Governor Sean Parnell announced his proposed budget for fiscal year 2015 Thursday, and it doesn’t including any funding for Unalaska’s capital projects.

The city had asked for $4.5 million to pay for a fourth engine at the powerhouse, plus three other lower-priority projects. City Manager Chris Hladick says it’s no surprise to him that those requests aren’t in the governor’s budget.

"It’s good to get into it because, typically, the legislators don’t mess with the governor's capital budget," he says. "But we’ve been in this position many times before and we’ll work with our legislators to see if we can get it back in the budget."

Unalaska requested funding for the powerhouse last year, too, but didn’t receive it. Instead, the city got money to renovate the wastewater treatment plant and the water plant, which were higher priority.

"You might ask for three or four projects and know that you’d be lucky if you get one," Hladick says. "But it, so to speak, puts things on their radar screen of what’s coming, so they’re familiar with the projects, they have information on the projects. And then when you talk to them about it in the year that it’s your top priority, then they’re familiar with it."

Hladick says Unalaska will work with Representative Bob Herron and others to try and get funding for the powerhouse project this year. In the meantime, the city will look at ways to fund the project without state financing:

"We would do the preliminary work so we would have it ready in the event we didn’t get money from the legislature," Hladick says. "We’ll pretty much know by the end of March whether things are looking good to get it or not."

The legislature will consider the governor’s budget when they reconvene in January. The budget totals $12.4 billion. That’s $1.3 billion less than last year. But it will still take more than $1 billion in funds from the state’s savings account to cover the budget.