“So another part-time position has become permanent?”
— Haines Borough Assembly member Don Turner III, asking borough manager Robert Venables about his proposal to create a full-time “facilities director” position, September 18, 2007.
“So long as grants are paying for it.”
— Venables’ response.
Let the record show: “Liberals” on the Haines Borough Assembly tried to reduce the size of government, but were thwarted by the staff and key allies on the assembly.
That’s right. The assembly met at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 20 to discuss which borough positions might be cut or left vacant in light of budget cuts to the Haines Borough by the State of Alaska.
My fellow assembly member Heather Lende figured reasonably that vacancies in several jobs due to resignations created an opportunity to trim or consolidate staff, including the job of facilities director, which costs the borough $140,000 per year, including benefits.
Created in 2007, that facilities director job was intended as a temporary one — to be funded with grant administration funds — to handle an overflow of borough projects when the state was rich on high oil prices and funding many projects in Haines. (In the Sept. 20, 2007 Chilkat Valley News, then-borough mayor Fred Shields said the borough could retire the position when the volume of projects declined. “If there’s no need, there’s no position,” Shields said.)
Now the state is poor and capital project grants are all but gone.
But besides a lot of predictable talk about taking a more wholistic approach and having more discussion, nothing happened at last week’s meeting.
Here’s why.
The staff came loaded for bear, including pages of documents showing how vital the facilities director was to the functioning of the borough and testimony about how “thinly” staffed we are and how low morale is.
Rather remarkably, assembly member Sean Maidy, whose wife holds a full-time job in the borough office, asserted that it’s not proper for the assembly to determine the size of the staff, and that consideration of staff size amounted to micro-managing by the assembly.
The truth is that the Haines Borough Assembly has added two full-time jobs to the payroll since 2016 — a policeman and a full-time assistant to our full-time planner. Also, the assembly in May received $500,000 in raises and increased benefits and the borough police chief, who is paid $100,000 in cash and $50,000 in benefits, is angling for more pay.
Also, nearly all the existing large infrastructure of the borough were built without a “facilities director” on the payroll, including the Chilkat Center, the Haines School, Haines Public Library, the water and sewer systems, and the Haines boat harbor previous to the 2016 expansion. (The borough hired engineers to oversee those projects during construction.)
Also, despite the fact that since government consolidation in 2002, the borough has employed three full-time workers in facilities maintenance. These skilled workers do a great job holding together our facilities. Four years ago the borough built them their own maintenance shop on Union Street across from the Public Works Department.
So why is the facilities director position still needed?
The question is still a good one, bu unfortunately, the borough assembly can’t even begin a conversation about reducing staff. That tells you how much power the borough staff holds. The workers are running the company. In another context, such as a widget-factory, that might be okay.
But a government controlled by its staff is dangerous for at least two reasons: 1) Because as the staff is not directly accountable to the public, there’s no brake on its engine, and 2) Because the staff has its own agenda, very often to feather its own nest and the nests of its self-determined constituency and allies.
Right now the staff is deciding how many employees should be on the staff. If that’s not a wake-up call to “fiscal conservatives” in the Haines Borough, nothing is.