Don’t be fooled.
A ballot measure asking Haines Borough voters to expand police powers to the roaded boundaries of the municipality would give the borough power to tax residents in outlying areas for those times that townsite police choose to drive out there.
Don’t let proponents of this change tell you otherwise. The power to deliver a service is the power to tax for it. If this measure passes, four votes on the assembly is all it would take to start taxing residents in outlying areas for police service that a majority of people in those areas don’t want.
And that’s what this vote is all about.
What’s more, the Haines Borough Assembly has effectively disenfranchised voters in the outlying area by rejecting a proposal that would require voters in the outlying areas and voters in the downtown core to approve expanding police separately. The rejected idea was that voters getting a new service and voters whose service was being expanded over an exponentially larger area each should agree to the change.
That’s just plain wrong. Under the question now going to voters, people living in the townsite numerically will be able to force police service on other people living in a largely unpopulated area 40 miles away. That’s undemocratic, and its passage would be costly for both groups.
Last October, taxpayers in three roaded neighborhoods in the outlying area – Mud Bay, Lutak and Haines Highway – each were asked if they wanted police service extended to their neighborhoods. By margins that should have been convincing, each neighborhood voted “no.”
It’s bad enough that police and borough administration – not residents – initiated these attempts to expand police service – but now they’re trying to get in through the back door.
Proponents say the charter change is necessary because police sometimes make trips outside the townsite and that’s an unacceptable violation of borough code.
That’s bunk. For decades, City of Haines police went up the highway for emergencies and no one cried wolf about code violations or anything like that. In addition, Haines Police Chief Heath Scott has said repeatedly police certificates from the State of Alaska empower his officers to enforce the law anywhere in the state.
So why is the charter change necessary? Quite bluntly, it’s not, though it does fit neatly into a big-government approach embraced by some people in the Haines Borough where everyone in the borough would receive identical services, laws and regulations, and pay dearly for them.
What’s more, this change would likely have a disastrous effect on efforts at maintaining state trooper service in Haines. If the Haines Borough indicates to the State of Alaska that it’s willing and able to provide police service outside the townsite, the troopers may well pull out its state trooper here, sticking residents with a giant bill for providing police in an area larger than the State of Delaware.
Haines is served by a state wildlife trooper who also is trained in criminal enforcement and responds to personal crimes. According to the state trooper website, in Southeast Alaska, “there are 13 troopers to serve an estimated 10,149 people that rely on Alaska State Troopers as their primary public safety. That is an average of one trooper for every 725 residents.”
There are about 725 people who live in the Haines Borough outside the townsite. The rural areas of Haines have trooper service that’s equivalent to the service received by other rural areas of Southeast. So do we have a real problem with police and trooper service in the Haines Borough, or do we have an imagined one manufactured to push a political agenda?