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

By Kyle Clayton

All seven seats on the Haines Borough Planning Commission will be up for election this October after the borough assembly voted unanimously to reject the borough clerk’s recommendation to phase elected commissioners in after the current appointed members’ terms expire.

The decision comes after voters passed an initiative 445 to 248 at a special election last Tuesday. Borough Clerk Alekka Fullerton advised the assembly to phase in the election of members, citing the difficulties of finding seven qualified candidates in one year. That advice was contrary to the will of the voters and the way the new ordinance will be written, said initiative organizers.

“To say that some other arrangement other than electing a full planning commission, all seven members in October, should be done, I think that’s in bad faith,” said Tom Morphet, who led the ballot initiative. “I think that’s in defiance of an open and free and very clear election to change the law and that’s what’s happened. The law has changed.”

Assembly member Debra Schnabel made a motion to elect all the commissioners in October. Candidates who receive the most votes will receive three-year terms. Terms lengths ranging from two years and one year will go to candidates based on the number of votes they receive.

“It seems like a very reasonable thing to stagger them,” Schnabel said of the clerk’s advice.

“But the words are the words. I read the words to say ‘shall be elected.’ It doesn’t say to be elected in a staggered way. I think we should elect the planning commission.”

Assembly member Jerry Lapp asked Fullerton whether her advice aligned with the will of the voters.

“There was no direction by the voters with respect to how to implement this policy,” Fullerton said.

Mayor Douglas Olerud advised the assembly to follow the will of those who organized the initiative.

“If the people pushing the initiative think it was supposed to be one way and that was the side that won, maybe we should listen to them,” Olerud said. “Just a thought.”

The assembly also rejected an appeal from a 26-Mile resident signed by more than 18 nearby neighbors to rehear a planning commission decision to issue a heliport conditional use permit. The appellant, Nicholas Szatkowski, called the planning commission’s decision “unlawful, arbitrary and capricious.” He criticized the borough manager for failing to address complaints that Campbell was unlawfully operating helicopters from his FAA-certified airstrip for eight months after neighbors documented helicopter activity, a use that requires a conditional use permit in the general use zone where they live.

Szatkowski said helicopters would create undue noise in the area and cited past decisions where heliport permits were rejected because of their proximity to residential areas.

“Any reasonable person would consider that to be undue noise,” he said. “You cannot allow something to cause (that level) of noise in someone’s home. That isn’t right.”

Schnabel made a motion to rehear the appellants but the motion failed 3-2 with Jerry Lapp and Gabe Thomas in opposition. Assembly member Cheryl Stickler was absent from the meeting. Schnabel made a second motion to alter the conditions placed on the permit, a motion that passed unanimously.