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

The Haines Borough Assembly has decided voter approval is unnecessary to formalize the practice of emergency police response outside the townsite. On Tuesday, the assembly voted to amend a resolution from December instead of placing the question on the October ballot.

In response to concerns that areawide police response was not permissible under borough charter, at the end of 2019, the assembly passed a resolution interpreting charter to explicitly allow for emergency police response outside the townsite until “voters have settled the question of emergency police services at the (Oct. 6) election.”

For the past few months, the assembly has been tinkering with ballot measure language to get it ready for the election. However, this effort was abandoned Tuesday in a 5-1 vote that removed the language requiring voter approval.

Assembly member Zephyr Sincerny, the sole “no” vote, declined to comment.

Those who voted in favor said they decided to put the issue to rest without public approval because they felt the ballot measure was unnecessary, becoming increasingly convoluted and taking up assembly time that could be better spent on other issues.

“Nothing’s really changing, so why are we putting something out there that’s going to potentially confuse people,” assembly member Paul Rogers said in an interview Wednesday morning.

Rogers said he isn’t concerned about the potential loss of public input. People have had sufficient time to weigh in on this issue as it “has been an ongoing discussion for quite some time,” he said.

In 2018, residents voted down a ballot measure that would have raised taxes outside the townsite to pay for expanded police service. Assembly member Brenda Josephson said, based on recent public feedback she’s received, residents appeared to be conflating the 2018 ballot proposition with the current one.

“There was concern by the public both within the townsite and out the highway that… this (ballot proposition) was trying to do the same thing again in another way,” even though this wasn’t the case, Josephson said.

On Tuesday, the assembly also revised the December resolution’s definition of emergency. The new definition leaves out the phrase “threat to property,” a change in keeping with a recommendation made by the assembly’s Finance Committee last week.

In an interview discussing Finance Committee recommendations for the now obsolete ballot measure, Josephson said the recommendation was largely influenced by public comment, which pointed out the nebulous nature of the phrase “threat to property.”

“We needed to make sure it was understood that emergency response is for personal protection,” she said, adding those who want more expansive police response can move to the townsite.

The resolution now defines emergency as “a violent crime, an imminent threat to life or a life-threatening crime, including response after the fact.”

Rogers said the change is also intended to allow police to respond to domestic violence cases where a threat to life can remain even if a crime is not actively occurring.

The final edit to the resolution made at Tuesday’s meeting removed a sentence requiring that response outside the townsite be funded by general fund sales tax revenue. As a townsite service, the police department is traditionally funded by townsite revenue.

At past assembly meetings, there had been discussion of approving a reimbursement mechanism, along with the ballot measure, to formalize a process for transferring areawide taxpayer dollars into the townsite fund as payback for police services. Earlier this month, the Finance Committee advised against any formalized reimbursement mechanism.

“We do allocations like this all the time in the budget, but this would be the only place where we’d put it in code, which seemed illogical,” Josephson said. Instead, any reimbursement for police response will be a matter of policy, the result of annual discussions between the assembly and borough staff.

Rogers said he believes having the general fund pay for police response outside the townsite is unnecessary.

“We feel that the funding for that comes from funds already being collected,” he said, noting that those who live outside the townsite make many of their purchases within the townsite and sales tax revenue from these purchases goes into the townsite fund.

Police response outside the townsite has been an ongoing debate since Haines became a consolidated borough in 2002. According to charter, “the establishment and operation of police departments” is a power reserved for service areas, rather than an areawide power. However, police have traditionally responded to certain emergencies outside the townsite service area.