Haines draft zoning ordinance deletes more than commissioners voted to strike

The sentence Commissioner Jerry Lapp moved to preserve in August is missing from the draft ordinance headed to the Haines Borough Planning Commission on Thursday, Sept. 17. Nothing in the commission's own August motion asked for that language to disappear.

Written public comment closes at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 16. The commission meets at 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the Assembly Chambers at 315 Haines Highway and on Zoom.

The General Use district governs nearly all land outside the Haines townsite, including the Upper Valley neighborhoods now under a rezoning study. Its current intent language recognizes borough regions with no previous land use regulation and states the zone is intended to allow as broad a range of land uses as possible. A separate subsection reads: "Nonconforming Uses. There are no nonconforming uses in this district." Under Title 18, a nonconforming use is one prohibited or conditional under the code but lawful before the code took effect.

On Aug. 20, with four of the commission's seven members present, Lapp moved to "take the suggestion that the manager has to strike the first sentence up to the comma in HBC 18.70.030(D)(1) and recommend the change to the Assembly." The motion carried unanimously. A participant had put it plainly minutes earlier: "And I think you could just strike everything before the comma."

Striking up to the comma leaves the rest of the intent statement standing. The district would remain intended "to allow as broad a range of land uses as possible."

The drafted ordinance does something different. Its legend marks bold and underlined text as additions and struck-through text as deletions. Read against that legend, the entire Intent subsection is struck through, both sentences, including the one the commission voted to keep. In its place the draft adds: "The intent of the general use planning/zoning district is to preserve broad flexibility in land use and honor the historically diverse, mixed-use character of the area." The phrase "as broad a range of land uses as possible" appears nowhere in the new text.

The draft also strikes the nonconforming uses subsection in its entirety, renumbering the conditional uses subsection in its place. It retains one operative rule from current code, "This district allows any use, but requires a conditional use permit for high impact uses," while replacing the rest of the intent subsection and deleting the separate nonconforming-uses provision. Neither the August motion nor the agenda's account of it mentions nonconforming uses. The agenda says staff drafted the ordinance to reflect the commission's intention and "also took this opportunity to clarify legal ambiguities in the code language." Other additions read that way. Container homes and yurts are written in as uses by right, moving an existing code reviser's note into the section text. An agriculture entry is expanded to name personal and commercial use. A new lettered use covers other uses in the HBC 18.70.040 chart that do not require a conditional use permit.

Lynette Campbell raised the nonconforming question a month earlier. In an open letter dated Aug. 13 to the assembly, the commission and Upper Valley residents, she wrote that rezoning "will not make those existing uses disappear. Instead, it can turn presently lawful uses into nonconforming uses surrounded by properties operating under a different set of rules." Hers was one of four written comments on file, all opposing the rezoning. No supporting comment appears among the meeting attachments. The 2035 comprehensive plan appendices, completed in late 2024, name clearer regulation of the Upper Chilkat Valley, including nonconforming distinctions, as a potential outcome.

The rezoning study itself is not up for a vote Thursday. That item carries no motion and is limited to survey results and next steps. The posted survey documents are mostly images. Two of the August supplement's 26 pages are readable, and they print 86 IP addresses beside responses, resolving to 17 distinct values, all in ranges registered to Cloudflare. The September version drops the IP column. Eight of its nine pages are images, and on the one readable page, listing serials 121 to 135, 13 of 15 responses select General Use.

The work plan had scheduled a formal rezoning stage to begin Sept. 20, starting a 60-day clock for a final report and a 10-day public protest window. The draft minutes recording the narrower August motion are item 3A on Thursday's consent agenda, at the same meeting where the ordinance is up for a recommendation vote.