Rashah McChesney: Nick Szatkowski, thank you so much for joining me here in the KHNS studios. I really appreciate it.
Nick Szatkowski: I’m happy to be here. Thank you for for doing this. I think it’s a good service for the community.
Yeah, it’s a lot of things at once. Also, did you tell me you used to be the news director here, so people are hearing you for the first time?
I was the news reporter, and for some time, I was the only news reporter. So that made me the news director at that time, but I wasn’t like an official position. I wasn’t ranked above any other person in that role. But yeah, I did some reporting though.
Some day, I’m going to get every former journalist in this town to do an April Fool’s edition of the CVN with me.
It may not fit in one edition.
Shall we jump right in? I’ve got a whole list of questions, and I’ll leave a little bit at the end for you to tell me anything I’ve missed. I’m so curious. Since I got here in 2024, the planning commission-that was the first year they were an elected body, or they’d become an elected body-and I’m curious in your time watching the difference between an appointed planning commission and an elected planning commission, if you think the fact that it’s an elected body now has changed the way that land use is being regulated in the borough,
I think so, but I don’t have a super strong opinion about that exact comparison in a way that could be corroborated or shown evidence for at this time. I mean, I definitely think it’s better. There’s no question that the role does have some importance in the community. It’s appropriate that the community can select who those people are. So I do think that that’s fair, and I do think that not using that system previously did sometimes lead to some problems. So, it doesn’t mean you can’t still have problems in the current system. Of course, you can, but I do think it’s more fair and it’s more democratic.
Okay, so you’re in favor of an elected planning commission. I bring it up because I thought it was a really interesting move for the community to make, and in some other committees I’ve covered in the state that have struggled a little bit with land use regulation and sometimes boards being weighted in favor of one industry or the other, this seemed like kind of a novel potential solution to that problem. But what I haven’t really seen from people is whether the upsides of having it elected are outweighing the downsides, or how if the system is shifting, what change are you seeing over time?
Well, you know the downside of it to me, you know, I don’t. I have not studied game theory, but I understand. I think the basic concept that you look at “what are the pro and pros and cons of this scenario? What are the pros and cons of this scenario, and how do they add up?” So, what is the negative side of having elected commissioners? I think that it’s a little extra effort.
It’s a little bit of a drag having extra people have to go on like me sitting here and taking up time. So you know it’s a small burden, but it seems like a very minor problem to have to bear. The positive side is that the people that are there making those decisions, which do have some bearing on our lives, are people chosen by the larger community. So I think that benefit far outweighs the potential burden of a little extra time taken up during election season. Maybe there’s some other. If there’s some other downside or burden, then I’d be happy to learn about it.
Well, it’s interesting to me both as a person who moved to this community as it was happening, but also we have that ballot initiative, basic that question on the ballot asking if we should go back revert to a an appointed planning commission instead of an elected one, and I was sort of curious how people were landing on that issue and if they preferred one or the other. But one thing that I’ve heard from people who aren’t supportive of it is that they feel like it means there’s less industry expertise or just less expertise in general in irrelevant expertise. to planning on the planning commission when you elect folks.
Well,I would say just in response to that, I’m not trying to make. I’m just only responding to what you’re saying. I’m not trying to make a precise description of any individual on the commission. But if there’s expertise needed, the public can vote for that expertise. But having the entire community choose which people with which expertise are appropriate makes a lot more sense. The reality is, planning involves all land uses in the borough. It is not specifically, do you know how to build a highway. It’s not just industrial resource extraction or industrial road building. That’s not the only thing the planning commission has responsibility for. You need people who understand a lot of other things besides that. And so, if it’s too heavily weighted toward people whose only area of expertise is heavy industry. You’re not going to get a well-balanced commission. What that you know, I’m not trying to claim what the perfect balance is. I want the community to decide, and they’ll pick the people that they feel match that best. But people need a lot of different areas of understanding to make good land use decisions.
Okay, one thing that I’ve noticed is that there is sometimes some tension between opinions that the planning commission gives and decisions that the assembly ends up making at the end, or sometimes permits get decided and then sent back. There have been a number of these back and forth [situations] between the two bodies since just in the short time since I got here, and I’m curious if you were elected, like what you would do to deepen collaboration and communication between those two bodies.
