Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

Mayor Jan Hill and Haines Borough Manager Mark Earnest traveled to Washington, D.C., last week to lobby for money in support of projects such as Small Boat Harbor expansion and borough acquisition of Picture Point.

“In my experience, and I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, it’s very important to have an elected official and someone with the administration,” Earnest said. “It’s really better just to have a small group for a very limited purpose and a very specific purpose.”

The trip had an estimated cost of $5,000, and Hill and Earnest attended meetings with Brad Gilman, a D.C.-based lobbyist the borough pays $50,000 annually.

Hill said repeated visits to the nation’s capital pay off and have made the trio “familiar faces” to many national officials.

“Mark comes to us with a lot of previous experience, even with our own lobbyist, and with the delegation,” she said. “No matter where we went, he had some contact with those agency people or someone who had been in that agency. We weren’t making introductions.”

The April 11-13 agenda included meetings with U.S. senators Begich and Murkowski, U.S. Rep. Don Young and representatives from the National Association of Counties, Federal Highway Administration and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“Even though we have opportunities to meet with our delegation individually when they’re visiting, those trips are usually for a different purpose,” Earnest said. “These trips, we have the benefit of having all of their staff available.”

The Federal Highway Administration manages the National Scenic Byways Program that Earnest aims to use for Picture Point.

The grant program has been in budget limbo and last allocated $41 million to 160 projects in 43 states for fiscal year 2009.

“They seemed to be very supportive of our efforts,” Earnest said. “We were able to explain and present what the project consists of. This is really a project that has been a part of every planning document that the city and subsequently the borough has commissioned since the early 1980s.”

He said with a government shutdown averted, he hopes the borough will be able to move forward with the grant application.

Earnest said in-person communication with the Federal Highway Administration “put the project and the community on the map.”

Hill said discussion with the Corps of Engineers allowed the borough to “reinforce the priority of our boat harbor expansion.”

She and Earnest missed the April 12 meeting of the Haines Borough Assembly, where members also showed their support for the Small Boat Harbor.

“The assembly adopted a resolution supporting the idea of creating a separate funding program within the Corps of Engineers (civil) works division – a funding set aside for the Pacific Ocean Division,” Earnest said.

Lobbyist Gilman advised Earnest that the borough needed to take that kind of action in response to a federal earmark moratorium.

“The Corps has been telling me for some time that the Alaska communities need to join together if they want to be a force in getting funding for their projects,” Gilman said in an e-mail. “We’ve never really attempted a coalition effort because the funding process continued to be project-specific. We are now at a crossroads and will need to take a different approach if we are ever going to get your harbor project off the ground.”

Earnest said the scoring system for funding favors urban ports, but said Corps officials are receptive to the Pacific Ocean Division’s concerns and realize “there are very few communities in the nation that are as water-dependent as communities in that region.”

“They understand that communities or states like Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific Island territories are just not in a position to compete with large port facilities,” Earnest said.