It’s budget season for the Haines borough, kicked off by an assembly discussion Thursday night to go line-by-line through its areawide general fund.
The budget determines taxation – who gets taxed and by how much – and spending, on services like education, the pool, public safety and economic development. Balancing this year’s budget has been made particularly complicated by the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in property tax revenue and federal funding.
Those losses include Secure Rural Schools funding, which interim borough manager Alekka Fullerton said Thursday have been cut from $276,000 last year to just $13,000 this year. That grant is passed from the federal government to municipalities that have national forest land, and is spent across a number of areas, beyond just school funding.
That decrease will be compounded by the expiration of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding, stimulus passed under the Biden Administration in 2021. The borough spent $200,000 of ARPA funding in FY24 and $100,000 in the current fiscal year. That was the last of it; there will be none going forward.
Much of Thursday’s meeting was Fullerton going through her proposed $49 million budget, with assistance from finance director Jila Stuart.
Fullerton and Stuart answered clarifying questions from assembly members, but the atmosphere was more information gathering, rather than any discussion of how assembly members might modify the proposal in the coming weeks.
So far as there was discussion by the assembly and mayor, it lingered on a couple of specific topics:
Of any one category, the assembly spent the most time talking about the public library. The proposed budget projects $46,400 for library utilities and $20,000 in building and liability insurance for the upcoming year.
Assembly members asked Fullerton a number of questions on that topic:
Craig Loomis: “Do they keep the heat on all the time?”
Mark Smith: “Do they turn the lights off at night?”
And Cheryl Stickler: “That’s the cost of aging infrastructure.”
Loomis continued the thread by noting the extremely high temperature of the borough pool showers – leading to a broader discussion about heating systems and costs borough-wide.
Many of the high-cost items assembly-members focused on were ones Fullerton described as fixed costs. For insurance and many of those facility costs, the borough has limited power to significantly cut, outside of taking buildings off-line altogether. That might come up later in budget discussions, as Smith has previously suggested selling the Mosquito Lake facility.
Smith led the charge on personnel questions, noting that payroll is projected to be 46% of spending in the areawide general fund. For the full proposed budget, payroll is projected at 12% of all borough expenditures.
Smith directly asked Fullerton if she saw any borough positions that might be cut; Fullerton said that the borough was “chronically understaffed” across all departments except for at the library, where she said she had identified one employee whose position could be reduced from 29 to 20 hours per week without affecting quality of service.
There was little discussion of school district funding in this session, but it is sure to come up going forward. The proposed budget grants the school only half of its requested $540,000 funding increase, and in Juneau, governor Mike Dunleavy recently vetoed a bill that would have increased per-student funding from the state.
The assembly committee will meet again on May 1 to discuss the townsite service area.
Further budget deliberation will be conducted in committees until the first public hearing on Tuesday, May 13. That will be followed by a second public hearing on May 27, and a potential third public hearing on June 10. The deadline for adopting the new budget is June 15.