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.
This interview transcript has been edited for clarity and grammar.
Rashah Mcchesney: George Campbell, thank you so much for joining me. Where are you? You were just telling me you’re somewhere not in Haines.
Yeah, I’m outside of King Salmon at a fishing lodge on the NaknekRiver.
Okay, all right. Have you been there all summer? You’re going to be there fall?
I leave the 25th. I got out here in the middle of August. They called me up and they needed a pilot, and so they called me up and asked me to come back and work for them for the remainder of the season.
Okay, well, thank you for taking the time to chat with us about your planning commission candidacy. Can you tell me first: when did you decide to run? What made you decide to run?
About a week before the deadline, there was a conversation happening, and I made the proverbial comment to somebody about certain things, decisions the planning commission has made over the last few years, and how things have been handled. And somebody said, “Well, we need a bunch of planning commissioners. Why don’t you run?” And I sort of said, “oh no, I can’t really run because my wife won’t let me.” And they went and talked to Lyn[nette Campbell], and Lyn was like, “I don’t really want you to, but you probably should.” So I decided about a week before the deadline.
Okay, and this isn’t your first go round in serving in public office in Haines. You’ve done it at least twice before, I think. I know I’ve seen your name all over the archives on the assembly.
I did one term on the assembly, and then I have been on the board of equalization since it became a citizen board.
I’m curious. I moved here in 2024, and one thing that I was really surprised at, one thing I was interested in reporting on when I first got here, was the fact that Haines had just switched to being an elected planning commission, which is different than anybody else in Southeast, and I think most of the state is doing it. And I’m curious if you think that since it’s been an elected body, that’s impacted like land use regulation or the other things under its purview in the borough during that time.
Okay. So the planning commission body previously was an appointed body, and at that time … well, the planning commission is based should be basing decisions on code, land use code. We can recommend, as a planning commissioner, we can recommend codes, and we can recommend changing of codes, but we can’t pass codes. So we actually are just taking codes, and we’re supposed to interpret them evenly across the board for all to the public, and have the assembly make the codes. As an elected body, now it’s essentially a popularity contest.
A lot of people, you know, [think] “this is my friend, so I’m going to vote them in,” and they may or may not have experience in things like land planning or construction and things like that. So, as an appointed board, one of the things that happened was that the mayors or the assembly people, when there were openings, would go search out and find people that had construction experience. And as an example, when the dock they were looking at plans of the dock, there was some serious effort to get some people that had experience looking at plans, constructing, doing heavy construction, to try and get people that could balance out other people that were citizens that may or may not have that experience, because respectfully, when you drop a 300 sheet set of plans in somebody and a 250 page contract document. If you haven’t ever seen that stuff before, it’s entirely daunting, and it’s not something that when you’re trying to deal with a $20- $30 million project, it’s not something that you can just learn instantly. So, as a group, that one of the things the planning commission needs to do is review plans of projects the borough is involved in, and we had a lot of big projects recently, and I don’t feel that they were treated fairly by the planning commission just because we elected people that were not of the construction. They don’t have the experience to see that, and so I do not agree with the elected planning commission for those reasons, and again, we’re supposed to read code and administer that code levelly on a fair playing field to all. We’re not making, we’re not making up code. We might suggest it, but we aren’t making it.
If you were elected, what kind of expertise are you bringing to that position? That’s similar to what you just described to me. That you’d like to see on it.
I’ve had 26 years now of contracting in the civil world. Mostly, it was landscaping, wetland restoration work, but I’ve built driveways. I’ve been on. I worked on phase one and phase three. I’m a subcontractor on the highway project, so I’m around the heavy civil contracting, and so I’ve got lots of years of reading contracts and figuring that stuff out, and I do this also. But I fly also. I’ve also been involved in subdividing land. You know, built a few houses, built buildings. So I’ve had to deal with different forms of government to make those happen. And so I’ve got a lot of experience dealing with agencies, including the Habitat Department of Fish and Game Habitat, the EPA, DEC. So I’ve got a lot of experience in dealing with those sorts of things. And although I don’t, I don’t profess to know it all, what I do know, as I kind of know how to go about finding the people that can explain it to me, so I can understand. And like anything, it’s more important to know how to get the information and how to learn what you need to know to make a decision than it is to try and know everything yourself.
