After more than four decades, the Kenai group responsible for advising the city on harbor matters has come to an end. Kenai City Council members voted Wednesday to sunset the four-member Harbor Commission.
Efforts to sunset the group started with an email from Lisa Gabriel, one of the four active members. The other three seats are vacant. She said during a meeting last year that it’s tough for them to meet even the bare minimum to hold meetings.
“I'm trying to recall anything that we really did as a commission that required us to do anything, if you can understand that,” she said. “So, we've been trying to create agendas, we have a lack of quorum a lot of the time and we have a hard time keeping commissioners. And I think that's pretty apparent by our numbers now.”
City records show the Harbor Commission convened for the first time in 1979 with a mission of advising the city council and staff on harbor facilities and tidelands. The city owns and operates a dock near the mouth of the Kenai River that includes four boat launches and is especially busy during the summer fishing seasons.
Last year, the commission cancelled more than half of its meetings leading up to the work session where they considered sunsetting.
Matthew Moffis, the group’s vice chair, said during the same meeting that he agreed with Gabriel.
“We're all here to serve and I'm happy to, but if there's no agenda items and it's hard to reach a quorum and now with the parks taking over the dipnetting stuff and it just seems like it could be easily merged to another commission,” he said.
That’s exactly what city council members did Wednesday. The duties formerly assigned to the Harbor Commission now fall to Kenai’s Planning and Zoning Commission. The council also created a new section of city code to govern how the city leases tidelands, previously within the Harbor Commission’s purview.
Gabriel, who first proposed sunsetting the group, encouraged other commissioners to seek seats on other city groups to stay involved in city happenings.
