Finalists Candidate Interviews April 25, 2026

I'd like to call a special council meeting, uh, to interview finalists for the vacant city manager position to order. Would you please call the roll? Zingy. Here. Matani.

Here. Bradbury. Here. Gas. Here.

Finnegan. Here. Gage. Here. Kuss.

Here. Stevenson. Here. Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. The Ketchikan City Council would like to respectfully acknowledge the traditional First People of the land in Ketchikan. The Tongva Tlingit people. On our communications, we have some information on the candidates and the questions that we're going to ask them on the table. With that, is there anybody to speak under persons to be heard?

I'm not. Thank you. Brings us to new business, which is the interview of the finalists. Um, so, uh, do you want to make a comment before we start inviting them in and tell us how this is— you see this process going? Morning, morning, Mayor and Council.

I'm Clay Pierce on behalf of Strategic Government Resources. We've had the opportunity to conduct the search, uh, had a very good response, over 30 applicants. Uh, you've seen voluminous materials for the candidates to get to this point, uh, winnowing those down to semifinalists and now the finalists you have before you tonight— today. So today you're going to be interviewing the 4 candidates, one of them virtual, 3 of them in person. We have—.

There's been questions that have been provided. So, you know, it is an HR kind of process. It's important, I think, to maintain decorum with all the HR rules. Asking the same questions of all the candidates in basically the same order. But I would— you'd obviously be welcome to answer follow-up questions to clarify anything that happened that comes along that strikes them from their responses.

And then my understanding is at the conclusion of the 4, you'll be breaking into executive session and deciding next steps from there. So I want to thank you again for the opportunity. We had a staff meetings last week, yesterday, with all the finalists, and then also a community meet and greet opportunity. And so we're going to be getting you the feedback forms from both of those, and you'll have that before you deliberate later this afternoon. Uh, candidates also had a tour earlier this week where they went with staff and looked at city facilities and met some of the other staff.

So they're well prepared. I know you are, and looking forward to the process going today, hopefully to a conclusion. So any questions of me, or any questions? Thanks, sir. So our first one will be Abner, is that right?

That's correct.

Morning, Abner.

You're muted now. There you go.

Yes, good morning, Mayor. Can everyone hear me okay? Yes, we can hear you just fine. Thank you. Very good.

Well, thank you, Mayor and Council, for the opportunity to be here this morning. I really appreciate the flexibility you showed in allowing me to join you virtually. I sort of anticipated the opportunity to provide an opening statement, so I have prepared some comments to give you a clear, organized sense of my background, my leadership style, and the values that have guided my work. Most of this isn't the first—. That played right into the first question where we were asking you to, uh, with a brief introduction, have a series of questions you're going to have today, and we'll leave time at the end for any questions that you may have.

Um, with that in mind, please briefly introduce yourself, share your background, career path, and key experience or value you'd like the council to understand as we consider you for the role. Yes, thank you, Mayor. I apologize for that. As I was saying, I did kind of prepare some comments because I anticipated this opportunity to introduce myself and talk about these items. So I've spent more than 30 years in public service, beginning with a 20-year career in the Air Force, including 8 years in Alaska.

And then after retiring from the Air Force, I served as the fire chief in Alaska and later as the chief and emergency manager in Ketchikan. I supported municipal and tribal organizations across Alaska and the Pacific Northwest through consulting work after I left Ketchikan, and those roles have taught me the importance of clear communication and disciplined operations, strong relationships across departments and with the community. When I left Ketchikan in 2021, my wife and I had just come through a long stressful year, as had many of us, and at the time we believed that what we wanted was to step away, travel, take a break, and we did travel quite a bit for the first 6 months, but what we found is that we were missing Ketchikan. We missed our friends, the relationships, the sense of community here. I also learned something important about myself.

I'm not very good at retirement. I enjoyed being productive, contributing, and being part of a team working towards something meaningful, and that led me into the emergency management consulting that I mentioned. And since 2022, in doing that, I've been back to Ketchikan regularly through a contract with the borough. In fact almost every quarter. Those visits have reinforced that it's a community that I care about, a place where I have strong relationships.

I'm 51 and I plan to continue working for at least another decade. A community like Ketchikan where I know the people and understand the expectations, have longstanding relationships, is exactly the kind of place where I want to do that. Since January, I've been serving as the interim city manager in Unalaska. When I stepped into this role, the organization was facing financial and operational challenges. Focus has been on stabilizing the organization, rebuilding some budget discipline, strengthening communication with the council and the community.

And this year we've built the budget around service levels and accurate historical costs. This has helped us to make clearer, more sustainable decisions and reestablish alignment with operations, policy, resources, and the city code. I'll tell you, my communication style is steady. It's transparent and it's grounded in preparation. I like to listen first, I evaluate, and then I speak with clarity.

I don't believe in surprises, not for the council, not for staff, not for the community. And that approach has served me well, building trust and supporting informed decision-making, keeping organizations aligned during challenging times. Ketchikan, again, is a community that I know and care about, and I understand the expectations of the community. The realities of operating in remote Alaska. I've lived there, and what I can offer is disciplined leadership, calm, consistent presence, and a commitment to strong relationships across the organization and with the community as we work toward a long-term stability and success.

Thank you, Abner. Any follow-up questions?

So, Dick.

Yes, what draws you to the Ketchikan City Manager's position at this point in your career, and why are you interested in this community specifically? Thank you, Council Member Kusa. I appreciate that question. I did allude to that, obviously, in my introductory statement. I apologize for taking the wind out of the question, but as I mentioned, after a long year, we wanted to travel, we wanted to take a break, and that's what we found.

Because what we really needed was just a short break. We found ourselves missing the community, missing the people, missing the, the friendliness. And so I also found, like I said, that I'm not good at retirement. I need to work and I need to be active and I need to do something that's helpful. And so that's led me back into municipal government and city management specifically.

And so that's why I want to come back. I think I can be useful to the community. I can help provide strong leadership and guidance and a steady voice.

Thank you. Any poll?

Jay. Good morning, Abner. Thank you for being here. How would you approach negotiating with organizations the city works with, such as labor unions, cruise line agencies, and intergovernmental partners, in a way that benefits the city while maintaining strong communication and positive relationships. Thank you, Councilmember Matani.

I appreciate the question. Negotiation is a tricky thing, right? You need to understand the situation. You need to understand the values of the people that are taking part in the discussions, what's important to them. And that doesn't happen at the negotiating table.

The place that that happens is before you get to the negotiating table. Making connections with those different organizations, talking to them about what their needs are, talking to them about what our needs are as a city, and pre-positioning ourselves to have those later discussions is how we're going to be successful. We have the— as a community, we have the resources and the strengths that we have, and so do the people that we're negotiating with. But understanding both sides and being able to frame it in a way that benefits both sides of the negotiation is how we're going to bring the best result to the city. Follow-ups.

Thank you, Abner. Um, Abby, describe—. Sorry, describe the kind of working relationship you seek with the mayor and city council. What are your expectations, communication styles, and guiding principles?

Yeah, thank you for the question, Councilmember Bradbury. Um, when working with the council, I think open, transparent communication is really the starting point, right? Um, having that open relationship where we've talked multiple times before, again, before the issue comes up, we want to sort of know each other already. I should know what your expectations are and how you prefer to communicate. And I— what I did when I arrived here in Unalaska is I met with each of the council members individually to talk about what it is that they needed and wanted from me during this interim time.

And I would do the same when I arrived there. I also talked to them about their preferred communication style, whether it's a phone call or whether it's a text message or whether it's via email or whether it's via a group email. One way, of course, so that we're not violating the Open Meetings Act, but I can communicate information to all of you, and especially in critical situations, that would be the best way to get that out quickly. But I think forming that relationship with each, each council member in advance and knowing each of your expectations and what it is that you need and want from the city will help me to, to guide that relationship. Any follow-ups?

Judy. Good morning, Abner. Can you share an example of how you improve the organization's financial performance through cost control or revenue generation?

Yes. Good morning, Councilmember Zingy, and nice to see you. Thank you for the question. So, improving financial performance, I have a great example of that currently where I'm at right now in Unalaska. I came in, fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, at budget cycle for the community.

They started in January and so did I. So, I have been working through the budget here, and as I started to look at that budget, I mentioned last night that I like to frame budgets around the levels of service and our essential functions for our departments. The other thing I like to look at though is what the historical performance is. And so as we started through our budget deliberations and our budget process, directors had developed their operating budgets already by the time I got here into the system that we use here, it's called Munis. And I started having one-on-one meetings with the finance director and each department head.

And what I found during those meetings initially, the finance director was remote, and so he was sharing his screen with Munis, the finance system, on there for me, and he was talking through the different line items and budget items in a department. And I kept looking at it and realizing that I wasn't seeing the same thing he was when I logged into the finance system. And so after like the second meeting when I just couldn't figure it out, I finally said, Jim, can you— at the end of the meeting— Jim, can you tell me what it is we've been looking at? Because I can't find that in my system. And he said, you should be able to see everything, you're the city manager.

And I said, well, all I see is the city manager's office budget. So he said, well, let me check with the IT director. And about 30 minutes later, I get a phone call from the IT director telling me, okay, I fixed your permissions, you should be able to see everything in Munis now. And so I log in and look, and sure enough, I can. And he says, I don't understand why, but for some reason, I don't know what the other city managers have been looking at, but you're the first one to ask for these permissions, and I've just been rolling over permissions for the past 5 or 6 city managers.

So none of the city managers before me, for 5 or 6 at least, could see the details of the budgets of their departments. And so when I started looking at those details, what I found looking at historical records is that we had departments that had examples of lines with, you know, say $50,000 in expenses every single year, and they were budgeting $0 in that line. I also found the opposite. I found departments with lines that were budgeting, for example, $100,000 a year, but only spending $10,000 a year. And so when I met with those directors, I talked with them about the history, I talked with them about the levels of service that they had to provide, And the end result this year is an 8% decrease in general government funds, uh, up non-personnel operating pretty much across the board in general government, and approximately 10% in all the utilities, just based on taking time to have that discussion, look at the historical spend, and talk about the levels of service.

And I didn't go into those conversations and tell any of those directors, you have to cut expertise. I simply guided them through the process. Thank you. Any follow-ups?

So I got one for you, Abner. In that situation, when you actually reduced the budget, was there any— I, I don't know what the tax structure is or the revenue structure you have in Alaska, but was there any savings to the public through that situation in regards to a rate or a tax? So the situation here, it looks like the revenues are forecast due to fisheries to decrease slightly this coming year, and so we made those cuts in the non-operating— but non-personnel operating budgets. Unfortunately, due to rising personnel costs and huge increase in insurance this year, It doesn't look like right now that's going to reflect a decrease in the budget. However, those savings definitely covered, and then some, the cost of the increased health insurance and the personnel, you know, regular wages and COLA increases and those sorts of things.

So, I mean, indirectly, I suppose, yes, but we did not see a change, it doesn't look like, in the bottom line. But you didn't increase, so that's what you're saying overall with the, with the, with the rise in insurance and the rise in health and, sorry, personnel costs. And then there's a bunch of deferred maintenance here similar to Ketchikan that the council has decided they want to appropriate money to this year. And with those 3 costs, the overall budget is going up slightly. Um, but not nearly as much as it otherwise would have.

Thank you. Anybody else?