Okay, and you know, one outgrowth that I’ve seen of there being an elected planning commission has been that there’s sometimes sort of tension between the planning commission and the assembly, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily because the planning commission has been elected, but I have seen since I got here that there are sometimes decisions that the planning commission makes or recommendations they make that the assembly doesn’t agree with, or you were involved in a sort of tangle between the two bodies, and there’s been lawsuits that have come out of things coming back from the assembly to the planning commission. Like it sort of seems sometimes like there’s some tension between which body is supposed to be doing what, and I’m curious if you were elected how you would go about deepening communication and collaboration between two bodies, or if you would at all, or how you see that tension?
Like any form of government and any governmental body, there always seems to be a little bit of a fiefdom defense, and you know everybody wants to have their ground where they’re supposed to do stuff. But I will submit that since you got here since the elected body you missed some of the big fireworks that we had back when it was an appointed body and one of them was the vote on the assembly in code — they have to have a vote of four even. If there’s four people sitting at the dais, you have to have a vote of four. The planning commission and it might have changed. I will have to go back and review if it got changed. But the planning commission had that belief for many years, and finally somebody went, “No, you just have to have a majority, and that became a very upsetting thing for the planning commission, even when it wasn’t appointed, and there was a big shakeup back then. So I’m going to say that that has been a point of contention in a lot of places.
Not just because it’s become an elected body, but just because the bodies have been tangled with each other for a while. Okay, that’s interesting.
And a lot of that is because of personalities and ideologies. Some people really like blue houses, other people don’t like blue houses, and at times I think that our borough has got themselves tied up with not adhering to what the code says, but trying to insert extra words or meaning that aren’t written in there, and they try to interpret it. And I think one of the things that I would try and bring in my belief is read what the code says. And when you’re sit, when we sit at the dais, I think it’s important when we start trying to say that well, code says this. What we really should say is here. Let me read what the code says and read the code right from the code, because one word, one word omitted, one word added can completely change the meaning.
When I was on the assembly, we had a couple of these situations where I’m going to say long arguments would ensue, and so I’d go back and you know I’d read the code, and then I go excuse me, let me read what the code says, and you know the question gets called and the vote happens because what we were arguing about, we didn’t, you know, really had no, no bearing because of what code actually said. So I think as a planning commissioner, one of the important things is to go back and read the exact code. When we put anything before the assembly, we need to base our stuff on code, or if we are suggesting a code change, have a very easily understandable reasoning for why that code change will be good, and also talk about what the unintended consequences are going to be, and then have a free form of communication back and forth that you know when it goes before the committee of the assembly, I think the planning commission really needs to have representation that can talk about it, so that the assembly can understand it instead of at times I’ve seen where the assembly brings up a change and the there’s no commissioner there to stand up and represent the planning commission and and have a dialog in a public forum. So I think those things, changing those things would help an awful lot.
What I heard from you there, and we had kind of a wide ranging answer there because I had a wide ranging question, but what I heard from you there was that that there needs to be sort of a planning commission representative when maybe available to answer questions or at least explain why the decision was made when the assembly is taking up something that the planning commission is recommending.
Yeah, that’s part of it, but yes, correct, and that representative needs to be appointed by the planning commission to be the representative, not just well. There’s a planning commissioner here, maybe they could answer the question. The person needs to be there specifically at the behest of the planning commission to represent that subject.
Interesting. Sort of like the assembly has a liaison to the planning commission. You think the planning commission should have a liaison to the assembly?
When you’re talking about important stuff, yes, I do believe that because again, every one of us has a filter, and every one of us has a view. But having the body itself that has taken a vote. Having them represent themselves, I think, is very important. For just this is what the planning commission talked about. The liaisons are fine, but if you want to get into the fine points of why does the planning commission believe this or this or this, I think a member of that body should be Representative of the Planning Commission in that meeting.