Yeah, I mean, I will just try to be as open and communicative with the other bodies as possible. I don’t have, like somehow the golden solution [or] what will solve that issue, but it does seem like there’s a problem right now, and that the two bodies don’t seem to have a very good working relationship.
I don’t think the planning commission seems to have a lot of control over that, but it does seem that the assembly doesn’t. Yeah, I don’t know. Again, I would veer away from trying to make any specific criticism. I don’t want to… I’m not because I can’t tell you a specific event that this person said this or did that.
The general sense I get of it is that the planning commission is not getting a large amount of respect from either the borough assembly or the borough administration currently, and that’s a dysfunctional arrangement. And this shouldn’t be that way. They should all work together to cooperate to have a good running municipality.
A poorly running municipality is actually financially inefficient. It doesn’t operate as effectively, and that means our dollars are getting lost because we’re wasting time through decisions that then don’t go forward. You have staff time that isn’t resulting in a you know a result because there’s back and forth or pulling back or blocking each other or all this stuff and it just doesn’t work very well and it burdens up the whole community every every aspect of it you know every doesn’t matter what your political leaning is having a municipal government that doesn’t actually function efficiently is just bad economics
I suppose that that question to me specifically was born from the fact that the borough has been sued several times since I got here, or maybe not several, a handful of times relative to not being sued at all. It has been sued, and you and another candidate for the planning commission have been involved in lawsuits with the borough, and to me, what that says is that there’s some part of the process for people that’s not working. I think you could litigate all day what part of the process is, but but as an outsider, without getting into the weeds of you know those lawsuits, I’m mostly curious what you think you could bring to the planning commission that could help change situations that end up in lawsuits or where people feel like they have no other recourse but to go to court because they’re kind of bouncing between two bodies.
Well, so one of the issues, and I don’t know if this is exactly what your question is, but it seems to somehow be relevant between the different questions you’ve asked. I think formerly the appointed commission and the individuals that were appointed to those seats often had an extremely poor understanding of borough law. I can’t tell you the number of times that I attended borough meetings and would read the actual wording of the law to make sure that they were aware, because sometimes it seemed like they’re, from their discourse, they did not seem to understand it. I would make the law completely clear, and they would make a vote blatantly in violation of that. Now, of course, me saying that in public, someone’s going to get upset, but they’re going to have to face that, and I’ve got evidence to prove it. Like it’s not, it’s not like really that. It’s not, it’s not. It shouldn’t even be a controversial idea because it’s happened, and it was egregious. Like there were multiple people who were appointed to those positions, and they repeatedly made decisions that were clearly in violation not just the general spirit of the law, but the outright literal letter of the law as it was written. It was seemingly that they didn’t think they had to follow that if it meant if that’s what they had to do to get the decision they wanted. So I don’t want to see that happen anymore. If the community actually feels there’s some aspect of the law as written that’s inappropriate for us, then there’s a procedure for changing the borough code. But the commissioners do not have the authority to just abandon that if they want to, you know, make a decision in a certain direction.
I’m really glad that you brought up borough code. Because this has been something that’s come up in almost every single planning commissioner interview that I’ve done so far, is this idea of like people wanting to get on the planning commission and follow the letter of the code, and what I’ve heard from people who’ve been on the commission, either elected or appointed is that what they found is that it’s not always that simple. Sometimes it’s as simple as reading a sentence and saying, “Oh, yep, this is clear. “This shall means shall and may means may,” and that’s what we do. But I think there’s some other decisions that require a little bit of subjectivity on the part of a planning commissioner, either because the code’s incomplete, or in the last year we’ve run into a situation where you know we didn’t really have a permit that applied to the situation that was coming up, or maybe it should have been applied for a different permit. And so I think that there is both knowing and learning the code, and then I think there’s what do you do when the code stops and you have to make a decision past that? How do you think you would handle that situation?
