A draft plan is out for the Haines Borough’s new comprehensive plan. The document outlines community priorities for the next decade based on surveys, community forums and individual interviews that began in the summer of 2023. The plan is expected to be completed later this spring after the contractor incorporates community input from a visit this week.

CVN sat down with Shelly Wade and Margaret Friedenauer, consultants from the Anchorage firm Agnew Beck, to go over some of the highlights of the plan, talk about the process going forward, and highlight changes from the previous plan, which was released in 2012.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lex Treinen: The comp plan is not a code change. Why is it important? Why should citizens care about this?

Shelly Wade: Citizens should care about this because this plan helps to preserve the things that Haines residents like the most about their community. It does that by setting a vision and policies around important topics that can help achieve that vision and sustain the things that that Haines residents like the most about this community. Without resident input through this process and developing the plan, it’s not representative of what folks like the most and care about the most. What do they want to see with land? What do they want to see with housing or economic development?

Lex Treinen: And the idea is policy makers, assembly members are referring to this when they’re deciding what policies to make?

Shelly Wade: That is correct, but it’s broader than that. It’s not just the borough assembly or planning commissioners or borough staff. Really, residents interact with this plan when they’re thinking about what they want to do or where they want to open a business or for developers where they want to do projects.

Lex Treinen: A key piece of a comp plan is the land-use policy. There’s a proposed map included in the draft plan. Can you talk about just the particular changes to the downtown area from the 2012 plan? What are these new land use designations?

Shelly Wade: For the townsite, there’s a town/downtown core area that is really predominantly around the Sixth Avenue to Portage Cove and Union Street to Fort Seward.

The idea there is that you want to create a walkable, potentially more dense area, and to take advantage of redevelopment opportunities or spaces that are underutilized or opportunities for infill so that you have a more dense area in the downtown area. So again, it’s walkable where there’s really a business district.

The other newer designations that are helpful and relevant are the differentiation between rural residential and rural mixed use. In some areas of the townsite, but also in the Mud Bay and Upper Chilkat Valley and other areas folks would like to see less development, larger lot sizes, less dense housing. Um, so rural residential in this case, and then rural mixed use recognizes that in some areas. There are folks that have businesses and light industrial activity on their properties. And so this designation embraces that idea
Another change is the areas that used to be multiple uses recreation emphasis and multiple uses resource emphasis. Those are together now under one umbrella called public multi-use.

Another one that I want to point out is the river corridor. The idea that residents have prioritized fish habitat and protection of critical habitats. That is a completely new designation.

Lex Treinen: There’s also the idea of overlays. Can you talk about those, particularly the “Indigenous Places” overlay? Is this something that you have done in other communities as well?

Shelly Wade: It is not. It’s basically developing a policy that really goes above and beyond recognizing ownership of lands. But it’s also looking at traditional uses and putting that into practice in a land-use practice or policy practice that really guides future development and educates potential developers or partners and protects those Indigenous places.

Lex Treinen: This is maybe a good segue to the larger question about transitioning this plan to changes in zoning and policy. A lot of the previous land-use designations didn’t make their way into zoning from the last plan. Is this is a problem other communities have? What recommendations or ideas do you have for how the borough can be more efficient at translating this comprehensive plan into zoning changes?

Shelly Wade: It is a challenge that other communities have. I think engagement and ownership of the comprehensive plan is a starting point. I feel like Haines is at an advantage through this process because there has been such robust engagement in the process.

Another part is that we are going from a super complex comprehensive plan from 2012 to, I think, a potentially more accessible comprehensive plan here. I think that’s a critical starting point. We also have recommendations in here that are really outlining a clear implementation plan. There’s an implementation plan for each of the core chapters in the priority strategies

Lex Treinen: Can we use the topic of housing to give an example of this? What are the challenges and the opportunities that Haines has for building more housing and attainable housing in Haines?

Margaret Friedenauer: Housing was not a standalone chapter for the 2012 plan, but it was identified as something that in the last 10 years has come out as a challenge and a priority that they wanted to address. Across Alaska, really, especially in Southeast, people have identified that it’s harder to find housing, more expensive, nobody’s building, because it’s expensive to build

Housing is a bit of a unique chapter because, as folks just pointed out, housing is not a responsibility of the borough or a power under the charter. So this is kind of an example of a piece that the borough itself cannot implement, but it really needs partners and private developers to look at the comp plan and say, ‘Well, this is what we learned from the community about housing issues, challenges, and what they would like to see in the future.’

So there might be some sort of incentive programs or things like that that the borough could assist with, but it’s also a matter of what’s available and really reaching outside of Haines to partner with folks. There’s a housing working group in the planning commission that we suggested could continue by working on some of these initiatives and policy ideas.

Shelly Wade: We also talked about doing a housing-needs assessment as a starting point because this is a best practice across communities. We don’t really have a great picture of exactly what is happening with housing in Haines right now.

Lex Treinen: In the community survey you did, residents highlighted the natural environment as the top draw, and the high cost of living is the biggest challenge. Does that line up with other communities and is there anything else that stood out to you in the survey?

Shelly Wade: Well, what stood out was the high response rate. I think that speaks volumes to how much folks care about and want to have a voice in what happens in this community moving forward.

To your question about cost of living — no question that is shared among all Alaskans. The focus on recreation and the natural environment — I think that is in part, maybe a little uniquely Haines. The abundance of voices and many different ways that folks shared that access to the outdoors, the natural environment and how that ties to recreational opportunities, and how that just actually ties to quality of life, and why people choose to move here, live here, stay here. It also ties into economic development opportunities. Recreation or access to the outdoors is really integrated and woven throughout the plan.

Residents can find more information and submit comments about the plan at https://hainescompplanrevision.com/