Three Haines assembly members and the mayor traveled to Anchorage last week to join the Alaska Municipal League. The annual conference is an opportunity for local leaders from throughout the state to learn, network, and strategize. We spoke with borough leaders about their trip.
For a week, the Alaska Municipal League conference offers workshops on all subjects related to local government. This year’s agenda listed sessions with names such as “strengthening coastal resilience”, “making the most of your money”, and “recruiting, managing and retaining a healthy workforce”.
The first day was focused on newly elected officials. Haines’ new assembly member Craig Loomis went to brush up on procedures and rules of discussions.
Loomis: “Basically, the 101 of being a newly elected official. You know, Robert’s Rules, and how meetings are supposed to go and how you go ahead and get your motions in, etc, etc.”
Mayor Tom Morphet attended the Parliamentary Procedures workshop. He said he learned a couple things.
Morphet: “Oftentimes at our meetings someone goes ‘point of order!’ Well, a point of order doesn’t necessarily do anything. It just asks the chair to take action on something going on in the meeting.I think that has been misapplied in our proceedings a little bit. There are a couple other ones. Motion to adjourn needs a second. We’ve been assuming that that didn’t need a second. So they are little things.”
Beyond learning more about the nuts and bolts of governing, Morphet says the gathering is an opportunity for municipal leaders to find common ground and hone their messaging.
He says a few years ago, when he attended the conference as an assembly member, he had concerns about the state putting pressure on the borough to take over state responsibilities. He says the bridge to the Porcupine, 26 miles from town used to be state property, same with the downtown harbor. He says the state gave those properties -and the responsibility for maintenance- to the borough in what he called a forced transfer.
Morphet: “So in 2016, I attended municipal league and I said ‘what about those obligations that we are being asked to take on as municipalities, isn’t that unfair, considering the state of Alaska has a much bigger tax base to pay for things, you have more people, you have a bigger base for paying for things.”
Morphet says he is pleased that the league has rallied around this concern. Opposition to policies that transfer state or federal responsibilities to local government without adequate funding is now part of the league’s Principles and Policy statements. He says the distance between municipalities in Alaska affects elected officials.
Morphet: “Very often, we don’t understand that what is happening to us is also happening to someone else. And we have power in numbers. And the municipalities right now I think are fairly upset with this administration for it’s treatment of municipalities, particularly with school funding. But also with things like these forced transfers, where the state gets to claim to the constituency ‘well, we’ve cut the budget’, well you really haven’t cut the budget. All you’ve done is taking your responsibilities, and foisted them on to these little communities.”
Morphet says he now sees this mechanism at work with state parks. The state has recently closed the Portage Cove campground, and is neglecting the Mosquito Lake campground. He says other municipalities are now paying for state parks.
Morphet: “I talked to the mayor of Valdez, and Valdez is paying $50 or $60K a year to top pay for managing what are the state’s properties.”
Morphet says he is now talking with other communities, and aims to form a coalition of municipalities that have state parks. This coalition would have greater leverage with the state. He says that is a great strength of the Municipal League conference.
Mortphet: “When you go to AML, you get to make those bonds, or make those contacts, and start building these municipal coalitions. Which is what you need. Because, the state, just by virtue of having a larger bureaucracy, can lord over municipalities to a certain extent.”
Assembly member Natalie Dawson also attended the conference. She says a workshop on Asset Management Planning really caught her attention.
Dawson: “It’s a plan to look at what we do own, where is it located, what condition is it in,and how much will it cost to repair and replace it. In a local government and in a community of our size it would help us find out what we know and what we don’t know, and how we get to know more about what we need to know.”
Dawson says a community can build an asset management plan around a sewer system, for example, and consider it as a system.
The idea of an asset management plan is you assess a value to your current system, and then try to project out based on its current condition how much it’s going to cost to repair or replace something.”
She says having data about how much something is going to cost allows communities to plan how they are going to pay for it.
Dawson: “Do you add a new tax, or do you pull from your savings. Because oftentimes we think about all the things we want to do but not always do we think of how much they are going to cost, and where we are going to get the money from.”
Dawson says she was surprised to hear how much communities underestimate the cost of maintaining their infrastructure.
Dawson: “One thing they mentioned, this Canadian network of asset management managers that did this presentation, was that oftentimes, when you are building something new, the capital cost is only 20% on average what the total cost of that entity is going to be. So when you are planning for the long term, and you are going to build something new, think about that cost.”
She says she looks forward to learning more about the asset management planning already in effect in the borough.
