I was ready to go all Chuck Norris on the Haines Borough budget this year. Give it a karate chop and show it who was boss. Vote to lop some heads at city hall. Jack up some fees on underpriced services. Maybe lay on some specialty taxes.
Much of the rest of the assembly was feeling the same way, as far as I could tell. We polled ourselves at a retreat in December about budget priorities. We wanted more hours at the pool, less spending on police, less money for staff travel and more for youth activities and the school.
Well, they say no one should watch sausage, laws or budgets being made. All the ingredients fed through a grinder isn’t pretty.
The first response to our priorities was a full-scale campaign for a fifth police officer by new police chief Heath Scott. Scott showed up at the December assembly meeting armed for bear and equipped with charts and reports and numbers, pleading crime in 2016 had spiked and the beleaguered HPD just couldn’t keep up.
But Scott’s case was misleading because key numbers were presented out of context. For example, the total number of misdemeanors and felony cases at the Haines Court had increased in 2016, but only to a long-running, historic average of about 75. What had actually happened was the number of crimes filed in the court had dropped dramatically in the previous two years, when resignations and other factors had reduced the force to only a few officers.
Scott’s spike in minor offense violations was explained when the Chilkat Valley News reported months later that of the 279 minor offense cases, 131 were for “improper driver behavior” a category that had increased 263 percent in one year as cops ratcheted up numbers of motorists they were pulling over. (Petersburg, with about 1,000 more people than Haines, had 17 cases of improper driver behavior for the same year.)
But the assembly didn’t have that information until April, and by then Scott had also sounded alarms that the loss of a state trooper and opioid abuse would leave police scrambling, or at least without the proper “work-life balance.”
When it became clear to me that the assembly would be agreeing to budgeting $152,000 more for cops than it did a year ago, I bid adios to that tough hombre Chuck Norris. As long as we could go into savings for more police officers, we could spend some savings on recreation, nonprofits and those things that lift people up and make them feel good about themselves and their town.
So I pushed for opening the swimming pool up on Sundays in winter, which will improve the health and mental health of the dwindling number of people who live here year-round. I endorsed spending another $10,000 on our award-winning public library, where staff was considering writing a grant to buy a vacuum cleaner. I pushed for reserving $32,000 for nonprofits in the event that the volunteer organizations that hold together this town need some help from the rest of us for an important cause.
If my attitude about government spending shifted from Chuck Norris to Santa Claus, it was out of a concern for justice and fairness in the budget. If we’ve got dough enough to send two police officers to your door, we sure as hell have enough for a vacuum cleaner at the library and a swim for families on Sundays.
A correction: I mistakenly said at Tuesday’s assembly meeting that $95,000 for the new Haines Economic Development Corporation would be coming out of borough savings. It’s not. It’s coming out of $150,000 in borough sales tax revenues collected each year for economic development. The borough has previously used that pot of money for boat harbor improvements and salaries, but don’t get me started on all that.
(Posted June 15, 2017)