Capitol Rebuild: Juneau
A Capitol That Has to Fight to Stay
It’s the largest state capital by land area. But definitely not by population. There is no way to drive there. It’s the most vulnerable capital to relocation (not to mention the climate threats it faces). Let’s talk about Juneau.
How Did the Capitol End Up There?
The history of Juneau becoming the capital of Alaska is pretty straightforward.
The United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 Million (I’m sure the Russkies wish they could take deal back). The original Alaskan territorial capital was in Sitka due to Russians originally settling there and the city served as a hub for commercial activity, mainly whaling and fur trading. However, the Klondike Gold Rush changed Alaska as over 100,000 prospectors traveled north between 1896 and 1899 with the hopes of riches. Juneau quickly became the most prosperous city in Alaska because of the mining industry and it made total sense to move the territorial capital to Juneau in 1906. Alaska was admitted as a full blown state in 1959 and Juneau was established as the 49th state capital.
But the story isn’t how the capitol ended up in Juneau. It’s about its consistent struggle to hold on to the capitol.
You see, there is no road that connects to Juneau. So the only way to get there is by plane or ferry (and the ferry takes a minimum of 4.5 hours). That can be an issue for any state capital, but particularly when your state is the largest by land area. It would be an understatement to say that state legislators from outside of Juneau do not care for the commute.
Their answer? Try to move the capital somewhere else. Here is a quick summary of the times that the rest of the state has pushed to relocate the capital out of Juneau…
1960 - First attempt to relocated due to how isolated Juneau is from the rest of the state. The goal was to move it to Wasilla, which is about halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks (where majority of Alaskans lived at this point). This ballot measure failed.
1962 - Ballot measure to move the capital to unnamed location in Western Alaska. Failed.
1974 - Statewide referendum to move the capital from Juneau to a location at least 30 miles from both Anchorage and Fairbanks. This one actually passes and the Alaska Capital Site Selection Commission is formed to pick a new capital location.
1976 - Referendum to determine where the new capital should be. Voters pick Willow.
1978 - Now the hard part….paying for it. A ballot proposition is presented to issue $966M in bonds to build the new capital in Willow. Voters hate this cost and the proposition fails spectacularly.
1978 - The FRANK (Financial Responsibility Act for a New Capital) proposition passes that requires that all future capital move costs be publicly calculated and approved by voters before any money can be spent.
At this point, most figured the case was closed on moving the capital from Juneau. But some people would not let their dream of an easier commute to govern die. Let’s keep going.
1982 - Voters are presented with a ballot measure for a $2.8B plan to relocate the capital to Willow. Voters reject it decidedly.
1994 - Another ballot measure to move the capital, this time to Wasilla. Fails.
1994 - FRANK initiative is fortified and voters require any bond to be approved by the electorate that covers all relocation costs before any funds are spent.
2002 - Measure is put on the ballot to move the legislature activities, but not the capital itself, to Matanuska-Susitna. Voters say no.
2022 - Three Alaskan legislators in the State House put forth a bill to move the capital to Willow. The bill died in committee.
State Senator Jesse Kiehl, who represents Juneau in the legisature, puts this issue best: “As long as we remain dedicated and vigilant, I think we can continue to hold this off and keep this smelly old zombie that tries to shamble out of the crypt periodically from threatening the town,” Kiehl said. “But you’ll never stop it from getting reanimated by somebody somewhere.”
The Arc
The population “exploded” in Juneau from 1960 due to two factors: first, the City of Juneau merged with the City of Douglas and the Greater Juneau Borough in 1970. This expanded the size of Juneau to 3,255 square miles, making it the largest capital and second largest city in the US by land area. The second factor was the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, located in Northern Alaska, which is the largest oil field in North America. The explosion of this industry increase population across Alaska, including Juneau.
It’s somewhat frightening how flat the population has been over the last 25 years. More on that later.
My Experiences with Juneau
Like so many Americans that haven’t taken an Alaskan cruise, absolutely none.
What’s Working
I’ll be honest, I didn’t think it would be as easy as it was to write this section. There are a surprising amount of things working in Juneau’s favor.
Civic infrastructure
We don’t often touch on education here, primarily due to the historical challenges that most school districts in cities face. But Juneau stands out for its strong public schools, highlighted by a 96% four-year graduation rate in 2024. This is a great way to attract young people and families to your city.
Juneau does have a fairly diversified economy (at least compared to other small capital cities). While government is the largest employer, there is a considerable amount of private sector activity due to tourism, mining, and seafood/fishing. This allows there to be balance when one sector is down which is pretty rare when you look at the capital cities with populations under 100,000 people.
I’m sure we will touch on this with Honolulu, but Juneau has been responsible with how far it goes with the tourism economy (the ills of which were covered in Santa Fe). The city caps the number of daily cruise passengers to create a strong tourism economy that doesn’t overwhelm the natural charm of Juneau or makes the housing market completely out of wack.
