Tuesday’s Haines Borough Assembly discussion of the Haines Economic Development Commission veered off, too predictably, to an idea to merge the government’s tourism and economic development functions.
The topic at hand was the effectiveness of spending taxpayer dollars on the commission, a nonprofit launched in 2017 by borough manager Debra Schnabel back when she was director of the Haines Chamber of Commerce.
Assembly member Stephanie Scott, a master of deflecting topics she wants to go away, successfully moved the discussion off to a new universe to die. On the surface, combining tourism and economic development might have some appeal. Dig any deeper, and the idea is a no-go, unless the goal is to destroy the municipality’s attempts at both.
Tourism promotion and economic development are not the same thing. Tourism promotion is to economic development what a grocery store is to capitalism. The former is a thing that can be defined and quantified and measured. The latter is a concept, nebulous and politically loaded, that means different things to different people.
That partly explains why Haines has had a successful tourism program since 1985 and has generally floundered about with economic development for just as long. The town sorted this out 35 years ago when it hired Chip Waterbury as its first tourism director. A year previous to Waterbury, it had hired Paul Wellman to work as economic development director.
Wellman and economic development didn’t last. Waterbury and promoting tourism did. In 1987, city voters liked Waterbury’s program enough to vote to tax themselves 1 percent on their groceries to pay for it.
In 2004, two years after the merger of the City of Haines and Haines Borough, voters approved expanding the tax for tourism to also pay for “economic development” efforts. What those efforts might be, and how they would be decided, implemented, and measured for success were questions left for the borough to figure out.
The voters bought a pig in a poke. As a result, the borough over the years hired two municipal “economic development directors,” Robert Venables and Bill Mandeville, without replacing them, and during the interim used economic development funds for paying part of the manager’s salary, cleaning out fuel tanks at the boat harbor, and paving streets in Fort Seward, among others.
Everything and anyone, it seems, could be defined as “economic development.”
An idea behind the HEDC was to more narrowly focus economic development efforts and to bring in local business leaders to help steer those efforts. The commission has compiled a thorough overview of the community’s economy and written an ambitious five-year plan with worthy goals like retaining local businesses, attracting investment, and partnering with local tribes and young people.
But with only one employee, the HEDC can do only so much. It’s a sapling, and it probably shouldn’t be expected to bear fruit just yet. Its biggest handicap may be the borough administration’s tendency to use it as a research arm. Politically, that could be fatal. Alaskans have an enduring contempt for studies, justified partly by government’s history of funding them, then abandoning their findings and recommendations.
As an assembly member, I supported funding of the HEDC under the reasoning that as long as the borough was taxing residents for economic development, it should be spending that money as closely as possible to the voter’s intent, and not building roads or cleaning out tanks with it. I hold to that view.
If the borough decides against funding the commission, it should go back to voters and ask if they still want to have 1 percent of sales tax pay for economic development. Otherwise, it will be collecting tax dollars to allow slush-fund spending.
How much taxpayer money should be spent on HEDC is a tough question. The assembly in the past 10 years has reduced “community chest” funding of Haines-based nonprofits from about $120,000 to $25,000.
Does HEDC merit $90,000? $75,000? $50,000? Nothing? It’s really a matter of faith at this point.
Everyone supports economic development. But our difficulty to define it, to quantify it, to look at it and see it, remains a conundrum that will hobble this program into the future. Certainly mixing it into tourism promotion as a function of the municipality would only make the endeavor murkier.