Hearing, seeing none. How do you evaluate staffing levels to ensure departments are adequately resourced without overextending the city's budget? I go back to that levels of service discussion. We absolutely have to define what are the essential functions, what are the critical functions. So what functions does a department have to provide under city code under any relevant federal and state laws, and we need to make sure we understand what those are, and we should be explaining to you as the council what those are so that you understand.

But then the next component of that is the level at which we provide that service, right? So if we provide emergency response, what is the level? Is it to have a fire truck and 75 firefighters on scene in 1 minute, or is it 5 firefighters and 2 trucks on scene in 10 minutes, let's say. So a different level of service, right? And very clearly a different cost depending on what level of service we define.

So we can provide required services at different levels, but understanding those, making a decision on what those are, and then funding to that level is what we should be doing. Thank you. And that's how you'll align the, the budget with what you're adequately staffing at.

Thank you. Any follow-ups on that? Riley, describe your leadership style with department heads and staff. How do you balance support, accountability, and performance of expectations?

Um, my leadership style with department heads and staff. Thank you, Councilmember Gass, for the question. Uh, I like to lead with, um, I like to lead through consensus generally is my first approach. I like to collaborate with my staff rather than completely direct them. I don't like to micromanage, but I want them to be able to do what they need to do and meet the standard.

And if they don't, I'll hold them accountable to that. But my first approach is to make sure we understand what the standards are, to have that clear discussion, to give them the tools they need to do their job, and then allow them to do that job without micromanaging them.

Any follow-ups?

Hey, Abner. Um, what does living on the island and being visibly engaged in the community mean to you as a local government executive?

Thank you, Councilmember Gage. Another good question. Um, Obviously, I've lived on the island before, so I do understand the, the difficulties that brings. However, I don't think that's what your question about. It's more about how do you engage in the community and what does that mean?

And I think that, again, I'm a relationship-focused leader. I engage with people and get to know them and what it is that they need and explain to them what we need ahead of time before the issue comes up. I don't like to go back to COVID a whole lot, but the community saw the result of that during COVID when I led that effort. Because of my relationships that I had built throughout the state, our community received a ton of support from the state level. We could pretty much call anytime we wanted and get almost anything we wanted within reason because of those connections that were built ahead of time.

And I do that in the local community as well. Here in this position, I'm engaged with the tribe, weekly. I just went to lunch with their community development person yesterday, yesterday, day before yesterday. I talked to the OC, the Native Corporation, on a regular basis. I meet with various community leaders, and I did that when I got here as well.

I intentionally, in addition to council members, went out and met with the various community leaders that we need to engage with I had discussions with them. I shared thoughts with them. They shared thoughts with me, try to understand each other's position, and then follow through on whatever commitments that I make to folks.

Any folks? Yeah, Riley. Thank you, Abner. Quick follow-up since you mentioned back during the COVID times and how things were handled. Since you were leading the charge in that hindsight's always 20/20, but do you think we were looking back now, did you feel that we were too restrictive on some of our recommendations at that time, or do you think it was handled appropriately?

Hindsight is— thank you for the question, Council Member Gass. First of all, hindsight is always, as you said, 20/20. And are there things that we could have improved? 100%. We— the difficulty in emergency management in emergency situations is you're always dealing with limited information, incomplete information, and you have to try to make the best decision possible at the time with the limited information.

And I think as a community, we did very well compared to what many other communities were doing. Yes, we had recommendations, and in some cases we had some strict recommendations, but we kept them as recommendations and for the most part allowed the community to decide what they wanted to do. So could we make changes and improvements? Absolutely. But we have to make the decisions and try to do the best for the community at the time with the limited information that we have.

Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else?

Um, yeah, good morning. Imagine you're faced with a situation where the city council is leaning toward a decision that would address their immediate priorities, but your professional assessment shows that a different course of action would better serve the long-term interests of the community and its residents. How would you navigate that situation, and what steps would you take to balance maintaining a positive relationship with the council while still advocating for what you believe is best for the city?

Thank you, Councilmember Finnegan. I appreciate the question, and it's nice to meet you virtually, by the way. I believe you were in the community and probably aware of me, but I don't think that we ever met. So, um, I guess to answer your question, situation where council is working to address their immediate priorities, but I maybe disagree with that, or my personal assessment is different than that. What I'll tell you is that my role as city manager is to give you as the council my best professional assessment, even if it doesn't align with the direction that you're talking about or the direction that you're heading.

But how I do that makes a huge difference. My goal as a city manager is to support the council, protect the organization, and advocate for long-term interests of the community. So what I do is I start by making sure that you as the council have the full picture. If I don't necessarily agree, I'm probably seeing something that maybe you don't, or that I think that you don't. And so I want to make sure that we have the same frame of reference.

So sharing that information, laying out what it is and why it is that I'm seeing what I'm seeing is part of my job. Not to make you go that direction, but to make sure that I'm doing my job to give you the full information. And the full information on the direction that you're leaning towards as well, because my goal is not necessarily to influence that directly in the sense that I'm not trying to make you steer you towards my decision. But rather to give you all the tools you need to make an informed decision and for you to do what's best for the community. Because we all know that that's why you serve on the council.

You're not serving on the council for, for personal benefit. You're serving because you want to take care of the community and you're invested in the community. So the other component is I would try to make sure that I understand why it is that the council is leaning towards that direction. And if we can find some other method in there, then we do. But at the end of the day, Whatever decision the council makes, it's my job to implement it.

And if you choose a different direction than, than what I think is right, I'm going to support that decision and make sure that we do it well. And I'm not going to withhold information from you. Thank you. Any follow-up? Yes, Abby, to follow up on that answer.

Um, if the council did make a decision that wasn't necessarily aligned with your assessment or staff members' assessment, the council votes, you have to move forward. How would you kind of handle that situation with staff and making sure that we all still work towards the decision, even if we don't agree?

Thank you for that question. And it's a very good one and somewhat a difficult one in some sense, because people do have opinions and they think that their way is right. But setting that expectation early on that and making sure folks understand that council sets policy. Once that policy is set, staff's job is to implement that, and it doesn't matter whether we agree or not. We have to do what the council wants us to do.

And if someone can't get on board with that, then we will deal with that. But the way that I would help to bring them along with that is by then relaying the information that we've all discussed and where I've understood where council is coming from. I like to give people the why they're doing something. I don't think that, that I always have to say, do it because I said so, right? That, that's a really hard leadership position to be in.

And if you're an expert in everything, then maybe you can do that. But if you're not, it really helps to inform people of why they're doing something. And generally, I have an ability to get people to do what I want and think that they want to do it. Thank you. Anybody else?

Yeah. Yes, what's that? Something? No, I thought she had—. She—.

I didn't have a follow-up. No.

Assuming you have investigated and evaluated the city's current status regarding the operating and capital budgets and the city council and general city operations, what would be your first 3 actions as the city manager?

I'm just going to read that question one more time to make sure I have it right. One second. You bet. Assuming you have investigated and evaluated the city's current status regarding the operating and capital budgets and the City Council and general city operations, what would be your first reactions as the city general manager?

Okay, thank you for the question. First of all, um, it's a finance question clearly, and it's about evaluating the budget and how we deal with that once we've evaluated it. Operating capital budgets. Okay, so, and I assume this is probably leading towards, you know, maybe the finances aren't there to do that, so we need to make some sort of decision. And I guess what I would say is it is my job to evaluate that and put together all of the information on the current status, but then what I have to do is present that to you as the council so that you can make a decision policy-wise on how you want to proceed forward.

You need a clear picture of the budget. You need to understand if there's shortfalls and what those are. And then I need to share with you all of your options of how to deal with that. So if the issue is that we're going to be in a deficit budget, or, or we're not going to have revenues to cover all of our expenses, then I need to share with you a breadth of options. Well, first of all, why is that?

For example, this year here, the reason is because of those increasing healthcare costs. The reason is because of increasing personnel costs and because of the one-time deferred maintenance costs that we have that council has planned to fund in this year's budget. Once I explained to you as a council why we're in that position, that's step 1. The next thing I need to do is I need to understand what all the options are. So that would be step 2, evaluating what the options are and what impact that will have on our budget.

So if that's, you know, reducing positions, or if that's increasing revenues, or if that's adjusting levels of service, all of those sorts of things, I need to evaluate those, and then I'll present those to you so that you can make an informed policy decision, and then I can turn around and carry that out.

Follow up.

Jay. Thank you. Uh, given our limited resources, how would you manage departmental spending and reduce bond debt principal while minimizing the financial impact on our citizens? Thank you for that question. So limited resources, budget's out of control, debt payments that are high, and you want to lower those and keep the impact on our citizens low.

All reasonable expectations.

The answer, not quite so simple. And I think, again, that comes back to the levels of service and the essential functions. If we don't have those, that has to be the starting point for those discussions. We have to know what those are. But then, in addition to that, to get to that point and to, to implement this, I think what may be missing is some sort of a strategic plan that helps align the council direction where you want to see the city in 5 to 10 years, and then staff to have participated in developing that, and staff to have buy-in and understand where it is that you're trying to get.

So that instead of being reactionary each year to that situation, we can highlight where we're trying to get our services to in that timeframe of the strategic plan. It's gonna take a little bit of time to get that sort of a plan into place, but I think once you have that, those decisions become much easier and less emotional discussions at that point. When you're talking about what level of service you wanna provide, versus, you know, the emotional arguments that are often brought in.

Questions? Your Honor? Yes. Okay, again, late. Abner, on the strategic plan, how would you follow through with making sure that we stay on those— on that path into the future of that 5-year plan or 10-year plan?

Mm-hmm. Thank you for that question again. The—. So once you build a strategic plan, if it, as I think you're alluding to, if it just sits on the shelf and gathers dust, it's no use, right? So as part of the development, you need to develop measurable progress indicators.

And then I think that the way that you stay on that plan is you— we report those to the council on a regular basis. Frequency to be determined, but whatever is appropriate, whether that's monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, we should be reporting the progress and the status of those performance indicators to the council, and that holds us accountable and gives you visibility on what we're doing and whether we're following that plan. Thank you. Anybody else? Abby, do you have any experience with creating a strategic plan?

I have worked on various strategic plans over my career, and I've developed capital and major maintenance spending type plans in order to address long-term issues. For example, in fire department, you have a lot of expensive tools and equipment and apparatus, and I've walked into positions where there was not a good plan for the timeframe of those replacements. Replacements were not being done based on operational needs and data and a real specific defensible timeline. They were just kind of, well, I want a new truck, so I'm going to get it sort of thing. And so in that, and in a strategic plan, you have to base that on data.

You have to base that on defensible needs, and you have to base that on best practices. And outline that. And then you have to have those measurable indicators. Is it reduced down— in that case, it was reduced downtime on apparatus, and it was the staying within budget and those sorts of things.

Jay. Abner, just to follow up, you've been referring to in many of these questions levels of service. Ketchikan and the community has come to expect high-level service that we provide, our crackerjack city team. Has maintained that, but in that process, we've seen a budget deficit to continue to provide these services. Are you suggesting curtailing the level of service, or how would you maintain the same level of service and then handle our limited resources?

So you guys have started down the road on the utility side, at least, of defining what it costs to provide a service. So, you know what it costs to provide a gallon of water, let's say, and we know how we provide that currently. And so we know what that should cost each user in order for us to break even. But in some cases, we're not charging that, and that, that's difficult, or we're not metering that. So we're not actually charging per use, we're charging across the board and trying to make up that difference.