Place
Simply put, Juneau is gorgeous. The city is set between the mountains and water so you can take your pick of how you want to enjoy the outdoors. Extra points for the fact that you can hop on a boat and see humpback whales, orcas, and gray whales.
Juneau also is one of the more sustainable capitals due to the fact that 70% of the city’s electricity comes from hydropower.
Arts & culture
I don’t know about you, but when I started thinking about Juneau, “strong arts scene” was not the first thing that came to mind. However, the city does have a thriving art scene, which is driven by the Sealaska Heritage Institute, which has the mission of perpetuating and enhancing Southeast Alaskan Native cultures. It has built a cultural identity through workshops, exhibitions and artist development with a goal of making Juneau a global hub for Northwest Coast art.
What’s Not Working
Population Trend
From 2000 to 2020, the population of Juneau experienced only a slight increase of 0.2% per year, which is considerably less than Alaska as a whole or Anchorage and Fairbanks. This trend has gotten worse over the last five years, with the city losing 0.6% of its population.
The bigger issue isn’t that Juneau is simply losing population, but the types of population that is decreasing and increasing. The city is aging at a rapid rate, with the number of Juneau residents under 35 dropping more than 8% between 2020 and 2024 while the number of residents 65 and older grew by 21%. This means fewer new households, fewer workers to staff essential services, and fewer “foundational” residents who form the backbone of local leadership (boards, coaches, volunteers,etc). The overall projections show that Juneau is expected to lose an additional 15% of its population by 2050. Not great, Bob.
Cost of Living
Juneau has a very high cost of living and you don’t need to be Benoit Blanc to figure out why. If you’re a city without roads where most goods arrive by ship or plane, you’re going to pay a geography tax on everything from strawberries to extension cords. The numbers are brutal. People in Juneau pay more for groceries and second highest cost for health and “miscellaneous” costs compared to any other place in the country. If housing or transportation was super affordable, this might be balanced out. But they aren’t, which makes the cost of living in Juneau closer to Tacoma or Oakland than your typical small capital city. This is a problem.
Risk of Catastrophic Flooding
Juneau has a risk that has moved from “rare disaster” to “annual scare”, which is glacial outburst flooding tied to the Mendenhall system (specifically Suicide Basin).
The Mendenhall Glacier is a massive glacier that is located about 10 miles north of Juneau. The Glacier has amazing views and hikes and should be a prized asset for the people of Juneau. However, due to climate change, the glacier is rapidly receding and the melted ice from the Glacier is causing annual major flood events in Juneau.
In August 2023, the Mendenhall flood hit a then-record peak of 14.97 feet.
In August 2024, it happened again and got worse: the Mendenhall River gauge crested at 15.99 feet, about a foot higher than the 2023 record.
It’s also not happening in isolation. The broader ice loss has accelerated with the glacier melting roughly twice as fast as it did before 2010.
Flooding was not as bad in 2025, but this is mainly due to the city’s preparedness and response, not the amount of water. Floods are brutal for creating rising insurance costs and reducing property value and require more public infrastructure funding. For a city already fighting population stagnation and high living costs, an escalating physical-risk storyline is the opposite of helpful.
Capitol Persona
Juneau clearly isn’t a city that people relocate to to make their mark. To build real culture you need leaders who are from there and really care about the place. That is Rosita Kaahani Worl.
A survivor of being kidnapped as a child and forced into a Native Boarding School (more on the atrocious history of this practice), her body of work is truly stunning.
She has served as the President of the Sealaska Heritage Institute since 1998 and has built it into the model for language and cultural preservation. The Institute has very specific focus on continuity: children learning language, communities practicing culture, and institutions strong enough to outlive any one leader, which is critical for a place like Juneau that is aging and losing population.
Formulated the first State of Alaska Policy on Alaska Natives
Served as a member of President Bill Clinton's Northwest Sustainability Commission
Awarded a National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2024 for a lifetime of making Indigenous language, art, and history durable in the modern world
This is what Juneau (and other small capitals) need more of - locally produced leaders who can build things that make the place worth staying in. Truly inspiring.
Capitol Score
Capitol Score is my subjective ranking (using a 10 point scale) on how the city stacks up with regards to place, innovation, arts & culture, and overall livability. A perfect score isn’t the goal, improvement is.
Juneau’s Capitol Score is 4.5
Juneau has a Capitol Score Potential of 5.2
Three Wishes from the Policy Genie
Just a quick note here. This is just me throwing ideas on the wall based on my limited knowledge of what’s happening. There are likely many many things that need improvement and the folks on the ground will always know more.
Keep the Capitol in Juneau
Alaska has bigger problems than where legislators meet, especially when the regular session is 90 days and a lot of the real work now happens through staff, committees, and email anyway. The fiscal cost of moving the capital would be enormous, but the bigger cost is the attention cost: years of political oxygen, administrative effort, and institutional distraction spent on a relocation project that doesn’t actually make Alaskans’ lives meaningfully better.