I mean, obviously it’s a hypothetical, so I can’t give you… You know, we’d have to see about the exact situation when it occurred. But maybe what would be helpful here is I could give you a bit of background about myself and what I bring to making a decision on this. So I grew up in a very small town. I didn’t grow up in Alaska, but I grew up in a place on the Canadian border down south. That’s one of the more remote places in the entire Lower 48. There’s 300 people in a town, and there’s no city to drive to anywhere. And back then, like in the 1970s, there’s no internet. We couldn’t even get radio from anywhere, let alone television. It was a very different thing.
What town is this?
It’s called Robbinston, Maine, northeastern Maine. It’s right on the Canadian border. It’s Passamaquoddy territory, Passamaquoddy people, and you know it’s beautiful, beautiful land, beautiful forest, lakes, a lot of lakes. Similar climate to here. It’s transitional between the temperate zone and the boreal zone, like here.
But anyway, the point is, it’s a very small town, and the culture of small towns operating has been on going on there for hundreds of years.
Here, I feel like often people… it’s like we’re in a vacuum. There’s just like a void around us, and we don’t know what to do, and they’re just making it up from scratch. A lot of people, I think, live here, have come from places that were maybe cities or very different kinds of communities, and so they have an image of what they think a small town would be, but they haven’t necessarily experienced it very much. So I grew up in this very small town, very poor, single mom, six kids. That place where I grew up-it’s got poverty in a way that no people. I don’t think anyone around here is familiar with, honestly, because we certainly have poverty here, and that’s part of the population that I’m very concerned about helping. But even here, there’s also a lot of wealth in this town that you see all around you, and it was not like that where I grew up. So you want to know what it’s like-a place that doesn’t have a strong functioning economy that provides jobs for people. I already know what that’s like. I’ve seen what steps led to that, and one of them is excessive reliance on a single large industry, and it collapses, and the town collapses, and it’s really harsh. It’s not a wise course forward for the economy of any small town.
But there’s also stuff about the procedure, how a town operates, like holding a valid town hall meeting. You can’t call it a town hall meeting if you just schedule a PR session for some private business to come and give you their spiel. That’s not called a town hall meeting. Town hall meetings should have an avenue for the public to get to discuss an issue, not cut off at three minutes.
[You] get to actually discuss it, and doesn’t mean every assembly meeting is not the same thing as that. The assembly needs to get through their business, so you don’t want to bog that down with having people talk on and on and on, but there needs to be a role for something like a town meeting where people can really have, as citizens, still have their voices heard and recognized and and work through some issues.
Just because someone gets elected to the assembly doesn’t mean they’re the only perspectives that need to sort out our issues. You know, I respect those people in those seats. It’s a lot of work to do, but it’s too much to expect that they can hold the decision-making power for everybody in the community for years. So there needs to be a lot of input from the public, and you know, at a lot of the assembly meetings, there are people who come and speak, but it’s usually a very small number of people, and it’s usually the same people every meeting. It’s not really representative of the community when it’s just the same half a dozen people that are doing the public comments at every meeting.
So anyway, I feel like I had a perspective in seeing the way small towns operate… I call it a small town. It’s not even a town. Forests, really, just people living in the woods in different little areas and dirt roads. But anyway, I’m very familiar with that.
At the same time, I also had the advantage of getting a full scholarship to college and getting a degree in political philosophy. And I have studied a lot about how governments operate and what’s the relationship with the population that they are ostensibly representing? And so, I think that with those two perspectives, if I’m looking at interpreting something about borough code for the planning commission, I’m gonna consider what does this mean for the everyday people?
Is this in the interests of everybody, or is it in the interests of a specific business owner? Not that that means it is inherently bad, but that shouldn’t be the predominant thing that you decided on. And at the same time, I’m going to reflect on what does this mean about the relationship in a more philosophical way. I’m going to think about the relationship between the community, the municipal government, and where are we going? What are we? Is this serving the interests? Are we helping us move forward in a constructive way?
I’m curious what role you think the planning commission plays in helping the borough grow or stay stable.
I saw that question on the sheet, and I would my response to that initially is just, what do you mean the borough grow?
