Toward the end of my term on the Haines Borough Assembly, I commented at a meeting that my time there had been a failure.
I ran on a platform of stemming losses to borough facilities, boosting nonprofits, increasing recreation opportunities and reducing the police department. I was defeated on all four fronts.
That latter two were connected, I reasoned: Create enough healthy activities for adults and young people and we won’t need as many police out catching people engaged in unhealthy activities. It seemed logical to me and still does.
We did succeed in getting a Sunday swim scheduled at the pool, although that breakthrough was quickly tempered when the pool closed on Tuesdays.
What I didn’t appreciate when I ran for office was that borough staffers have their own agendas and a thousand ways to shut down initiatives by assembly members, primary among them, by pushing their agendas to the fore.
Police chief Heath Scott, with the support of borough managers Brad Ryan and Debra Schnabel, convinced an assembly majority to add a fifth police officer and to approve additional wages and overtime for a department that continually overran its budget.
A good share of the rest of the assembly’s time was spent debating two initiatives dear to staff that elicited little to no support from the general public: Expanding police jurisdiction outside the townsite and getting the borough into the local garbage business by adopting a $630,000 per year solid waste management plan.
Between them, these two ideas could have quickly cost the borough more than $1 million annually. Had they not been halted, the borough’s current financial crunch would be exponentially worse than it is.
What could we have been smoking?
Certainly we understood that state funding of municipalities was going down, not up, and that necessities like roads and harbors would no longer be bailed out by Christmas presents from the Alaska Legislature. (We couldn’t have known that Gov. Mike Dunleavy, elected in 2018, was going to renege on the state’s commitments to paying off our school construction.)
Certainly we understood that “Uncle” Ted Stevens was long gone from chairing the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, and that Hail Mary passes to Washington, D.C. would be fruitless.
Certainly we realized there’s a strong aversion to raising property taxes in Haines. A successful property tax cap initiative about a dozen years ago proved that, as does a strong attachment by seniors to their tax exemption.
But blithely we chugged along, unable even to trim from $100,000 annually spent on staff travel and needing a weeks-long effort to finally stop a staff proposal to spend $30,000 on increasing public participation in borough business via the Internet. (Zoom did not arrive quite soon enough.)
We’re still paying $5,500 per year for “Nixle,” a service so people can read about frost warnings on their cell phones, a questionable expense my assembly approved in 2016. Nixle was instrumental in rousting the town out of bed for a non-existent tsunami in 2018.
While we were batting down expensive and unnecessary staff-proposed initiatives, we were wasting time that could have spent deliberating on long-term borough funding sources or finding affordable ways to maintain our museum, arts center, library and swimming pool, possibly by enlisting the support of non-profits like the Chilkat Valley Historical Society, Friends of the Library and Foundation for the Chilkat Center.
Instead, our assembly reduced funding to local nonprofits and gave borough employees raises.
Today a new, more conservative assembly is considering deep cuts to borough facilities and my progressive friends are up in arms, as they should be. But a big chunk of the blame for the borough’s predicament rests with my assembly.
We frittered away too many of our meetings on foofaraw, forfeiting our chance to reshape the borough for leaner times.