The Haines Borough Planning Commission voted on May 12 to rezone a popular retreat, wedding and yoga center at the northern edge of the Mud Bay neighborhood after borough staff discovered that the business’ permit expired in 2019.

The move, if approved by the Haines Borough Assembly, would detach six adjacent lots, including the Chilkat Inlet Retreat, from the Mud Bay Rural Residential Zone and append them to the General Use Planning/Zoning District.

Borough planner Dave Long proposed the idea to rezone the lots a mile south of Carrs Cove after discussing it with the property owners, whose commercial enterprise permit expired three years ago. The owners said the general use zone would better suit their needs. There are fewer regulations on commercial activity in that area.

Mud Bay code requires a business owner to live on the same property as his or her business. The owners of the Chilkat Inlet Retreat live on a lot adjacent to their retreat center.

The borough granted the business a conditional use permit in 2018 on the condition that the owners would consolidate three lots within a year to be in accordance with code, but they never did.

“Time passed, commercial activities continued, there was no more follow up or enforcement by the borough,” Long wrote in a memo to the planning commission.

The commission also voted to implement a stay of enforcement on the permit until the rezoning question has been settled. Long said discovery of the lapsed permit this spring was “unfortunate” timing at the outset of a summer tourism season expected to be historically busy boroughwide

“We don’t want to cause any more undue financial hardship,” said commission chair Diana Lapham.

The permit lapse was not enforced until this spring. Borough staff appear not to have known that the permit had expired until a neighborhood petition to prohibit commercial events drew attention to the zone’s event venues. That petition — which is tied to complaints about a different event venue and likely would not affect Chilkat Inlet Retreat — is currently being discussed by the assembly.

An adjacent parcel owned by Beth MacCready and Gregg Bigsby, who run Chilkat Inlet Retreat, is already in the general use zone, as are several properties between Mud Bay and the townsite, so the two zoning districts would stay contiguous.

Aaron Davidman, who with wife Sarana Miller owns one of the six lots that would be rezoned, said the property owners’ main goal was to find “the simplest solution that’s right for the borough and also right for the neighborhood and also right for small business owners like us.” (Miller runs a yoga business.)

The planning commission voted unanimously to propose rezoning to the assembly, but commissioner Rob Golderg, who was absent at the meeting, submitted a letter opposing the idea.

Goldberg said he “fully supports” the Chilkat Inlet Retreat and would like to see the permit reissued but would rather the business stay in the Mud Bay zone with a code change allowing Mud Bay business owners to live on adjacent lots. He said rezoning the retreat center would set a dangerous precedent.

“Lots should never be rezoned for the convenience of the property owner,” he wrote. “There are many, many people in the Haines Borough who do not like the rules of the zone they are in. I predict that dozens of them will petition to have their properties changed to General Use.”

Goldberg also said rezoning the properties as part of the General Use Planning/Zoning District would be “anti-planning” because that classification is intended to be transitional for land that hasn’t yet been developed and zoned.

The general use district, according to code, is for “the borough regions with no previous land use regulation and the need to provide a reasonable transition toward land use regulation.”

Commissioners who supported the rezoning proposal worried that attempting to change Mud Bay code either would take too long, leaving the business owners in the lurch, or wouldn’t garner sufficient support across the neighborhood.

The assembly will take up the rezoning question at its meeting on May 24.