Moving Forward

We live here. We all know each other. In many circumstances, we all pitch in to help each other. From athletic events to medical emergencies to clean-ups. During those times we work shoulder to shoulder, getting to know each other even better.

I would like the remainder of this political season to be more like a community-wide effort to do our best to help each other. I look forward to the upcoming Chamber Forums (noon, September 23, Haines Borough Library) and the KHNS/CVN Forum (6 PM, September 26, Chilkat Center) as opportunities to forge connections and to develop mutual insights that will last long after the election.

What is it that we have to help each other do? We have to elect representatives who will enable us to move together, as a community to solve some tough problems: high cost of energy; threatened fish runs; infrastructure degradation; revenue short falls; rising transportation costs; revitalization of diversity in our economy.

Haines has long had the reputation as being a fiesty place. We express strongly held and often differing opinions. That’s “us.” And that’s OK. In fact, I see our ability to articulate our opinions as a positive. We do talk to each other. Let’s tweak that trait just a little bit and learn to prize those differences for the golden nuggets they are.

Each difference is an idea. No one of us is so smart that she or he is in possession of all the good ideas. We overlook ideas contrary to our own at our own peril. We can learn to listen to ideas with “a willingness to change.” Listening with a willingness to change smooths the rough edges of debate.

But as in all debates, the time will come for a decision. Decisions are not easily made or taken. The elected decision makers are the Mayor and the Assembly. The Mayor and the Assembly may have to be tough. They will have to be tough because they will have to make decisions that are best for the future of the entire community. These decisions may not necessarily be the most popular decisions. But that is what the Mayor and the Assembly have been elected to do.

The Mayor and the Assembly are, in fact, in a representative democracy, the “deciders.” But decisions will be defensible if they are arrived at through listening carefully to each golden nugget brought and sought.

My vision for Haines is that someday we will still be regarded as “fiesty,” but in a good way. We will be regarded as a place where issues are thoroughly debated, options carefully considered, and the best possible way forward selected by a thoroughly informed Assembly backed by an electorate that participated every step of the way.