I was speaking the other night with Vince Hansen, who once served as manager for the City of Haines, about recent and historic turnover in that position.
The town hasn’t figured out how a manager system should work regarding the relationship between assembly members and the manager, Hansen said, or words to that effect. Specifically, it appeared that the assembly was micro-managing manager Debra Schnabel, Hansen said.
Hansen’s view is similar to but more nuanced than the response most people take after a manager is fired: Either the manager or the assembly is at fault. In typical Haines fashion, most of us take up sides based mainly on our personal relationships with or perceptions of the players, then beat up on the opposite side.
Some of our brainier or more attentive citizens forwarded theories of more arcane causes for the breakdown – a detached mayor, perhaps, or the manager form of government vs. the strong mayor form of government it replaced when our two local governments became one in 2002.
These days I’m wondering if the cause isn’t simply our town’s difficulty living amicably under a centralized authority – the consolidated Haines Borough.
For the last 30 years of the 20th century, our community operated under a system of decentralized power in the form of two governments – the City of Haines and the Haines Borough. Located downtown, the city held broad powers but represented only about two thirds of those who lived here. The borough’s power was mostly limited to education and tax collection, but it also represented, as a voice, the entirety of the citizenry.
What’s more, during those 30 years, many people moving to Haines chose to live outside the boundaries of the city. They wanted views out their windows and elbow room. That changing demographic shifted relatively more power to the borough.
The two governments were famously at odds with one another, not infrequently taking opposing or conflicting views on issues. State legislators would throw up their hands, saying they couldn’t tell what “Haines” wanted. City councilors privately chided assembly members and vice versa. Workers for one of the governments would phone the newspaper with tips about mistakes or chicanery committed by the other.
I was the newspaper’s municipal reporter here during much of that era, covering meetings of both the Haines City Council and the Haines Borough and their respective mayors. The duality gave rise to some rich reporting, but also frustration at our apparent schizophrenia.
(Plus, some hilarious moments. When Yukon travel officials who once came to town for their meeting were slighted by commencing discussion without the customary welcome by the mayor of the hosting town, a panicked businessman collared me to fetch a mayor, pronto. When I asked if he wanted the city or borough mayor, he replied, “It doesn’t matter. Just get me a mayor.”)
As the millennium approached, many people living inside city boundaries became convinced that combining the two governments would make our town more efficient and effective. Many borough residents living outside city boundaries feared that merging the two governments was a Trojan Horse aimed at spreading the city’s elevated tax burden onto them.
The apparent tie-breaker was the hope, although no promises were made, that one, combined government would cost less than two smaller ones. (Complicating that possibility was the fact that City of Haines workers, previously non-unionized, would gain union status that borough workers had enjoyed.)
As a citizen, I supported consolidation. I was tired of covering two sets of meetings and the concept of gaining efficiencies seemed intuitive. At the least, our town would stop appearing to the rest of the world like a bickering couple.
But people like me missed the larger point and some of the larger themes at work in Haines. Consolidation, in fact, represented the consolidation of local power into fewer hands, and particularly into the hands of a manager charged with the day-to-day administration of government authority.
People in Alaska in general, and perhaps people in Haines more prominently, chafe at government power. Old-timers and newcomers alike want to live in what this town resembles to most outsiders: A big, wonderful playground during recess.
Also, and perhaps most importantly, there was a significant benefit of the two- government system that few, if any, articulated during consolidation: Each government had the effect of tempering the other. When one of them ventured into new or ambitious territory, the other would serve as a kind of check and sounding board – sometimes even as a brake.
For the whole community to get much done together, twelve elected representatives and two mayors had to agree. If you’re an efficiency expert, that sounds like a nightmare. But the purpose of government isn’t to be efficient, it’s to represent people. A government that moves slowly and with deliberation is more likely to be mindful of its constituents than one that moves fast.
That’s not all bad in a place where many people still believe that government is best that governs least.
We’re still relatively new at operating our improved and sleek consolidated government. It boasts considerable power under the hood, including those invested in the one person who serves as manager.
Considering the nature of our community and our previous system of government, we maybe should have anticipated mash-ups and devised a better braking system.