I see. Okay, I want to go back for a second. You were talking about reading straight from the code because a lot of times that that pulls you out of rabbit holes you’re down that maybe have nothing to do with you know conceptually what’s actually in the code. I’ve heard. From a lot of planning commission candidates in the last few years, that you know they’re gonna they’re gonna follow the code. They’re gonna get on the board and they’re gonna follow the code, or they’re gonna get on the commission. They’re gonna follow the code, and I think that there have been some situations where it’s not as cut and dry as that. There’s some subjectivity either because the code’s incomplete, it’s missing something, or maybe in the case of I think it was the cell towers, there was a permit type that there was one permit they could get, or another permit they could get, and I’ve seen it come up a couple times with that body where it’s not a complete answer to go see what’s in code, and you have to bring some kind of subjectivity to bear, and I’m curious if you have also encountered that, and if so, how you would approach a situation where the code isn’t the be-all, end-all; it’s just a guiding document that helps you figure out which direction you were supposed to be going in.
Well, that’s an interesting question, and I, I somewhat feel like you might have some motivation for that particular question towards me. But in some ways, you’re right. There are codes that are lacking, and I understand that. However, as a community, we are not the only community that deals with this. And so, if you have a code that seems to be lacking, one of the first things that a human being should do in an office is sit back and think, “What is common sense, you know?
And I’m just going to throw an idea out here: if you know in our community we are a small community, we have low levels of traffic. We have low levels of pedestrian traffic and all that. So if the code says something like you know crosswalks will have crosswalks at you know for on every street, and suddenly we get a plan that we’re now going to move the crosswalks from the corners, we’re going to move them into the middle of the blocks. It meets the code. We’re going to have them on every street, well, sit back and ask yourself common sense. Why do we have crosswalks on corners? You know, what are the advantages of that? One is you’re not bringing people out from in between cars parked. You go to a corner and you can cross two streets and , you know, get to the block kitty corner from you instead of having to walk half the block down. So a lot of times I feel like our borough says, “Oh, this code is confusing, or it doesn’t outline this, it doesn’t outline that. But we don’t sit back and first ask what would common sense dictate.
Then the next piece of this is that we are Haines, and I understand we’re Haines. But guess what? You know there are national standards on many things. There’s national standards. There’s acceptable methods and means for many things that we discuss. Instead of trying to recreate the world, you know the whole world for our own little fiefdom here. Let’s go look at what other places do. What standards are there? And you know, examples in traffic laws and traffic codes and building codes and all that. You know, there’s the United Building Codes. There’s federal highway codes. There’s things like that. So, as a planning commissioner, there are resources out there that will explain a lot of these questions in common sense. There are times where, okay, yeah, you’ve got an outlier that we have as an individual that wants to do something that’s not in code. Well, you know, remember the government is not there to run people’s lives. If there isn’t something in code that says someone can’t do that or it’s not allowed, it is allowed. We’re free, you know, we’re a free country. So this idea that we have the right to regulate everything someone does on their property, I disagree with. I think that the borough should be trying to do less infringement on humans, or on our local people. And if we don’t have a code that specifically says you cannot do that, I’m sorry. You get it’s your right to do it on your property. So you know. But again, go back to common sense. Look at what national standards are. Look at what other organizations, national organizations, do as a standard, and maybe try and do that instead of recreating and creating a lot of strife with our community.
I think what I’m trying to get at there is I think there are these sort of situations, and I’m I think the 5g conversation is a really good example of it, where you have a permit that goes in front of the planning commission, and there’s the permit specificity, and and the the things you can do in the permit. Then there’s private property. Someone may want to contract with the company to have an allowable use of a cell tower on their land. And I think a lot of people here prioritize private property rights. But then there’s also people who are neighbors who are worried about everything from their viewshed to their health, and there’s kind of a there’s a tension there between both, like what the code allows and what a value set might be around what a person can do on their private property versus how some people perceive it might impact them or how it might actually impact them. So it seemed like a recommendation or a decision-making point that sort of straddled a lot of kinds of personal philosophical things for people and what’s in code and how to follow it. So what I’m curious about is how you approach decision making with an issue like that where it’s not cut and dry and the value sets of people vary so dramatically about each of those things.
My father used to say that your rights end where my toes begin, and you know a pretty simple statement. But again, you’re talking about private property use, which you know is a lot of what the planning commission is going to do. Property owners who are paying property tax and have a lot of them have been paying it. They bought the land. They’re paying property tax. They have the right to do anything on their property that is not restricted by code that says you can’t do that.
