The Haines Borough Assembly will travel to the cannery community of Excursion Inlet for an open-house meeting Tuesday.
The trip is intended as an outreach to remote residents who sometimes chafe at paying borough taxes for what they see as little return. The assembly earlier this year appropriated about $5,000 for road improvements there.
Excursion residents pay the borough’s base income tax rate, 7.19 mills, compared to 11.26 mills on property located in the townsite.
Excursion lies 60 miles directly south of downtown. Its Ocean Beauty cannery is especially important to the borough. It’s responsible for a large chunk of the $140,000 in raw fish tax revenues the municipality is expected to receive in the coming year.
The idea for the trip arose from recent discussions about a survey for a land exchange between the borough, Ocean Beauty cannery and State of Alaska that’s been in the works more than a decade.
“The people who live there pay taxes. They’re part of the borough but they don’t get face time with any of us unless they come up here,” said Mayor Jan Hill. “We want them to know we realize they’re part of the borough and we want to talk with them.”
Borough records show 40 structures at 119 private parcels of land there, including at three subdivisions developed by the Haines Borough north and south of the cannery. There are six miles of roads.
Retirees and fishermen make up most of the non-cannery population, which shrinks to about a half-dozen people in winter, when the biggest event is the weekly arrival of the mail plane, sometimes including a pizza party.
The cannery provides most of the community’s infrastructure. It puts out a public boat float, operates a general store, provides barge service and maintains the airstrip.
The fish-processing plant typically employs between 350 and 400, but due to low pink salmon runs this summer, employment has been cut in half and the canning operation is shut down, said assistant manager Tom Marshall.
The plant’s work this season includes value-added filleting, flying out fresh fish, and egg processing, Marshall said.
Operation of canneries at the site dates to 1908 when ones owned by Pan American Fisheries and Astoria and Puget Sound Canning Co. were built there. In 2003, Ocean Beauty took over operations there from Wards Cove Packing Co. The company recently built a cannery museum in an old carpenter’s shop there, said assistant manager Marshall.
Mayor Hill said Tuesday’s day-long trip would include visiting sites of borough improvements, including a $100,000 bridge between the cannery and a subdivision south of it.