Haines was selected as one of 25 towns to receive a Recreation Economies for Rural Communities (RERC) grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The award is a technical assistance grant, meaning it distributes expertise rather than money. Each recipient is paired with three advisors who will work with the municipality for four to six months and ultimately help facilitate a community workshop to formulate goals for “environmentally friendly development.”

The EPA website says these goals could include revitalizing a town’s main street, expanding trail networks, developing amenities like broadband service, or “marketing local downtowns (to tourists)… as gateways to nearby natural lands.”

Haines Economic Development Corporation director Lee Hart, who applied for the grant, expressed her enthusiasm for Haines’s three assigned advisors. “We’re gaining top-level professional assistance from people with really strong backgrounds in this kind of work,” Hart said.

One of the advisors is a consultant from Charlottesville, Virginia who specializes in sustainable transportation planning. Another is the executive director of the Nuestra Tierra Conservation project, which helps ensure that disadvantaged communities in New Mexico have a voice in decisions about nearby land. The third advisor is a senior policy analyst with the EPA’s office of sustainable communities.

All three advisors will come to Haines to help facilitate the community workshop, which will be held at night or on the weekend to maximize local participation. “This is not strictly a tourism effort,” Hart stressed. “This is for people who live here.”

Haines Huts and Trails chair Natalie Dawson said she thinks the workshop will be very helpful. “It’s really useful to create space for dialogue,” Dawson said. “Outdoor recreation can mean a lot of different things for different people, so this grant gives us an opportunity to really discuss (those different definitions and priorities).”

Application evaluators interviewed Dawson, along with several other “coalition partners” — including Mayor Douglas Olerud, state forester Greg Palmieri, Alaska State Parks Southeast area superintendent Preston Kroes and Chilkoot Indian Association tribal administrator Harriet Brouillette — when deciding whether to award Haines the grant.

The RERC grant may also help Haines secure financial support down the line — especially when combined with the Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance grant that Haines received from the National Park Service in May.

“When you’re applying for money to fund infrastructure, it really increases your competitiveness if there is a master plan that shows there’s community consensus around this vision and this concept,” Hart said.

That was the experience of Thompson Falls, Montana — a town that received the RERC grant the last year it was offered, in 2019.

Kayla Mosher, Thompson Falls’s recreation coordinator, said the grant was “super helpful.” The workshop led the community to create a recreation department, post wayfinding signs around their downtown and develop an app where tourists can locate trails, campgrounds and river access sites.

The year after the RERC workshop, Thompson Falls successfully applied for a $30,000 USDA Rural Business Development Grant to support the goals they had agreed upon at the RERC workshop. RERC “100% helped us get that grant,” Mosher said.

Thompson Falls bears demographic similarities to Haines: it is a town of around 1,400 whose economy was once supported by logging and mining and which is now attempting to turn toward recreation as a new economic driving force.

More than 100 municipalities applied for the grant this year. Haines was the only town in Alaska selected — and one of only six towns west of the Mississippi.