I suppose I don’t mean to expand. I mean help the borough evolve into whatever it’s evolving into, and maybe it should guide the borough. What role does the planning commission play in guiding the borough?
Yeah. Well, clearly, the planning commission’s role is more specifically oriented toward land use decisions. Obviously, specific kinds of permits, conditional use permits in particular, but other other decisions too that involve a lot to do with how people are using the land that’s within the municipality, the municipality I don’t think is going to grow. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
There’s a notion many people think that economies can just grow indefinitely, and it’s actually just a physical falsehood. It’s not correct. That is, we do not live in an expanding earth. Everything on the earth is finite, and I know some people think, well, if we just get all the resources exploited, then we’ll keep growing our economy. And even if you did do that, it’s gonna stop growing at a certain point.
That’s what I grew up with. Where I grew up in northern Maine, there’s no old growth forest anywhere. Almost all the land base is owned by private timber companies, paper companies, in fact, and they already logged everywhere across the entire state of Maine, basically, with a few tiny, tiny exceptions. And it’s not; it doesn’t make the economy keep growing. Actually, the economy hits a plateau and then it hits a downhill.
So it’s I think wiser for everybody to look at how much can you grow, how much can you exploit, without damaging the … I don’t like comparing it to a financial situation, but like a bank account, it’s much smarter to use the interest that comes off it, and that could potentially continue on indefinitely into the future. If you take away the capital every year, you get less and less and less to earn your interest, and pretty soon you end up poor. Okay, so the same thing applies for a community, same thing applies for our relationship with the land. We have to be very careful about paying attention to what, how much surplus there is from the land that we can harvest and live from. And not everything, not all of obviously the entire economy of this area is not based only on resource extraction, some of it is, and some of that I think is pretty sustainable. But we still [have] to keep in mind what is the level that is sustainable because it doesn’t help the whole community to use more than that. There are lots of effects that start to accrue once you overutilize the resource base.
Okay, and so what I’m hearing from is maybe that there needs to be some kind of balance in different kinds of land uses, so that there isn’t one type that sort of extracts too much or or causes the borough to not have resources in the future that it needs.
I wouldn’t disagree with that. I don’t know if that is summing up what I said.
Well, you got to correct me if I got too it wrong. I think what I’m trying to loop it back around to is the context of that question, which is that I think. Everybody sort of joins the planning commission or wants to be on the planning commission for maybe their own private reasons or maybe because they want to be a public servant. But I want to know what you think the role of the planning commission is as it comes to sort of helping the Haines Borough with what it’s going to look like 25 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now.
Well, I’m excited. Whether it’s me or other people, I’m excited to have people on the planning commission that do have a vision of what a long-term sustainable community could actually look like. And in order to do that, you have to have people that actually understand ecology, right? That might sound shocking to some listeners. They might not understand that ecology itself is a scientific discipline that’s older than the combustion engine. It’s older than powered flight. It’s been around for a very long time. It’s an actual discipline of science, and it has to do with what are all the relationships between all aspects of the physical world, living and non-living, and including human beings.
So, to not be well versed in those issues would just make you make poor decisions if you don’t know what kinds of impacts you’re going to have, whether it’s on biological, you know, factors or other physical things. “You’re eating into the side of a mountainside. Is it going to relate to having a landslide or collapse or affecting groundwater or other things?
[It] is just nonsense to think that you wouldn’t think that it’s smarter to somehow not be aware of those things. We can’t be aware of every single detail, but the more we can be aware of that, the better. The same thing applies with interpersonal, interhuman dynamics. If somebody’s thinking something is creating wealth, is it… is it helping everybody? Who’s it the wealth for?
And so, a sustainable community means it’s got to be lifting everyone together up along the way and helping. And if some park gets far ahead, what do you do? If you’re hiking on a trail, you wait to make sure the other people are coming along with you. You don’t just take off and say, “I’m the best. I’m the first. Yay! At least you might do that, but you’re not probably going to have a lot of hiking partners for very long. So, I think it’s common sense. If we think we can create some wealth, that that could be great. But let’s make. What are we going to do to make sure that is is available also to the other parts of the community who maybe aren’t the big landowners, aren’t the big, you know, owning big, you know, profit for profit businesses or whatever? You didn’t ask about housing, but I think that that’s relevant in that area as well.
