After serving about 20 years on the Haines City Council, Chip Lende joked that his biggest achievement was helping to establish an ice rink under Payson’s Pavilion at the fairgrounds.
Lende intended the remark to demonstrate how difficult it is to bring change as an elected leader in a small town. But the ice rink – made possible when the city reimbursed the state fair for a few thousand dollars it was making storing people’s cars under the pavilion during winter – was a tiny first step of a project that led to bigger positive changes in this town.
Having an ice rink for a few winters inspired residents – including this writer and many others – to learn to skate and play hockey. Soon, local sporting goods stores were selling hockey sticks. A loose hockey league was formed.
The Haines Amateur Hockey Association bought a skate sharpener, and its members volunteered and built a much larger rink at the fairgounds’ Raven Arena. With the help of a friendly mayor in Haines Junction, Y.T., a Zamboni-like ice conditioner was acquired in a swap for salmon.
We’re still a long way from a refrigerated rink, but it’s a fair bet that ice hockey and ice skating are here to stay. When a deep freeze sets in, skaters take to the fairgrounds’ rink and to local lakes and rivers. Haines becomes a skating town just as the Dutch become skating fools when their dikes freeze.
It all started with a small donation of public tax dollars.
Maybe my biggest achievement on the Haines Borough Assembly in the past year was securing a Sunday afternoon public swim at the pool from November through April. It’s going to cost $17,000, a pretty high price tag that I’ll be looking into for an explanation.
(The Friends of the Pool paid $275.50 for free community swim on Friday night, Nov. 21, and that amount included the cost of paying admission for the 66 kids and adults who showed up. At $17,000, the cost of the winter swims is about $710 each. Also, if looking at costs, we must ask, how much did the borough pocket in the past decade as it eliminated all swims on Tuesdays, a Friday night swim for kids and a Saturday morning swim? Surely much more than $17,000.)
On the assembly, I compared opening the pool on Sundays in winter to the recent decision by the Hanes Borough School District to open Karl Ward Gym on winter Sundays for city league basketball. Along with much hard work by volunteers, opening the gym resulted in the wholesale revival of the city league program in Haines. A women’s league formed. Former players, men and women, joined up and got back into shape.
In March, city league players from Haines captured three of four championships at Juneau’s annual Gold Medal Basketball Tournament, the only real barometer for hoops prowess in Southeast. Those three trophies said this: Adults are playing a lot of basketball in Haines, and they’re playing it well.
That’s what a small investment in recreation can do for the town. If you want the rest of the story, talk to some of the players on the Gold Medal teams. Ask them what it’s meant to them to be able to play on Friday and Sundays in winter.
I ran for office last fall on a platform of expanding recreation opportunities here. A constituent who works at the brewery often asks me when I walk into the place: “Hey, I voted for you because you supported recreation. What have you done?”
A Sunday swim at the pool is a small step. It makes recreation available to children and families at a time in the week that’s convenient for them. I plan to follow up by helping promote the swims when they start in November. With enough participation, we can demonstrate to the borough that a swim is as worthy an expenditure as opening the library and gymnasium on Sunday afternoon.
One more thing. I’ve known a lot of kids who’ve grown up in this town, including several whose families don’t have the money or time for a winter vacation outside. For those kids, the swimming pool is their trip to Mexico.
It’s a way for them to break up the long winter and have some fun when outdoors there’s nothing but slush and gray. If they’re going to the pool, they may learn to swim. Swimming might help them safe a life some day or it might get them on the Haines Dolphins Swim Team record board in the pool hallway.
Those aren’t bad things.
(June 15, 2017)