Users should pay for what they're using in that case. And I guess when I talk about levels of service and defining that, that can be the starting point of the discussion, that along with that cost of providing the service. If the community has an understanding of what the services we're providing, a clear understanding, what it's costing us to provide it and why, right? Not just, well, it costs us this much. We need to explain why it costs us that much.

And we need to look at if there's any areas that we can innovate and that we can reduce that cost to produce. But if we can't find ways to reduce that, then we have to have that discussion of the level of service. The only way, if you're going to continue a same exact level of service, is to reduce your cost or to increase your revenue. Those are your two choices. The third choice is reduce the level of service.

And so if, if the decision is to maintain the level of service, one of those other two has to give.

Thank you. Thank you. Any other follow-ups?

Abby. A record number of cruise ships are scheduled for the upcoming season and residents are raising concerns about overcrowding and infrastructure strain. How would you address both the economic opportunity and the community concern? That's a great question and one that many communities around the country and around the world are struggling with. I think you have to be very careful when you make those decisions, and those will be policy decisions ultimately.

So as the manager, what we need to do is try to understand if we're actually seeing that, where we're seeing that, why we're seeing that, when we're seeing that overcrowding and infrastructure strain, Maybe we can smooth that out by spreading it out. Maybe we can add more capacity. What are the different options to address it? But then ultimately, I have to bring that back to the council and explain to you again, here's the situation, this is what we see, and these are the options. But as a community, Ketchikan's majority revenue comes from either tourism or adjacent revenue.

Taxes, etc. That's what funds the community, and that is what keeps Ketchikan going currently. Diversification of revenue might be something to explore if we can figure out some ways to, to bring in other revenue. But right now, with what the city has, we need to be very careful about how we approach tourism and any limits that we might want to place on that.

Follow-ups. Judy. Hi, Arthur. Describe your approach to managing employee compensation, benefits, and long-term obligations while remaining fiscally responsible to the taxpayer.

Thank you, Councilmember Zing. I'm seeing a trend here, a lot of accountability to the taxpayers, a lot of fiscal constraints, and clearly that reflects the situation that the city's been in recently with needing to pull from reserves in order to maintain the operating budget on the general government side and the infrastructure demands on the utility side. Specific to managing employee compensation, The difficulty in employee compensation is that a lot of our employee compensation and benefits— well, not the benefits as much, but a lot of that is set in our contracts. It's in our collective bargaining agreements when we have to provide COLAs. It is in collective bargaining agreements when we need to do merit increases and what those amounts are.

Benefits are often in those collective bargaining agreements. And so to really start to manage those costs, we have to take a very close look at those collective bargaining agreements when the, when the time comes to renegotiate them and, and address those increasing costs there where possible. And then there's things like healthcare that they're out of our control locally, unfortunately. And so knowing what you can control and what you can't and then addressing those is how you're going to have to approach remaining responsible to taxpayers. And if you, if again, back to the levels of service, you may have to cut FTEs in order to meet that limit.

If Council's policy direction is absolutely no increase in taxes, I have to present you with all the options of how to reach that. And in some cases, that's the difficult choices of things like cuts to staff. Um, but I better tie that back and tell you what impact that's going to have on the community, because once there's an impact on the community, you're going to hear about that too.

Thank you. Follow-ups.

What is your experience with enterprise funds, and what strategies would you use to address rising costs for infrastructure maintenance? Such as utilities, streets, and public facilities when capital needs outpace available funding?

Thank you, Mayor. The, uh, my, my specific experience with enterprise funds, I, I, during my time in Ketchikan, obviously was exposed to those and got to, to listen to those presentations all the time. I'm pretty good at picking up that information, but as far as leading that prior to taking this position in Alaska, I hadn't done that. I've been learning a lot about that through my time here as we've gone through budget season and as we're going through various projects. We're doing a sub-transmission line upgrade project currently here.

We're doing some more power plant upgrades and things like that. So I'm learning a lot about utilities as I go. I do rely a lot on my staff and the folks that are knowledgeable in those to give me the information and to understand what's happening.

I think as far as how do you— the strategies that you need to use to address the rising costs is, and Ketchikan has done some of this if not all of this, is the rate studies that you've done. You've established what it costs you to produce the power, for example, or the water, or to treat the wastewater. Once you have that rate study, you know what each user needs to pay per per quantity of service used, and then that's the next step, is to ensure that we're charging an appropriate rate that allows us to pay for our operations and start to build a reserve so that when those fluctuating capital costs occur and we need to maintain our infrastructure, we can do that. The other thing that we have to do is relentlessly pursue grants and other sources of funding that may be out there, or low-cost loans or no-cost loans, some of those sorts of things for the funding rather than direct revenue generation funding, and offset that, make it manageable over time. But in some way, whether it's increasing reserves or bringing in revenue from grants, etc., you have to level out that capital cost because it's not feasible to pay $50 million extra this year and then only $5 million the next year and then $100 million the next year and bounce around like that.

Again, that strategic plan will help with that because you can define what you want that utility to look like in 5 to 10 years, and then you're working towards that goal. But those are kind of the general things that I would say I would use to address those. All those.

Abner, what experience do you have advocating for our community at the state and federal level in regards to funding in your past experiences?

Thank you for that question, Mayor. I have done quite a bit of that in my past. I, during my time as a fire chief, the pretty much the entire time I was a fire chief, I served on the Alaska Fire Chiefs Association, and I was on the board of the Chiefs Association. I served as the president for 3 years. We did a ton of advocating in Juneau for support and funding at the state level.

We did advocating at the federal level as well.

I was on the school board when I was in Alaska, did a whole bunch again of advocating in Juneau for funding for school. And then I've led this year the legislative outreach for Unalaska, as I was fortunate enough to start here before that started. So helping the council to develop their legislative priorities, develop the talking points that went with those priorities, and then to present that to the legislature in Juneau, back in DC, and the various departments as well. Thank you. Anybody else?

Riley, a controversial decision made by the city leads to strong public backlash at council meetings and online. How would you respond?

I, I don't get emotional, emotional about those things. I think that the best way to respond to an emergency situation or a community backlash type situation is to calmly share the facts surrounding that. You can't control what that looks like necessarily. All you can do is share the information. If you've made a mistake, you own up to that mistake and then you fix it.

But really, you do have to address it and you have to share the facts behind the situation why the decision was made, what impact would have happened if it hadn't been made, or what impact happened because it was made, and just be transparent with the community. Because you can make mistakes, and if you own up to them and you're transparent about it, they're going to be much more understanding than if you try to hide something.

And I take that approach across the board with council and with staff and everyone. Not just with the public.

Any follow-up? Kelly.

What do you see as the most pressing challenge for Ketchikan in the next 12 to 18 months, and what specific steps would you take in your first 6 months to begin addressing it?

Thank you for that question. That's a big one. The— probably the biggest challenges that I see that you have coming up with all the discussion about budget is the fact that you're starting budget cycle in June-ish timeframe for a January start. And so that's going to be a major component for the first 6 months. As part of that, it sounds like you're going to be wanting to address cost control and the impact on the citizens, and, and those are both very important things.

The other component that it sounds like as part of that would need to be addressed is making sure that we've defined what those different levels of service are so that you understand the impacts that any changes have on those levels of service. And then I guess the other thing would be to, to come up with a plan for how we're going to develop a strategic plan and, and get that started so that in the future we can stop crisis managing and start working towards an objective.

Thank you.

So, um, in creating a strategic plan, Abner, each department is different in their needs. Some of them are driven by regulations that, that come down, they're unfunded mandates, and some of them come down through deferred maintenance with unintended, uh, unknown, uh, failures of infrastructure, that type of stuff. So again, this comes back to the, the first 6 months. How do you plan to assess— how would you assess the, the needs of the individual departments?

Uh, we, we would start with the staff that we have and, and having them put together an assessment for us of the things that we're capable of assessing, which is, is much of it, arguably. Depending on what that looks like, then there may be specific areas that we can't gather enough information on, and we may need some consulting support in order to do that. But I think we should, as staff, try to do as much as we can first within our constraints possible. And then, then rely on a consultant. I don't like for the first answer to always be, let's hire a consultant.

I think that staff has a lot of skills and abilities, and yes, they're busy, but sometimes we can do these things internal, and instead we spend money developing and paying someone else to put together a plan that we could have done ourselves. So that's, that's where we would start with that.

And I may have missed or forgot part of the question, Mayor. That's fine.

Thank you.

Everyone faced with resolving an issue about which you have limited knowledge, ranging from the specific needs of utility to competing schools of thought on a community issue. How do you seek and assess relevant information? And how do you then weigh and apply whatever information that you have gathered?

Thank you for that question.

In my career, I've had to deal with having limited knowledge of a situation or, or a topic a lot of times, and whether it be in an emergency response or whether it be in my role as the interim city manager here, the approach is the same regardless. You have to talk to the people that know about the topic and gather as much information as possible. You have to research, um, and I do a ton of research. And then you take that information, you have to digest it, sometimes relatively quickly, sometimes you have a little more time, but you need to digest that information and, um, determine a direction forward based on that. But expert consultation, research, and then, you know, I start to develop a plan and I will run that plan by the folks who know.

I reach out to contacts that I have that I know are experts in those fields, maybe that aren't even within the city potentially. I use all the resources that I have in order to help me develop that plan and assess that information. And then we move forward.

Any follow-up?

So, do you have any questions? Go ahead. I just wanted to share one more thought on that. Take, for example, preparing for this interview. In preparation for the interview, I have no idea what questions you're going to ask, right?

But how do I get past that? Well, you happen to post recordings of previous interviews. And so I go back and watch those an hour, 2 hours worth of recordings, and I jot down the questions and I prepare my answers to those, right? I go research online what are common questions asked by a City Council in a job interview, and I prepare my answer, at least in my mind, to each of those questions. Do I know what you're going to ask?

No, but I have a foundation that I can work from, and I've deciphered that, and, and that's similar type of approach to any of those sorts of things. Sorry about that. Yeah, go ahead, Demi. Can I just do a follow-up? Abner, when you talk about the strategic plans, or when you're building a plan for council, um, and you, you do your research, do you ever come up with multiple scenarios on how council can process or prepare or make a choice?

Without— you talk about all the variables. Do you— is that something you do on a regular basis? Yeah, and there can be multiple ways that you might— multiple methods that you might apply to making your decision. Some might be different than others.

But as the manager, I would present any options that you might have, both in how you come to your determination, the factors maybe that you weigh, for example. And what your options are. My goal for the council is to be completely transparent and let you make that policy decision. You've been elected to make the policy decision, not me. You're hiring me to do your will as a council and to implement that for the city.

Appreciate that. Thank you. Yes, Dick. Yeah, uh, Abner, a question, and I don't know exactly how to answer it or what question is, but We've talked about strategic plans. We've talked about expected level of service, and this is an expectation of the public, and we have to determine it or approve it.

So how would you go about getting from the public what their expected level of service is? And yet we're going to have to agree to it, and they're going to have to understand what the cost is. And that's where the rig rubs are coming in, is, uh, we think we've got it, the cost goes up, and we don't have it. So what's your thoughts on how do we get expected level of service agreed to by the public, and then we turn it into a strategic plan? So the, the first step is to have staff define what their current essential functions are.

