Wrangell is great at helping neighbors in need, at filling holiday food baskets and supporting student activities. The community excels at watching out for each other, watching over our elders and keeping watch over mariners.
There are multiple examples just in last week’s and this week’s Sentinel and on the Wrangell Community Group Facebook page: Volunteers working to reopen the roller rink after a three-year shutdown; all the effort that has gone into growing the community garden; the dedication, labor and money that have gone into building the Wrangell Mariners’ Memorial as a point of pride and remembrance; the new chess club at Evergreen Elementary School; all the community support and volunteer hours put into last month’s Sharing Our Knowledge conference; the food drive and countless programs run by churches in town.
Wrangell excels at all of that, and more. The town pitches in and does what’s needed to ensure people are safe and fed, that students have adult supervision and coaching for a long list of activities, and that help is at hand in a crisis.
The harder problems are tougher to solve. How to get past divided opinions; how to put aside disbelief and distrust of government; how to take the initiative to solve the bigger issues such as lack of housing, lack of child care and lack of economic opportunities.
Solving those requires more than helping out at a volunteer event, making a pot of chili or donating clothes. It takes leadership and not grousing, grumbling and griping to no purpose.
History teaches us lessons. Or so my teachers always told me, though it wasn’t until I grew into an adult that I realized they were right. And I have a lesson for today.
In the mid-1970s, the sawmill owner, Alaska Lumber and Pulp, donated $600,000 to the city for a swimming pool, which Wrangell sorely lacked. The city bid out the project, and the price tag came in at about $695,000. Rather than find a way to finance the $95,000, the community argued whether the proposed aluminum pool was the right decision after all. Maybe gunite (sprayed concrete) would be better, though it would be more expensive. Maybe the town didn’t need and couldn’t afford a pool. Maybe there was a way for the state to help pay. Maybe the plans needed to be redone. Maybe the proposed site was wrong. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
As the company debated the pool over the next several years, the company graciously let the city keep the interest earned on the money, which paid for recreation projects. Very graciously, considering that the community never stopped arguing over the swimming pool and how to spend the gift.
But then, in the early 1980s, as the sawmill business was proving unprofitable and the pool debate proving unending, the mill manager approached the city council to ask for the money back. Rather than help the town, the $600,000 gift had become a source of argument and division in the community. It was not the company’s intention to start a fight, and it was time to end it.
Healthy debate in a community is good. Different opinions can be productive, if people can get past the arguments to find a compromise. I fear that the debate over repairs to the school buildings and Public Safety Building, the fate of the former hospital property, Wrangell’s lack of housing and affordable child care are all similar to the swimming pool fight of more than 40 years ago.
Everyone loses when people can’t agree on an answer.
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