How to relieve congestion and make the Chilkoot River corridor more safe and enjoyable to visitors – and accommodating to brown bears – has been a borough issue since the mid-1990s, when brown bear sows and cubs started fishing there during daylight hours. Fortunately, the bears have been patient with us. In the late 1990s, the Haines Borough established a…
Little league baseball doesn’t cast a long shadow over this town. Summer is too short and the game requires landscaping, an art yet to arrive in the North. A regulation pitcher’s mound and a grass infield are luxuries our tiny ballplayers only dream about. They play on gravel, a Field of Screams where a hot grounder reaches critical velocity on…
It’s impossible to know precisely what younger adults make of our town and their place in it, but the mayor’s “40 and Under Survey” conducted in February provides a pretty good idea. So as to not sway the results, the survey presented three open-ended questions: 1) Why are you here? 2) What do you need to succeed here? and 3)…
On Tuesday, the Haines Borough Assembly will hold a public hearing on a seasonal sales tax. It’s a great idea: An easy way to raise money for our schools while giving a tax break to year-round residents. I’m supporting a “clean” seasonal sales tax we can all get behind. It raises sales tax from the current 5.5 percent to 6.5…
After pedaling a bicycle from Netherlands to Germany to Denmark to Sweden to France to Belgium and back to Holland again without ever having to stop at a customs station, it struck me as absurd on my return through Canada that I’d have to stop at U.S. Customs. The U.S. and Canada are both former colonies of Britain. We are…
The Haines Borough needs at least a short-range fiscal plan to resolve a shortfall resulting from Governor Dunleavy’s radical cuts to local government and the ill-advised exemption of up to $300,000 in local property taxes passed by voters last October. That’s the bad news. The good news is that making up about $1 million in lost or reduced revenues needn’t…
The Haines Borough Assembly is scheduled to introduce a seasonal sales tax ordinance on Tuesday. That action must happen on Tuesday in order for voters to decide on the idea in October’s municipal election. I strongly support a seasonal sales tax, but the assembly’s main option at this time is bogged down in complications and politics. I’m asking voters to…
“The idea that what you can’t name has power over you is a common theme with roots in various beliefs and folklore. The core concept is that naming something allows for understanding, control, and even ownership over it.” AI Suicide has vexed society and the medical community since forever. But a 37 percent increase in suicide rates between 2000 and 2018 –…
The federal government – which at one time helped fund our police and fire departments – is now looking to eliminate Headstart, a 50-year-old program that provides our most vulnerable young people with a few meals and instruction on being good people. The State of Alaska has $80 billion in the bank but can’t manage to fund schools, parks, ferries…
A band of self-appointed experts recently attacked the borough’s public works department for failing to maintain local roads. They were right about the condition of our roads, but they didn’t look very deeply at the reasons for all those potholes. Instead, they insisted on seeing the time cards of hard-working, underpaid borough employees. That was a shame. In October 2023,…