The Haines Borough Assembly this week rejected for the second time an offer from the state Department of Public Safety to take $25,000 in exchange for accepting police responsibility across the borough.
Borough manager Debra Schnabel reintroduced the contract that would require the borough to fund borough-wide policing for the one-time payment. “From my perspective it seems less and less apparent that the (state) troopers are going to put a trooper position into this community so I am wondering if you would want me to go ahead and see if we can capture the $25,000.”
Assembly member Sean Maidy gave a succinct response to the manager’s question: “No.”
The assembly voted last June to reject the same contract and later that summer directed the manager to collect data on police response outside the townsite to assess after one year the nature and cost of police response.
According to borough code, the Haines police are funded to operate only within the townsite. Haines police regularly assisted the state troopers on calls in the past and still respond to some emergency calls across the borough. Assembly member Heather Lende made a motion to hold an advisory vote to determine if residents living in Mud Bay, Lutak and out the Haines Highway want expanded police service.
“What I would prefer to do is ask the areas that may become service areas if they want police protection in a purely advisory vote and if they do then we can figure out how to pay for it (and) what we want to do,” Lende said. “This way at least we’ll be moving forward, making some motion on it and get a read on what the community wants us to do.”
Maidy said the question of whether or not people want police service is too generalized. He said police response data collection and analysis needs to be completed before a question goes before the voters.
“We’ve already had this discussion,” Maidy said. “We’ve already made this decision. We’re already in the process of doing the research to make this happen. I honestly don’t know why we’re talking about this again.”
Assembly member Tom Morphet also opposed holding an advisory vote. He argued that the borough should work harder to lobby the legislature for a state trooper. He said the effort behind such an advisory vote would distract from other issues and that no one has asked the assembly for expanded police coverage.
“We’ve never had a person in this room saying ‘We need police service now,’” Morphet said. “Not a single one has come here to testify. That’s who we work for and we don’t have a person telling us to do this.”
The assembly voted 3-2 in support of Lende’s motion for an advisory vote with Morphet and Maidy opposed. The motion failed because it needed four votes to pass. Assembly member Brenda Josephson was absent.
The Alaska State Troopers transferred its Haines trooper position to Western Alaska more than a year ago. Last November, the assembly and AST Director Hans Brinke reached an impasse during a public meeting on which government agency is responsible for policing the borough outside the townsite.
The Department of Public Safety recently gave four of five Haines Police officers a “special commission” that allows them to police Klukwan and outside the townsite under state insurance. The commission also allows the local police to work with Southeast Alaska Cities Against Drugs, a regional drug task force under the authority of the Alaska State Troopers.
Borough staff created an ordinance last summer that would have put police expansion to a borough-wide vote. The ordinance also would have folded the medical services area budget into the police department’s budget. Members of the public, and the ambulance crew, largely opposed the ordinance during public meetings and it never advanced.