Lutak Dock
Good news on the Lutak Dock has been hard to come by in recent years, but there seemed to be some of it last month when interim manager Alekka Fullerton announced the borough and dock contractor Turnagain Marine had agreed on a new design concept that would fit within the borough’s budget. That high-level outline for a new build earned a unanimous vote of approval from the assembly.
But now, just as quickly as the new design came together, it has fallen apart. Fullerton said Tuesday that Turnagain has deemed the new design concept – one that it helped create – too expensive for the borough’s budget.
That was a surprise, given that last month, Fullerton described the new concept as one both the borough and Turnagain were on-board with. And, Fullerton said at the time, the new plan was intentionally conservative.
“Turnagain understands we do not have the money for overruns,” Fullerton said in June. But now it seems the plan wasn’t conservative enough.
Turnagain will be sending a new design concept this week with a reduced number of encapsulated cells, Fullerton said. That means it will be smaller than the previous one, which harbormaster Henry Pollan described last month as “the smallest useful footprint.”
Fullerton also said she was waiting on a final number from Turnagain on exactly how far beyond-budget last month’s plan was projected to be. Depending on the price, one option, Fullerton said, could be to try to find additional funding to cover the gap.
The borough is currently planning to pay for the bulk of the project using a $20 million federal infrastructure grant it was awarded in 2021. If the assembly does not want to find additional funding, it will have to decide whether to accept the updated, smaller concept.
As for what changed regarding the cost estimate in the past three weeks, Fullerton said Turnagain hadn’t given her any answers.
“I was surprised and deeply disappointed,” Fullerton said. “They have other people who do the money side of it, I guess, that we weren’t really talking to.”
Turnagain Marine president Jason Davis did not respond to a request for more information.
Cell Towers
In the past year, borough officials and staff have explored multiple avenues for regulating new and controversial cell-tower construction. There has been pressure from residents who believe the cell towers could harm their health, and from companies that say the borough has a legal imperative to review permits in a timely fashion.
The situation was further complicated this spring when it was discovered that borough code wasn’t clear on how towers in certain zones of town should be permitted. For commercially zoned areas, one section of code mandated a conditional use permit; in another only a far less stringent land-use permit was required.
Now, the assembly has introduced an ordinance rewriting code governing cell towers, meant to clarify the whole permitting process in one go.
The new legislation would require all new cell towers, in any area of town, to go through a conditional use permit process.
That means public hearings will be held for all cell-tower permit applications. After public hearings are completed, the planning commission would vote on whether the application meets a set of eight requirements, including one that requires that projects “not be harmful to the public safety, health, or welfare.”
That could complicate matters for planning commissioners, as current opponents of new cell towers contend they are harmful to public health.
Besides just changing tower permitting, the proposal would also impose new restrictions on cell-tower siting.
Those would include a requirement that new towers be at least 1,000 feet away from any residence, school, day-care center, playground or youth center. Towers must also be set back from property lines by at least a distance equal to the height of the tower. As currently written, existing towers would be grandfathered into the new requirements.
Historical preservation changes
Besides cell-tower code changes, there were a whole slew of new ordinances introduced Tuesday that will have public hearings during assembly meetings over the next month.
The most controversial ordinance introduced Tuesday was a proposal to reorganize a historic buildings advisory committee that currently exists in borough code, but has never existed in practice.
If the measure passes, the reorganized advisory body, called the Historic Preservation Commission, would allow Haines to qualify as a “Certified Local Government,” or CLG, which mayor Tom Morphet pitched as a no-cost tool to bring funding into the borough. In the region, Ketchikan, Sitka, and Juneau have Certified Local Government status, qualifying residents and local government for state and federal historic preservation grants that Haines cannot currently apply for. In Haines, funding could go towards restoring historic buildings in Fort Seward and in the downtown historic district.
“This is an attempt for us to address some of our historic buildings that are falling down,” Morphet said, as a pitch. “These big buildings are falling down. If this doesn’t work, we’re not out on anything, we can disband this thing.”
Assembly members, however, said they were concerned about possible unintended consequences. Those ranged from inviting new regulation, to increased burden on borough staff, to spending borough resources on fixing private properties.
Assembly members Gabe Thomas, Richard Clement, and Kevin Forster said they worried restrictions on modifying historical structure — including renovation, rebuilding, or tearing them down — could be unnecessarily restrictive.
