Now it’s your turn.
Haines voters will cast their ballots Tuesday for two highly contested seats on the Haines Borough Assembly and two non-contested candidacies for the school board.
Incumbent school board members Sarah Swinton and Lisa Schwartz face no challengers.
Meanwhile, the assembly terms of Diana Lapham and George Campbell are up. Lapham is running for re-election. Campbell is not. Five others are also running for the two seats – Ryan Cook, Leonard Dubber, Judy Erekson, Heather Lende and Tom Morphet.
Polls at the Chilkat Center and Klehini Valley Fire Hall will open at 7 a.m. Tuesday and close at 8 p.m. Unofficial results should be available late that evening. The assembly will canvass any extra mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Oct. 4 before its Oct. 11 meeting. If no challenges are filed by Oct. 25, the assembly will certify the election that day and the winners will assume their seats at that meeting.
More than 800 eligible voters cast ballots in the 2015 assembly election – 38 percent of the borough’s eligible voters.
The Chilkat Valley News is running its traditional grid of questions to assembly candidates and their answers on pages 8, 9, 10 and 11. The answers were edited for length and clarity.
It is no surprise that if and when to tackle phase one of the controversial Small Boat Harbor project has been a hot election topic. Cook and Lapham are gung-ho about moving ahead with phase one. The other four either oppose it or want a public referendum on it done first.
The deadline to get bids to the borough’s administration to tackle phase one is Oct. 19. The Oct. 25 assembly meeting – with one or two new members – will be the first time that the assembly can discuss those bids. The assembly has roughly $15 million in state money to pay for the phase one construction.
However, the odds are that Tuesday’s election would likely have no effect on Phase One of the harbor project. The two assembly members who opposed approving the so-called “95 percent design” last spring were Campbell and Tresham Gregg in a 4-2 vote.
If Lapham and Cook are both elected, that would increase the fast-track factional split to 5-1. If Lapham and Cook both lose, the assembly would likely end up with a 3-3 split on moving immediately ahead on the harbor with fast-track supporter Mayor Jan Hill casting the deciding vote.
Meanwhile, no obvious alliances among the candidates stretch across all the other issues facing Haines.
All candidates agree that the Lutak Dock needs to be overhauled as soon as possible. But funding will be a huge hurdle with no easy answers.
The size of Haines’ police department could be a factor in this election. Voters definitely have choices when it comes to candidates and the extent of the borough’s support of nonprofit groups. Heliskiing is the issue that never goes away – with candidates having different opinions on how a state mountain goat study should be factored in.
The borough faces a $450,000 deficit, which will be a major headache. And can Haines’ economic health be improved?
The election also affects the Chilkat Valley News with publisher-editor Morphet being a candidate. If Morphet wins, he wants to remove himself from coverage decisions relating to the borough’s government in order to avoid a conflict of interest.