he Haines Borough Assembly dissolved the Solid Waste Working Group at its meeting on June 28, saying the group had achieved its goals.

“We don’t want to overburden volunteers who serve on (borough) committees,” borough manager Annete Kreitzer wrote to the CVN. She said that it’s better to shut the groups down “if there’s not a current issue that requires meeting.”

The group was disbanded most recently in 2017 and reestablished in August 2020. In its latest configuration, it included members Melissa Aronson, Derek Poinsette, Craig Franke, Andrew Letchworth, Reilly Kosinski, Shannon Donahue and Tom Morphet.

Former members disagreed both as to why the group had been formed and whether its dissolution was warranted.

Aronson, who headed the committee and is also board chair of Haines Friends of Recycling, said she believes the group accomplished its defined tasks. “I think it’s OK for committees to end,” she said. While she recognizes that there is still plenty of work to do – she mentioned the need for a scrap metal recycling site, for instance — she doesn’t think the SWWG needs to continue operating under the auspices of the borough.

In Aronson’s view, the group’s main missions were to address the littering at 25 Mile – an unachievable goal, it turned out, due to lack of law enforcement outside the townsite – and to make the town’s garbage service more convenient. She said she feels the group achieved this second objective through Community Waste Solution’s new orange-bag program, which allows people to deposit household garbage in prepaid bags to avoid waiting in line at the dump. Aronson said the program “grew out of” conversations at SWWG meetings.

Franke, the general manager of Community Waste Solutions, joined the committee in 2019 and had a different conception of its primary purpose.

“My understanding was that (the committee) was initially formed in response to addressing the question — or drafting a proposal – for a central transfer facility.” He said he believed that the landfill’s new drop-and-drive orange bag program had made the need for a facility less urgent.

“Discussion and collaboration is useful to a point, but in the absence of something to do, it’s just a meeting of friends,” Franke said.

Kosinski, a Haines Friends of Recycling board member who has served on every iteration of the committee over the past 10 years, said he thought the group “probably could have done more” if it stayed together, “but if they feel that our usefulness is over, that’s fine by me.”

Like Aronson and Franke, he mentioned the accessibility objective and the drop-bag program.

“I think (the committee) will pop up again when we hit another challenging spot,” Kosinski said. “I wouldn’t mind there being a continual solid waste working group, I think that would be good, but again that’s not my decision.”

Group member Tom Morphet agreed that a need for the group would most likely reemerge within the next few years. Of the interviewed members, he expressed the most vehement opposition to the group’s disbandment.

Morphet said he believes that this iteration of the group was formed primarily because of a bear problem in summer 2020. He admitted that trash-habituated brown bears are no longer an issue because almost 50 brown bears were killed that summer.

Still, he thinks it is naïve to believe that a need for the committee won’t arise again soon. “Because this issue resurfaces every two or three years, it seems premature that we would disband this committee,” he said.

Morphet previously suggested that the borough is “over-committeed” after a Haines Borough board and committees fair in December drew a scant crowd. However, he said he thinks the SWWG is an exception because of Haines’s “patchwork waste management system.” The working group performs a crucial function, in Morphet’s view, by drawing together representatives from several involved parties – CWS, Friends of Recycling, the watershed council, and the chamber of commerce.

Beyond facilitating communication among these local experts, Morphet said the working group serves the community by providing “a public forum where people who have issues can raise (them).”

Morphet wrote to assembly member Debra Schnabel a day after the meeting, recommending that the group be labeled “inactive” rather than disbanded entirely.

Schnabel was the only assembly member who opposed the group’s disbandment. “We are not doing a good job (with waste management),” Schnabel said at the meeting. “We still have many people who do not use the commercial avenues available to them. They do not recycle, (and) they are still stockpiling waste and defacing our natural environment.”

Beyond its explicitly stated group objectives, Aronson said this iteration of the committee also helped improve communication among parties involved in waste disposal by creating a comprehensive document called “Reduce Our Waste Together.” She said she was disappointed that the document had not been circulated more widely by the borough.