It’s mid-morning on a Sunday in early July and Julie Korsmeyer has given up on a posthole digger. Instead, she kneels down and sticks her arm deep into the ground of the Mosquito Lake baseball field, to clear the last of the dirt out of the way for a wooden fencepost.
Nearby, Jim and Deb Stanford worked to get a trailer carrying a concrete mixer hooked up to an ATV and maneuver it into position so volunteers could start shoveling concrete into the holes to anchor the fenceposts.
The group was putting the finishing touches on upgrades to Emerson Field, part of a park that sits at the entrance of the Mosquito Lake Road leading into the community.
Jim Stanford, who has been pushing for maintenance and upkeep of the field for years, rattles off a quick history of the park. He said it’s named for Fred Emerson, a logger who lived on the property 40 years ago. After he died, a group of volunteers turned about three acres of his property into a park, which includes the baseball field and a paved area for a tennis court.
But after Emerson died, Klehini Land, which owned the property, threatened to sell.
“We went ‘What? We’ve just spent hundreds and hundreds of volunteer hours building a ballfield,” he said.
So the group approached then-borough mayor Jerry Lapp and the assembly, who agreed to buy it. It was later turned into a borough park and covered with liability insurance.
“What’s amazing about this was we had liberals and conservatives working side by side to build this thing,” he said.
Stanford said he has mowed it in the summer for years, watching as the chain-link fence for the backstop degraded into jagged edges of metal, the brush overtook first and third bases and the field became riddled with ankle-breaking holes in the dirt.
“Parks and Recreation came out and looked at it once and said somebody is going to get hurt horribly,” he said. “Still, nothing done.”
The borough did place boulders around the park perimeter to keep out cars and four-wheelers that Stanford said were regularly driving through the field and tearing it up.
Eventually, the borough assembly designated about $474,000 on its capital improvement plan in the 2024 fiscal year for funds for improvements at parks in Haines, including Oslund Field in Haines and Mosquito Lake’s Emerson Field.
But Stanford said that money never materialized.
“I went through three separate facilities managers and still nothing,” he said. “So this year – the place was dangerous for kids and it was ridiculous, so I just decided to redo the ballpark.”
Stanford said he finally went into the borough admin office and talked to facilities director Brad Jensen, who said there was just about $13,000 left in an account dedicated to improvements to local parks.
“So I made a deal with Brad and he jumped on it. I said I’ll donate all the labor and equipment to rebuild this ballpark if you will buy me a backstop and maybe some fencing,” Stanford said. “He went for it, so we did it.”
It’s an aspirational project – the group is rebuilding the field because they want children to have a safe place to play.
Stanford carved two large wooden signs, one that reads Emerson Field and another, smaller one that hangs below it that reads “Home of the Skeeters.” Something that could perhaps be used by a future Little League team, or any sport for that matter, he said.
“I’m hoping it’s a team that exists out here. I think everybody stopped using the field because of the dangerous condition it was in,” he said.
Some in the group see the saga of improvements to the field as yet another indicator that the borough prioritizes spending in Haines over other parts of the Chilkat Valley.
“We keep saying ‘Well , we pay taxes. We don’t have any services and yet we pay taxes and they want to sell the school and not give us this or that. It’s like, come on, we’re part of the borough,” Korsmeyer said.
Stanford said he sees a younger group of people moving into Mosquito Lake and wants to set an example.
“If you want something, you’re going to have to pitch in to do it because the borough government, for whatever reason, won’t do it,” he said.
He also sees a deeper issue: all across the country local governments are overwhelmed, public services are being cut either due to dwindling budgets or a lack of manpower and public spaces are suffering because of it.
“I think that’s what’s happening here. Not only did we have a rapid turnover of facilities managers – you know Brad Jensen inherited over 100 projects that hadn’t been done,” he said. “It isn’t because the workers in town don’t get the job done. With that turnover in administration, things get dropped.”
He sees the solution as an army of volunteers who can and should take up where the government has failed. It’s something he thinks the Chilkat Valley excels at.
“Look at the volunteers in the community. From the fair to ballgames to the community foundation [they’re] providing services for people. Look at the fire departments, the ambulance crews, they wouldn’t exist without volunteers.”