I was out at the town cemetery this week, visiting people I used to know. Hertz is out there, with Joey and Jesse, and Joan Comerford and Frank Wallace and Molly Hibler. Someone left a full can of beer at the headstone of Leo Smith. Six years ago, the newspaper ran a front-page Memorial Day photo of Leo, kneeling beside…
For our town to work, the borough assembly must lead. A liberal assembly. A conservative assembly. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because each fall we hold another election when at least one third of our town’s elected body can change, an adjustment citizens can make to the assembly to more closely match their wishes. This is the way our…
We were standing in the parking lot of the assembly chambers when I asked a retired friend, an accomplished man who is occasionally outspoken, if he would run for the assembly. He laughed and said, “The assembly? Are you kidding me? I’ll show you the borough assembly.” He got into his sports car and drove around in circles. I don’t…
If one more person says that our rocky history with borough managers shows that our town or its government is dysfunctional, I’m going to scream. Wait. I scream all the time. Maybe I’ll whisper instead. Maybe someone will listen. Haines is no more dysfunctional than any other place. There are errors that we make continually and habitually, but that’s not…
I was not surprised when I heard the news Tuesday afternoon that the assembly might be firing manager Debra Schnabel. I wrote members after the meeting that Schnabel deserves the chance to fight to keep her job, but I’m not particularly hopeful she’ll make that effort. Based on what I know, the move to oust Schnabel is not a conservative…
Tuesday’s Haines Borough Assembly discussion of the Haines Economic Development Commission veered off, too predictably, to an idea to merge the government’s tourism and economic development functions. The topic at hand was the effectiveness of spending taxpayer dollars on the commission, a nonprofit launched in 2017 by borough manager Debra Schnabel back when she was director of the Haines Chamber…
It’s a good thing that the Haines Borough’s founding fathers were wise enough to tuck away a bit of gift money for an emergency. That’s how we got our $9 million borough permanent fund. Whether we’re as wise managing the fund as they were in creating it can be debated. Saving gift money for emergencies is an Old World idea…
It’s an interesting coincidence that the decline of our nation’s big-city newspapers and the fracturing of television and online journalism have paralleled breakdowns in the functionality of our state and federal governments. Is a functional, thoughtful press linked to functional, thoughtful governments and communities? My thoughts about this are reinforced by recent trips I made to my hometown of Media,…
One of the chronic shortcomings of local government is an institutional difficulty with nuanced ideas, including that its authority needn’t always be a hammer, as every issue is not a nail. This week’s assembly debate over 14-day quarantine is only its most recent failure to paint policy with anything other than black and white colors. Some assembly members wanted to…
We are taught as children in America that we’re free to do what we want, but of course that’s not the case. Our freedoms are limited by all kinds of things, all the time. First, there are physical limitations, imposed by nature and genetics. My freedom is limited to what my body, physically, can do. No amount of training is…