They'll do the research, they put that information together, right? What are we currently providing and what are those essential services? And then once we have that, we need to develop an understanding internally with staff again of how those change if we change the levels of service. And then once we have all of that, the next step is to communicate that with the public. So it's, you're gonna have to have a series of town hall type events, public meetings, sending staff out into the community to talk about, talk to the users of these various services, pick some of the larger ones and go, go have a conversation with them about what impact that has to them.

And we, we wrap all that together and we involve Council in those discussions with the public as well so that you're present and understanding what's going on throughout that process. And then ultimately we compile all that together and bring it back to council for discussion and refinement and eventually a decision.

Abby, you mentioned public engagement. Uh, as you know, public engagement's fairly low here, even when we do have these public discussions. Knowing that hurdle, um, how are you going to overcome that to actually get public engagement on these topics? Part of it's timing.

A Friday night meeting in summertime when the weather's nice outside is not going to get high public engagement. A lunchtime meeting when it's yucky out and you provide a lunch, maybe you're going to get more. And I don't think that it will be difficult to get large public engagement to happen, I think, with what, what you've seen there. But rather than having a big open house at Ted Ferry Civic Center, you go out to a local business location or the chamber lunch or the Rotary meetings, and you have those discussions and present that information there where people are already naturally gathering. And then that's how you start to build that.

And once you start to get that information out, and the more people that hear it, The more interest you're going to have, and then your chances of later events as you work through this process are higher, right? So I think that's how they— how you approach that to try to increase that engagement.

Anybody else?

So, Abner, what question do you have for the council?

Thank you, Mayor. I think one question I have for you is, and you sort of asked me this, but as you think about the next year, what area do you feel needs the most stability and predictability from the manager?

You ready?

Yes, go ahead, Riley. Rate increases, just to be a little more, I don't know, maybe we could come up with a more long-term gradual approach or just that's kind of the real sticking point in the community right now.

Thank you for that. And I was going to make a joke and say, so you want rate increases, right? I know better. I understand. He knows you way too well.

Uh, anyone else have thoughts? Yeah, um, getting to the strategic plan of, um, our utility infrastructure and, um, voicing that to the community so they understand where we're at and what we need to do and moving forward, I guess. Um, Abby, budget stability. So I'm not kind of getting into rate increases, but actually living within our, our means of what we can financially support versus living in a fairy tale.

For me, Abner, I don't think— and, and you hit on it some, and so at the council— is that we don't interact and explain ourselves and the decisions that we make to the public, uh, in, in other forms than just at a council meeting. Um, there's, there's a misconception sometimes about why we raise a rate or, or, um, you know, all the stuff that's buried into a rate or tax structure. And, you know, some of the options that may be available, uh, as we have done with seasonal taxes or or other things that may be able to do that. And, you know, quite frankly, there may be some feedback from the general public that can help with the decisions that the council makes. So I think I would be interested in more public engagement and for our community to know our department heads more so they have an option when they have a question.

Yes, Jay. Yeah, thinking about that, I mean, when you go through a budget cycle and over the years you've seen over budgeting, that would help you, you know, control spending and making sure that the right infrastructure projects are funded so that they will be carried on, not you budgeted it and use the money for something else and moves forward. The infrastructure project. So basically making sure that we as a council with the management team sit down every 3 months and see what was budgeted and what was spent so that we— so that you have an idea of where to control it. Anybody else?

Well, thank you, Abner. Oh, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Thank you, Your Honor. I just kind of dovetails with what the mayor had offered, and I think it pertains largely to communication with the community. And I don't think this issue is necessarily unique to Ketchikan, though I know we encounter it here.

Having a better understanding for the community about why we make some of the changes or decisions that we do is important. But in terms of outreach, I often get correspondence from residents who are concerned about issues that have already been addressed at some length by the council, but they're only They feel they're only finding out about it when it's in its final reading. And so whatever work we can do to engage the community early in the decision-making process, so that instead of having, you know, if there's an issue that's going to stir a lot of concern, you know, I want to hear what everybody has to think about the matter. I don't want them to feel like their only opportunity or their first opportunity is when we're at the final decision, the final step in the decision-making process. So whatever we can do to better engage the community so that they know in advance, in anticipation of impactful decisions that we might make, would be beneficial to the council and to the community at large.

Anybody else?

Thank you, Abner. We appreciate your answers and deliberation here with the council, and we will let you know what goes on later. Very good. Thank you again all for allowing me to participate remotely. I understand how difficult that can be, but I have enjoyed talking with you and I look forward to hopefully working with you in the future.

Thank you.

That was an hour. Pretty good.

So, um, we have the next— who's the next candidate? The next candidate is Michael Kovacs. Um, I texted him, so we're running ahead of schedule, so if you want to take a break and gather our thoughts and do stuff, that's fine. Anybody need the break? Paper was pretty impressive.

Hey, sir. So to begin with, we'll start with a brief introduction. We have a series of questions for you today, and we'll leave time for the end for questions that you may have for us. Um, with that in mind, please briefly introduce yourself. Sharing your background, career path, and key experience or values you'd like the council to understand as we consider you for this role.

Wait, is this on? Is it on? I don't know. Doesn't feel like it is. I can hear a chat.

Speak up. Also go with the mic off the podium. You'd have to hold it. You'd have to hold it though. I think it's good.

Okay, the table closer. As long as you can hear me. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay.

My name is Michael Kovacs, and I'm the city manager of Texas, which is in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. It's a metro area of 9 million people almost. I've got a 30,000 population city on its way to 35,000. I've been the city manager for 28 years. Starting as of this month, 28 years, 12 years in state, and 14 of my years have been in tourism-oriented areas.

Several of those are coastal, most of them coastal, 10 years in coastal areas. And my most— the largest city I've been in is Galveston, Texas, which is a significant population, about 45,000, on its way to 50 when I was there. And then Major cruise, major tourism areas of beach tourism, cruise tourism, historical tourism, and some nature tourism. So interesting, interesting place. That's where the ships, they leave from.

So folks come down and look at the historic Caribbean, get back. Values-wise, I'm fairly conservative, though I've been called a liberal all the time. It kind of depends on your point of view. I consider myself kind of a radical centrist, and I try to approach policy from a non-confrontational perspective. Transparency and just good government.

So smart government. What things work? If walkability works, which it does, walkability. Big on downtowns. I focus on improving tax base, economic development.

And really boosting the economy as a way to offset costs that we all have.

Thank you, Paul. Question.

Yeah.

Yeah, welcome, Michael. What draws you to the Ketchikan City Manager's position at this point in your career, and why are you interested in this community specifically? This point in my career, I am able to retire from Texas. I'm originally from Canada. I'm a naturalized American, 2001, and my wife— met my wife in Texas, and we had to decide which country to live in.

I lost that argument, so here we are in the United States. And I have a saying, I always say that Alaska has always been top of our list when we made the list of states we wanted to live in. This has always been tops. Most like Canada, but it's the United States, it's America. So at this point I can retire from Texas and come to a more nicer location, I would say, something more that feels like more like home.

And I really have a lot to, I think, contribute as far as the maritime experience I've got, tourism experience. You've got quite a few issues here to tackle, and I like that sort of thing. One of my One of my friends, I told him I was coming up here. He's a city manager in Port Aransas. He said, yeah, they've got some financial problems, but he says, you like all that kind of stuff.

I do. And I was telling Clay, it's kind of like a, you have to win. It's like no surrender sort of situation. This is a challenge and I think I can tackle it. I'd be really happy to be in a small town again and enjoy the small town life.

I really like that. All my other cities. And my city's getting big. It's 30,000. It's getting bigger and bigger.

It's becoming more and more national politics, sort of red meat, blue, you know, red versus blue, team blue, team red. And, um, that really wears on me. It's hard to get stuff done when everything's political. So this is a lot more practical, and I think I can make a big contribution here. I really want to be part of the environment of a small town.

Any follow-ups?

Okay, welcome, Mr. Kovacs. How would you approach negotiating with organizations the city works with, such as labor unions, cruise line agencies, and intergovernmental partners, in a way that benefits the city while maintaining strong communication and positive relationships? Sir, I've got quite a bit of experience in intergovernmental relations and union relations. I'll start with union relations in Galveston. We had a police union, fire union, and had very adversarial relationship with us prior administration.

So I came in and the way we approached negotiations was respect for one another. And they had new people. I was new. They had new people on the union, which really helped. And we set out for some mutual goals.

We wanted to make sure we had enough pay to maintain the force. And so the pay was an issue. We both recognized sustainability of our force being on the island, that we had to do something about that, and then to make sure they have the operational capacity to do what they need to do. And so we approached those negotiations and we have negotiated successful union contracts that both benefited the city and the unions. Intergovernmental relations experience, I was the primary— in my role in Park City as assistant city manager, I was primarily tasked with legislature and organizing activities with our two lobbyists and the, well, two state lobbyists.

We had a federal lobbyist too, so three lobbyists, and interacting with the Utah League of Cities and Towns to defend ourselves against bills that would take our sales tax. We defeated bills that would destroy our historical powers in Utah. We actually killed that bill on the ski lift, did a ski meeting with the senator who proponed that bill, and we talked to him about— I talked to him about how that was going and how the city was going to be impacted by it, and he killed his own bill on the chairlift, which was kind of fun. But also defending ourselves against things that would weaken our school district, take our sales taxes, and so forth. So very successful legislative sessions there.

And so I've done that my entire career. I would apply that here in Ketchikan with whatever your governmental relations work that you'll need to do, which looks like there's a number of different organizations and levels to communicate with. That would be something I'd bring to you here. Any follow-up questions? I have one.

Yes. So, um, how do you see yourself, um, crossing over with the borough assembly? Because the borough runs the school district. So how do you see yourself being part of that, uh, conversation? I was mentored in my first job as a city administrator Cassidio, Texas, which is the Big Bend area.

I was mentored by the county, essentially the county executive, which the county call them judges in Texas. So it's like a fusion of a county executive and a county mayor, essentially. And, um, so I learned a lot about county relations. We had a lot of different things we did with our county. So it's always been ingrained with me that it's not just the city that provides services, but the county as well.

So I've kept that through my whole career, and I talked to our county commissioner probably 3, 4, 5 times, sometimes 5 times a week. So constant communication. I just got an email this morning from the county judge back in Rockwall County. So that, that's something I would continue to work on and interact with is a critical component. And I think as long as the service levels and the revenues— you know, it's always going to be someone's going to always have a little bit of an advantage, but maybe the county gets a little bit too much revenue, or the borough gets too much revenue for this, that.

But as long as it's somewhat fair and you can help each other, you can avoid a lot of duplication, and they can be great allies. So it's not a unique environment you've been in? Oh, God, it's like this everywhere. Okay, thank you. Any other follow-up?

Abby, describe the kind of working relationship you seek with the mayor and city council What are your expectations, communication style, and guiding principles?

I think relation-wise, I like to have personal relationships. I mean professional, but not overly personal, but to be able to talk with, with each of the council members, try to set up meetings with council members depending on what their, what their style is. Some folks are more engaging and they have more time, and so the challenge there is to make sure you spend enough time with each council member, but I do want to have a good relationship with each of the council members, be able to pick up the phone whenever there's an issue, or try to anticipate, try to think of how you may process different issues and be ready to respond or be proactive. Um, the style I like to use is, is fairly open and transparent, so you won't see me hiding different things. Everything's going to be above board, and I provide you lots of information I like to send like a weekly update, like an email weekly update, and figure out if there's different statistics or performance indicators you'd like to see, or if there's just different things.

