Editor’s note: This year the Chilkat Valley News partnered with KHNS on its election coverage in addition to hosting two candidate forums. A playlist of these profiles, as they are posted, can be found here.
You can find KHNS’ coverage, including audio-only excerpts of these conversations here.
We’re hosting a forum for assembly candidates on Friday, Sept. 25 at 6:30 p.m. in the Chilkat Center. It will also air live on KHNS, 102.3 locally.
Will Steinfeld: All right, Diana Lapham, thanks for joining me in the KHNS studio. You first ran for office, tell me if I’m wrong, around a decade ago?
Diana Lapham: Yeah, pretty much. It was 2013. I ran as a write-in, and I won. I was so afraid. I was so scared of the job. But Stephanie Scott was the mayor, and she was an excellent mentor. She helped me out in a lot of rough patches, and the thing that hit me the worst was I have to vote in front of these people, but you kind of get over that. It was an interesting run. I learned a lot. I ran again in 2016. I lost, and when I did lose, I then turned around, and I started putting in for committees. And slowly but surely, I wound up sitting on every committee, including the planning and zoning, all at the same time. And there was nothing in code that prevented me from doing that. And on some of these committees, it was that they needed somebody to make a quorum in order to do business, and I thought, I’ve got the time, I can do it, and it was really interesting how they all, at some point, interwork with each other. It was amazing. I’d sit in some meetings, tourism advisory board and public safety, and then all of a sudden these two are meshing together. It gave me a wonderful overview of the borough, how the borough works, how these committees work, what the public is saying, because as you well know, the public can come to these committee meetings, and they are not as rigid with rules as the assembly meeting or the planning meeting, and they can talk freely. You know, we can have a nice conversation. So, yeah, it was an excellent learning experience.
You’ve clearly put in your time. Tell me why this year you’ve decided you want to run for assembly.
Well, that’s a really good question, and I’ve thought of that, and it hasn’t been that I’ve gotten tons of people asking me, “Oh, are you going to run? Are you going to run?” Actually, it was, I’m ready. It was just one of those, lightning bolt moments that said, “I’m ready, and my philosophy on this is: if I win, fantastic, I’ll give it 110%. If I lose, I still win because I’ll still keep my Ports and Harbors Committee, which I’m on, and I might get on a couple more committees. So I’m not closing the door down, but I would like to bring my perspective back to the assembly, and because I’ve got all this institutional knowledge now, I believe I can do a good job.
Yeah, that was one of the things I was curious about because I do think we have a mix of newer and older candidates, people with less experience and more experience. Do you feel like the town and the borough have changed in significant ways since you first started serving in public office?
I don’t want this to sound negative because new ideas are good, but when you take on a new idea, and let me use the planning commission as a for instance, you know, I had one year left on the planning commission, and then it went to an elected board, and by doing that, you took off all your institutional knowledge off the planning commission. So these people that are coming on, yes, they’re new and they’ve got great ideas, but you still have to go by code. You know there are rules and regulations that you have to go by, and things that are set up within the borough itself, the policies you have to abide by, and that was kind of lost. And I believe if there had been a few people, a couple, say like, half the board, three people left on there, they could have been a good mentoring relationship going on with the new people that came on. And a lot of times, when new people are put in a position like that, that’s an empowered board, and that means they can make decisions. Sometimes it doesn’t necessarily have to go before the assembly, and there’s a lot of frustration, a lot of angst, and, in my opinion, a mentor can help guide you through that and give you the different perspectives. I will. I am not hard line left, hard line right. I am neither one of those. I am right down the middle, and I see advantages to both sides. I just, I think where I can shine is being able to bring both sides in the middle and make a good decision.
To me it sounds like you’re kind of talking about some ways the government can function process-wise, beyond just the votes, the yes or no. I’m wondering if there’s anything you’ve seen from this current assembly in the past year, past two years, where you think you could have fit in there, been the puzzle piece they needed to do something differently.
You know, anybody can be an armchair quarterback. But when you’re sitting in those seats, it is difficult. It’s intimidating. Let me just give you an example. There were times that I would do my research. I would come in having an idea of kind of how I was going to vote. Somebody in the audience will stand up, and they’ll speak to it, and their perspective absolutely threw me over. And it’s hearing that one perspective, like I never even thought of that, to have someone be open-minded enough to to acknowledge that, and then to change their mind and vote differently, is what I think we need to search for.
