The Haines borough is hiring. The planner position has been open for a while, and recruitment will start as soon as the 2025 budget is approved. The borough clerk left her job recently after years of service. And the borough manager last week sent a letter of resignation to the assembly. And these are just the most prominent positions.

Mayor Tom Morphet says there are reasons for the vacancies.

“Well I think staff has been overworked for a number of years,” Morphet said.

Morphet says the pandemic took its toll. The clerk did double duty for over a year, including during the 2020 landslide. Back then she filled her duties as clerk and took on the role of acting manager. As for the planner position, Morphet sees it as inherently difficult and controversial.

“The job might be the most demanding job in the borough.in that planning is a sophisticated idea, and it requires cooperation on a lot of different levels, and a common vision for the community of what it wants to see in terms of residential neighborhoods, and what it wants in terms of development, all those issues come to a head with planning. So the planner’s job is necessarily a hot seat,” he said.

Morphet says wages are another issue that causes high staff turnover.

“Wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, so many of these salaries have to go up. Quite frankly, if we want to have a certain quality of services. In public works, we have a high rate of attrition. We train equipment operators and they go right in the private sector. So until our wages are competitive with the private sector, we are always going to be hiring trainees.”

Morphet acknowledges that there has been some friction in the past year between staff and newly elected leadership.

“The assembly changed, priorities of the assembly changed accordingly. And that necessarily requires the staff to shift priorities, shift their energy, now we are doing this. So I think a certain amount of friction between the elected leadership and the hired leadership is inevitable.”

Annette Kreitzer has been borough manager for almost three years. At a recent meeting with the assembly, she requested a raise, which the assembly declined. Last week she offered her resignation. She will leave her position in August, six weeks before the end of her contract. In her letter she praised the borough staff’s diligent work. Kreitzer declined to comment on her resignation, but said she is working on recruitment.

“Right now we have a borough clerk position that’s open,” Kreitzer said. “Right now I am reviewing the references for an applicant for that position. The assembly has not made a decision yet and the assembly has not yet met with the applicant so we will be scheduling that.”

Kreitzer has nominated deputy clerk Kiersten Long to be the interim clerk. Long had been working as deputy clerk for over a year.

On her first day with the new job title, Long said that her duties are not different, but that she has to work with less guidance.

“The deputy clerk and the clerk, they basically do the same thing,” Long said. “I’m not doing much more than I’ve done before but instead of having Alekka to help me I have to do it by myself. Which is a little difficult, because I’d always have her check my work, or check my minutes, or ask for advice. But now I don’t have that.”

Still, Long shows the diligence praised by Kreitzer.

“We are doing our best, and what we can every single day to make sure that the borough is still functioning like we are not short staffed.”

Mayor Morphet says there are things that can help retain staff in the future. He wants to dedicate $400.000 of borough funds to increase salaries and hire extra staff.

“The idea is to have the manager position have a full time deputy position that can handle a good amount of the manager’s responsibilities,” Morphet said. “And that’d be a training position as well, so that when we lose the manager, the deputy manager rises to the manager position, and same with the clerk.”

In the same vein, a compliance officer could lighten the workload of the planner.

“And it’s going to cost more money, but we are not going to burn out our personnel, and we have a succession plan when clerks and managers move on,” Morphet said.

Meanwhile, manager Kreitzer urges residents to be patient with borough staff.

“We are down a planner, we are down a borough clerk, people are still getting sick, these things all have an impact on our ability to get work done. People will just have to have patience with how long it takes to respond. I’m going to probably change my outgoing email to just recognize that yes I got your email, and I will get to it as quickly as I can.”

Applications for borough jobs can be found on the borough’s website.