Preventing littering and providing public safety outside the Haines townsite are right and worthy goals.
How best to achieve those goals is the issue before the Haines Borough Assembly.
The borough administration has proposed a major restructuring of local garbage service, including a 1 percent hike in sales tax and borough participation in waste management, in order to eliminate the illegal dumping of household trash in our valley. The administration also has proposed extending the city’s police service to the Canada border, out Lutak and Mud Bay at an initial cost of $70,000 to property owners in those areas.
The administration is asking the assembly to advance those two questions to voters in the fall municipal ballot.
I’ve long held that no honest person fears an election, but I oppose putting these two measures on the ballot because less expensive approaches to garbage dumping and public safety service outside the city have not been tried.
The solid waste restructuring plan is a $628,000 anti-littering program. Borough manager Debra Schnabel has stated that the reason the plan is necessary is that some folks continue to dump their garbage in the woods rather than use our private landfill, recycle or take other responsible actions.
Illegal dumping is a problem, but how big a problem is it? Is it a problem that requires an annual, $500,000 appropriation, eight pages of new laws and the beginning of borough management of waste removal? Or is it a problem that can be addressed less expensively?
When I ran for office, I proposed a two-prong approach to illegal dumping: 1) education, and 2) landfill vouchers for families having difficulty paying for refuse disposal.
Toward education, the assembly in May inserted an additional $5,000 in the community chest to pay for a program educating schoolchildren about proper trash disposal, to be led by Haines Friends of Recycling. (A similar fire prevention and safety program in the schools, started by fireman Al Badgley about 25 years ago dramatically reduced the incidence of house fires around Haines.)
Some people have criticized my idea for a voucher program as unworkable, saying that people who dump trash won’t come in for vouchers, even if they qualify for them. That may be partly true. That’s why I’m proposing two other ideas: 1) an annual free day at the landfill, sponsored by the borough, and 2) borough financial support for a weekly transfer station service at Mosquito Lake School.
These small, incremental options would be less expensive than a $500,000, taxpayer-funded restructuring of our waste disposal system. And, by engaging the public, they would help us begin to understand why dumping occurs. (A free day is used at the Gustavus landfill, hailed by the State of Alaska as a model community waste program.)
Currently, the borough doesn’t know why people dump their trash in the woods. Is it to save money? It is for convenience, to avoid a 50 or 60-mile round-trip drive to the landfill? Is it out of ignorance about the negative effects of dumping? And just how big a problem is dumping?
There are so many unanswered questions at this point it seems imprudent to pursue an expensive master plan to fix things. For example, under the administration’s plan, residents would still pay fees to take their trash to the landfill. The administration’s assumption is that reduced landfill fees – subsidized by taxpayers – would result in fewer people dumping.
But would it?
If people are dumping because they’re poor, or because dumping is convenient, or because the landfill is too far away, reduced fees may not significantly reduce dumping. Then we’re spending $500,000 for nothing.
If the borough starts with less expensive, incremental approaches to stem dumping, we’ll have a chance to see what specifically works, and to target our efforts there.
We’ve seen big improvements in waste management my 32 years in Haines.
Once we had an open landfill, full of bears and eagles, where garbage was dumped. We now have a much cleaner, fenced landfill that sorts refuse, buries only inert waste, and composts household wastes as well as sludge from the sewer plant. Like many facilities and businesses in our small town, it’s a work in progress.
We also have an active, successful nonprofit that successfully recycles a large percentage of waste products.
Yes, we have littering and dumping issues. But we needn’t involve large government spending and involvement to address them.
On the question of expanding the police from the city to the borough’s borders, the borough also is taking a big-government approach.
Haines Borough Police Chief Heath Scott has stated he believes 8 officers are needed to protect our community instead of the 5 currently on the city’s force. That’s one of the reasons I oppose extending police service paid for by taxpayers.
The last time the Haines Borough increased its city police force in May 2017, the expansion cost the borough $150,000 (including $30,000 in additional standby and overtime). At that rate, an 8-man force would cost the borough an additional $450,000. Here’s the kicker: When the assembly approved a fifth officer, we didn’t find a way to pay the additional expense, so the borough pays $150,000 out of savings each year to pay for the police we have now.
So the true cost of an 8-man police force is $600,000. Where is that money going to come from? Increased taxes? Or cuts to our school, public library, Chilkat Center, swimming pool or museum?
Just like with garbage, the question is: How bad is the problem and how big a fix is needed to address it? How much crime is happening up the highway, at Mud Bay and at Lutak? The current proposal before the assembly is that the outlying areas would get “on-call” service for threats to “life, well-being and property” that “may include monitoring traffic or patrol.”
As calls outside the city are still covered by Alaska State Trooper Trent Chwialkowski, I’ve proposed that, until other potential remedies are exhausted, the city police only drive out the highway in the event of imminent threat to human life when Chwialkowski is not available. That seems to me a sensible approach that could be paid for from the share of borough sales tax already paid by residents of outlying neighborhoods.
For reasons that I can only attribute to the desire of the administration and police force to expand policing boroughwide, this approach has been resisted.
In the meantime, there are several other avenues for improving public safety in outlying areas that have not been pursued, or only by token efforts.
Our State Senator, Dennis Egan, said in a front-page article in the January 19, 2017 Chilkat Valley News, “We are going to fight like crazy to get that trooper position back,” referring to a bureaucrat’s decision to eliminate the Haines State Trooper (blue-shirt) post in December 2016, an office that was funded for decades before Alaska had oil money.
The problem was, the Haines Borough didn’t hold Sen. Egan to that promise. That was a mistake. Right now, we are in the middle of a big, statewide election. At the end of it, Haines will be represented by a new state representative, a new state state senator, and very possibly, a new governor. Candidates are out stumping for votes now.
Instead of debating the merits of expanding our police force, we should be working to get commitments from state candidates that they’ll “fight like crazy” to restore our trooper position. We need a unified position on this as a community. As long as we’re talking about providing police service ourselves, state officials have little incentive to go to bat for us. That’s just good, common political sense.
If – after a concerted lobbying effort – the Haines Borough is unable get state lawmakers to live up to their obligation to fund a state trooper here, the borough – if directed by a vote of residents outside the townsite – could pursue getting a state village public safety officer (VPSO) stationed in the upper valley.
A VPSO would be much cheaper alternative than a city police officer and the officer could be stationed in the upper Chilkat Valley, the area of apparent need. Another option would be working with the Village of Klukwan, which has state trooper service, for a request to expand that service to valley areas outside the village.
There are several more practical and less expensive ways to provide public safety outside the city than an expensive expansion of the Haines Borough Police Department. We need to fully explore and pursue those before pursuing options costly to borough taxpayers.