I’ve seen it maybe once, or two times recently. Not often. You know, we’ve had some. There are some contentious issues out there, and nobody likes to be wrong. And it’s sad because the only people that are going to suffer for this are the residents. You know, the people that sit on the dais are never held financially accountable or responsible for their decisions. They’re protected, but I have to be able to sleep at night, and so when I do my researching, I talk to a lot of people, a lot of different people, and just get a good baseline. I’ll leave it at that. A good baseline, because when you do come in and you sit down, and again you listen to the public comment or the hearing, people speaking to the ordinance, there can always be that one time and that one person that comes in and absolutely blows you out of the water because you never thought of that.
Can you think of a specific issue, either when you were sitting on a board or just in the audience, where you felt like you heard new information and it changed your view?
No, I can’t, because when you’re up on the dais, you’re focused so heavily on what it is you’re doing, what is on the agenda. You’re focused on the people that are speaking. You’re focused on the information. You’re listening. You’re listening to your contemporaries debate, debate the topic, and you throw your debate in the mix. And if somebody were to ask me, “Do you really agree with what you just said,” right after I walked out, it’s like, “I don’t know, what did I say?”
It isn’t until maybe the next day where when you go home, you don’t just turn it off. I mean, you’re having it go around and around and around in your head, and God, could I have done better? Could I’ve said something? You always want to be the one that has the statement that just stops everybody dead in their tracks and makes them go, oh my God, she’s right. You know, that doesn’t happen very rarely, but as far as I know, what I’ve voted on, do I have some regrets on my votes? Yeah, oh yeah I do. And the only excuse I have is I think I got caught up in the discussion. It was the inexperience of it all, and now with the experience behind me, I don’t get caught up so easily anymore.
I’m very interested in hearing more about your experience and some of this stuff. So I want to circle back on it, but I wanted to, before we get too far, I wanted to kind of zoom out and talk economy a little bit. I want to start as broad as possible before we jump in; Do you feel like you have some kind of vision, say, 20 years from now, you can snap your fingers and turn Haines’ economy, whatever that means to you, into whatever you’d like. Do you have a vision for what you’d like that to be, and do you think that’s important for assembly members to have?
Yes, I do. Incredibly important. I mean, we spend the dollars to make a new comprehensive plan, and that’s our guide until 2035, and the assembly had better have that long range thinking as well. My vision for Haines, and and I’ve always thought this Haines could be the poster child for an economy in Alaska. We’re small enough. We have resources. We have the people. We have the entertainment part. We have the blue collar part. It’s all here.
These people want to work, but they need a year round industry. We. My vision is a diverse economy, not to have all the eggs into the tourism basket. I grew up in Sitka. That was my job throughout high school. I worked for tours. I worked for Alaska Airlines for many years. So I’ve always been tourism related based, but to have a diverse economy where you still have something going on in the fall, in the winter, in the spring, is so very important.
I just heard this the other day: we only have seven kindergartners. Our preschool is shutting down. That’s horrible. I mean that is, it’s unconscionable. We should not let this be happening. We should be working hard to help these people, help these young families to stay here by giving them a year-round economy.
Do you think that’s something the assembly has the power to do? How active of a role do you think the assembly plays in getting to that point?
The assembly has a very powerful role in it, even with the things that come through the planning commission, as far as new development, new lands, are we going to put lands up for sale? The final yea or nay is from the assembly. So by opening up these things — you know, I can remember years ago, Will, people saying we need to say Haines is open for business, but nobody would say it by their actions. It was always making it as incredibly difficult as possible for people to even build a house. And we’ve got to court and bring these people on board. Haines may not have the best reputation in all of Alaska, but we’ve got to come full circle.
Who do you think, if you’re on the assembly, you would go and try and court? And what does it mean to go and court someone?
I would like to hear more about (Global Ports Holding), as far as taking over the (Port Chilkoot) dock. I would like to read the RFQP. From the onset, it appears to be very well written. The PC dock is an enterprise fund under the borough, and to have someone with the potential of taking that over and running it, and then still having the borough have a yea or a nay on it, I think is very critical. The people are still tied to it. They still, you know, they can guide more or less. It relieves funds for the borough to go to do something else. You know, put those funds somewhere else.
Which funds? The ones that would go towards dock maintenance, or what kinds of funds?
This is just talking off the top of my head — I could see the PC enterprise fund going more into the harbor, more into Lutak. The PC Enterprise Fund itself, I don’t know what the rules and regulations are on it, but it would seem it doesn’t make quite enough sense to go and turn it into paving a road, right? You know, I think because so many funds are earmarked specifically for specific jobs, something like that, you know. And we have another dock coming up, Lutak Dock, that is going to take more funding.