“What happens is these buildings fall to the ground because no one can afford to preserve the buildings to the required standard,” Forster said.
Maria Lewis, the administrator of Alaska’s CLG program, tried to allay those fears. Lewis said any federal or state regulations on managing historical structures would be on an opt-in basis. Individual homeowners would choose whether to opt into a historical structures survey, and restrictions on restoration would only be applied to properties that chose to accept state or federal funding, Lewis said.
But even after Lewis’ comments, concerns remained, including about work the borough would be doing for privately-owned structures.
Buildings in Fort Seward and downtown are privately owned, and some questioned the nature of the relationship between the borough and those landowners.
“Why should the borough step in and provide grant money to a private homeowner?” Clement said.
Some of the grants available through CLG status are matching grants. That would mean the borough, or private landowners, would have to contribute, possibly in-kind through volunteer hours, grant administration time, or materials.
“I also need to understand the flowchart of who’s responsible to do what. If we’re going to sign off on this, we have a capacity issue in our small borough. To just say, this sounds great, let’s do it, and then we have to hire another staff person to manage it, that’s not going to serve us very well as a borough,” said assembly member Cheryl Stickler.
In the end, much of the debate centered around trying to understand the specifics of the program. Assembly members agreed that they needed more information, and also that they wanted to see a bigger show of support from entities like the Port Chilkoot Company that could benefit from possible grant money. Forster, who voted in favor of introducing the ordinance, made a pitch that was well received on the dais:
“I’m not guaranteeing my [final vote on the issue], but [introducing the ordinance] gives people the opportunity to speak to it,” Forster said. “And if no one comes, then I might have a different vote in two meetings.”
Eliminating dead storage
The historical preservation changes are now just one among a large slate of ordinances awaiting final votes in the next month. One of those is an ordinance that imposes penalties on “dead storage” boats that sit in harbor slips without being operated or sailed.
Harbormaster Henry Pollan described them as a potential liability. “Boats just sit there and deteriorate, and eventually they sink,” said Pollan prior to Tuesday’s meeting. “If you have a big steel boat with 300 gallons of diesel that sinks, then we have a serious environmental disaster on our hands, and an economic one too because the harbor shuts down.”
Currently, the harbormaster has little enforcement power when it comes to dead-storage boats. The new ordinance, recommended by Pollan, would require each boat moored in the harbor to sail out of the harbor under their own power at least twice each year, with at least 50 days between each trip.
If boats don’t comply, they’ll see a 50% moorage rate increase. On top of that, dead-storage boat owners will have to prove they have a protection and indemnity insurance policy and a major pollution liability policy, both of which must name the borough as additional insured. Neither type of insurance, Pollan said, is currently common among vessels in the harbor. Failure to meet the insurance requirements will be an additional $100 monthly fee.
Pollan said the legislation follows regulations in place in Homer and Petersburg, harbors he called two of the best-run in the state.
Seasonal Sales Tax
The assembly also held the first set of public hearings on a seasonal sales tax proposal for the October ballot. If approved, voters will then decide whether it goes into place.
The general concept has been much-discussed, upping sales tax in the summer to capture more revenue in the busy months, while giving a corresponding tax break in the winter for year-round residents. The specifics, however, are still not settled. And the current plan endorsed by the assembly, to raise summer taxes and exempt non-prepared groceries in the winter, drew criticism from members of the public Tuesday.
Part of the criticism was directed at the summer tax increase, which some said would be more of a burden on year-rounders than the assembly was anticipating.
Public commenters Barbara Nettleton and Cindy Jones argued that year-round residents, too, spent more in the summer, on recreation, building projects, and preparation for winter. Under that logic, a tax decrease in the winter, even if it were equal in percentage to a summer increase, would mean year-rounders would still be seeing an overall tax increase.
Nettleton, commenter Karen Hess, and mayor Tom Morphet all said that while they were critical of the specifics, they were supportive to varying degrees of the overall concept.
The three different people offered three different solutions: Nettleton suggested expanding winter tax exemptions beyond just non-prepared groceries, and Karen Hess proposed giving year-round residents a card that would exempt them from the summer increase. Morphet said he preferred a plan to increase the tax by 1% in the summer, and decrease by 1% in the winter. Compared to exemptions on various goods, Morphet said his alternative, because of simplicity, “stands the best chance of approval by voters.”