The Haines Borough Assembly approved a major spending package Tuesday, including $41,300 to study helicopter noise, $22,000 to study the police department and $100,000 for planning toward Lutak Dock improvements.
The assembly voted 5-1 to approve the package, with assembly member Ron Jackson opposed.
Mayor Jan Hill broke the tie in favor of including the noise study in the spending package, joining assembly members Diana Lapham, George Campbell and Dave Berry, who were also in favor. Assembly members Jackson, Joanne Waterman and Mike Case were opposed.
The Oklahoma-based architectural and engineering firm Mead & Hunt put a $51,450 price tag on the sound study in a memo to Sosa on Dec. 31. The company later provided a revised estimate of $41,300. The study will include noise monitoring, noise measurement analysis, a background noise study, and a presentation of results to the borough.
The borough assembly voted in April to solicit bids for a helicopter noise study after it voted to overturn a planning commission decision and approved a conditional use permit for a sister company of heli-ski operator Southeast Alaska Backcountry Adventures to build a heliport at .6 Mile Chilkat Lake Road.
Several residents Tuesday expressed their opposition to the studies, including Thom Ely, who pointed to the helicopter noise study, police department study and a $30,000 winter tourism study the assembly approved last April as examples of reckless spending.
“I really think that the assembly is going the wrong direction by authorizing all these studies,” Ely said. “We know what the results are going to be. I think we just need to work on solutions and focus on our children here and our educational system over wasting time and money on more studies.”
Resident Melissa Aronson considered the multiple studies in the context of borough support of nonprofits. In its annual disbursement of grants, the assembly in 2014 gave the lowest amount to nonprofits that it had since 2009, she said.
“If we are spending a lot of money on unnecessary reports, then we don’t have money to support nonprofits,” Aronson said.
In a time where borough staff and the assembly are warning of tighter budgets and less money coming in from state and federal sources, it seems contrary to spend limited funds on studies, said resident Paul Nelson. “If we’re going to tighten our belts, we need to do it in some way, and not study things. I think if the government needs to cut its budget, there are ways to do it without more studies,” Nelson said.
Residents Suzanne Vuillet-Smith and Nicholas Szatkowsi also submitted written comments opposing the expenditure of taxpayer money on a helicopter noise study.
Assembly member Jackson called the helicopter noise study “a waste of money.” Without first determining how the data from a noise study would be used, or what level or type of noise would be considered excessive, the information is effectively worthless, he said.
“At the end, we are going to have spent this money and we will not have any better, clearer picture of how to site heliports in the borough,” Jackson said.
Both assembly members Campbell and Lapham pointed to an earlier attempt to gather decibel data from the area cheaply: former planning commissioner and Alaska Power & Telephone employee Danny Gonce went to the proposed heliport site near 26 Mile Haines Highway last winter and took decibel readings using AP&T equipment.
The data was deemed unscientific and unacceptable by opponents of the heliport, Campbell and Lapham said, and conducting a third-party objective study will help dispel those objections.
“I want to be able to base my decisions on how I vote on fact, not on hearsay from people who are against heli-skiing or people that are for heli-skiing. I want to base it on fact,” Lapham said.
Manager David Sosa acknowledged the study was much more expensive than initially anticipated and said conducting the study wouldn’t automatically solve the longstanding polarization about heliport locations.
“This is a lot of money to spend to move forward on a particularly thorny problem, but my hope is that we can come out of this with some legislation or planning code that is acceptable to the community so we can move past this,” Sosa said.
Mayor Hill said she broke the tie vote in favor of authorizing the study because she was swayed by Sosa’s argument and the rationale of assembly members who have been following the issue.
“I just decided tonight that I would support this, because there has been a lot of process here and the manager stated it very well: This has been going on for a long time and we’ve never been able to come to a resolution. This is a new effort to resolve a problem that has existed for many, many years, (even) when I was the Mayor before. So I’m willing to give it a try,” Hill said.
The assembly largely ignored the $22,000 police study. Because of the way in which the motions were made, it became bundled in with the helicopter noise study. None of the assembly members saw fit to remove it for a separate discussion of its merits.
Audience members, however, spoke up on the issue, including former assembly member Debra Schnabel, who questioned why police chief Bill Musser could not conduct his own assessment of the department and fix its problems.
“The thing that concerns me right now,” Schnabel said, “is that we have a new professional chief of police that was hired not as an individual who came to us with no experience, not as somebody who came to us and needed training, apparently. I would like to see or be made privy to what his own evaluation is of the department and know why it is that the issues that the department faces are not identifiable or solvable or approachable or desirable or whatever within the resources that we have available to us.”
The study, by Soldotna-based Russell Consulting LLC, will review the department’s policies, procedures and practices. Consultants will observe department operations first-hand, interview staff, and ultimately provide a “scorecard” report reflecting the discrepancies between desired and provided services.
Resident David Kammerer advocated for the study, comparing it to a third-party audit a business might conduct for its books. “In the same way with the police department, somebody that is independent and objective needs to look at them. Are we getting our value? Are they doing their job? It doesn’t seem we’ve done a very good job in the past on our own.”
Manager Sosa said the police study should be done every three years.
The larger amendment ordinance also included $100,000 for Lutak Dock planning, which will likely include an update of the 2012 Northern Economics study that looked at prospective dock customers and cost $25,000.
“The one thing that we looked at before was a very narrow focus on Lutak as an ore transshipment point,” Sosa said. A wider study would look at other options, like generating revenue by marketing Lutak as a port for bulk transport of heavy equipment into the Yukon Territory.
Sosa also intends to spend $10,000 of the $100,000 traveling to other regional docks with assembly members, the harbormaster, and members of the working group.