It’s that time of year again: the bears are out at Chilkoot, and your neighbors are vying for your vote.
Six people are running for three open Haines Borough Assembly seats. The top two vote-getters will serve three-year terms, and the candidate with the third most votes will fill a seat recently vacated by Caitie Rothbart (formerly Kirby) for the remaining year of her term.
Election day is Tuesday, Oct. 4.
This year’s field features a diverse mix of young and old, usual suspects and newcomers, town dwellers and rural residents, a doctor, a carpenter, a road builder, Lynn Canal Conservation board members and Constantine Metal Resources employees.
The borough faces a number of challenges and issues that the CVN will ask candidates to address at a debate next month and in detailed interviews with the newspaper. But first, the paper reached out to all the candidates to learn more about their background and their motivations for running and to introduce them to readers.
What follows is a series of short candidate profiles.
Ben Aultman-Moore
Ben Aultman-Moore, 30, a local carpenter, said he wants to join the assembly to add a young perspective to local government.
“I think there’s really a lot of young people in Haines that are not in office or are not even close to office,” Aultman-Moore said. “They are running businesses and raising families. And just sort of realizing how many people, how many of my friends and my peers need a positive voice on the assembly – we are inheriting a town and we want a say in the community’s future.”
Aultman-Moore moved to the upper Lynn Canal in 2015 and has lived in Haines full-time since 2017. In addition to carpentry, he serves as a Lynn Canal Conservation (LCC) board member and enjoys subsistence activities.
Aultman-Moore grew up in West Virginia and graduated from West Virginia University in 2014. When he first came to Alaska, he worked in the tourism industry in Skagway and at Glacier Point before eventually settling in Haines.
Now a full-time carpenter, Aultman-Moore apprenticed for several years with residents Dave Ricke and Ian Seward before starting his own business, Bamco.
Aultman-Moore doesn’t have a background in politics or government but said through his experience starting and running a business he has learned to work with community members to develop construction ideas into tangible projects, a skill he expects would translate to his work on the assembly.
“When I moved here, I had to transition all of my skills from tourism to something that was a little more year-round,” he said. “I had to teach myself how to run a business, how to learn a trade, how to budget money, how to budget time.”
Aultman-Moore mentioned zoning and planning, use of the Lutak Dock and possible construction of a mine at the Palmer Project as issues that “have a lot of bearing on the future of the community” but said he’s preparing himself “to be interested in everything. I don’t want to be a one-issue candidate.”
In West Virginia, Aultman-Moore took an interest in small-scale organic farming and worked on several farms. Although he ultimately decided on a different career path, he said he remains committed to local food production and appreciates Haines’ subsistence culture.
“It was a way of life that I didn’t know still existed (before moving here),” he said. “I saw that people live really close to their food (in Haines), and they’re not (all) farmers.”
In addition to volunteering with LCC, Aultman-Moore hosts a jazz show on KHNS.
“Most of all I want to run because I love this community, and I feel like if I’m lucky I’ll be here for a long time, and I would just like to be part of the growth of the community,” he said.
Eric Holle
Eric Holle, 72, has lived in Haines for more than three decades but this will be his first bid for borough assembly. Why now?
“I’m feeling like the Haines Borough is at somewhat of a tipping point. And what I would not like to see is to continue into what seems like a potential boom and bust type of economy based on resource extraction,” Holle said. “I would like to do what I can to work towards a steady state economy – which is not continuous growth but is something that is healthy and sustainable.”
Holle, who worked for decades as a professional musician, has volunteered for Lynn Canal Conservation (LCC) for about as long as he has lived in Haines. He spent 10 years as LCC board president and currently serves as vice president.
Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio near an “industrial wasteland” and a river so polluted it caught fire, Holle said he came to appreciate the woods and clean water on the edge of town. He moved west to attend the University of Colorado Boulder and became involved in environmental advocacy, particularly around issues like the Rocky Flats Plant, a nuclear weapons production site that the federal government eventually shut down due to pollution and violations of environmental law..
Holle said he’s “very interested in thinking about how water is essential to life around here in so many ways. And extrapolating out from that, we start thinking about fish and what salmon means both to the economy here and to the ecology.”
