I was not surprised when I heard the news Tuesday afternoon that the assembly might be firing manager Debra Schnabel. I wrote members after the meeting that Schnabel deserves the chance to fight to keep her job, but I’m not particularly hopeful she’ll make that effort. Based on what I know, the move to oust Schnabel is not a conservative…
Tuesday’s Haines Borough Assembly discussion of the Haines Economic Development Commission veered off, too predictably, to an idea to merge the government’s tourism and economic development functions. The topic at hand was the effectiveness of spending taxpayer dollars on the commission, a nonprofit launched in 2017 by borough manager Debra Schnabel back when she was director of the Haines Chamber…
It’s a good thing that the Haines Borough’s founding fathers were wise enough to tuck away a bit of gift money for an emergency. That’s how we got our $9 million borough permanent fund. Whether we’re as wise managing the fund as they were in creating it can be debated. Saving gift money for emergencies is an Old World idea…
It’s an interesting coincidence that the decline of our nation’s big-city newspapers and the fracturing of television and online journalism have paralleled breakdowns in the functionality of our state and federal governments. Is a functional, thoughtful press linked to functional, thoughtful governments and communities? My thoughts about this are reinforced by recent trips I made to my hometown of Media,…
One of the chronic shortcomings of local government is an institutional difficulty with nuanced ideas, including that its authority needn’t always be a hammer, as every issue is not a nail. This week’s assembly debate over 14-day quarantine is only its most recent failure to paint policy with anything other than black and white colors. Some assembly members wanted to…
We are taught as children in America that we’re free to do what we want, but of course that’s not the case. Our freedoms are limited by all kinds of things, all the time. First, there are physical limitations, imposed by nature and genetics. My freedom is limited to what my body, physically, can do. No amount of training is…
Before we give all credit for bungling the coronavirus response to Donald Trump, let’s acknowledge that our very own governor, Mike Dunleavy, also made – and continues to make – important contributions to the unfolding public health disaster right here in Alaska. Dunleavy, in announcing his emergency shutdown of the state, exempted from 14-day quarantine essential workers, including the guys…
They say a child never touches a hot stove twice. Lacking the acute memory of a child, the Haines Borough is about to be burned again. The borough is slowly gutting tourism regulations that kept the industry responsible here for 25 years. Changes to borough code regarding tourism have sailed through the assembly with little comment, including reducing review of…
Oh, those Michiganders and their angry protest against the COVID-19 lockdown. I want to say to them, I’m with you. No, not like that. I’m not with their crazy conspiracy theories and their anti-government paranoia and their macaroni-and-cheese-fueled brain functioning. I’m with them to say, “Yes. You are humans, too. You are bat-shit crazy, but so is most of the…
His cringe-worthy press conferences during the corona crisis have underscored everything that’s wrong with the Trump presidency: His errors, his lies, his exaggerations, his unpreparedness, his unfocused, garbled, stream-of-consciousness meandering and his naked self-promotion. As some wag remarked, “He sounds like a kid giving a book report who didn’t read the book.” What makes it a spectacle is that while…