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 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,…
There’s more trash around town than meets the eye. You find out when you spend an hour pitching in on the Community Cleanup. On the north side of Lutak Road between Young Road and Picture Point, I filled a large yellow litter bag with chunks of Styrofoam, broken windshield wipers, a ball cap, bottles and cans, plastic bags, candy wrappers,…
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…
I was stunned at a recent borough assembly meeting when a self-described “fiscal conservative” characterized public funding of the nonprofit Haines Chamber of Commerce as unnecessary. For most of its history, the Chamber received support from our municipality, and for many of the same reasons that funding other nonprofits makes sense: The chamber does necessary jobs for cheap. First, the…
There will be no more ravens, at least in terms of street names, at least for now, and we mean it this time. That’s about all borough officials can muster after stepping into the quicksand of what we call streets and roads around here. Some efficiency-minded public employee questioned why our town has a Raven Drive, Raven Road and Raven…