Congratulations. You’re in power. Now you must sit down with your fellow assembly members and come to some agreement about what you’d like to get done. This will be your most single most important achievement and it’s not as difficult as it sounds. But it must be done at least annually, perhaps even quarterly, or your leadership will be blown…
Infectious diseases have ravaged human populations regularly since forever. Bubonic plague. Spanish flu. Yellow fever. Tuberculosis. Polio. Measles. Mumps. Rubella. Ebola. West Nile. Most of us walk around with a permanent tattoo on our shoulders left by vaccinations to ward off childhood diseases that in an earlier age would have maimed or killed us. In Alaska, white man’s diseases like…
Juneau, Alaska – At Tuesday’s Haines Borough Assembly, the town’s most outspoken civil libertarian thanked leaders for not mandating face masks, as has been done here and in Anchorage. “Freedom is the most important thing we have,” he said. That was incorrect, of course. It was Thom Jefferson who nailed our inalienable rights right on the kisser and in the…
Nine years ago, I was in Reims, France on a bicycle. I’d sat in a restaurant with a bottle of champagne and a plate of escargot until after dark, but I still wanted to glimpse the town’s famous cathedral, a giant and historic one where French kings were coronated for 1,000 years. The streets were empty and the cathedral closed,…
Because newspapers broker in ideas and also stir the political pot, they attract all manner of hell-raisers, free-thinkers, marginal literary types, crackpots, cranks, wits, half-wits, intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, highballs and goofballs. And that’s just the reporting staff. Then there are the hangers-on, the sources, interlopers and news junkies who frequent newsrooms. They seem never to get enough of the drama and…
Some people blamed Mayor Jan Hill for the firing of Haines Borough Manager Debra Schnabel. Hill cast the deciding, tie-breaking vote, but I’m sure she hated doing it. Hill has carved a long career in local politics by dodging bullets. The law of survival in politics is to show your cards only when it’s safe or when you must. Otherwise,…
Lorenzo Fertitta came cruising up the Inside Passage this week aboard his $125 million yacht “Lonian.” Because it’s only 285 feet long, the Lonian was accompanied by a support yacht carrying Lorenzo’s toys, including a helicopter, a submarine, skiffs and jet skis. Lorenzo, who raked in $2 billion on a bit of televised savagery called Ultimate Fighting Championship, didn’t spend…
The Haines Borough Assembly wants the public’s thoughts about reducing borough manager turnover. Here’s my idea: Supervise the next one. That would be a start, and a first. Assembly members say they supervise the manager, but how do six people actually supervise anyone? The truth is that the only real “supervision” borough managers get are annual performance evaluations, if they’re…
If you’re concerned about cuts to Haines Borough facilities like the public library, museum, Chilkat Center and swimming pool, where were you last year when the assembly approved three years of raises for borough employees totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars? Without those raises, our town could have been spared recent cuts to facilities. Haines progressives need to get their…
It’s easy to throw up your hands about local politics, about the issues that divide us, about the excruciating difficulty we have resolving many of the shared challenges we face as a community. So it’s helpful to remember that right here in Haines we have tackled problems and put them behind us. We forget our victories, and that’s too bad.…