It’s baseball season and the Haines Borough Assembly is out in left field. COVID and December’s wreckage brought sharp focus to borough meetings, but the assembly is out grazing in the grass now, entertaining a gun-nut resolution. This is where assemblies land when they fail to deliberately and thoughtfully establish their goals. They stumble around like a drunk, opening doors…
All the constitutional scholars on the Haines Borough Assembly, please raise your hands. Great. Thank you. Now please explain, using simple language the rest of us ignorant plebes might understand as well as your knowledge of the discussions held during the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1789: Was it the intent of the founding fathers that “arms” meant…
Incoming Haines Borough Manager George Zoukee faces an uphill battle. His resume is short in three critical areas – municipal management, Alaska knowledge and small-town savvy. That means the odds will be against him. Former managers who arrived with similar resumes – including David Sosa and Bill Seward – didn’t last long. To succeed, which for this job might be…
A big dump turned our old, jaggedy gray snow all new and smooth and white again, which counts for some kind of redemption at this time of winter, if not cause for celebration. An old truism goes that on any job, the first 90 percent of work takes the first 90 percent of time and the last 10 percent of…
Living in Las Vegas for six months, I got to know some of Sin City’s landmarks, most notably its signs. Vegas is a town full of implausible solicitations like “Loose Slots!” and “Breakfast: 99 Cents!” My favorite was one above a strip-mall storefront, in giant block letters, reading: “Free Money!” You can’t fault Vegas for not understanding what people want.…
To understand Alaska politics, it helps to know the politics of capital projects. Big projects – the Susitna Dam, the Juneau Road, Ketchikan’s “Bridge to Nowhere” – consume more than their share of government business in this state. That’s also true on our local level. Consider the numbers of meetings spent talking about boat harbor expansion, rebuilding the firehall, and…
“Their greatest value no doubt lies in the universal interest of the public in seeing and photographing them in their natural habitat, and since they can be observed along most any good salmon stream when the fish are running, they provide a wonderful tourist attraction. For the sportsmen seeking a trophy, however, other areas in Alaska offer larger and more…
For his birthday party Tuesday, Pizza Joe invited friends to the skate park to play pickleball. About a dozen people showed up. The games went on for six hours. A week previous to his birthday, Joe was out at the fairgrounds with a fire hose in single-digit temperatures, putting down layers of ice at the makeshift rink there. Parnell has…
The headline in the Anchorage newspaper read, “In Haines, Divisions Recede as Community Members Rally to Help after Landslides and Flooding.” The story remained on the paper’s website for weeks, proving it was a popular one, generating clicks. It’s a feel-good story, the kind people like to read about folks setting aside differences to help each other during a catastrophe.…
A long time ago aboard a state ferry that may no longer be around someone mounted a display of black-and-white photos of Sitka in winter. They were outdoor night scenes of wet houses and piles of slush, bicycles under an eave, lit by streetlights and illuminated windows. The photos were as somber as they were starkly beautiful, conjuring up this…