Legislature’s logjam cedes control to cities

This editorial originally appeared in the Wednesday edition of the Juneau Empire.

During this year’s abbreviated session of the Alaska Legislature, lawmakers couldn’t pass a complete budget. The Alaska House didn’t have enough votes to tap the state’s Constitutional Budget Reserve.

The House did have enough votes to pass a different bill, one that demands the United States hand over all non-park federal land to the state. Besides being unconstitutional, House Bill 115 is patently ridiculous: Alaska evidently doesn’t have enough money to effectively manage the state land it already has.

The incomplete budget passed by the House kills funding for two state foresters in the state’s largest state forest, the 283,000-acre Haines State Forest.

As Tom Morphet, editor of the Chilkat Valley News, wrote in an editorial last month, it seems as if the state is considering the Haines forest to be a liability rather than an asset, one that supports Haines with jobs in timber, fisheries and tourism.

The foresters in Haines manage timber sales, maintain access roads and take charge of fire prevention.

Without those foresters, the state forest will be managed from Juneau or Ketchikan, unless state forester Chris Maisch can scrape together enough money to fund a seasonal position in Haines.

In demanding that the federal government turn over its land to the state, lawmakers have taken the position that local control is better. Someone on the ground, at the scene, can make a better, more informed decision than someone in far-off Washington.

There’s some truth to that argument, but Morphet suggests taking the next logical step — if Alaskans can manage federal land better than the federal government, why couldn’t Haines manage its state forest better than the state?

He argues that turning over the forest to the Haines Borough makes logical sense. Given legislators’ pattern of action this year, we can’t say we disagree.

While the Alaska Legislature has been bogged down in budget discussions, municipalities across the state have been coming to terms with their budget problems. Anchorage and Fairbanks are cutting teachers. Juneau is raising tobacco taxes and eliminating sales tax exemptions.

If the Alaska Legislature continues its Congress-like logjam, local communities will assume more authority, taking the steps that will be needed to keep government functioning. Advocates of taking control from the federal government may find themselves undermined by municipal officials just as they’ve been doing to the federal government. If the Haines State Forest is the first tree to fall, it may not be the last.