In the wake of continuing police call-outs for bears in garbage, some residents are pushing the Haines Borough to adopt tougher regulations on securing residential trash.
Pam Randles, president of the the Chilkoot Bear Foundation, said her group is seeking a borough ordinance similar to one adopted in Juneau in 2002 because other efforts, including public education, haven’t worked.
“We’ve had five or six years of posters and flyers and ‘bear aware’ public safety announcements on the radio and we’re still having preventable incidents. That says to me we still need to take another step,” she said this week. “We can’t prevent everything, but we can prevent more than we’re doing.”
Randles is asking for a borough law that would make it illegal to create a “bear attraction nuisance” and has provided definitions and wording for crafting a law similar to Juneau’s.
Manager Mark Earnest said he’d bring the matter to the assembly for direction at its next regular meeting Tuesday. “Bears are an issue,” Earnest said.
Borough police chief Gary Lowe was out of town this week and couldn’t be reached for comment, but individual officers said they support the move. Although bears fall under the responsibility of state agencies, local police respond to most bear calls in town.
The ordinance the group supports would require secure storage of trash and prohibit residents from leaving trash cans out all night in advance of collection.
“We realize that’s an inconvenience to people, but repeated cases of bears getting into trash is also an inconvenience to people,” Randles said. Such incidents are a danger to bears, residents and their neighbors, she said.
Randles said her group supports a clear line between intentional and unintentional feeding of bears and also would bring a citation only after a resident failed to heed police direction to eliminate a bear attraction after a bear encounter.
“We’re asking that if people don’t take care of a situation after they’ve been asked to by authorities – at that point there’s a problem,” Randles said.
The bear foundation pursues the goals of the borough-led Chilkoot Corridor Working Group, including to minimize conflicts between bears and people, Randles said. It recently purchased two bear-proof garbage containers for downtown and will be buying more.
In addition, the group will be asking for a “garbage amnesty day” that would allow residents to dump accumulated garbage for free. “We’d like to give people a chance to do the right thing and take care of any attractants that might currently be out there. Everybody gets a fresh start, then it’s just a matter of people keeping up with it.”
Police officer Cassandra McEwen said she thinks all local police officers would support an ordinance addressing bear-proofing garbage and garbage left out all night for pick-up. Most bear calls come between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m., she said.
Police can now pursue the problem through borough littering laws, but that requires police to send a landowner a letter explaining the problem before making a citation. That method was pursued once last year, she said.
A bear-specific ordinance would help for a juvenile brown bear that’s been the cause of several calls in the past week, McEwen said. “If we can contain the trash, he’ll know he has to go for berries and fish and that’ll be the last we hear from him.”
The bear in recent weeks has moved from one garbage can to the next in neighborhoods where they’re left out before collection, including empty ones.
Patterning like that starts a bigger problem, said the bear foundation’s Randles. “Bears are smart. If they’re successful at finding food in people’s yards, they’ll return. We don’t want to teach them that. That’s where conflicts come from.”
Violating the ordinance would be an infraction or class “B” and “C” misdemeanor depending on whether the offense was intentional, involved negligence or was committed unknowingly.
After Juneau adopted its bear ordinance, bear nuisance calls dropped from 114 per year a five year average ranging from two to seven, Randles said. “In Juneau now, people just expect that it’s their responsibility to take care of it.”