If I had my druthers, I’d give the Lutak Dock to Lynden Transport or Delta Western or to both.
But they wouldn’t take it.
They wouldn’t take it for the same reason you wouldn’t take a free milk cow even though your family drinks a lot of milk: The cost of maintenance.
In the long run, it’s much cheaper for you to buy milk than it is to keep a cow. And it’s cheaper for AML and Delta Western to pay fees for using our dock than it is for them to own the dock themselves.
There’s a lot of talk that we have to fix up “our” Lutak Dock but the truth is that the only thing about Lutak Dock that’s ours – that belongs to Haines taxpayers – is the cost of maintaining it and replacing it. The benefit of the dock goes to Lynden and Delta, two multinational corporations who, unlike you and I, make money on the dock and have a key to the gate that surrounds it.
If owning a large, earthen dock was a money-maker, AML or Delta would have bought it from us years ago. They’ve never even made an offer because they adhere to an old rule of business: Success comes by privatizing profits and socializing costs.
To grasp the full absurdity of small-town taxpayers owning such a large dock, it serves to remember just where the dock came from: It was built by the largest, wealthiest government agency during the biggest pork-barrel in world history: Pentagon spending on the Cold War.
The Army built the dock during a hysterical moment when we had to pump jet fuel from here to Fairbanks because we were convinced that Joe Stalin was about to invade Tok.
He wasn’t. Joe’s average Russian was rooting around in his backyard for an extra potato to eat, millions of others were in prison camps and the Soviet Union’s largest bomber couldn’t even make a round-trip flight to U.S. mainland.
Lutak Dock was built on an absurdity. Most monstrosities are.
The U.S. Army itself would have been stuck with the dock, but it was smart enough in 1977 to do what you yourself would do with a milk cow – it gave the dock away. Why the City of Haines accepted the dock isn’t clear but it helps to understand that the city government and the logging industry were nearly identical at that time and the dock offered another place to load lumber into Japanese ships, conveniently located right next door to the sawmill.
But let’s get back to the bigger issue: A freight dock is not a municipal asset. It’s a piece of industry infrastructure. If it were an asset, other towns in Southeast Alaska would own freight docks. They don’t. Haines is one of only two municipally owned freight docks in Southeast. Freight or fuel companies own all the rest.
Also, Lynden and Delta are monopolies that largely control the cost of living in Haines by controlling the price of the most essential of essentials: the shipping of most goods that come to our town and the fuel that we put in our cars and furnaces.
It’s true that Lynden and Delta pay us for use of “our” dock. Together, they pay about $350,000 per year. That sounds like a lot but it hasn’t been enough to maintain the dock in the long run. If it were, we wouldn’t need to beg $25 million from the state and federal governments to repair it.
Because we lack both perspective and foresight, we’re about to spend 25 million taxpayer dollars on a dock that we don’t need to own or maintain. At the very least, here’s what we should do when we get done: Send a letter regularly to AML and Delta Western reminding them of our very generous contribution to their operations and ask them to ponder that every single time they consider hiking what they charge us for freight and fuel.