Garbage disposal at the Small Boat Harbor has been an issue for a long time, and the Haines Borough’s Port and Harbor Advisory Committee wants the administration to deal with it.

  Harbor staff is spending an inordinate amount of time trying to deal with the deluge of trash people dump at the harbor, said committee member Norm Hughes.

  “Right now they are hopping into a dumpster which is full of who knows what, and putting stuff in trash bags and putting that in a truck and hauling it to the dump,” Hughes said. “Then it’s full again the next morning.”

  Illegal dumping is also a problem at the facility. Police have yet to cite any of the 11 people they caught on a surveillance camera dumping illegally at the harbor.

  The existing dumpster has also become an attractant for animals, especially ravens that pull trash out and toss it around.

  In October, the committee recommended purchase of a $12,800 dump trailer to save money and employee time. Harbormaster Phil Benner and chief fiscal officer Jila Stuart crunched numbers and supplied the assembly with information to back up the claim that the trailer would save money.

  “If they just put in a dump trailer, you drive up to the landfill with it, everything falls out of it and you’re done. One guy can do it,” Hughes said.

  Benner estimated the trailer would save the borough $8,000 a year and pay for itself within two years.

  Despite appropriating the money in spring, the assembly a month later voted down the trailer purchase due to objections from assembly members George Campbell and Dave Berry. Campbell didn’t buy Benner and Stuart’s analysis, and Berry claimed saving the borough money would cause Community Waste Solutions to increase rates for other customers.

  At a recent meeting, port and harbor committee members decided they would broach the issue of the dump trailer again and voted to ask the assembly to reconsider. The committee even asked manager David Sosa if he would be willing to use his executive authority to buy the trailer without assembly consent.

  “At the meeting, the manager wasn’t willing to do it at that time,” Hughes said.

  “We’re trying to be proactive and bring it back. If this assembly doesn’t deal with it, we’ll have to re-educate the next one. Everyone on the borough assembly right now has seen these numbers before,” he said.

  Though originally slated for discussion at Tuesday’s assembly meeting, assembly member Campbell pulled it off the agenda, stating it was a “day-to-day, in-house operational issue, not a policy issue,” and that the manager could work it out himself.

Sosa said he discussed the matter with harbormaster Benner and will figure out what to do without assembly input. “What I want to do is take a look at what the options are for trash removal and identify what the best way to do this is,” Sosa said.

  “This is a routine, day-to-day matter we can certainly handle at my level,” he added.