Okay, so if a person has a piece of property and they want to build pink houses on it, and there’s nothing in the code that says you can’t build pink houses, but all the neighbors around it don’t like the color pink. I’m sorry, people. That’s that person’s right to do on their property, and quite often, again, our borough has spent a lot of time, a lot of money, and created a lot more strife by instead of telling the neighbors, “Hey, folks, you moved into a zone that allows this. You’ve had the opportunity to change it for however long you’ve been here. The new property owner has read the code. What they’re trying to do is within code. If you don’t like it, you have the option of moving. You have the option of buying the land. Get together, buy the person’s land from them, and you know, so that they don’t build their pink house. And this is again not just the cell towers.
There’s been a lot of other issues that have come up, and this is where, personally, as a planning commissioner, I don’t think I have a lot that can have much impact. But a lot of these issues have come because of people, again, the borough. When the first call comes into our borough offices, the borough management needs to look at the code, read the code specifically related to that. Maybe have a conversation with a property owner. Why do you, you know, if they if the borough thinks that they’re out of line a little bit, you have a conversation, and because I’ve done this at times, I’ve had conversations, and I’ve said, “Well, okay, you’re reading this code, but you didn’t read far enough down, and right here, this says I can do this. Well, that needs to happen. You know, it instead of people jumping into the fray without reading all the codes that oversee it.
So again, if a property owner is within their rights, the borough doesn’t have the right to step in and do anything. And you know, I’m sorry. And yes, I know that that may upset people, but again, we are a free society, and until our government stops trying to get involved and trying to stop people from the free use of their land, which within the codes, you know, we’re going to have these conflicts. And my particular area, as you’re well aware, right now there’s been – the borough that has begun a rezoning project out in 26 Mile, and this rezoning project was not requested by a petition of the local people. It was dreamed up by our – whether it be the administration, or the planning commission or the assembly to start doing this rezoning project, and it has not been a comfortable situation for the planning commissioners. But the problem with it is that out at 26 Mile, people buy land out there so that they can have a dog team if they want a dog team. They can have their sawmill. They can, you know, have a firewood business. They can have a shop and run snow machines and, you know, race car engines and heavy equipment. Well, you know, and there’s been other activities that people have been objecting to, and they like, well, we don’t want our neighbor doing this. If you don’t want businesses and firewood cutting and heavy equipment and all this stuff. If you don’t, you know, and heliports and all that.
If you don’t want that, that’s why Lutak went through and they rezoned their area to restrict businesses and restrict all that stuff. Mud Bay did the very same thing. So there already are zones in our community that you’re not allowed to do these things, so if that is what, if citizens don’t want certain things, they need to choose where they purchase a house. Just like people that want to do certain things purchase land and purchase houses out the highway or in the general use zone.
Yeah, I had a question about that, but I’m glad that you brought up the heliport because I think a lot of people are probably familiar with you as having this long-running kind of legal dispute with the borough and neighbors weighing in on it.
And I know that was the very first planning commission meeting I ever covered, or maybe it was the second, but it’s been something that I’ve known that you’ve been grappling with for a while, and it sounds like you pretty firmly fall on the side of like if it’s an allowable use on the property, the planning commission’s job is to enable someone to have that allowable use.
Is there a point at which you consider if code needs to be changed as a planning commissioner, or if there’s an allowable use that does end up impacting people in a way that you’re not personally supportive, is there a decision-making point in which you think you would approach like potentially changing the code, or is that something that you think the planning commission should be taking up?
When you say the code, I’m assuming you’re talking about land use code here, specifically land use
Code, permitting. Process just in general.
Well, yeah. So there are many codes. I just want to make sure that we’re talking specifically about planning, planning, zoning, and land use codes.
First of all, as a planning commissioner my personal views — and I am going to give a shout out to Rob Goldberg, who to me was one of the best planning commissioners to ever listen to and watch — My personal views should not, and my personal ideology should not be involved in it
I believe a planning commissioner is beholden to what the laws, what the codes say, and laws say and we need to follow those. Should those laws, codes be changed? By all means, we should always be willing to review that. And again, as an assembly member, I remember one time something was extremely unpopular amongst us, the assembly members. But the question came before us: Should this go on the ballot for at the next election? And I voted yes. And a whole bunch of people called me up and said, “Why did you vote yes for that?
