The Government Affairs and Services Committee advanced a recommendation to the assembly on a substitute ordinance for employee housing that would prohibit tents and impose sanitation requirements.
“We’re trying to hold employers to a standard that they need to pay people well enough so that they don’t have to live in a tent,” committee chair Heather Lende said on Tuesday.
Committee member Brenda Josephson agreed with Lende. Josephson said that doing so would eliminate “tent cities,” preserve the townsite area and limit tents to general use zones.
Committee member Sean Maidy disagreed with removing tents from employee housing. He said as long as an employer offers proper facilities up to standards, he doesn’t think it’s the Haines Borough’s place to tell employees what they can’t choose.
The committee unanimously agreed to add sanitation requirements to code. Borough planner Holly Smith said she will add a mandate to the ordinance to include a required number of toilets per a set number of employees, using government agency health and safety regulations as a guideline.
Smith proposed a substitute ordnance that eliminates employee housing from accessory use and establishes special approval criteria after the planning commission’s decision to separate the two in July 2018.
The committee’s recommendations will be brought the Haines Borough Assembly for review.
On Tuesday, the committee also killed the borough clerk’s recommendation to increase burial rates, keeping them at $350 per person for burials and cremations. The proposed increase would have increased the fee to $600 per person, and charge $100 to reserve a plot.
Borough manager Debra Schnabel said the current $350 covers labor and equipment, but does not account for the cost of expanding, developing and maintaining the cemetery.
Committee members Lende and Josephson opposed the increase. Committee members Maidy said not increasing fees to meet the cost of service puts too large a burden on the volunteers, who perform the various responsibilities of handling the deceased.
“I’m not looking to make money off it,” Maidy said, “I’m looking to just break even, which if we don’t increase the fee, we won’t.”
Josephson said that since volunteers who do the work have spoken against raising fees, she can’t support the increase.
In public testimony at the Feb. 12 assembly meeting, volunteer medical technician Cindy Jones said she is on the ambulance crew that picks up a body for free, and she also helps prepare bodies for burial. “To raise it this much I think is really excessive and I would really like to see you folks revisit this,” she said.