After finishing a year-long term on the assembly, Richard Clement is running again — this time for a three-year term.
During Clement’s tenure on the assembly, the borough has seen major re-staffing in the borough administration, including a new manager, clerk, planner, and police chief. That’s a boon for getting things done, Clement said, and his reelection is about maintaining momentum. With a team in place, he hopes to make progress on issues like borough land sales, infrastructure maintenance, and housing.
“This (year) was the rebuilding year, and now it’s really time to get to work and get things done,” Clement said.
But amid the positive momentum, Clement has focused on what he sees as a serious problem in the community: local disinformation. At a recent candidate forum, he called it the “single biggest issue” that motivated him to enter the political arena. And he isn’t referring just to disagreements stemming from different perspectives, either. Rather, Clement hopes to call out what he said is the intentional, knowing, spreading of incorrect facts — about the Lutak Dock rebuild, and on other issues as well.
That problem, in his eyes, has come from a specific group of residents.
“There is a group of people in town that are essentially isolationists and don’t want the town to prosper. They want a small community that is very disconnected,” he said.
Clement gave as examples debates on whether the Lutak Dock design and Porcupine Road repairs were meant to facilitate mining.
As for the motivation for the alleged spreading of disinformation, Clement attributed it to selfishness. That assessment could be a tough pill to swallow. Different perspectives offer a hypothetical middle ground; selfishness as the root cause doesn’t exactly offer as clear a path forward.
Clement acknowledged that, and said he didn’t have a plan beyond the fact-finding he said he has done this past assembly term.
“It’s really tough because I’ve tried to talk to the folks who believe in these rumors, and they just believe in them,” Clement said. “They don’t like getting challenged about their beliefs.”
“We will always have a lot of dissenting voices. We just need to make sure we have verified facts out there to base our decisions on,” he added.
When Clement talks about the disinformation issue, it centers around what he describes as conflicting visions for the borough’s economic future. And while he described the state of the discourse in dire terms, he said his own vision wasn’t a major change to the status quo.
“When I look at Haines, I see it as a connecting point. We’re one of three Southeast towns that are connected on a road, and we can take advantage of that,” Clement said. The amount of commerce is currently greater than some might imagine, he argued, pointing to fuel shipments from Haines to Whitehorse.
Clement, however, stressed that he sees Haines as a logistics and trade hub, not a site for major heavy industry. He doesn’t want to “go back to the ‘60s or ‘70s when (Haines) had a lot of logging going on.” Rather, he sees Haines as a connection point to the interior. In other words, keeping Haines’ economic profile roughly the same as it is right now, he said. Major new borough infrastructure builds, outside of rebuilding the dock, are not part of that vision, Clement said.
As for the hot-button mining discussion, Clement said it wasn’t relevant to the assembly.
“That’s all state or federal land, and forces outside of the Haines Borough are going to make decisions that we’re going to have to live with,” Clement said.
Going forward, even though he said he has been frustrated by some of the discourse, Clement pitched himself as a listener. “I don’t vote my beliefs, I really try to listen to people and translate what they say into what I vote on,” Clement said.
With talks about the sale of the Mosquito Lake School, Clement said he initially saw the facility as costly, aging infrastructure. But after a special assembly meeting at the school, he said he was impressed by the level of community investment he saw.
“Instead of just coming down with this hammer that says, you’re going to sell all your land – that strong-arm approach – I think there’s something to be worked out with those folks, and I never realized that opportunity before,” Clement said.
That’s the kind of shift in thinking he said he’s open to in another assembly term.
“I replay every assembly meeting and listen to the public comments, especially,” Clement said.“I like to remind people, we are flexible in the borough, we do change the course that we take and decisions we make based on what people say.”