The Haines Borough Assembly on Tuesday is scheduled to consider an Alaska Mountain Guides application for a helicopter skiing permit, but a mayor-appointed work group has yet to make a recommendation on how permit approval would impact the boroughwide allocation of skier days.

A public hearing will be held.

“It seems premature,” said resident Rob Goldberg, one of nine members of the heli-skiing work group. “I would think that they would want to have the findings of the committee in place before granting another permit.”

The issue came up at the work group’s Dec. 6 meeting. “If the skier days stay the same, how will they divide it among three operators?” Goldberg asked.

AMG is requesting 600 skier-days in the 2011 season, or the same amount of user days as the other heli-skiing tour permit holders, with a maximum group size of eight.

Sean Gaffney of AMG is part of the heli-skiing work group that includes current heli-skiing tour operators Sean Brownell of Alaska Heliskiing and Scott Sundberg of Southeast Alaska Backcountry Adventures (SEABA).

AMG has offered heli-skiing in Skagway for more than a decade.

“It’s been our goal for many years to be able to have a substantial, year-round business presence in Haines, and this is certainly an opportunity that would allow us to do that,” Gaffney said.

AMG has plans for educational courses in leadership and guide training, plus guided heli-skiing day programs in the borough, with a focus on operations out of the airport.

Mayor Jan Hill said the work group was formed only to make recommendations to the assembly.

“The permitting part is the assembly’s decision, and I don’t think it’s really in the scope of what the committee is doing,” Goldberg said. “The committee can’t grant them a permit; that’s up to the assembly.”

At the work group’s first meeting in November, Gaffney shared his intent for AMG to expand its heli-skiing business from Skagway into the Haines Borough.

“It was in Skagway because of an effort to avoid conflict in Haines,” said Gaffney. He said Skagway is “a fantastic location” for skiing.

Gaffney said an assembly decision to delay approval of the permit application would be “a reasonable consideration given where the process is at” in the work group.

During the assembly’s most recent discussion of a proposed commercial skiing tour ordinance, a base limit of “no more than a total of 1,200 skier-days” was to be “authorized in an initial allocation of skier-days.” A skier-day is defined as “one individual skier or snowboarder participating in a commercial ski tour on one particular day or any portion of a day excluding guides” for a season that would run from Feb. 1 to May 3.

“If you get a third company in here and take that 1,200 and split it up even more, what it’s really doing is taking stuff away from people that have earned it,” Brownell said at Monday’s work group meeting in the assembly chambers.

Gaffney said assembly discussion of capping the number of heli-skiing permits “spurred us to apply at this time.”

“We recognize that the Borough Assembly is in the process of readdressing the permitting process and operating guidelines associated with helicopter skiing within the Borough,” he wrote in a letter included with the permit application. “We will change our operating plan as required to be in compliance with any new regulations established by the Borough.”

Borough clerk Julie Cozzi said she set the AMG public hearing for Tuesday without consulting the work group because “there’s nothing in code that prevents a person from making application for a permit at any time.”

Gaffney said he’s confident there is room for another heli-skiing operator in the borough, and he supports “leaving out controversial areas” as the work group makes revisions to a heli-skiing map. Gaffney said he also backs the use of global positioning system technology to track helicopter flight paths.

Flight paths are expected to be one of the topics at the work group’s next meeting 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 15, in the assembly chambers.

Goldberg, Brownell, Gaffney and Sundberg already have met to work on adjustments to the current heli-skiing map in the borough.

Mayor Hill had requested that Goldberg and Brownell form a map subcommittee, but she said other work group members were welcome to participate.

“There were a lot of areas where the ski run would start, and then halfway down the run, there would be the boundary, and we looked at those and tried to make the heli-ski boundary areas more realistic, so that you could actually complete the run and go to the bottom and get picked up without going outside the boundary,” Goldberg said.

He said other revisions mostly would be “new areas to the north and east of the highway, in an effort to try to take some of the pressure off the existing areas that are to the south and west of the highway.”

Goldberg noted the pressure would depend on whether skier-days are increased.

Daymond Hoffman, an assembly and work group member, said Tuesday he was undecided about supporting another heli-skiing permit.

“I’m going to be looking at it here this week, before it comes up, just to get some more information from AMG and try to put that together with what we’ve been doing with that working group,” he said.

Hoffman said he wants the work group and assembly to continue their emphasis on calmer discussion about heli-skiing.

“For a long time, it’s been this big issue, and I feel like we need to be able to talk about it,” he said. “More than anything, that’s what I’m working towards, is just making it so that we can bring it up without it blowing up.”