Like one of my things in my citycouncil.com, they, they want to see police shifts. They want to see like how many folks are on duty here, how many folks are on duty here, how many calls we got, how many we reacted to, how many traffic stops, how many tickets. Some folks are really into that sort of thing. So whatever I would try to figure out some of your different issues that you like, or economic development. We have an economic development office.

Who's meeting with what's going on and which business is coming in. We work with these folks. I try to make sure that you get at least kind of that basic flow every week. And of course, personal follow-up.

Any follow-up on that? Did I answer the whole question or is there something that I missed? Nope, I think you got it all. Great.

Judy, can you share an example of how you improved an organization's financial performance through cost control or revenue generation? Yes, I've pretty well done that my entire career. I started in Presidio, Texas, my first city. I was 25 years old, city administrator, and we had sat down with the accountant and he said, you're broke and you're going to be going under, and you got the environmental guy and he's, he's here waiting in the— he's here waiting for you and he's going to close the landfill. So my next meeting was with the environmental, uh, guy, and he's like, I'm going to close your landfill.

I'm like, time out, time out, can't close the landfill. And, uh, we, we're in violation of closure, post-closure costs. So long story short, we implemented an austerity program immediately. So we stopped travel, we froze positions, we reduced overtime to basically zero. This was absolutely critical.

And canceled projects. Just, I mean, everything. If you didn't have to send money out the door, it didn't go out the door. And then we raised rates. My first city council meeting, I raised trash rates $8 a month.

And then the next meeting, we raised water rates and sewer rates $5 or $6 a month. And, uh, we looked at collections issues. People weren't paying their taxes, so we had talks with the county about enforcement, and that wasn't very popular. But we've got 60% of the people paying their taxes, that, that doesn't work. Got to have 95% of the people paying their taxes.

So we initiated activities with the county that see if we can get some of that collected. And we made it, we made it through the year and started building our reserves. We were never really rich there, it was a poor community, but we were able to access grants and get back on our feet, get some matching funds put together and work with our county, and we made it. So that was probably, that was probably the most stark scenario. So as we look at the budget here in Ketchikan, And what's happening, you know, part of it, a lot of it is financial forecasting.

Really watching right now, I'm watching building permits back at home because a lot of our— we've got a— we're a pretty high-growth city, so building permits drop. We have a recession plan, so we— my finance director and I put together a recession plan. It's got triggers just like an emergency management plan. I got that from my emergency management planning. So you get a trigger, 5% revenue decline, this thing triggers 10%, these things trigger, and you just kind of go down the way.

But so when the revenue comes back, also on the revenue generation side, I like to play offense on revenue. So everything is how can we improve the economy. So a lot of that is through better planning, cost-benefit analysis on whether or not certain areas should be developed. So we have a model that we developed to rate development, and so we'll rate them based on the revenues they generate and the expenses that they create. And the expenses also create infrastructure depreciation.

So we bake that in and we can see if a project is net revenue positive or negative to the city.

And then, of course, infrastructure maintenance is a major issue that you have to save up for if you can. Judy. So I guess to follow up on that, Sounds like you raised a lot of rates and your popularity no doubt rose with that. How did you, how did you determine, you say you made $8 here and so how did you go about establishing those rates? Early on it was myself just doing the calculations based on, I gave the council several options so we had the The most— the largest increase was 8, and we had like a 6, and I think we had like a 3.

The different levels solved different problems. And so I presented the kind of menu of how far— how hard do you want to go right off the bat? And they went, they went all the way. Uh, in—. That was a very, very poor city.

We had to do things very quickly, so I had like a week to put that together. But, um, in my current city, of course, we use rate consultants. So we have a consulting company called NewGen. And they're out of Austin, Texas, and they, they do rate analysis. They look at our water and sewer rates and they work with the water district where we buy our water from.

And they tear everything apart. Austin, look at our 5-year CIP and look at how our— what our debt rates are, what our cash is, what our plans are, our impact fees. We use a lot of impact fees to offset costs for capital. And put them all together and they'll come up with a rate model. My folks, we also do— my finance director and I, we also kind of do a parallel study, kind of a poor man's quick study based on the budget.

Ours is a little bit more accurate than the, the consultants, but, um, so we try to— if the consultant will say, hey, you need to raise rates, you know, $1.50, and we can kind of see like, hey, we're going to have a surplus this year and we've got these capital items, we've got so much in this impact fee reserve, we're driving this down, we've got 3 or 4 more years drawing this down, and then we can do the rate increase. We know that our population and our business businesses are growing. So we'll hold our fire. A lot of times when the rate consultant will say, hey, you need to do a rate increase, we'll be like, no, not, not quite yet, we're not quite there. And it's worked out pretty well.

So we try to— somewhere in between the rate consultants and our numbers is probably reality. So we've been doing pretty well about that. And we've—. The last time we raised rates in my city was about 3 years ago. We did a $4 a month increase because we had to do a new sort So here at Ketchikan, if we have access to funds to pay for rate consultants, I'd highly recommend doing rate consultants.

And you don't necessarily have to bring them out here if the travel is the cost. You can do stuff remotely. We put them in and bring them in on the monitors from anywhere in the country, and we can do stuff remotely, make sure that you got a good— got a good rate base, make good decisions. Thank you. Any other follow-up?

I have one. Yeah. In the community where you set the freezes on, um, where any of that, like, how does that work in a union-based, um, well, in that community we didn't have unions. Um, when you've got unions, it's a little bit trickier. So we'd have to approach that in negotiation.

Perhaps if there's a, if there's like a minimum staffing in the union contract, you have to look at the union contract to see if it's got any staffing issues. If it's got staffing stuff in there, then you, you may— we may have to open the contract, see if we can negotiate that out. To follow up on that, when you froze those, um, rev— the, the salaries, how did that impact the community? Because they also pay those rates. I'm just curious how— what the backlash was.

Definitely, definitely the toughest part was on employees' families. Because a lot of them depended on that. They had so much— we had so little staffing that they depended on that overtime. They had kind of gotten to a point where there's overtime was baked into their salary and they got used to that. So the hardest part was on, um, was definitely on these, their families.

They had part of the, part of the success, I think, would be to show them like, hey, this— we're in this, everybody's in this together. And then it's going to be— there's going to be an end to this. So there's going to be like, it's going to be 8 months and then we'll be back in business. So did you drop the rate? Sorry, did you drop the rates after you guys got it?

No, we had to keep them. Okay, thank you. Yes, Jay, you're talking about rates and you're talking about rate consultants. Over the last year, we've gone through rate studies. We've got, we've got a rate setting engine.

My concern is, if you were to be hired, are you talking about when it comes to rates, bringing in consultants that you are used to working with, rate engine providers that you're working with, or would you be able and can you be able to use the rate engines and the studies that we already have because we've spent money on it, and that also contributes to spending more money when we need to control cost. Now, if you've got a good— if you've got a good consultant that you use and you've got a good rate model and it's fairly recent and not a lot has changed, I would talk to the finance director to get their opinion on it to make sure it's— if it's fresh enough, then There may be some things that we do ourselves to just kind of tweak it, or we can get a, you know, very small update. You can do like an update contract, not full contract. You do just a— we've done that before with sales tax. We've had someone do our sales tax forecast for us.

It's worked out pretty well, almost right on the dot. And we've also used that for building permits. They weren't quite as good with building permits. We're better. A lot of times our stuff's better than their stuff.

So I would, I would take— I would check with the finance director to see if it's close, and then if it's close, maybe just a couple little updates, and then usually it's a— it's more of a political issue than it is a financial issue as far as adopting the rates. I found—. Anybody else?

How do you evaluate staffing level to ensure departments are adequately resourced without overextending the city's budget? The key is definitely— there's two ways to do that. I think the first way is, is kind of somewhat intuitive, so you have to rely on departments. But then the second piece is, is with data. So if we have data that you can tie back to performance measures, so maybe there's a similar community in the area, they do— they deliver similar services, there's someone that's a good match, you can kind of use them as a benchmark.

We've got a lot of different cities in our area, so we can watch and we can look at our neighbors and see who the really good ones are. And you can kind of know, like, some, some people's outfits are a little bit, um, a little bit heavier than some of ours. We've got a very lean staff. One of the things I pride myself on is only increasing staffing when absolutely necessary. So we deny most of our staff increase.

I got, um, while I was gone, my assistant manager sent me an email, said We have 104 staff members for a 30,000 population city, which is pretty lean. And so, um, they said my, my folks asked for 17 more staff members, so we're probably gonna— I hope they're not watching, but we're probably not going to give them any staff members next year because revenues are only going to be up about 4%. That's just not enough to really add folks. So we'll use intuition from the departments, we'll use goals that the council is setting, like maybe They want to push public— a couple years ago they wanted to push public information. Big deal, public information, public information.

We hired a public information officer, and now we can see our website visits increasing, website work, Instagram, Facebook, all these numbers going up. Council's really happy with it. Folks doing videos and all sorts of things. So very measurable results that made them very happy. But, um, so we'll watch what the council's looking for.

Maybe it's public safety. Crime rate's high, you want to knock down the crime rate. Got enforcement issues of different pieces. Your parking—. They set up a parking system on the seawall in Galveston.

So we use a pay-by-phone to do a paid parking system. Super cool. And we use some of that revenue, gave it to the police department, had the police department do extra enforcement on the seawall to knock the crime rate down. And we tied it in with the license plate recognition stuff. Kind of controversial.

But, um, so then when people came from Houston, like the gangbangers came to the beach, you can see that, you know, when the police car went by to check to see if their parking was expired, it would pop a warrant. This guy is wanted, armed robbery, whatever. And then we go pick him up on the beach while he's suntanning.

So lots of— I think lots of, lots of great applications for attacking problems like that. Yes, Riley, just to follow up on that, when you talked about the leanness of your staff for your city, uh, you know, from our perspective, I don't want to speak for all of us, but I think we would all agree we never, if we can avoid it, we never want to be in a position to cut or lay off, uh, you know, current staff. However, as our costs and our rates skyrocket year after year, one thing that's been brought up a lot And I think that there might be some room here is the idea of, you know, setting up some kind of a— whether it's an official system or not, but when people retire or leave, to really do a deep dive in the departments and analyze their efficiencies that could be made. Could we, you know, reduce the staffing levels at all as people leave? I suppose that could be controversial too, but is that something you would consider doing?

Should be a lot of, lot of great organizations, including ours where I'm at right now. We do process improvement items. My assistant manager is a Green Belt in the, in the process improvement type system, one of the process improvement systems. So we're always tearing apart processes to see if we can save either time or money. So exit interviews of staff, um, evaluating staff.

Just because you lose a person doesn't mean that position is always filled, especially if you're in a If you're in an austerity program, so looking at those sort of things, absolutely. You do that. It's a good practice. It's a good best practice to do. Now, if you've got goals you want to hit in the department, you know, you lose a police officer, but you want to knock down traffic, you know, if you've got traffic issues, then you may want to fill those positions based on performance targets and then evaluate whether or not that worked.

So when the budget comes around next year, you can, you make those decisions. And then as people leave, you can shuffle between departments and reskill.

Thanks. Appreciate that. Thank you. Anybody else?

