Upper-valley community members gathered Sunday at the Four Winds Resource Center for a barbecue, and also a show of community strength as the borough government debates selling off the local community center.
The resource center is housed in the former Mosquito Lake school, which was decommissioned in 2014. Since then, the borough-owned property has been managed by a volunteer board and repurposed for a range of community services, including garden, tire-shop, adult education center, emergency shelter, and food bank.
Those services are staffed and run by volunteers, like Mike Ogborn, who took the day off from the tire shop Sunday to roam the barbecue handing out home-pickled sea-pops and herring eggs. The tire shop serves Chilkat Valley residents free of charge, and the space also hosts a tool library, where residents borrow and learn how to use tools.
Ogborn says some who use the tire shop offer to pay, but he refuses. Any donations for services go to supporting the community center.
“I don’t want the money, that’s not why I do it,” Ogborn said on Sunday. “I’m disabled and I don’t work. This is my way to help give back to the community.”
Next to the tire shop is the Victory Garden, which long-time community members say has supercharged an increase of community center participation in recent years. The garden is productive to a point where, even after garden volunteers have taken as much produce as they need, there’s surplus, said Victory Garden manager Sarah Ammons. That surplus then goes to organizations like Haines Assisted Living and Southeast Alaska Independent Living.
Ammons said that productivity is in part due to good growing conditions, but also established gardeners who lend their expertise, like garden teacher Mardell Gunn.
Gunn has a garden of her own farther out the road; her involvement with the Victory Garden she said is less about the vegetables, and more about the people.“It’s the intergenerational camaraderie,” Gunn said.
“The vegetables are a good side effect, but it’s really coming and feeling connected. These gathering places – the community center, the church, the ballfield – that’s what’s needed for out-the-road-type communities.”
Now, upper-valley community members like Gunn and Ogborn are concerned that gathering point may be in jeopardy. The assembly voted this spring to advance the proposal to sell off the facility, but no final vote has been taken yet.
Selling the facility would take off the books roughly $40,000 a year the borough pays for utilities, insurance, and maintenance for the old school building. But if the property was put up for public auction, Four Winds president Julie Korsmeyer said the group wouldn’t be able to compete. “We don’t have the money to buy this building,” Korsmeyer said. “If it goes out for public bid, we’re screwed.”
That public bid, however, isn’t the only option. One middle ground that has been proposed at the assembly level is to give the portion of the property with the school building and garden to Four Winds for free. They would then be on the hook for raising annual upkeep funds, and the rest of the property – undeveloped, swampy hillside – would be auctioned off.
That’s a proposal that could keep the community center running; Korsmeyer said Four Winds “might be able to get enough support” to make it work. Assembly member Mark Smith, who first proposed the sale, said he would vote for that arrangement.
But instead of a happy compromise, that middle ground has uncovered a deeper disagreement about what upper-valley residents deserve from their borough government.
Smith earlier this week described his proposal as “the good of the many outweighing the good of the few,” and said he took issue with borough tax revenue being used on the community center.
“I don’t want to fix a building that’s just being used for a small group of people,” Smith said.
Smith said the measure is not intended to “pick on” the group. In fact, Smith went out of his way to recognize the amount of volunteer work that has gone into building the community center, calling it “a very active, very effective non-profit, [who] are very good at getting money.” To Smith, the volunteer infrastructure means the facility could continue to run after borough divestment.
But community center volunteers have widely disagreed, saying their work should spur the borough to do more, not less.
“Volunteers are doing the borough’s job for them, managing the facility and doing maintenance,” said Jim Stanford, who has for decades helped maintain the property.
Korsmeyer echoed Stanford, saying the borough has an obligation to provide services to upper valley residents, just the same as in-town residents.
“We’re part of the borough, we pay taxes. This is part of the [assembly] constituency,” said Korsmeyer.
For Korsmeyer, Stanford, and other volunteers, having the borough facility at Mosquito Lake represents a return on paying taxes. That includes the quality-of life-improvements, they said, but not just quality-of-life improvements.
The community center is equipped to serve as a disaster preparedness center, stocked with emergency supplies and cots. And collaboration with the Salvation Army and the food security program delivers material assistance for more individual challenges. That, Stanford argued on Sunday, is a matter of public safety.
Upper-valley residents will have the opportunity to make that pitch to assembly members face-to-face next month. On August 11, the assembly will travel out of its usual chambers up to the resource center, where members will hold a joint meeting with the planning commission.
Where exactly the two bodies stand on the issue is unclear. But the odds for a borough sale of the facility may have shifted on Sunday, with mayor Tom Morphet pledging to veto any assembly vote to sell the property.
That was the first time Morphet has used, or pledged to use, his veto power since he was elected mayor, he said afterward.
“With little more than willpower and sweat equity, the people of Mosquito Lake have built a community asset from a mothballed school at minimal cost,” Morphet said in a statement.
“The Mosquito Lake School and Community Center is a borough asset that more than pays for itself.”