Six candidate forums were held during the municipal election campaign in 2016 when I was elected to the Haines Borough Assembly.
The final forum was held at the Chilkat Center, with a proposed theme that we articulate a vision for what Haines should look like 25 years into the future. The forum strayed wildly from that theme and got hung up on the harbor expansion project, but the idea for the forum was appealing and legitimate.
Visioning is something we expect from leaders, rightly. Leaders can’t lead without knowing what they’re leading citizens to.
I recently heard that Haines had no “shared vision.” Shared vision can be an overgeneralized catchphrase that seems to suggest a broad and ambitious community plan that also has broad public support. As such, that’s a tall order for Haines.
It’s easy to have a shared vision among like-minded individuals, say, in a town full of dairy farmers in rural Wisconsin.
A shared vision, in such a context, would be anything good for the farms and the farmers, and as the town only has farms and farmers, identifying and sharing a vision is relatively easy. A shared vision is more difficult in Haines, where people live for widely divergent reasons and with often opposing values and goals.
Because of the diversity of our population, we’re unlikely to reach a shared vision about the future of Haines, but we can identify some common goals, articulate them and get to work on them. If, by working together on those, we can get to know each other a bit, we might also become able to disagree more peacefully and productively on issues we’ll never agree on.
That would be a start, and we’ve done it before. In 1995, the Haines Chamber of Commerce hosted the “Haines 2005” visioning project, a boroughwide effort to identify and get to work on some goals we could all agree on. The final, short-list of goals included pursuing alternative energy sources, downtown revitalization, restoration of Sawmill Creek and a network of alpine, public-use cabins.
Wouldn’t you know? Today our town is served by hydroelectricity for most of its electrical needs, downtown buildings once shuttered are open and improved, an entire enterprise – Takshanuk Watershed Council – has improved Sawmill Creek and many other streams, and a group of young people called HUTS is nearing completion of our first alpine cabin.
You might even say that Haines 2005 worked insomuch as eventually we achieved the goals it identified. Of course, some of those projects weren’t realized for 25 years. That’s life. I led a project to build a sauna at the Haines Pool and that took 7 years. Things always take more time than we expect.
But progress was made, so perhaps another visioning project should be launched, using the same model.
In the meantime, residents and leaders have spoken for years about the need for communitywide discussions outside of the assembly chambers, a time and place that people could go to vent about issues or debate them or to propose new ideas for our town.
My personal vision for that would be called “Town Hall.” It would be held at 6:30 p.m. on First Fridays at the Sheldon Museum. We could build a small riser or soapbox and ask speakers to stand on it. The rest of us could share drinks or nibbles. We could listen to each other for a minute or an hour. Speakers could take questions from the audience.
Then we could all go home and ponder what was said.
Such a “town hall” wouldn’t necessarily result in a “shared vision” for our community, but it might be a start us toward a more reasoned and civil discussion of local issues.