’s budgeting process. She noted that projections are for less than one percent growth in 2014, in part because oil prices are expected to decline.

"Our sales tax revenue and the price of a barrel of crude oil -- the lines sort of mimic each other. There's a correlation coefficient to sales tax of 0.97 percent, which is pretty darn close to 1:1."

Miller says that's because of the huge volume of fuel sales in Unalaska. In response to the projections, Hladick recommended that city council re-adopt the its fiscal year 2013 budget goals, which include keeping non-personnel operating budget growth to less than 3 percent and cutting costs in other areas.

After some deliberation, Council voted to sponsor the 20th anniversary of Symphony of Seafood, a contest that challenges participants to come up with new ways to prepare and market Alaskan seafoods. Council voted to support the event with a one-time, $5,000 donation. Several councilors, including Dave Gregory, noted that while supporting the event might not have direct benefit to Unalaska, the indirect benefits were worth the contribution.

"We're a one-horse economy," Gregory said. "A one-fish economy, I suppose. Anything we can do to help get folks to eat more seafood through interesting new recipes of interesting different fish critters is a good thing."

Council also voted to send Mayor Shirley Marquardt to the annual legislative meeting of the Alaska Municipal League in February, and to the Southwest Alaska Municipal League Conference later in the month. Councilor Zoya Johnson will also attend SWAMC.