Do you think there are other opportunities like Global Ports in other industries to get to that year-round economy? Do you think Global Ports is the way to get to a year-round economy?
You know, I don’t know. I don’t know without looking at the specifics. I wish I had that crystal ball. I really do. But I I think it bears trying it out because we don’t know what we don’t know.
And if I can just throw this in, my late husband was a (Alaska Department of Transportation) foreman, and the state wanted to pave Mud Bay Road. The pushback, oh my God, don’t pave the road! It was horrible to drive out there, just horrible. And the state, in their infinite wisdom, chip coated it anyway. In a year’s time, there was a little wear on the side of the road. Again, Pete got inundated with phone calls: “Oh, Pete, the road is falling apart. You got to get out here and fix it.”
The point of that is, they were so dead set against it, afraid of it, did not want it, but after they had it, they realized, “oh my God, this is so nice driving on. It’s saving our cars. I don’t have nearly the flat tires that I had. It’s easy to maintain in the winter time.” And then, “oh my gosh, it’s starting to wear now. We got to stay on top of it and keep it in good shape.” That’s what I mean by that crystal ball attitude. Without us trying it, we’re never going to know.
And from what I have understood, you know the contract can be two, three years, one year. I don’t know, but you know, let’s give it a try and see if it works. The retail businesses I have heard, they would love to have a ship in here every day. That doesn’t mean 6000 (passengers), one at the dock and two out in the water, but, you know, there can be some control on that. But for them and by doing that, that brings the domino effect of another business in.
We used to have pack horses do trips, tours around town. The pack horses were in my front yard, basically in the field in front of my house. It was wonderful, you know, having that here, and of course, after 2000, everything went away. But it’s the domino effect of having the reliability, having the integrity to say, this is what we have, and yes, we’re not going to be changing it midstream. We’re going to go ahead with these rules and regulations that we have. If you have something that might be a little bit better, we’ll look at it and maybe incorporate it a year down the road.
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s interesting to hear you talk about that because I do think that it seems likely a new assembly will have to vote on this proposal pretty soon after they’re seated, unless it comes before that. So I think it’s timely.
I wanted to ask about sectors of the economy outside of tourism. Kind of what I was hearing from you before was a feeling that in the past there have been times where people with their actions didn’t show that they were “open for business.” What does it look like for you as an assembly member to be “open for business?” Is there a list of things you’d like to change in code? Is there a list of things you’d like to explore to be open for business?
Not yet. I would very much like to get the seat, then to go in there with a preconceived idea of, “I’m going to change this and this and this and this.” It does not work, and I’ve had that happen.
We’ve had that happen, like with the AlCan race, it went over to new organizers, and they changed everything, and it was a total, complete fiasco. So no, I know I only have three years, but I’d like to get in, get my feet on the ground, get the information that the assembly gets that the general public does not necessarily get, and just take it one bite at a time.
Yeah, I definitely hear you on the idea that you don’t want to, you know, have these preconceived notions of what the right thing to do is. I’m wondering if solutions aside, if you have an idea of what you think are the biggest problems the assembly is trying to solve right now. What you think is most important. Because I do feel like those issues will roll over to the new assembly, and I’m wondering what you see as your priorities there.
Very true. Priority is going to be Lutak Dock. It was in 2013 when Mr. Sosa, our then-manager, brought it to our attention that that dock is falling apart. Prior to that, again, I go back to my late husband, who took me out there and showed me two cells that had imploded. I mean, that’s a definite priority, and I feel that the dock is in qualified hands right now. I know there’s a special meeting on Tuesday because they can’t build it for the money we have, and I am hoping and I am praying hard that the assembly will just reduce the footprint of sorts, and this is my statement because I don’t know what that meeting is going to entail. I don’t know what kind of information they’re going to get, but I am hoping that the assembly will be amenable to saying, okay, we can reduce it a little bit. Because I think it is a little bit bigger than what they had originally thought.
And then you know, anyway, to work with Moffatt & Nichol, not to throw up roadblocks and say, no, we can’t do this. We can do anything we want. We need to get that dock repaired because, like it or not, if it is not repaired and that thing falls in the water, then you’ve got an environmental catastrophe. So you’ve got to pick your poison here.
One thing I heard from the Moffatt & Nichol engineers last week was, as they’ve tried to right size it and get the price of the design down, they’d gotten to a point where, they they seemed to say, we can’t shrink it any further and see cost savings. We’ve shrunk it as far as it can go. So, I could be wrong on that, but if that turns out to be the case, do you think that the borough should bond for this? What do you see the avenues being for a dock that really is just over budget and can’t be made cheaper?