Describe your leadership style with department heads and staff. How do you balance support, accountability, and performance expectations? I definitely am, um, of the servant leader philosophy. So I build relationships with the department heads, and I show them that I care about them. And generally, I've even had people say that— several people, when I left certain cities, they just, they retire.

My assistant in Puerto Rancis, she was nearing retirement anyway, but she's a couple years away. And when I went to Park City, she says, okay, I'm not, I'm not training another one. I like working for you. I'm retiring. So I have a good— I think I have a really good relationship with my staff.

They know I'll go the extra mile for them. And I'll do things like— my assistant manager, he loves this— is he's got little kids. He's kind of— he's younger than I am. He's got kids in the school system and so forth. And what I'll say is, like, you pick what— we'll lay out the year and we'll say, okay, you pick your vacation days.

When you want to be out. And I'm— all my kids are grown, so I'll just pick up the leftover, like, whatever. If there's a couple days of Christmas, I like to do a couple days of Christmas. But otherwise, you know, you take— you get first dibs on all the, all the, all the time. So we'll make sure that one of us is there all the time.

So that's the kind of the style I've got. I've got a very, very personal style when it comes to accountability. I need— usually I need a little bit of help with that, to be honest. And so my assistant manager, we're kind of a yin-yang, and he's— he helps me. And so I'll say, hey, you know, you'll be a little tough on the finance director— he's watching— and, um, you know, you'll be a little tough on him on this one because, you know, he's got this issue, we got this issue.

So I'll take that advice and I'll tell my staff, hey, if you see— if you see I'm being a little bit too cautious about this or that, Please let me know. And then sometimes when you have to do really tough things, you have to warm folks up for that. So I'll start, I'll start, you know, very gradually say, you know, we've got an issue here, we need to start looking at it, and just kind of stay on them just to be kind of almost aggravating, but in a nice sort of way, just kind of like you are with your kids, you know. Hey, time to clean your room. Your room's looking a little bit dirty.

And then half an hour later, they haven't worked on it. You start, you know, working on it, but the third time you tell them, it's like, all right, go to your room and you're not coming out till you clean it. I tried at least to use my staff to help me with those blind spots and help me with being a little bit tougher, because I do have very personal style. People like that, but You want to make sure that folks don't take advantage of that. And if I do have folks that start taking advantage of that style, then it tells you a lot about their character.

And, um, and then of course we try to— at some point we try to offboard those people because they're not good. They're not good folks for the community. Any follow-ups?

Jennilee. Um, what does living on the island and being visibly engaged in the community mean to you as a local government executive? I love—. I'm a very— I'm an extrovert, so I thrive and get energized by spending time with people. So I love small towns.

One of the draws of coming to a small town— I've always worked in small towns. First town was 3,000 population. My second town was 5,000 with 20,000 tourists. And my next one was 5,000 again, 6,000 with another 20,000 tourists. And then Park City was about the same size as this community, about 8,500, and we were shrinking, went down to 7,800 in a couple years while I was there.

Um, Galveston was a big one, but it was very communal. And so I, I really do enjoy, like, um, I like working and being in small towns. I know it takes a long time to get through things like going to the post office or going to the grocery store. Folks will catch you. But, uh, I always join the local church.

And make sure I give to my local church. I serve with my local church. I'm currently an usher coordinator. It's called usher coach in church. So all these volunteers, you have to coordinate all these volunteers.

Quite an ordeal. So I participate that way. I've joined— my family and I have joined historical associations. So the Port Aransas, we were part of the Port Aransas Historical Society, and we try to engage with different ways. Um, I was a— I also organized a, like, inline hockey, not quite league, but like a drop-in inline hockey thing.

So we did that. Played hockey in, um, in Park City. We had a city employees kind of centric team, so I played on that with the guys. And, um, yeah, try to just be part of the— be part of the town, enjoy the home, and make it your home, and invest in it. It makes it hard to it makes it hard to leave.

And especially for a town like this, I could see myself just never leaving. Got 14 more years to work, and, uh, I need at this point in my career to start a new— if I move to another state, I need to start a new retirement system in the next state and stick with it to the end. So this, this move will probably be my last move, my plan. So, looking forward to it. If you all pick me, I'd be a big part of it.

Thank you. Any follow-up? Yeah. One follow-up. So, with that engagement in a community, how do you separate your position as a community member from your social engagements within your own community?

Like, so you have your bubble of community members, and how do you separate that from your job as a city manager? It's very difficult. So they— and the hardest part of that is some people who, some people who say they're your friends are not your friends. You don't, realize that until you're out of a job. So half the people that you know and that you hang out with get fired, they ghost you because they were only hanging out with you because you're a manager.

They want to be some friend of someone else. So that's probably the hardest part. Hopefully no one ever has to experience that like I've experienced that. But, um, you're always seen as the city manager. It's It's like, it's just like you're, it's like you're a superhero and everyone, like the public identities, you know, secret identity superhero, public identity superheroes, and the public identity folks have the hardest time because everybody knows who they are.

So you're kind of perceived as this person and it's, there's a very few amount of people that will just get to know you and love you for who you are. And then everybody else is kind of a shade of gray of how much, how much they want to. Then they still bring up, most folks will bring up like, hey, you know, you're playing hockey with someone and they'll say, oh, you know, there's a pothole on such and such street, can you take care of that? And then a lot of times, of course, you're sitting in the locker room, you don't have a pen. You're not going to remember.

It's like, well, send me an email on Monday, sort of thing. And so that's the way a lot of times you can answer that. There's, there's a lot of good folks, mostly like in the churches and in some of the clubs that you join, and you find when you make close friends. I've had some close friends in other towns, and, uh, you just know. Like, sometimes you know, but a lot of times you don't know.

It's, it's difficult, and I think some of you all might experience some of that.

Thank you. Any other follow-ups?

Jack, thanks for being here today. Yes, sir. Imagine you're faced with a situation where the city council is leaning toward a decision that would address their immediate priorities, but your professional assessment shows that a different course of action would better serve the long-term interests of the community and its residents. How would you navigate that situation, and what steps would you take to balance maintaining a positive relationship with the council while still advocating for what you believe is best for the city? Yes, excellent question.

That happens all the time, especially in the budget process. We just— we had one. And so the, the, the quick answer is you have to execute the council's direction, and you have to be good with it. Personally, you may feel like, well, we should have done this and we should have done that, but once the decision's made, you have to execute. And then carry that forward with staff and be positive.

So that's how you do that. We had an example. I'll give you an example. This last budget process, we've been stepping up our street maintenance in my current city. Street maintenance, as you know, is super important.

If you can spend a dollar, then you can maintain your streets. You can save your road base. And so we're moving up our— we're moving about half a million dollars every year, just stepping up our street maintenance. We're stick it on this pace. And, you know, of course, the anti-tax people come to the council meetings, and there's a lot of pressure.

Folks are putting stuff on Facebook, etc., etc., etc. So the council steps back a little bit, and they only did about half the increase that we wanted to get to our street maintenance goals. And they kind of knew, like, they knew, they're, they're pretty educated, they know, they really knew how to be doing more street maintenance, but They had to balance— of course, you have to balance that tax. If you're raising taxes, it's a big deal. So they backed— so we backed off.

We did about half the increase. So we're still stair-stepping up there. It's just we took a little bit of a break. And it's okay. That's, you know, that's some of the things that happens.

Happens all the time. Every budget, there's always stuff that we need to do. We just can't get there. So we regroup and we come back and next year we're still shooting for another half million dollars in roadway improvements. Whether we're going to get it this year, I don't know.

They might want police officers, they may want to hold the line on taxes or reduce taxes, perhaps even. So that's okay. And then so I would apply that, that here, and following your direction, I'll always give you the best advice I can. And if you don't want to do certain things, then you we, we'll just keep, we'll just keep trying, try again next year and show you what it looks like. Thank you.

Any follow-up?

Yes. Assuming you have investigated and evaluated the city's current status regarding the operating and capital budgets and the city council and general city operations, what would be your first 3 actions as the as the city's general manager?

My first— I think my first 3 actions— well, generally it's going to be still familiarization. So familiarization, uh, even though I've done a lot of research, read a lot of documents, gone to all the different pages of the website for both the city and the borough, just getting— and I've taken the tour and met with y'all— there's still a lot to learn. So still, I think the first step would still be familiarization. Relationship building. And so that would be, that would be number one.

The second item is going to be, since I'm a very financial and business kind of oriented person, is going to be look at financial forecasts. So getting with the finance department and translating kind of where the budget says this, but kind of where are we now and what does it look like for the next few months and how are we going to, how are we going to finish the fiscal year? Do we look pretty good? What's the, what's the tourism look like? What's the weather look like?

You're in the beach and you have a hurricane come in on 4th of July, you can lose a ton of revenue. So fortunately, no hurricanes and sort of, sort of that here anyway. But, um, so the second thing would be financial forecasting, making sure we're in good shape. And then the third item would be execution of any, any changes that we need to make. So if it's— if we need to go into an austerity program, it would be execution of the austerity program and designing it.

And getting with City Council to see, you know, what that looks like and what you're prepared to give up, what some of the staff ideas are. And if things look good, then it's going to be executing the current budget and looking at what's been done, what needs to be done, uh, where are we, and how can we get to accomplish all the goals that you all set out for the staff and yourselves by the end of the fiscal year.

Follow-up. Just a heads up, hurricane weather for you is regular winter weather here. I was hoping for some rain to get the authentic experience. We've had all that just for the last 4 months. I'm familiar.

I said when I was in the Army, I was in British Columbia a lot. So that's good to know. Okay. Jay, given our limited resources, how would you manage departmental spending and reduce bond debt principle while minimizing the financial impact on our citizens?

That's a lot. Yes. I think there's, of course, there's always immediate response. So I would say immediate response would be austerity programs, looking at current spending, freezing debt issuance, and looking at reserves to see what reserves look like. Sometimes there's a little bit of firepower left in reserves before you hit your minimums.

Sometimes you're already inside your minimums and you can't, you can't give it up because you've got bond coverage requirements or other, other things, or you just got, you just need, you need emergency reserves because emergencies come. And then the second thing, I mean, really part of the long-term strategy is to play offense and get into economic, really to put in some effort into economic development. We've done a lot of that sort of thing. I've done a lot of that in my current city. It's been a major focus for our city council to build the commercial base, to build sales tax, and to do all sorts of different deals.

We, we put together essentially a downtown shopping, and it's really starting to get some critical mass and be kind of a cool spot. And so I'd like to, I like to really focus on economics, working with the chamber, working with the business community and tourism community. I was on the, um, 2 different cities. I was on the different, different committees for the chamber boards. So the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce was on a couple of their committees, including marketing, governmental relations.

And then I was actually on the Park City Chamber Board, both as a city representative. So we do all the marketing. And then I ran for a spot on the board and was selected. So I got the city 2 spots instead of 1. But, uh, so that would be my, my approach is to is to be aggressive in developing the economy, which then brings in revenues to the city.

So you play offense— play defense first because you have to, and then you go on the offense. Yes, Jan Lee. In that respect, um, we talked about commercial and seasonal, but I, um, I, I'm curious to hear what you have to say about, um, building up, uh, commercial year-round businesses and understanding that the minimum average wage in this community is $16 an hour, and the state goes up in July. It goes to— I think it's either going to $16, so that means it'll most— will go up to $17. But how do you see— because that is an economic driver— how do you see bolstering that?