Holle worked for 12 years as a technician with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, doing a variety of work including king and coho salmon surveys. He also spent about two decades working as a contract biologist collecting data on desert tortoises in the Mojave Desert, a species threatened by habitat loss and disease.
In recent years, Holle has been an outspoken advocate for mountain goat conservation and has publicly opposed efforts to expand the local heliski industry due to concerns about the impacts of helicopter activity on mountain goats.
Holle plays banjo, mandolin, accordion, fiddle and piano and performs with three local bands, including Extended Play at the Saturday farmer’s market.
Thinking back to his upbringing in Ohio, he lamented the suburban sprawl that has since destroyed the woods he grew up playing in.
“I have kind of been retreating from that my whole life, and I feel like Haines is the last stand,” he said.
Margarette Jones
Margarette Jones, 27, said taking a “holistic” approach to problem solving and overcoming political divisions would be her priority if elected to the assembly.
“I see a lot of ways that political structures that are meant to serve people … don’t serve people first,” Jones said. She said she appreciates Haines’ sense of community and closeness among residents.
“We’re forced (here) to look at the person not only at the politics,” she said.
Jones was raised in Haines and graduated from Haines High School in 2013. She now works as a special projects coordinator for Constantine Metal Resources, the company advancing the Palmer Project, an exploratory mining operation north of Haines.
Before joining Constantine in June 2021, Jones said she gained experience across numerous industries. She was a special education teacher in Portland, Oregon for a year after graduating from Pacific University in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in political science.
Jones spent summers working in the upper Lynn Canal tourism and service industries, including stints with the Haines-Skagway Fast Ferry, the Bamboo Room and Pioneer Bar and several restaurants in Skagway, she said. She also taught English in Peru.
“I think I have really highly varied work experience,” she said. “I’ve worked in 20-something different jobs in various fields and industries.”
Jones said she thinks her diverse work background, her education in political science and her experiences directly serving people have prepared her for the assembly.
As special projects coordinator at Constantine, Jones said she fills in the gaps at the company, often helping with community engagement, such as preparing social media posts or newsletters.She said working for Constantine has given her “good perspective” on how to engage with neighbors who approach her having made assumptions about her based on her affiliation with the mining company.
Jones mentioned solid waste as an issue that’s “essential” to the borough and “shouldn’t be controversial,” and said she would look forward to taking “the tangled knot of the history of that issue and try to untangle it.”
With regards to her “holistic” approach to governance, she said she thinks it’s important to consider how any given issue could impact “people, the economy and the environment,” and not to focus on one effect or the other.
“It seems instead we often get caught up in the silo the issue is most relevant to,” she said in an email to the CVN.
Bill Jurewitz
Bill Jurewitz, 76, delivered babies for 40 years. Now he wants to try his hand at local politics.
The former physician, now retired, moved to Haines six years ago with his partner, Julie Korsmeyer, and said he’s been weighing an assembly run for more than a year.
“I just would like to do something positive for the community if possible,” he said. “I think I’m a person that looks at all sides and makes decisions that are beneficial to as many people as possible.”
Jurewitz, who lives at Mosquito Lake, grew up in California and ran a medical practice near Los Angeles for 15 years before working for five years as a clinical professor at UCLA and for 20 years as a locum tenens (temporary) doctor traveling the country. He spent time in Missouri, Texas and Tennessee, among other places, he said.
Jurewitz graduated from University of California San Francisco medical school in 1973 and specialized in obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA. He has delivered over 8,000 babies.
Jurewitz moved to Haines following Korsmeyer, who had fallen in love with the northern panhandle after a trip to Glacier Bay National Park. “We love the beauty up here,” he said.
In addition to business experience from running his own medical practice, Jurewitz served on the board of the Little Company of Mary hospital in Torrance, California. He said the board managed a budget of “tens of millions of dollars.”
Jurewitz said he wants to help the borough find a balance between the “very nice beauty and lifestyle” here with the need to “make it so people can live here.” He acknowledged that not all residents are retirees like him.
“In order to make this work for everybody, you need to have a very viable, diverse economy where people can make a living, where people can raise families if they want to and kids don’t have to go to the Lower 48.”
