The Haines Borough Assembly’s Government Affairs and Services Committee and the municipality’s Public Safety Commission have both recommended postponement of a controversial minor offenses ordinance until the document can be reviewed by a slew of other committees and departments.
The Port and Harbor Advisory Committee, however, has recommended passage of the ordinance sooner rather than later.
The ordinance is scheduled for its second public hearing at Tuesday’s assembly meeting. At that time, the assembly will consider the recommendations and either pass the ordinance or postpone it.
The committees started combing through sections of the ordinance in recent weeks, with the public safety commission looking at public safety-related offenses like traffic violations, the GAS committee tackling offenses outlined in Title 12, such as failure to properly display house numbers, and the harbor committee discussing harbor-related offenses.
The safety commission recommended removal of separate fines for altered (neutered or spayed) and unaltered dogs. In the current draft, dog-related offenses like failure to display a tag charge $100 more for an unaltered dog than an altered one. The group’s consensus was the dog’s status is irrelevant, except in the case of dogs at large, which would be free to roam and procreate.
Government committee chair Dave Berry said the committee voted 3-1 Monday to recommend postponement of the ordinance until other groups like the Finance Committee, Tourism Advisory Board and Commerce Committee could examine their respective sections of the minor offenses ordinance and offer feedback on whether any of the laws are unnecessary or outdated.
Assembly member Diana Lapham voted against the recommendation. She also attended the public safety commission meeting, where she voiced her desire to pass the ordinance so enforcement officers are empowered to ticket and deal with violations.
Lapham has repeatedly championed passage of the ordinance, saying the code can be reviewed and revised later.
Safety commission chair Jim Stanford disagrees with the pass now-fix later approach, which he referred to as “putting the cart before the horse.”
“Why would you pass something as important as an ordinance and say, ‘Oh, we’ll fix it later?” Stanford said.
Berry, who supports postponing the ordinance, said he believes each committee going through code will take months, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“I’m assuming it may take a year or more to finish that ordinance,” Berry said. “I predict that that ordinance will go onto the priority list for the assembly to complete within the next year.”
The 35-page ordinance contains about 250 minor offenses and accompanying fines. The list doesn’t represent new rules or violations but compiles all existing rules in one place, manager David Sosa has said.
Since the ordinance’s introduction at the June 9 assembly meeting, residents have called the list of minor offenses “completely ridiculous,” “a mess,” and reminiscent of a “police state.”
The ordinance also allows the borough manager to give other employees the power to write citations “as deemed necessary.”