Will Steinfeld with the Chilkat Valley News is back in the studio with KHNS’ Melinda Munson to get Haines ready for Tuesday’s borough Assembly meeting. The Assembly will be presented with Lutak Dock options, severance tax, plastic bag legislation, and more. 

Melinda Munson: Will, the assembly is being presented with the current options for the Lutak Dock, and they have two recommendations in front of them. Tell us about that.

Will Steinfeld: I think it’s kind of a momentous thing that’s going on here. It’s been many weeks, months, years, even, of people hearing about the Lutak Dock and considering all these different factors. What kind of dock do they want? What’s the process for getting it built? And recently, it’s been a lot of kind of intermediary work going back and forth with the borough’s consultants from Moffatt and Nichol, the engineering firm…

But here at Tuesday’s meeting, the Assembly is … scheduled, to make a decision on what broad design concept they want to move forward with. So there’s three on the table. It’s not a detailed engineering design yet, but it’s three different styles of dock construction… 

And whichever one the Assembly chooses here, it’s not necessarily a final decision in the sense that they’re certainly building that one. But it’s going to be the dock concept that the contractors, the borough’s consultants, start putting more work in and developing and trying to get out the bid at the end of this summer. 

Coming into the meeting, two borough bodies, the Planning Commission and the Ports and Harbors Advisory Committee, have each made recommendations for which of these three concepts they think the Assembly should move forward with. 

 And while all these bodies, including the Assembly, are using the same criteria to evaluate these dock concepts, the two bodies that have made decisions or made recommendations so far have each recommended different things. So we’ll see what kinds of qualities the Assembly chooses to prioritize, and where they eventually come down.

Okay, Will. Tell us about last meeting. There were only four assembly members that participated in the meeting. So what did that mean?

It was kind of a weird situation, procedurally, since there are only four assembly members to get the four votes to pass any of the legislation that was on the table. Or really do anything. Amend it, send it to committee, any of these actions that require a majority vote, in this case, required a unanimous vote of all four members who are present. That gave each person sitting at the dais basically a veto. If they voted no, the thing was going to die. 

So two pieces of legislation that the Assembly had been considering for a few weeks were voted down. One was adding language to the borough’s plastic bag ban that some Assembly members hoped would clarify the legislation eliminate stores using plastic bags in town. And the other was a severance tax to tax raw materials being exported from the borough, like timber or gravel and sand. 

Both of those are back on the agenda for this week. So it’s kind of old things made new again, and they’re going to have to start all the way back at the start of the legislative process. They’re up to be introduced for a first public hearing, even though at the last meeting they were up for a final vote. I think we’ll hear more about the procedure of this, maybe from the clerk at the meeting. But I think it’s kind of a way to reconsider these pieces of legislation from the start.

The one that has some changes is the severance tax. There are actually two proposals. One is the prior proposal that was being considered, and one is an adjusted proposal from assembly member Mark Smith. The difference with Smith’s would be his removes timber from taxation. It also halves the rate of tax for gravel and sand, and it recommends that the borough use a payment in lieu of tax for mineral ore instead of severance tax.

Finally, there was a petition with over 500 signatures to pause sales tax, because people are feeling that everything is just so expensive. Tell us what happened after that petition came out, and what the muni’s response was to that.

I think the number of signatures really made an impact on the Assembly, at least from what I’ve seen in the past year or so. It’s pretty rare to get that much public support behind something. And assembly members, I think across the board, have said, ‘Hey, we really hear you on this. We think we see costs are going up. We want to try and do something about it.’ But that something is hard to say, exactly what the mechanism might be. 

And so last meeting, what assembly members decided to do was have a town hall where people could come in. And the mayor said, you know, ‘It’s important for us to actually hear what specific struggles people have before we decide what the best way to try and address those is.’ 

Unfortunately, last week, at said town hall there was only one member of the public in the room, and maybe two or three or a couple more online. So, it ultimately just ended up kind of being a discussion forum for assembly members who are there. And there was actually only a couple assembly members there.