And I said, “Well, the question was, should the people get to make a decision? Of course, it should not always be on us, the “us the elected official.”
It shouldn’t always be on the elected officials to make a decision. At some point, the citizens have the right to petition and get something on the ballot. And any time a citizen petition comes forward, I believe and it qualifies under code, I believe that should immediately be put forward to a vote of the people that are supposed to be in there. Are there code changes I think need to happen? Yes, there are. There are a couple.
In fact, the whole planning and zoning change, I believe that the code should get changed to where a zoning change can only happen by a vote of the citizens. I think the citizens need to petition and then vote on it if they want. And when I say the citizens – I also believe it should be the property owners within an area because they’re the people that are tasked with making sure they pay property taxes and have the ownership of that land. And I think those people, anytime you want to change their zoning, they should have the right to vote. Whether or not they agree, but the short answer is yes: code code changes should always be considered.
And on that sort of vein, like what role do you think that the planning commission plays in helping the borough grow? Does it play a role in helping it grow?
Well, of course they do, and I mean there’s some obvious ones with the reviews of all the projects, street projects, any street project, any borough project, they review that. One of the things that the borough can do again, or the planning commission again, is get people that can actually look at a set of plans and specifications and make heads or tails of it to make a decision of is this a good idea or not. Another thing that the planning commission can do that, and as a borough assembly member, we missed this one when Front Street was being done or Beach Road was being done between the harbor and the Quick Shop, that all was being redone, and it was brought to us about, “Hey, do you want to spend an extra $100,000 and put the power lines underground? “And that was the question that was posed to us. And at the time, money was tight, and we decided not to do that. And this is where I believe that the planning commission could have stepped in.
It wasn’t until it was all built and the power lines were up and finished, and everybody looked around and went, “Oh shoot, the power lines cross the road in two places, which means fishing boats are restricted to taking their masts down, being pulled out. Whereas, had we put that all underground, it would have made it much easier for the fishermen to move their boats out of the harbor and to other other locations. And there were two or three boatyards that were within three quarters of a mile that they had to pull their masts down at that point. So, just that right there, the planning commission having people with great ideas or listening to great ideas and bringing them forth, we can help in there.
As far as community growth, I think one of the important things for the planning commission to remember is is that there are there’s a lot of natural resources we have in our community, and since before most of us were here in town, the you know that has been a lot of our income, you know, and a lot of our our stable base, and I think that we sometimes forget that if you don’t have industrial land, you can’t have a lot of this stuff, and maybe that’s some people’s goal. I don’t know, but I think that when we when we build plans and we look at future planning and zoning, we need to consider that you know how where are we going to put our heavy equipment yards so that people can have snow plows, you know, and snowplow equipment, and and have them closer to their snowplow jobs because, you know, moving a grader 10 miles to go do three hours of grading just doesn’t make sense.
So if you’re with the heavy equipment we need, our needs in the winter time are a lot more than people realize downtown, so you can’t restrict all those industries to five miles out of town. You get out the highway, you need industrial land if you’re going to, you know, even timber of any kind at some point. You’ve got to have logging trucks and stuff like that. We’ve got a lot of small sawmills happening. So thinking ahead and thinking about how our people can can what they will need to have employment, and look at our youth. You know, when a young person graduates from high school here, what can they do for a living? How can they make a buck in this town? Commercial fishing, we’re less than half of the gill net permits than we were in I think the 1980s. So we’ve been losing ground as far as what I’m going to say. People that haven’t gone to college, you know, people that have gone to work apprentice schools and stuff like that; those jobs are decreasing, and I think that it’s important that we look at that and make sure that our that we don’t plan and zone ourselves out of the ability for people to make a living.
I think what I’m trying to understand there too is I heard from some people who were elected to the planning commission, and that first crop of folks that got elected, that there were some things that they wanted to address that maybe weren’t that sort of long range planning. I’m thinking about light in the townsite, or not to call anybody out specifically, but just some future growth opportunities or future issues to address that would be generated from planning commissioners themselves and not necessarily from the community.
