The Haines Borough Assembly needs a new home or improvements to its current chambers, leaders said after Tuesday’s meeting, where more than 40 people forced into the hallway by overcrowding outnumbered the 38 audience members inside.

It was the third time in as many months that citizens attending an assembly meeting were left standing in the hallway outside. After crowded meetings last fall, police chief Gary Lowe has been enforcing a fire marshal’s restriction of 45 occupants maximum in the chambers.

“I wasn’t given any direction by anyone. There were general discussions about the room being crowded. It’s an important thing that the fire marshal takes seriously. I know it’s a hazard,” Lowe said this week.

On Tuesday, only a few people near the chambers’ front door were able to hear the proceedings inside. Katey Palmer was one of the residents left in the hallway. The chambers filled up and Palmer and others were turned out before the meeting started.

“This doesn’t seem like an adequate environment for a public hearing. We can’t hear at all. I’m pretty disturbed at that,” Palmer told the assembly.

Most in the crowd came for an assembly discussion of expanding helicopter skiing.

Some residents standing in the hall grumbled that non-residents were taking up seating, and some who got seats in the chambers gave them up so others there for business at the top of the meeting’s agenda could get in.

In an interview following the meeting, Mayor Jan Hill, who oversees assembly meetings as chair, acknowledged that crowd overflow is a problem.

“I can’t just change the meeting place. The meeting place has to be noticed. I don’t have the luxury of just changing it,” Hill said, referring to open meetings law restrictions.

In terms of scheduling meetings at other locations in advance, it’s difficult to predict when a larger crowd will attend a meeting, she said.

A new assembly chambers would be one way around the problem, Hill said. She also voiced support for a suggestion that a loudspeaker broadcasting the meeting be placed in the hallway outside as an interim measure.

“The other side of it is that when the meeting ended, we only had three or four people in the audience,” Hill said.

Deputy Mayor Jerry Lapp said the chambers were too small for some meetings even when Haines was divided into two governments, prior to 2002. Lapp said the assembly needs a room that holds at least 100 people, and suggested a close-circuit TV might be placed in the hallway.

The borough last fall renovated the chambers, including new windows, carpeting, paint and dais improvements, at a cost of about $5,500. The room on the south side of the firehall has served as the local government meeting site more than 30 years.