It is. That actually plays right into my next question: What does responsible development look like to you?
Yeah, yeah. So, and I, I mean, I think what I had just said addresses that question to a large degree, but I do think that housing is one of the resources that isn’t distributed very equally around the community right now, and I feel like for quite a few years I’ve been watching decision makers in the borough do things or make decisions that seem like they think they’re addressing the housing issues, the shortage of of low income or you know low cost housing. They seem to think they’re addressing that by making decisions to benefit the largest landowners.
That’s the exact opposite…that’s not how you do that. You don’t just make it really profitable for a huge developer to make lots of like for-profit developments. That’s not you know you go to any place that actually has low-income housing. That’s not how they do it, right? And so I can understand. I was even willing to be like, hmm, that doesn’t seem right, but maybe I’m missing something. I’ll watch for a little while. I’ll see what happens. And I have watched, and it doesn’t seem like it’s resulted in an increase in low-income housing available to the community. We still have the same problem, but there’s just more. There’s some subdivisions, but it still costs a lot of money to buy into those subdivisions. It’s not really addressing that issue.
So I don’t know why people, you know, maybe it has to do with like growing up in the 1980s and the talk of like trickle down. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like getting trickled down on, and I don’t know anybody who did like it. Honestly, it again, it’s one of those things that sounds like it in theory. Maybe that could work, but watch what actually happens. You benefit the richest people. Is that the best way to help the poorest people? I mean, it doesn’t seem intuitively like it would be correct. Then you watch, observe, and over time you say, “Oh, indeed, it’s not. It’s not correct. It does not work. Actually, I’m not saying that no rich person has ever helped other people. Sometimes they do. I’ve known some very, very wonderful, very generous, rich people, or people who have resources, whatever you want to say, call it. But it’s not; it’s clearly not the best way to help disadvantaged people. Some people with wealth sometimes spread that around, but it is not universal, and they’re not required by law. To do so, and the idea that that’s somehow more egalitarian than actually just spreading it around to everybody just doesn’t. It’s just sort of, I think, it’s nonsense.
Are there other parts of the Chilkat Valley or just sort of the Haines Borough in general where you see a need for different kinds of development? I mean, you’ve just brought up affordable housing. I think you’ve articulated pretty well what that need is. But are there other things that the planning commission would maybe have a role in recommending that you see a real need for?
Well, yes, probably.
Do you want to articulate any of this? That’s kind of putting you on the spot. I’m just curious if you sort of see a gap in … you mentioned that there was some that you saw a fair amount of poverty here, and so I’m curious when I think of poverty, I usually think of low income housing. I also tend to think of, you know, availability of food and food resources. And there’s a lot of people in the valley kind of trying to address food availability. So I’m curious if there are some other needs that you see that you’d like to sort of tackle.
I do think the mental health services would be really valuable to get a stronger foundation here. I know there is counseling and there are some services available, but I think that that’s all small communities everywhere. It’s a really big need that usually gets proportionally way less support and funding because it’s a small community, but that doesn’t mean there’s proportionally less of that issue there. So I think that’s something that could really make a difference. I think honestly, I think a lot of things that are perceived as being law enforcement or criminal issues often have at least partially a role with a mental health issue, and I don’t want that to be misconstrued. I’m not in any way saying people with a mental health challenge are inherently going to do anything criminal, or that criminals are necessarily people with mental health issues. But sometimes there is a way that something could get resolved through services and therapy and other things. And if you have to have the police be the one to come and pick somebody up because they’re acting, you know, in their aberrant way or something like that, that’s not very helpful for that person. You know, we don’t have any facility for a person with a mental health issue. They have to go to jail, right? Do you think that’s good for their mental health? Like, so I think that’s an issue that, just out of you know, I mean, I don’t I don’t have any big answer for things like that, but I think if people are feel compassion, if they want to things to be helpful for others rather than just trying to get for yourself, and you just approach any issue with that mentality, hopefully we would make kind decisions.