Because a lot of community members The seasonal is a part of it, but they're left out of that equation. Yeah, there's a lot—. I think a lot of economic development can be focused on primary jobs. So primary jobs being jobs that industry that then cascade into secondary jobs. And so secondary jobs would be things like accountants and tax folks and insurance agents.

And then you get into the tertiary jobs, which are the service jobs. So, okay. If you can bring in primary employers, that is the biggest thing, or increase different things. I think Rich, y'all were talking about a Coast Guard vessel that's governmental, so that, that does help. It's almost like a form of primary employers.

And then I think there's— in tourist areas, you've really got this, um, and it's already starting. You've already got an art scene starting, which is the, the mark of like an indicator that you have a creative— you have a creative class starting. We've always had that. Sorry. Yes.

It's been around for a very long time. Yes, for a long time. So one of the things you can do to kind of bolster that is through housing. It sounds strange, but a lot of times folks will say, like, what you really want in a town is people. We need people.

And so your population should be increasing. Some of the ways you do that is you can do things like promoting through the planning process. Things like, uh, the limit— if you have parking requirements, eliminating parking requirements, um, encouraging redevelopment, reducing lot size requirements, increasing heights, and so forth. So if you can start bolstering the city's, uh, housing, you'll eventually— you'll start bringing in a creative class. That starts to happen gradually.

Those folks create businesses, they create jobs. In Port Aransas, we had just down the street from City Hall, we had a cable and internet consulting business. They had 10 people, and they just kind of had this little, almost like a little, um, like a, like a trailer, essentially, like a double, like a double wide. It's fancy, you couldn't really tell it's a trailer. But in that, in that building, they had 10 people, and they had an office here in Puerto Rico, they had an office in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and they sent people to Switzerland to do consulting.

And they just kept to themselves and they just love living on the island. A bunch of guys were surfers. So, as you start to get little businesses like that coming in, they create really good jobs for people. And then that cascades into those secondary jobs. They go to the grocery store, they hire people to clean the building, et cetera, et cetera.

There's other jobs that are great. So, really focusing on— I would focus on population and focus on primary jobs.

Abby, a record number of cruise ships are scheduled for the upcoming season, and residents are raising concerns about overcrowding and infrastructure strain. How would you address both the economic opportunity and the community concerns? Yes, that's a great question. Every tourism community at some point gets to that point. We had a situation in I guess short answer as far as how to address it, there may be ways to schedule the boats, and I'm not sure what our powers would be there.

We have to look deep into that. But I know in other areas such as Key West, they had to limit the number of boats because this literally— the system could not handle the amount of tourists that were coming at one point. So you've got to kind of know what your max is, because at some point it destroys your visitor experience, right? If you If you're— if you have a ski hill, some of these ski hills in Park City and other places, they're limiting the number of lift tickets that they're selling because at some point the visitors get angry because there's too many people, there are too many people in the way, sort of thing. So there is, there is a physical limit to what your city can handle.

And so knowing some of those limits, some of these— some of the different cities have done carrying capacity studies and have to be careful with that. You don't want them to be hijacked by other folks that aren't really interested in tourism. But if you're focused on tourism and what can you really handle, and then scheduling the boats out— I know I saw some YouTube videos about people's horrific experiences coming because they ride the bus to Ward Cove, and there everyone wants to be on the last bus, and the last bus line was like, you know, 400 people or whatever, and there's one bus. But, um, I think you can schedule things out, perhaps try to do that. You've got kind of a natural limit here with the 4 berths.

That helps. So you don't have, you know, you have, you don't have folks like mooring offshore and sending boats ashore and sort of thing. Oh, you do? Oh crap, that's not good. We technically have 9 berths.

Sometimes we can have 9. Some pirates, some pirate ships, some people. But definitely there's, there's that. At one point in Galveston, we had so many cars coming across the bridge that the public works director is like, the street grid cannot accept any more cars. And so we had— the state called me and said, hey, we want to widen your bridge to the island.

I'm like, there's no way. Like, forget it. I don't want to widen the bridge because the street grid will not function. We're done. There's no way.

So there's things like you can install intelligent transportation systems. You don't have a lot of lights. You don't have a lot of traffic issues, which is fantastic. But as far as pedestrians and so forth, I would do some potentially, potentially good carrying capacity studies to see how we could try to move the timing of the ships around. And at some point you may have to do things like Key West did, which is limit the number of ships that are arriving at certain times in order to preserve the experience, because you want people to come and have a great time.

And then of course increase your air traffic. You know, if you can get people to fly in and come across like we did, just bring people, bring them in by air and ferry them across and let them hang out in town. See, that is a big— that could be a big, big emphasis is to get that fly-in tourism system a little less Any follow-up?

Uh, describe your approach to managing employee compensation, benefits, and long-term obligations while remaining fiscally responsible to the taxpayer. So that, that is probably— the city is typically 70% salaries and benefits, and that is the hardest— that is the hardest piece of it. So I like to do cost of living. I look at regional cost of living indexes, so use the Dallas Fed, and we look at the— how their— what their projections are for inflation. And of course, the government's changed inflation.

They've changed the equation so many times to make us feel better, and real inflation is actually higher. But, um, we use the, you know, we use the official inflation numbers and try to go a little bit higher than that. So we'll try to do a cost of living increase every year. And then every couple years we'll do a market study. I actually had to do it— I had to do it like an extra one for public safety because people were stealing police officers from each other.

Because when you're all— when you've got 120 cities next to each other in counties, 9 different, 12 different counties, everybody steals employees from each other. So it makes it really difficult. But, uh, so I do market studies. And we can do those remote as well. You don't have to necessarily fly people in.

You have to send documents to them and have them in Zoom meetings and so forth and have HR present it. So do COLAs, you know, do the COLAs, stay on top of the market studies, have good peer cities that you study in your market study, and be transparent with the staff. And a lot of times, sometimes you have to forego, you have to forego a market study a year. If you're, you know, if you've got tax impacts and citizens are tapped out, then you have to, you know, you have to say, okay, we're not going to do a market study this year. We'll try to do a COLA.

Sometimes you do a half a COLA, right? That's not very popular with the troops. Sometimes it has to be done. So I think those are my approaches. Always remember the tax impact and the tax and the great impact to the citizens.

But if you fall too far behind, then your staff starts to suffer, morale starts to suffer, and you start to see that in the operations.

Kelly. In that respect, how would you go about working with staff when, say, your market study comes back that, like, for example, um, linemen in our area is way below the market level, but as a community it's not sustainable. So how would you go about looking at ways to mitigate that?

So, so the, the nice part about enterprise funds is They have their own dedicated revenue source. They don't have to compete with the general fund. So police, fire, recreation, typically all that's in the general funds. The general fund is the hardest to make that work. I try to not treat the enterprise funds different from the general fund.

It's kind of like every— we're almost together. And so regardless whether water can pay, you know, maybe certain parts, it's very tempting that the water fund's got more money. So the water employees can be taken care of better than the general. I try to avoid that as much as I can. So in that respect, I would put them kind of in, in the— they would be in the overall market study and try not to say, well, because we have electric revenues, we can raise electric rates and plug this hole over here.

So I try to approach it, but at the same time, you know, if they're really, really far behind, then we got to step them up somehow. And sometimes Sometimes you can't afford to do that all in 1 year. You got to show them like, okay, well, you know, the market study shows, yes, transparent, it's all public document. You know, you can look up and see how underpaid you are. I'm sorry, right?

But we're going to step you up. You do it for everybody. Say, hey, we're going to go halfway this year, and then let's take a look at next year and see if we can go the other half. So you try to just at least scale it, give them some hope. That you're working on it and bring them— eventually bring them to the parks so that you don't lose them.

Any other follow-up?

What is your experience with enterprise funds, and what strategies would you use to address rising costs for infrastructure maintenance such as utilities, streets, and public facilities when capital needs outpace available funding? My experience with enterprise funds are significant. So water, of course, water and sewer, port revenues, harbor revenues. We had a gas utility in one of my cities. We've got impact fees, which function as special revenue funds in most of my cities.

So a lot of enterprise, lots of enterprise funds. The approach, I like to use as much as possible innovation. So there's different— one of the nice things from bringing folks from the outside a lot of times, we also have sort of a bunch of kooky ideas, but some of those kooky ideas, there might be one of them in 100 that's really good. And so a lot of times have a fresh perspective. I like to look at different problems and try and diagnose, is there another way to do things?

Is there new technology that can be brought to bear? I know we've, we've developed a lot of improvements with AI in our city that I'm at. We've done like little things like texting, like texting the city. So now you can text instead of making a phone call. So text volume just went through the roof because we've got a lot of younger folks in our town.

So they love texting us. And that comes in on the computer screen and the folks can see the message and they don't have to respond right away. And the average response time is like 45 seconds. So you send back a little thing and people love it. They love that sort of stuff.

So using technology, we got a new billing system for utility billing and our old system was kind of clunky and it kind of looked like, kind of looked like someone was trying to phishing message you. It's so bad. Like, is this a phishing message or is this actually from the city? So we got rid of that system and put a new system on top of it. It's a lot more user-friendly.

So I would like to, you know, I use as far as technology and innovation, different ideas, different ways to solve problems, working with staff, potentially working with consultants, budget, you know, budget permitting. And then a lot of times, you know, there's, there's not another way to do it. It's just very, it's kind of simple. You have to replace this or you have to replace that, a road, right? We haven't figured out a way to do roads cheaper yet.

There's different ideas out there that USDOT has got like a Q Branch working on roads, but they're not quite there yet. They're partnering with different universities trying to get frames to do roads cheaper. In all, like, you're going to spend somewhere between $2 million and $4.35 million per lane mile on redoing a road. So sometimes when a road goes, or the road's about to go, you have to put it in your capital budget and then, and then work on it in time, either save money to pay for it Or look at strategic debt. A lot of times you can go short with debt and knock off your interest rate, which is also sometimes popular with the citizens.

They're more financially savvy. You can kind of show them that you're saving a couple percentage points by going— instead of doing like 20-year bond, maybe like a 7-year tax note or something shorter. 15-Year— I've used a— done property purchases using 15-year revenue bonds, and that's a pretty good— that's a pretty good little tool.

Yes, right. You mentioned about how you have experience with charging impact fees. Can you elaborate on that, please? Yes. So, in Texas, we're allowed to charge in other states too.

Utah allows impact fees. Right now we charge in my current city, we can charge them on new developments. So, someone comes and they buy a building permit. So, let's say their building permit is for a commercial building is $10,000, and— but they're generating traffic. So based on the planning table of uses, you base it on a house.

So a house generates typically 4 vehicle trips per day. And if you've got someone like a doctor's office or a fast food restaurant, they generate, you know, a bazillion trips a day. And there's a calculation based on the trip generation. And so when they buy their building permit, one of the impact fees— I think we had a grocery store come in They're looking at this. We have a Kroger Marketplace coming in.

Their impact fee is probably going to be $200,000, $210,000. That goes into a capital fund for new roads or improvements in the city. So you have to use it on— unfortunately, you have to use it on new growth. You can't use it on existing maintenance. And so if we need to bump out a road, we're building new roads, we use it, we can use it to offset those costs.

And then, you know, you can also charge it on water and sewer. So water and sewer, if you need to make a line bigger, or if you need to install like a new sewer line, we use it for that sort of thing. So same sort of stuff based on your flow calculations. A residential unit might pay $1,500, add that to the building permit, and then sewer charge could be like another $1,750 or so, or $1,800. So it's a good source of revenue.

