There’s a general dissatisfaction among residents that the Haines Borough doesn’t get enough done.
There’s some validity to that, but there’s also a legitimate explanation of how our two local governments – the Haines Borough and the City of Haines – were able to achieve so much in the 20 years before the millennium and why we’ve accomplished considerably less since.
The biggest cause of diminished productivity, of course, is the decline of the state’s oil wealth and you need only glimpse a chart of Haines property tax rates before the cash gusher was turned on in the late 1970s to appreciate this.
Before oil, Haines residents routinely paid property taxes at a rate that today would be considered astronomical. The combined tax rate for property owners in the townsite during the four years before oil money started rolling in to the state treasury in 1977 averaged 24.2 mills. Compare that to the average rate for the most recent four years (2021 to 2024): 16.7 mills.
Yes, folks in Haines used to pay a lot more in taxes than they do today. At the peak of the oil boom in 1983, the combined property tax rate in Haines dropped to just 9.2 mills.
While the State of Alaska was paying a big share of the cost of local government (including paving and repairing local roads, building the swimming pool, visitor’s center, and senior center and rebuilding the Chilkat Center), the federal government was contributing its share as well, including federal municipal revenue sharing that helped pay the cost of the city’s police and fire services.
(Today, state and federal support are mostly gone, due mainly to Republican Party presidents and governors who cut their budgets by passing the costs of necessary services down to municipalities.)
Our city and borough governments had other advantages in the 1980s and 1990s, as well.
The city and the borough each were served by their own elected council and elected mayor, a total of two mayors and twelve elected representatives. That’s many eyes and brains working to improve our community. As importantly, each of our two municipalities had a “strong mayor” form of government, in which the mayor managed municipal staff.
That arrangement lifted considerable responsibility from the shoulders of municipal administrators. Freed from managing employees, administrators had time to design and plan projects and to tackle other issues that arose.
Further, in some circumstances, each municipality qualified for different and separate pots of money, bringing more government dollars into town than could a single, combined municipality. (In Ketchikan, Fairbanks and Kodiak, where separate city and borough governments never consolidated into a single entity, duality still brings certain financial benefits.)
Also, during the 1980s, our state government funded a robust agency called the Department of Community and Regional Affairs that was paid to answer questions and help municipal staffers run their towns. Staffers – even news reporters – could phone and get quick answers about municipal issues.
Then, in 2002, came a fateful decision. In a move that was largely advocated by City of Haines officials, our two local governments combined into a single, consolidated borough.
Our areawide third-class borough government, responsible only for education and some limited planning, was wed to a first-class city limited geographically to the downtown but responsible for a host of functions, from dog-catching public works, to fire and police services, to water and sewer utilities and harbors.
The marriage was Venus and Mars awkward from the start, pairing a borough government concerned mainly with personal freedom and enrichment to a city bureaucracy that was all about law and order and economic development.
Further, the consolidation was touted as an increase in efficiency, eliminating duplication. The claim was appealing but dubious, as it assumed that some workers at the city were doing the same jobs as borough workers. That wasn’t the case. All the workers were doing different jobs and reducing their numbers only loaded more work on fewer shoulders.
In addition, consolidation forced the union issue. The relatively small borough staff was unionized. The larger, city staff wasn’t. But city employees made it known early that their support of combining the governments rested on them becoming part of the borough union. Unionization, of course, led to increased government costs as well.
Since consolidation in 2002, our combined government has struggled for myriad reasons including a hyper-charged and exhausting national political culture kept at a boil by 24-7 news, the loss of mainstream media and a general decline of sustained thought by leaders and the public. The example set by our Divider-in-Chief President Trump, who prides himself in provoking and aggravating instead of unifying and healing, hasn’t helped.
The more our local government battles over trifles like freight docks and potholes, the less likely we’ll ever get around to resolving more complex issues like affordable housing and daycare. Trust, the glue that makes all human endeavors possible, seems more difficult to engender with each passing day.