Credit the Haines Sheldon Museum for coming to its own rescue.
Then fill out the flier that went into your post office box last week and buy a museum membership.
The reason you never needed a membership previously was that the Haines Borough and museum were flush. Now both are struggling and your help is necessary to keep the doors open.
The museum is becoming an independent nonprofit, with its own board of directors, managing its own employees. Under a model adopted by the facility’s board last fall, the Haines Borough would continue owning and maintaining the building.
That’s akin to arrangements that existed at museum and library in the 1980s, prior to unionization of borough employees, and it’s sustainable.
The former model wasn’t.
Borough employees unionized when workers in the Haines Borough office, public library and museum started comparing their wages to ones paid to workers doing similar jobs at Haines Borough schools.
School district office staffers were paid twice or more as much as workers in the borough office, library and museum who worked comparable – and sometimes much more challenging – jobs. Instead of trimming pay for nonunion positions at the school, borough leaders extended union membership and substantial raises to borough office and facility workers.
Old hands at the borough who understood that Prudhoe Bay oil was finite objected, but there was still money enough coming in for the assembly to approve the deal. When the Haines Borough and City of Haines combined in 2002, union protection was extended to city employees for the first time.
But the party’s over now, and we must choose between having borough facilities with nonunion labor or having no facilities at all. Yes, professional museum employees deserve real wages and benefits. Under the new model, they can have those – if the nonprofit managing the museum can find enough money enough to pay for them.
If not, employees will have to work for less. That’s unfortunate, but it’s the model that’s been working for community nonprofits for years, including at the Southeast Alaska State Fair and KHNS, for example, which receive annual appropriations from the borough and in-kind assistance, then must rely on non-unionized employees, volunteers, grants, memberships and the grace of God to survive.
The same model may have to be applied one day to the public library, swimming pool, maybe even to the town landfill and garbage collection. Labor is the biggest cost of any facility, but we’re a very small town that loves facilities that could never exist in other places of the same size.
Oil money paid to build our facilities, but it’s gone. We can reasonably ask borough taxpayers to keep the lights and the heat on, and to take care of major maintenance. Funding professional staff paid at union scale is a worthy goal, but when push comes to shove, a public facility’s first role is to be open to the public.
We owe our museum, pool, Chilkat Center, and library to one-time pots of gold that built them. Unfortunately, the pots of gold that staffed and operated them are drying up. Nonprofit management and nonunion labor offer us the most realistic option for keeping them open.
Buy a museum membership today.