The July 14 Haines Borough Assembly meeting will cover the borough’s appeal over a Board of Equalization decision, a possible update to conditional use permit code and plastic bags – again. KHNS’ Melinda Munson spoke with Will Steinfeld from the Chilkat Valley News to cover the details.
Melinda Munson: Something that might take up a lot of the time for Tuesday’s meeting is the board of equalization issue. Go ahead and take that away, Will.
The Episcopal Church in town has this property at around one mile of the highway, and it’s been tax exempt for a long time. And this year the borough’s assessor removed that exemption, and it was appealed to the Board of Equalization.
And now the borough is appealing what the Board of Equalization decided, which was to grant the exemption. And so that borough appeal, where they’ve taken this to state superior court, is where the conflict or at least disagreement lies.
The borough has faced a whole bunch of criticism the past month or two over their decision to take this to court, but they are standing their ground. And now, the manager has presented a memo … where she’s giving a little more information on why the borough has decided to appeal this to Superior Court.
And so, some of the new information that we’re seeing this week is basically, the borough stands by its decision to not grant this exemption. And they’re doing it on the basis of what they say were basically errors by the Board of Equalization and how they conducted their hearing.
The manager, Alekka Fullerton, has cited instances in which one board member said he had done prior research, and in this case, it appears that it was when board member Jim Stanford said he had researched the relevant statute prior to the hearing, which the manager says is is against the rules for these board members.
She cited board members consulting AI. I think the general idea here is, while the board members feel like they conducted the hearing properly, the manager says this wasn’t done right, and that’s why we, in large part, want the court to overturn their decision.
Assembly member Sargent is presenting an ordinance regarding conditional use permits. Tell us about that.
I think it’s in a similar vein as the Board of Equalization issue, where it has to do with the borough being in court, either being sued or facing administrative appeals over permit decisions. Just just in general, finding themselves in court, and it’s something the borough is frustrated about too.
And something Assemblymember Sargent, who introduced this, as well as other borough officials, elected officials, have talked about, especially in the past year, is this idea that there might be a backdoor where people can get possibly more favorable permit outcomes by suing the borough.
So the way this argument goes is that generally, if you go to the Planning Commission, they deny your conditional use permit, and you appeal to the Assembly to overturn the Planning Commission’s decision. You need what’s called a super majority. You need five votes of the Assembly.
Whereas, if you sue the borough and you offer a settlement, that settlement to be approved only requires four votes. And so, some people say that four votes rather than five votes – it’s easier to just sue the borough, and it incentivizes people to take the borough to court.
So, whether or not you agree with that, Assembly member Sergeant is trying to change code to remove that back door that he sees. And the main way he’s doing that, based on how this ordinance is written, is requiring settlement agreements on these permits to require a supermajority as well for approval.
And plastic bags are back on the agenda again. Walk us through how the issue of plastic bags is reappearing on Tuesday’s agenda.
Yeah, plastic bags are back. We spent a lot of weeks on this earlier in the spring and in the summer. I don’t think this will be a complicated thing.
What’s being introduced is basically just taking that controversial section that kind of banned plastic bags in code, but maybe didn’t actually ban plastic bags, and just removing it altogether. If it’s introduced this week and then approved after public hearings, the borough would just have no more language in its code about plastic bags.