And then the reality of being a planning commissioner is that you spend a lot of time on permits that people have applied for for development of their own, and there’s not as much time to like to sit and think ahead about what your priorities might be as a body. And I’m curious if you think that that is the role of a planning commissioner to be planning for a future that nobody’s talking about yet, or if you how you think about what the planning commission can do as part of that long-range planning when it isn’t as simple as a company coming in and asking for a permit to do something?
Naturally, we should consider the long-term plans, and I believe I was at one of the meetings, and it might have been that first one you were at where somebody brought up light pollution issues. We’re a small town, we we have extremely high electricity rates. Our water and sewer rates for seem to be high. Our freight rates are high. There’s not a lot of what I would call attractive factors for any large scale industry to come in that isn’t already here in some way, shape, or form, you know, I I don’t really see a major manufacturing company to come in for anything because just the freight rates would kill them, and you know, or if you’ve got electrical machinery of any kind, the electrical rates would just would make it unpalatable for almost any any company, and so the idea that we’re worried about future growth of any size, when you start looking at the size of our community, and I’m going to go to the U.S. Census,
I’m not going to go to the the Haines Borough numbers –
And the state.
So you go to our census and you start looking at where we are, and then also go look at our school numbers. We’re not a growing community. We are an aging community that is, you know, frankly, we’re aging ourselves out, and what we’re turning into is we’re turning into a summertime. We’re a summertime community where our winter community has very few people.
And if you’ve tried to go eat out during the winter time, I’m sure that you’ve been challenged a few times. And even in the summertime, there are times where you’re very limited to what you can do for anything entertainment. So some of this stuff that people start talking about, where you know you’ve got big cities with lots of land and lots of potential for growth of some types of industry, you know we are the end of the road, and so you know maybe you get some freighting that happens through here, but you know for for large scale, I don’t see anything that’s going to bring in hundreds and hundreds of people that is going to impact downtown very much.
If you walk down Main Street, you know last I looked we had two stores that were selling secondhand type stuff. I think one of them is now closed, but you know when some of your main business district has a secondhand store, you have to consider where your income of your community is. But I, when I was a kid, from what’s now Mountain Market all the way, you could go down to what was Wallace Garage, but now Mountain Market and Third Avenue didn’t happen. It wasn’t there. Nothing on that side was there, but it was pitch black to get to what’s now the Outfitters Sporting Good. That area there was pitch black, no lights, no nothing, and there was Port Chilkoot.
None of the development behind what’s now the Parts Place between there and the clinic and all that, none of that was there. Our, what I’m going to call the downtown area, has spread out now all the way you know to the fort, all the way out to the ball fields, and so we’ve spread stuff out, but we really haven’t increased the businesses as much as people think. We know Main Street used to be a thriving business district all winter long, and it has kind of changed, and a lot of places close in the winter time now.
So when we’re talking about planning, one of the things I, again the red face test common sense, I don’t see a lot of potential for some huge impact of people coming in that will even take us up to the 2,500 people year round that our borough seems to think that we have. So, yeah, we need to think about it. But some of this stuff, I think, also is stuff that’s to me, it’s big city concerns, and in a small town. And I, again, I’m going to go back to the freedoms of people. I am trying to tell people that they can’t turn on their Christmas lights or have lights on all winter long. I just don’t, I don’t see the need for that, and I think our electricity rates probably will help dictate bright lights more than anything.
Okay, well, we’re about wrapping up on the amount of time that I was hoping to take for this interview, but I’m curious if I missed anything that you think is important or anything that you want people to know about what you would like to do if you were elected?
Well, I don’t really have something I’m bringing in as far as we need to do this or we need to do that as far as code. What I hope to bring is I hope to bring some experience and bring in a reminder that “let’s read code. What does code say?” You know, stop the conversation. “Let’s not get into an argument. First, read the code. What codes apply to this. Let’s read those, and now let’s see how this decision, you know, goes out.”
Because as you talked about the rabbit hole, you know, mentioned that you’ve heard some of these rabbit holes. A lot of these conversations are cleared up in code, and it’s only when the code is a little bit hinky that these discussions, I think these discussions should happen. But I would hope that I could bring a level-headed approach, following code, following laws, and not make stuff, insert words into code, or try and warp the code, or warp common sense to fit the desires of myself or or other people that are are feel that they need to have it a specific way.
Okay, George, thanks so much for taking the time. I appreciate it.