On a totally different note, do you support the development and expansion of the local 5G cellular network?
I feel like I would need to learn first off more information about, like, show me show me that there’s a need. I want somebody to and I and not I don’t want it to be. What’s the need for that 5G for us here? What the purpose of that? And I don’t want to have the case for it made by the company that’s going to make a profit out of doing it. So other people need to make it clear. And again, that same concept, whether it’s called game theory or whatever it is, what is the pro and what is the con? Right. Like, I’m not convinced there’s a need for 5G here, and I also feel like there are health issues that are in my mind not resolved around it.
I’m not trying to assert any specific thing. I don’t know that much about it, honestly. I do know that electromagnetic frequency can be very damaging in certain situations. Then I don’t know if that applies in this kind of tower and this kind of thing or not. I don’t know what proximity, or where it is going to be. Different populations can be more vulnerable than others. So I feel like there’s a bunch of that kind of stuff that should be made more clear before we have any opinion about that, or before I do anyway.
It’s one of many topics that’s been in front of the planning commission this year, but that one’s kind of interesting to me because it seems like it sort of gets a lot of threads in this community. Like you know, people will say if something satisfies the conditions of the permit, you have to give it the permit, and then other people will come and say, “Okay, but my viewshed. If you put one of those in my neighbor’s backyard, sure, that’s allowed in my neighbor’s backyard. But you know, am I safe? Am my children safe?
It seems like there’s a sort of lot of overlapping values.” Issues involved in a piece of infrastructure that could otherwise be just a cut and dry permit, and so I guess I’m I’m curious when you consider it from that perspective, if you were to become an elected planning commission member, how you kind of balance the the rights of a private landowner to do what they want on their own property, particularly in an area that’s like use by right, because of the zoning that’s where it is versus what the neighbors need. Like, how would you make that decision for yourself?
Yeah, I mean, I would have to, I’d have to research whatever the issue would be extensively because I’m not aware of anything right now in borough code that would clarify that. If you’re saying it’s a situation where it’s a use by right, I don’t think the planning commission has any role in making a decision about that action. So I don’t think that it would even come before the [planning commission], as far as I can understand. And so if there is some other avenue or some other way that can be addressed. Is there a clause anywhere in the borough code that says no matter how legal an action is, if it causes some other kinds of consequence in some way, whatever that would be, people decide, then the otherwise legal action will not be allowed. I don’t. I’ve never heard of anything like that in borough code. Any kind of across the board thing that says, “Oh, nobody’s viewshed, or no, you know, it does seem like impacting people’s health with electromagnetic frequencies against their will. That seems like it should be something that should not be allowed.
But how do you determine that? I don’t know. So I think we need a lot more technical information first.
Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you think is important, or you know, some reason that you’re running that you want to articulate?
You must want to talk about the Lutak Dock, don’t you? I’m just joking.
I’ve been letting people bring that one up, I feel like I don’t need to talk about it. Honestly, if you feel called to by all means, no, I don’t. I mean, there’s obviously issues there that could be talked about, but I don’t think it’s necessary to get into it for this. I don’t think it’s for one thing. The planning commission, as far as you know, any time in the upcoming year or two, I don’t see any they’re going to have any role in that anyway, so it’s not really relevant. Yeah, I don’t. I would just, I guess, repeat if I didn’t say it clearly enough before that what I what I’m looking forward to is seeing a planning commission that has a wide range of expertise with people who do understand a lot of different dynamics about how communities operate, economic issues, ecological issues, social and community issues, and in fact, actually knowing the specific details of how to do an industrial development is actually less important. That’s not the role of the planning commission to be the technical engineer of that project. We can find out the details as necessary.
I feel like I’d like to see a planning commission, whether it includes me or not, that has a group of people that have expertise and experience and personal experience. In a wide range of issues that are important for planning, so that means social issues, cultural issues, ecological issues, economic issues are all necessary to understand to make appropriate decisions. And as I said before, to some degree, we need to understand the technical side of some industrial activities, but you don’t have to be an industrial engineer in order to make forward-looking decisions for the benefit of your community.