Jurewitz said he wants to improve internet service in the borough to attract more business owners. “If you could run your business up here and you didn’t need to be stuck in the middle of Des Moines or Los Angeles or whatever, it’s a good option,” he said.
Jurewitz, treasurer of Four Winds Resource Center (formerly Mosquito Lake School and Community Center), said he had weighed an assembly bid in the past. When he decided to run this year only one other candidate had filed, and he thought the borough needed more civic participation.
“It’s something that I think I would enjoy, even though people think that might be a crazy way of enjoyment,” Jurewitz said.
Jerry Lapp
Jerry Lapp, 73, is running to extend a long career of public service in Haines. He has spent a combined 20 years on the borough assembly and as Mayor and currently sits on the Haines Borough Planning Commission.
“My interest in running is to keep our community moving forward to make sure that our kids have a future here, that they’ll be able to raise their families, that they’ll be able to work here and enjoy this lifestyle,” Lapp said.
Lapp and his wife Kathi owned 33 Mile Roadhouse for 34 years. They sold the business in 2011 and took jobs with Constantine Metal Resources. Jerry does part-time maintenance and expediting work and is now “semi-retired,” he said, and Kathi was a cook for the Palmer Project.
“I’m kind of a person that likes to get things done,” Lapp said. “I’ve been on the assembly through different projects – we got a new library, we got a new school, we built Skyline subdivision up there and the Letnikof subdivision … I just like to see us making this a better community for people.”
Lapp mentioned a new public safety building, completion of the Lutak Dock reconstruction project and solid waste as the “biggest issues” currently facing the assembly.
He also said he’d like “to keep our taxes low, so seniors like me that are on a fixed income can afford to live here.”
Lapp said he thinks the current assembly has a number of new members and could use the “balance” of more seasoned public servants.
“You should have some folks on there with experience, to help with the history of the borough so we don’t make old mistakes or invent the wheel on something,” he said.
For 13 of the last 20 years, an assembly seat has been held by Lapp. He lost a reelection bid in 2015 by 12 votes. Later, in 2020, the assembly appointed him to fill a vacancy for six months. Then he was elected to fill out the remaining year of the term. He decided not to run for reelection last year.
Lapp was Mayor from 1996 to 2002. He has volunteered for the Klehini Valley Fire Department and was a board member of the Haines Chamber of Commerce.
Gabe Thomas
Incumbent assembly member Gabe Thomas, 43, said he is running for reelection because he wants to see through what he’s worked on in his first term, especially Lutak Dock renovation and the Tlingit Park longhouse, a project that he has helped lead.
Thomas is a sixth-generation Chilkat Valley resident who grew up in Klukwan and moved to Haines in sixth grade. He worked as a commercial fisherman for two decades before leaving Alaska to work construction in Washington state. Now he works for Southeast Roadbuilders as part of the explosives and rock stabilization crew on the Haines Highway project.
Thomas said he believes his presence on the assembly is important because he’s the only current member and candidate who is a parent of school-aged children – his children Mila and Silas are 6 and 9 – and also the only Tlingit Native.
He said he’s learned a lot in the three years since he was elected and has appreciated the ideological balance of the recent assembly. “You start to realize you serve the whole community, not just the people that voted for you,” he said.
Thomas ran for the assembly three years ago because he “didn’t feel like it was representing the whole community” at the time.
Seeing a lack of Tlingit representation in local government and no assembly members with young children “made me want to get involved more,” he said. “So I did. Now there’s so much I feel like I need to be part of to finish – between Beach Road, Lutak Dock, Tlingit Park.”
Thomas graduated from Haines High in 1997 and moved away shortly thereafter because “there wasn’t year-round employment here.” He spent time in Anchorage, Ketchikan, Oregon, Washington and Florida doing a variety of jobs. “I worked everywhere – every kind of job you can think of,” he said, including mechanics, industrial painting and construction.
Thomas moved back to Haines eight years ago. In addition to road work, he’s a member of the Uglys, a local nonprofit that provides scholarships and aims to promote general welfare.
“I do believe there is a balance in the community that has to be made,” Thomas said. “It’s vital we have these discussions and not be so ‘yes’ and ‘no’ – and think more about the middle ground.”