The Lutak Dock is no longer necessary for the town to receive its freight and groceries, so why is the Haines Borough Assembly looking to spend $26 million or more to rebuild it?
That’s a question you need to ask your representatives on the assembly. Whose bidding is the assembly doing? And why are taxpayers paying for it?
The Haines Borough recently signed a contract with Alaska Marine Lines, the freight company serving Haines, under which AML will bring the town’s supplies over a rebuilt roll-off dock, north of the 70-year-old earthen dock that is falling into Lutak Inlet.
To ensure this arrangement, the borough gave AML a 50-year lease on the property the ramp occupies.
So why is the borough pushing for tens of millions of dollars to repair the crumbling, earthen dock? Only the Haines Borough Assembly knows.
Built by the federal government to construct a military tank farm here in the 1950s, the U.S. Army gave the City of Haines the earthen dock in the 1970s, when the dock’s first repair bills were coming due. The City saw the dock as a money-maker, but that proved a mistake.
User fees could never keep up with the maintenance on a dock this size, exponentially bigger than what the town ever needed to get its freight. It’s also exponentially larger than the freight dock in Skagway, which sees considerably more through-freight northbound to the Interior than Haines does.
The earthen dock saw some use decades ago, as a log-staging lot during the era of industrial sawmills in Haines. It also was used to land pipe and other materials for building the trans-Alaska pipeline. In other words, by owning the dock, the municipality was able to make it cheap for wealthy outfits to ship resources and equipment through Haines.
The municipality never charged enough in wharfage rates enough to cover the dock’s depreciation, which is why the dock is falling down today. If the city charged enough in wharfage to cover depreciation, it may have never attracted any users at all, barring the pipeline, a project richer than Midas.
Undaunted by a 2018 report that found the earthen dock too small to serve as an ore-loading facility and needing up to $60 million in repairs, the assembly is pushing to spend $26 million on upgrading the facility, including $7 million for a first phase, and money on top of that for a lobbyist to secure the funding.
The requested $7 million from the Alaska Legislature for Phase 1 is money that could have gone to floats for the harbor expansion, or shoring up any number of borough buildings in need of repair or upgrades. The assembly chambers has been in violation of federal law for public buildings for 30 years; there’s no bathroom there for people confined to wheelchairs.
Every large industrial project in Haines requiring a dock – including Fort Seward, the U.S. Army tank farm at Lutak and the Schnabel Lumber Company mill – has built its own dock, with its own money.
So who is telling the Haines Borough Assembly to spend so much taxpayer time and money rebuilding the crumbling, outdated, unnecessary Lutak Dock? And why aren’t those folks paying for rebuilding the dock? Why don’t those folks just buy the dock from the borough?
Is it because the dock has no value?
The borough could simply learn from the Army’s example and give away the dock, and get taxpayers out from under the obligation of propping up this dinosaur. What a concept. The Army was smart enough to do that 45 years ago, when the City of Haines should have been smart enough to know that what comes for free is rarely worth it.
If you’re a Haines Borough taxpayer, you’re being suckered by someone.