It’s baseball season and the Haines Borough Assembly is out in left field.
COVID and December’s wreckage brought sharp focus to borough meetings, but the assembly is out grazing in the grass now, entertaining a gun-nut resolution.
This is where assemblies land when they fail to deliberately and thoughtfully establish their goals. They stumble around like a drunk, opening doors here, looking in windows there.
After one member drags it here, or a manager or police chief or Chamber of Commerce president pulls it there, the assembly eventually finds itself out in left field, wondering how it got so far astray.
I know. I served on an assembly that did the same thing. In three years, we held one, productive goal-setting session, drew up a list of agreed-on priorities, and never saw that list again. Turns out no one else in the town or government gave a fig what the assembly wanted and we didn’t have the gumption to nail our list to the assembly chambers door.
During my term when I asked a friend to run for the assembly, he jumped into his sports car and drove around in circles. “This is the assembly,” he said.
Going in circles might be amusing were it not for blown opportunity costs. “Opportunity costs” are what economists call the valuable things you didn’t get done because you were too busy with something else.
For example, as member and then chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens funneled $3 billion into Alaska from 1995-2008.
While other Alaska towns were building firehalls and ice rinks with all that money, Haines was in pitched battle over whether the school mission statement should include the word “global” or “American.” Or whether to combine our two, dysfunctional local governments into a single dysfunctional government.
Too often, the opportunity costs of left-field politics are losses of potential income and improvements.
For example, on Tuesday, when many residents and assembly members were writing up thoughtful statements about local participation in federal firearms law, a deadline was looming for getting in requests for some of the $1.25 billion in CARES Act funding coming into Alaska.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy and legislators differ on exactly how to spend all that dough but appear to agree on giving at least $30 million to non-profit organizations statewide. Legislators also want to give $80 million to local governments and $20 million to economic development corporations like the one in Haines. Small businesses would get between $30 million (the legislators’ plan) and $300 million (Dunleavy’s plan).
Alaska’s 231 tribes – two of which are located in Haines (Chilkat Indian Village and Chilkoot Indian Association) – are getting their own $1 billion in federal relief.
A lot of money will be given out quickly and the winners will be people and places that have their acts together.
At their meeting Tuesday, assembly members never even mentioned the deadline, how or if Haines is positioned to get its chunk of the $1.25 billion coming to the state, if local nonprofits were aware of the deadline, or what our local tribes want to do with their share of $1 billion coming to them.
Haines is a hornet’s nest. Someone is always taking a stick to it. This creates a great and consuming fury that seizes everyone’s attention. Amid all the excitement, important issues go unnoticed and critical work goes undone.