That’s interesting, because I did not realize that, and bad on me if that was out in the public.
But I mean, you know, it sounds reasonable that they have gotten to a point where they just can’t make it any less expensive. I would want to know first if they have any ideas. They’re the experts, you know. What kind of ideas do you have? What can we do? We need a barge landing and we need a fuel landing. What do we do?
That seems to be kind of a sad situation because it doesn’t take anything away from the assembly to ask that kind of a question, but to go in there and think you have all the answers is what puts people off. And so far, all of the answers have put me off.
Working with Moffatt & Nichol, I think there’s a lack of trust. I see that a lot. Actually, I saw that on the prior assembly, and I see it a little bit on this assembly. To to get to an end product, you’ve got to have trust in your, your qualified people, your experts. Am I going to argue a point with them? No, I’m going to trust them that they’ve got our best interest at heart, and that trust is lacking here.
I wanted to make sure we cover budgets before we go. I’ll give a little bit of background for people watching: the borough last year spent somewhat significantly from savings in their annual budget. There were a bunch of cutbacks in state and federal funding. This year, we’re spending much less from savings, but still drawing a little from the borough’s savings account to pay for the stuff that the government is paying for. Do you think that spending needs to go down, or do you think it’s okay where it’s at right now?
I think definitely spending needs to go down. There needs to be — and again — it’s easy to be an armchair quarterback on that, but to track how money is spent in the budget is a fascinating thing. Now they’ve gotten cliff notes in the budget, and those were actually put in in 2013 at that assembly’s request, because we didn’t know — it would show up over here, but we didn’t know that it came from over there. So anyway, I think to really know the budget is to get a real good grip, a real good handle on this community. There are going to be certain things that just will not be funded. That can’t be funded.
Do you have ideas about where we might cut?
Well, again, the low hanging fruit has always been the nonprofits, and I’m going to put that out there. It’s not saying that I would cut the nonprofits because there are many good nonprofits. They’re all good in this community, but we can’t afford them. You know, we have to prioritize what we’re going to fund, what we aren’t going to fund.
It’s like on taking over the lot at Third and Main, I was so confused, because we’ve got this lot that if put on the payroll or the tax roll could be bringing in a significant amount of funds into the borough. To take it off the tax roll forever and make it a park? You’re losing that. Plus, if you want to put infrastructure on it, the borough then is liable for that infrastructure to take care of it. It’s a quandary, and yes, it all looks nice and it would make people happy, but really, do we really need that?
Yeah, when you mention nonprofits, I think that’s a hot topic. This assembly has made pretty significant cuts to nonprofits. That was one of the first things to go from their budget. If that stays the same, do you think there’s anywhere else you see that could be cut from the budget?
I don’t know, you know, because then I would be looking at that budget. I look at certain things in the budget pretty closely, but I would be looking at that budget as a whole and tracking where X goes to Z, you know, how this all lays out, but I don’t know.
This has been great, and I’m glad that there are more forums to come and more opportunities for people to talk with you and hear your perspective. I wanted to throw one last question at you: the explanation for it is, sometimes I hear people up on the dais at assembly meetings say, “my constituents,” or “the people I talk to,” and I’m wondering if, if you’re elected, who in your head are your constituents? Who are you representing, and do you think there are people that are underrepresented currently?
Yes, I do, and I’m representing everyone, even the people that didn’t vote for me, whether they like it or not, because the decisions I make will affect every resident in this community, whether it’s in the town side of the highway, Mud Bay, Lutak, you know, we are a community, and that’s how people have to look at this. We are a community, and there are going to be decisions that are made that I may not be happy with, but sometimes you have to be the bad guy, and it’s not that we’re deliberately targeting anyone. It’s just, it could be that there’s something better coming down the road, that we have to lay in place, and that’s the information that doesn’t necessarily get out to the general public, and until it’s time, you know, this is my community, and I am proud to represent everyone here. And I have had people, I have had Lutak, Townsite, Mud Bay, highway people at my house having tea and and discussing things, and it’s been wonderful because the one basic thing is there are times where we can agree to disagree, and walk away, still acknowledging to each other that we may not be bosom buddies, but we can talk, and that is so critical. It’s not easy. Nobody has that one-two punch up there, so yeah, I represent everybody.
Well, thank you, Diana, for coming in here, and thank you for putting in the time to run for office.