A town hall meeting on the Haines Borough’s minor offenses ordinance this week revealed a fundamental misunderstanding between residents and members of an ad hoc committee on the extent of the controversial ordinance’s overhaul.

About 16 members of the public attended Tuesday’s meeting at the Chilkat Center, where the Ad Hoc Minor Offenses Committee reviewed the work it has completed over the past five months. That work didn’t include removing any of the about 250 violations and accompanying fines identified in the ordinance, such as “failure to remove ashtrays,” “annoy, injure or endanger the public” and “reducing surrounding value of properties by maintaining (a) building in (a) state of disrepair.”

“I’m a little bit confused,” said resident Sue Waterhouse. “I know the committees did a lot of work and I think what you’ve done is really great, but I think that when the people signed this petition – the 600 people – they wanted to get rid of a lot of these.”

Waterhouse was referencing a petition signed by nearly 650 people that pushed the assembly to overturn the minor offenses ordinance several weeks after its passage in September.

Others also seemed disappointed that the committee hadn’t done any work to identify superfluous or unnecessary violations.

“I thought that for the size of Haines, we had too many minor offenses, and that there would be some identification of the ones we don’t like or the ones we don’t want to enforce and that those would come out,” Evelyna Vignola said.

Resident Bill Kurz echoed the sentiment. “The people who were complaining were complaining about this massive pile, and this pile needs to be cleaned up either at the same time as going ahead with this ordinance or prior to this ordinance being passed,” he said.

Committee members repeatedly stated that identifying violations for removal was not their task. Assembly member Margaret Friedenauer, who also sits on the minor offenses committee, said many of the violations outlined in code also are in state law, meaning local police or troopers could still write citations for them even if the borough deletes them.

“When we (the committee) got the direction from the assembly, it wasn’t necessarily to look at each individual piece…it was how do we process those violations if they happen and how do we deal with those violations within our borough,” she said.

Committee member Deb Vogt acknowledged some violations could stand to come out, but that wasn’t the purview of the committee’s work. “I’m sure there are provisions that we don’t need, but I don’t think that was our mandate to look at those things,” she said.

Vogt suggested setting up a co-committee to handle that task.

Committee member Mike Case reiterated that the committee’s job was to work on the ordinance that deals with the handling of the offenses, not whether or not the offenses should exist at all.

If a violation is removed from the minor offenses ordinance, it would still exist where it was before in borough code, Case pointed out. There is nothing stating, however, that the committee couldn’t recommend those violations be removed from the minor offenses table and the violation’s associated place in code.

The only two recommendations the committee is making regarding specific violations is that skiing violations be aligned with state regulations on pedestrians (meaning skiers on roads would have to behave like pedestrians), and that the fine for failing to put street numbers on a house be cut from $100 to $50.

While the committee hasn’t spent its 11 meetings over the past five months identifying what some might see as excessive or needless violations, it has addressed several of the other concerns residents voiced about the original ordinance.

The committee is recommending, for example, that a statement of “purpose and intent” be added to the beginning of the document, which includes a clause to quell fears about potential abuse of the law by “policing for profit.”

“Under no circumstances shall revenue generation be used as a motive to enforce the provisions of this title,” the document reads.

Interim police chief Josh Dryden piped up at one point and said he found it “very distressing” that residents were worried about being “over-policed,” adding that Haines is one of the most lenient communities he has ever lived in.

The original ordinance also included a provision that would have allowed the manager to deputize any borough employee to write citations. The committee is recommending only police be allowed to write citations, with the exception of the harbormaster and assistant harbormaster, who would be allowed to cite for harbor violations only.

Other recommendations include that the borough maintain a record of the number of tickets and amount of fines collected to provide some oversight and guard against policing for profit. It is also recommending removing all of Title 18 – land use and development violations – from the minor offenses ordinance, with the reasoning that those disputes should be handled by the Planning Commission and planning department.

The committee also identified areas of unfinished business, including the idea of “separable offenses,” or how violations are racked up, i.e. can a person be cited for the same violation once a day, once a week, once a month, if the violation goes unaddressed.

The committee must bring its recommendations to the assembly by April 26, the deadline set by the assembly in October.