Mud Bay residents and the Haines Borough Planning Commission are trying to decide how much is too much when it comes to natural resource extraction on rural residential property.
The question comes after a Mud Bay property owner requested a permit to selectively log and sell timber in the neighborhood zoned rural residential.
Borough planner Holly Smith said no language in Mud Bay zoning regulations address resource extraction, defined in code, in part, as the clearing, mining or grading of land for commercial purposes.
Because nothing in code prohibits it, anyone in the Mud Bay zoning district is free to log or dig gravel for commercial purposes at any scope without borough approval or public notification.
“This has opened up a question as a neighborhood, and as a planning commission we need to address this hole in the code… We can do nothing, or we can address it by prohibiting resource extraction, or modify it in some way at a certain level,” commission chair Rob Goldberg said during Thursday’s meeting.
Smith recommended the commission address the issue by adopting code either that prohibits resource extraction, or allows it under the provisions of a conditional use permit.
Goldberg wrote a letter explaining the issue to Mud Bay property owners stating the commission could also “quantify resource extraction as a certain number of board feet of timber, or a certain number of cubic yards of gravel, and then allow amounts below the limit and prohibit amounts above.”
That notification only went to those on the borough’s tax rolls, however, and public land owners including the Bureau of Land Management, the University of Alaska, and the Mental Health Trust weren’t notified of the issue.
Goldberg said the commission would wait until its June meeting to make any decision on the issue so those stakeholders had time to comment.
Many peninsula property owners wrote letters and attended Thursday’s meeting to voice concerns.
Sylvia Heinz and her family own a small sawmill. Heinz said she’d like to see small-scale resource extraction allowed without a conditional use permit, and large scale resource extraction allowed when it doesn’t infringe on neighborhood rights and property values.
“I think it’s an incredibly important process to being a self-sufficient community, which is one of the words that’s on the code for Mud Bay zoning, is the importance of self-sufficiency. I think that local resources are key to having that sense of self sufficiency,” Heinz said. “I think it’s important to be able to buy local resources and I think it’s important to be able to sell local resources to our neighbors.”
Bill Finlay wrote that, whether it’s firewood, for personal use or sale, “clearing any trees from a residential-sized lot should be a protected right.” He said commercial logging or gravel extraction from larger tracts of land should require a conditional use permit.
Katey Palmer said what one neighbor does to their property can affect other neighbors directly, citing as an example trees cut down for driveway that exposed an area to strong winds, causing a neighbor’s trees to blow down.
“It is this type of difficult, predictive effect that must be considered before a resident ‘selectively logs’ for ‘commercial’ reasons,” wrote Drew Degen and Sandy June-Degen. “Merely ‘quantifying’ resources that could be extracted (one of the options apparently being considered) is not a guarantee that the repercussions will be either predictable or acceptable. One size does not serve all.”
Many residents said they didn’t want to see the issue pit neighbor against neighbor and stressed they wanted to work together to find a solution.
Mike Mackowiak said allowing one property owner the right to extract natural resources might affect neighbors and their property values, but so does prohibiting those rights. He said he grew up far from neighbors.
“I live in a community now and I know because I live in a community, I have to get along with my neighbors,” Mackowiak said. “To live successfully in a community, we all have to give and take a little bit. It can’t be one person’s way or the highway… The other thing we need to be able to guard against is mob rule where a few people can dominate the process and take away the rights of others. That’s inappropriate as well.”
Goldberg said the commission will try to find a way to accommodate people’s needs to be able to sell some of their resources on their property, but not at a “level that affects the lifestyle there or the lives of their neighbors.”
“It may be a matter of scale, a certain size of resource extraction that may be acceptable to most people and compatible with rural residential zoning and above a certain amount it may not be acceptable,” Goldberg said. “The scale is going to have a lot to do with the impacts on neighboring properties.”