I’m heartened and humbled by your show of support during the recent recall election. I intend to live up to your expectations of me. That is, to be open and fair-minded and to put in the hours required for thoughtful consideration of local issues.
For most of the past year I’ve been fighting with one hand tied behind my back, as the obligations of owning the Chilkat Valley News limited the energy I could bring to Haines Borough business. The recall effort also worked to stymie a full and courageous discussion of issues on the assembly level in the past few months. Now that those matters are behind us, I expect to be making headway on several items including recreation, budgeting and borough policing.
Also, I’m looking into state law on recalls with an eye toward preventing “nuisance recalls,” such as our recent one. (And such as Haines Borough Assembly recall elections in 1993 and 2011.) Our recalls have been a waste of taxpayer money and government time. They achieved nothing. The only one that was partially successful — in 1993 when two assembly members were removed — was ultimately rejected by the Alaska Supreme Court for lack of grounds.
One idea is to require a greater percentage of voter signatures to trigger a recall or to allow less time to acquire the necessary signatures. Currently, organizers have 60 days to gather the number of signatures required to force a recall. The number is 25 percent of votes cast in the election for the seat that the recall target holds.
Don’t get me wrong. Voters need the power to throw out politicians who turn out to be criminals or scoundrels. In those cases, it doesn’t take two months to get just 25 percent of the votes cast for the scoundrel’s seat. Two or three weeks should do. Two months is longer than the borough’s election season. That’s excessive. Those are two months when government business goes into a kind of suspended animation, as elected leaders weigh each utterance and decision on the basis of how it might affect the recall. In effect, it’s a political campaign which hinders the work of government.
Part of the rationale behind political terms is that a politician’s popularity naturally goes up and down during the course of a multiple-year term. Raise taxes and your popularity wanes. Host a free town picnic and your popularity rises. A vote that pleases one half of the town can upset the other half. It’s a bit of a roller-coaster ride that’s leveled out, in part, by multiple-year terms of office.
When citizens can vote “in” or “out” governments on a whim, that leads to the kind of chaos we often see in unstable, less developed nations that change their governments as often as they change their sheets. That’s not productive.
If I were recalled, I had half a mind to head off to Australia, my wife’s homeland, which in some ways resembles the United States of my childhood: A large middle class, reasonable politics, a shared sense of national belonging. When I let friends know what I was thinking, they jokingly asked which way they should vote on the recall.
The answer is I’m here. This town can be tough and confounding, but it’s a great place and it’s where I’m planted. I think the town can be improved and I’m committed to helping make that happen. Stop by sometime and share your vision for Haines. My office is down the hall from the newspaper’s, at Third Avenue and Main Street.
Yours,
Tom Morphet
Posted 8/24/17