That doesn’t mean every state function needs to be headquartered in Juneau. In fact, a smarter model is a distributed state: keep the seat of government in Juneau, but intentionally place agencies, service centers, and leadership footprints around the state where they make the most sense. You don’t have to build a new capitol complex, you aren’t lighting money on fire finding office space, and you don’t need to create a multi-year bureaucracy spiral. Focus on the things that matter.
Embrace Car-Lightness
For almost 20 years, I have visited Mackinac Island with my wife’s family. Mackinac is locally known for a number of things, but nationally it’s recognized as the most famous car-free destination in the United States. It’s refreshing to see people who would never think of walking or riding a bike at their hometown really enjoying the ability to just get where they want to without a car.
Juneau can’t be Mackinac Island, but it can absolutely borrow the idea: make it normal (and pleasant) to move around without a car. Juneau already has the ingredients: a compact core, a tourist-heavy economy, and the reality that visitors arrive without their own vehicles. The gap isn’t the concept, it’s the infrastructure and the defaults.
The wish here is to lean into a “car-light” toolkit: better transit frequency, safer pedestrians connections, and a real network for small mobility (golf carts, snowmobiles, e-bikes, scooters, trikes, snowbikes…whatever works in Juneau’s terrain and weather). Pair that with safer street design in the places where people actually walk (downtown, waterfront, key visitor corridors) and suddenly Juneau becomes more charming, more functional, and more memorable. And it becomes something rare: a small U.S. capital that can credibly say, “you don’t need a car to enjoy this place.”
Pay Government Workers More
This is true everywhere, but Juneau makes the case in a 42-point bold font. Recruiting and retaining government talent is already hard in any capital. In Juneau, you’re asking people to take on an isolation premium on top of an already high cost of living. That’s a recipe for vacancies, turnover, and a permanent “acting director” culture, which then cascades into slower service delivery and weaker execution.
So yes: pay more, especially for hard-to-fill roles and mid-career specialists. If Alaska can’t do it broadly right now (and it’s not, given the state’s tightening posture, including periods of hiring restraint tied to oil revenue volatility), then at least do it strategically: location differentials, retention bonuses, housing support for critical roles, and fast hiring for scarce skill sets. Otherwise, Juneau becomes the place where government jobs are available… because no one stays.
What’s Happening in Juneau?
Before I get into (way too many) news links, I have to give a shout out to KTOO for providing an amazing, easy to use news source on Juneau. Please consider making a small donation to their team, we all need to do everything we can to keep small town journalism alive.
After more than 50 years, a family-run shop in downtown Juneau is closing its doors
Too common of a story these days across the country….business that has been handed down from generation to generation and ultimately there is no one left to take over. We need to figure out solutions for this.
Juneau revives task force to tackle big tourism questions
City now accepting ideas for how Juneau spends marine passenger fees
I’ve never worked in a tourist community so the pressures and trade-offs of these decisions are really interesting to me. Juneau seems to have a good handle on this issue.
U.S. Army Corps to hold closed-door glacial outburst flood solution meeting in Juneau next week
From the outside looking in, my assumption would be that “glacial outburst flood solution” would be about as close to a consensus issue that you could find in a local community. But the issue becomes a question of fairness between people who spent money on their own property versus public money being used to protect people who did not.
Juneau leaders begin to grapple with budget shortfall following election tax cuts
Yikes!
Juneau’s 10 strangest stories of 2025
Have to stop now before I get even further in the Juneau rabbithole. So greatly appreciate the Juneau journalism scene.
Final Thoughts
Juneau is a tough one. On paper, it has a lot going for it with real jobs, a relatively balanced economy, and a level of civic importance most cities would kill for. But none of that is translating into population growth. The hard truth is that geography is policy here. When you’re not connected by road or rail, everyday life gets more expensive, slower, and more complicated at exactly the moment modern households expect everything to be fast, easy, and cheap. And hovering over all of it is the very real, very immediate anxiety of flooding tied to a melting glacier. It’s hard to recruit, retain, and invest with that kind of uncertainty in the background. But if it can lean into what it does have, maybe it’s got a better shot that I’m giving it.
Capitol Rankings
Capitol score (Capitol potential)
Phoenix, 7.9 (8.4)
Indianapolis, 7.4 (9.7)
Santa Fe, 6.9 (8.5)
Des Moines, 6.7 (8.2)
Montpelier, 6.1 (6.3)
Oklahoma City, 6.0 (8.0)
Albany, 5.8 (7.5)
Olympia, 5.6 (6.7)
Little Rock, 4.9 (7.4)
Juneau, 4.8 (5.2)
Trenton, 4.3 (6.8)
Harrisburg, 4.3 (6.1)
Our next stop is Lincoln.