Incumbent Eben Sargent is running for a Haines Borough Planning Commission seat for a year. He was among those elected to the planning commission during the 2023 local election – a first for the borough. Previous commissioners were appointed by the mayor.
Born and raised in northeastern Vermont, Sargent grew up in a small town with a rural economy.
“A lot of people moved there because it was a place where you could have cheap land and a rural lifestyle, and it’s beautiful. So we had super good public schools because one of the best jobs was being a teacher,” he said.
From the outside looking in, the economy looked monolithic, but there were also people working for the state, people working in healthcare or in the seasonal maple syrup industry.
“It was very similar, kind of, to the overall picture in Haines where everybody is hustling a little bit and a lot of people want to work for themselves and people are pretty independent,” he said.
Sargent’s professional career began in mechanical engineering, where he focused on product design. He said he moved to Seattle where he worked for K2 Skis and then Cascade Designs, working on custom solutions for military projects. He also traveled back and forth between the Lower 48 and Anchorage for hunting, skiing and outdoor activities which led him to visiting Haines for the first time in 2014.
Then, he spent a good portion of 2015 working for Haines-based Fairweather Ski works, helping them set up ski manufacturing technology.
Sargent has an interest in housing issues and it stems, in part, from his personal experience in Haines.
In 2018, he and partner Natalie Dawson bought a piece of land, started clearing trees and put up a shed and then a yurt – slowly carving a place out for themselves. They moved to town full-time about three years ago and bought a home on Piedad – a process he said was marked by loan officers being hesitant to work on properties in Haines.
That was about the time the existing planning commission took on the restriction of yurts.
“I was just frustrated that we have this housing problem, shortage here, and the one area we’re practically taking action is reducing housing options,” he said. “Now I’m not saying that yurts are the best solution, or that we should have yurts everywhere, all the time with no permitting, but it was just like – kind of a value statement that we’re taking things off the table and we’re not working on putting things on the table in a substantive way.”
During his time on the commission he has pushed for more nuanced planning discussions and better processes to address housing needs – though he acknowledges there are no easy solutions.
“It’s not a problem that you wave a stick at and solve. There are many factors outside of the borough’s control,” he said.
Of the factors that are in the borough’s control, even fewer of them are in the planning commission’s purview. But Sargent believes the borough can make progress by addressing smaller, actionable things – like working closely with industrial arts programs to make sure students are learning to build homes and have the support they need.
Sargent was critical of the former planning commission when he ran as a candidate last year – saying they were not proactively working enough on planning topics versus permitting.
“It took me a long time to understand how to be effective outside of permitting, because you just get so much workload as far as the scheduled meetings go,” he said. “We’ve tried to address different topics a couple of times. [But] when you have 20 people sitting there waiting to get their remodel of their house reviewed, it’s kind of impolite to talk about, you know, big picture ideas while they sit and wait.”
He said he’d like to see the borough’s permitting process get streamlined and thinks there should be separate conditional use permitting processes for things like heavy industrial activity versus vacation rentals or people’s updates to their homes.
“We have a very limited ability to do stuff when we mire on these big infrastructure projects or these contentious permits for many meeting cycles and multiple boards. It prevents us from doing other stuff,” he said. “We can’t remove contention about development from this town or any town but we can make it clear that if you want a permit – this is what you need to do.”