After buying a $12,500 trailer to house the Haines Borough’s public facilities director, it appears the director in the next fiscal year will be either moved into the administration building or put back into the borough offices on the second floor of the Public Safety Building.
The issue arose Tuesday when assembly member George Campbell asked if the trailer’s removal plan and the subsequent housing solution were included in the coming year’s budget.
According to code, the trailer behind the administration building must be moved within 18 months of its installation, which was in June 2014.
Sosa said the borough will likely sell the trailer, though that anticipated revenue isn’t reflected in the budget. “With a lot of these projects coming into town, we can probably sell it to Dawson (Construction),” he said.
Before the public facilities director moved into the trailer, the director’s office was on the second floor of the Public Safety Building. After moving to the administration building during a transition period between managers, Sosa and former Mayor Stephanie Scott successfully argued that keeping Jimenez in close proximity to the rest of the staff was necessary “for communication purposes.”
Sosa said moving the job back into the Public Safety Building is a more workable option now because of improvements to the Public Safety Building. “They’ve done work up there for the last couple of months to just make the office space more serviceable. It looks a lot better up there than it looked before.”
The position may move into the administration building with some rearrangement of furniture and digitization of documents, eliminating the need for so many file cabinets, Sosa said.
“That’s not a quick solution, but that’s, I think, the long term solution to increasing space over there,” he said.
The borough has $35,000 budgeted in the current fiscal year for “spatial modifications” to the administration building.
The borough bought the trailer from Pacific Pile and Marine after it finished work on the Port Chilkoot Dock project.