The different states will have different rules on how you can use it. Most of the time it's the Municipal League made a deal with the developers, and so it's really used for capacity increasing, not so much maintenance. So you also have to kind of watch that because they'll give you money all day long to make things bigger, but then at some point we have to replace it. That's all our nickel. So we also have park fees, so we charge on residential development, we'll charge a park fee.

So it's a park development fee. And so every residential unit apartment— an apartment complex comes in, they'll pay $350,000 in park development fees. We use that to build playgrounds and splash pads and so forth. So it's a good— it's a good tool for a high-growth community. In older communities, you know, there's limited applications, but it all depends on how the state allows you to collect and spend those revenues.

So, and you can have— consultant will have to have an engineering firm come and do the, do the study. It's part of the requirements. There's a schedule of projects. You can't add projects to the list. You can choose not to build, but you can't necessarily just add them, amend your stuff.

But it's a good tool. It's a good tool if you get a growth wave and you need to expand things. I know you're doing a new water line. If you can tie some of that stuff to new growth, perhaps there's a way to capture some of that with impact fees. You can also sell debt and use a revenue bond against the impact fee.

You just have to be careful then if that's tied to impact fee revenues and the growth stops, then it defaults back to the ratepayers. You have to be really careful.

Oh, whoops.

Riley, a controversial decision made by the city leads to strong public backlash at council meetings and online. How would you respond?

That almost happens like every meeting, right? So a lot of times if you're in a council meeting and It kind of depends like how it's being directed. Sometimes the mayors— the mayors are— put the mayor on the spot. Sometimes the mayors are really good with the public. I've had, um, my favorite mayor moment is someone stood up in the back of a meeting and he was just one of these negative people.

You probably have them at some point. There's—. They're everywhere. And, uh, he was criticizing the city about dandy grass. We're going through this austerity program, right?

And this is my first town. And so there's a little city park, and we didn't cut the grass. We just, we just let the grass grow. It was not essential, but that's how bad it was. We just, we had the guys working on other stuff.

We're not paying overtime to cut grass. We can't get to the grass, and the grass is getting this high. And this guy comes up and he's like, you guys, you know, the city's horrible. You guys can't even cut the grass. You have one little park, can't even take care of that.

And the mayor says, he goes, mijo, which means son in Spanish. Mijo, when you cut your grass, then you can come talk to us about our grass. Oh boy. And so I'm like, wow. So part of that was psychology.

And I don't think he even realized he was doing— he was a teacher, so he's used to dealing with students, high school teachers. You know, you're not going to beat them. But part of it is emotional. Like, a lot of times people will come at us with an emotional argument and they're upset about something. Like, it might not even be the grass.

It may be he's upset about the $8 increase we just gave him on his trash bill, but he knows we need it, so he can't hit us for that because he knows all this, you know, when it comes to the meats. But he's going to hit us for the grass, but it's not really about that, or, you know, His cat died or something. There's something going on in their life that now they're here, right? They're making an issue. And so it's an emotional— it's an emotional response.

A lot of times people, people will want to give like a logical response. We'll give a logical— we'll want to give a logical response to an emotional argument. And sometimes it's best just to give an emotional response to an emotional argument. Not to be mean or anything, but You know, that was a bit of an extreme example, right? Calling somebody up for not cutting their grass.

Small town, everybody knows who cuts their grass. But, um, sometimes it's like, you know, hey, someone could say like, these rates, like, I can't afford these rates. And he's like, I know, like, I know, like, we can't afford to not do this. Like, we can't, we can't let the electrical system fail. We can't.

What would happen to the city? And so you respond in a way that it's not confrontational necessarily, but it's emotional. You say emotional, emotional, and someone brings a logical argument, respond with a logical argument. So some of that, it may not necessarily help, but sometimes it makes the people feel better. And if they feel better, you know, it makes it worth their time, at least that they came and talked to you.

And then a lot of times you'll have them, they'll catch you after the meeting and they'll say, hey, thank you for saying this, or thank you for saying that. But if you engage with them, they engage with you emotionally, then you respond with logic. It just, it seems like it never works. So that's one technique I think. As far as in a meeting, that's been an effective technique.

Jay. Say if the council makes a policy decision as an ordinance, say it affects law and order or it affects rates.

After the ordinance has passed, and there's a huge backlash online. And public outcry. How would you mitigate that by educating the public?

It happens all the time. Of course, it happens all the time. We've got a public ed— so I would try public education. Sometimes it's like there's a 36-hour period where people are just out of their minds online. And then it fades.

I think what you want to look for is if it lasts longer than that period and it's not kind of being stirred up on purpose by bad actors potentially. But if it's a legitimate issue that just kind of keeps going, then that may be deeper. Maybe this, you know, we went too far. Maybe, you know, we pushed a little bit too hard, too fast. But, um, we've got a publication right in my current seat We talked about this before, but we've got a public educate— or public engagement officer, and she does a great job.

She pushes information on Instagram, Facebook, and the website, and we do emails. We've even done emails to people. We have like a constant contact for email, different statistics to people. There is like— the mayor did a little video inviting people to come in and interview and apply for our Comprehensive Planning Update Committee. There's different ways to push.

There's different ways to push information, but sometimes, you know, folks, they're angry. They get it. You just got to do your best and talk to them. You talk to them with empathy and also listening for, you know, did you make a governing mistake? You know, did you do something that maybe it's just too far?

And then how do you kind of graduate? How do you come back from that? I think she made a mistake or retreated slightly. Thank you. Kenley.

What do you see as the most pressing challenge for Ketchikan in the next 12 to 18 months, and what specific step would you take in your first 6 months to begin addressing it? Definitely, definitely based on all my research and the tours listening, it's going to be infrastructure, infrastructure replacement. And I would really watch, look at what reserve levels are, what reserve drawdowns have been. Is there any, is there any firepower left in reserves? Is it pretty well spent?

What's the capacity? What's the, you know, what's the stomach, I guess you might say, for for increasing debt versus using cash and put together a 5-year financial plan. So marry up the CIP with the 5-year financial plan so that it jives. And so the nice part of being able to do that— a lot of them, they'll have a 5-year CIP and then they'll have a 5-year financial plan, but they don't, they don't talk to each other. And so the nice part of putting those together is you can have those discussions and debates early, because someone will see something in the 5-year plan and they're like, oh, we can't afford that.

It's like, oh, okay, you don't want to do that drainage project? Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it now before you put it in the plan. Maybe it needs to come out of the plan, but you got to do what you got to do. Yes.

Um, just to follow up on that, um, in a 5-year plan, how would you, um, With the way insurance costs have gone up across the United States for employees and anyone working, how would you put that into a plan? Is there a way to like actually have a forecast of what that would look like in the near future?

Yes. Some of it's somewhat controversial, but 'Cause you can't talk about age really of your staff, but as your staff ages, the medical costs are going to go up. It's just natural, right? When you're 20-something, you're bulletproof. You break an arm, ah, 6 weeks later, back in the fight.

So, you know, as the— you can kind of see on the down low as your staff, if your staff is aging, that you're going to have medical costs kind of continue to eat away at the budget. But you can't do anything really about that.

There's different— I've seen different programs that worked. Of course, the easiest way to do that is most effectively is you look at sometimes the different states will have insurance pools. Our Municipal League has an insurance pool, the healthcare. It's horrible. It's horrible.

You know, it's one of those we saved a bunch of money on our health insurance sort of thing. We went to this plan. But recently, because of our employee size, we've been able to shop it and actually do better than our state plan. So now we've got real insurance and they pay claims. So nice.

But definitely looking at, like, we have a broker, looking at the broker, talking with the broker every year, seeing like, are there different things we can do? Is there different plan tweaks we can look at? A lot of times you make a change to a deductible or something, it's like immediate impact. We've used a health reimbursement account, HRA. So we give our folks, I think it's $5,500.

We're able to do that in combination with some deductible tweaks and things like that. So a lot of times you can structure the plan and the brokers can help you do that to really make the most of it. And so you can do a lot with plan design. And then the way they really win the war is health. So of course, this is a very active community that really helps.

So in Park City, we had Epic. Health of my employees because everybody skied and everybody played hockey or whatever, Nordic, cross-country, all that stuff. So people are in great shape. You can encourage that sort of thing through, like, basic stuff. Like, you know, you used to have pedestrian— used to have pedometers back in the day, but now you've got your phones that will track your steps.

You can do different apps that encourage employees to do different things, set different goals. Have an employee engagement committee that really pushes health, help the employee stay active, eating healthy, and so forth. So all that stuff really does help with some of the chronic disease things, which can really eat away at the healthcare. So people still going to have issues, but, but you can do at least a lot HR side to really encourage people to be as healthy as they can be. Thank you.

Yeah, when faced with resolving an issue about which you have limited knowledge, ranging from the specific needs of utility to competing schools of thought on a community issue, how do you seek and assess relevant information? And how do you then weigh and apply whatever information that you have gathered? Excellent. Yes, the short answer on that is, is I rely on a lot of expertise, but then I also try to gather information. Both from council members.

I've got some, some longevity, and community members. I'm always interested in what the business community has to say, like the Chamber. So I plan to be involved in a lot of the different business associations that you have here, economic development and so forth, and kind of listening to see all of that approach. And then there's, you know, sometimes you just get great ideas from the community. I I know we were at the, um, the meet and greet yesterday, and we had one gentleman— I don't know if he's in the audience or not— but, um, but he was talking about his experience with electrical.

Oh, he is, he's here. So I was kind of eating that up as far as like he's talking about like a mine to British Columbia, all sorts of good stuff. So a lot of times, um, if you kind of take your time with an issue, you know, you don't have to make a decision right away. Maybe you got 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 6 weeks to make a decision on something, then ideas emerge from the staff, ideas come from the public, from the council members, from the business community. And so kind of keeping your ears open and taking meetings, going to different things.

Someone invites you to a lunch, someone invites you to come speak, you know, go to that and gather as much intelligence as possible and then discuss it freely. And then a lot of times those good— those good ideas will emerge. It's part of the process. And if they— if you don't have a lot of great ideas, at least everybody's listening, feels listened to. And so yeah, if we have time to make decisions, that's the best— the best asset is if we have time.

Thank you.

Anybody want to follow up?

What question do you have for the council?

So I've mentioned longevity. I know that's a big deal for you, and I know you've brought someone from the lower 48 and they stayed a couple years. And I would be coming from the lower 48. I know your other candidates are Alaska folks, or they have Alaska connections. I'd love to be here potentially for the end of my career, which could be 14, you know, planning on 14 years.

So would you all be serious about trying to keep someone that long? And kind of how would you do that?

Anybody want to answer that? I can. That's okay. Yeah, sure. Um, I think for the most part, we, we have been lucky to have a, um, manager for 26 years.

So we tend to, like, we don't want to see the rotating door. That's not our— for me, it's not my endgame. I see you as a partner or the manager as a partner and not as an adversary.

Fantastic. Yes, Dick, and then Jay. You said 14 years. Yes, that'll make me— I'll be 67. As long as the performance is there and it works.

Absolutely. You got it. The last guy was— or the Carl was what, 20, 20 years? 26 Years. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I mean, it's cost effective and leadership is consistent if we have a long-term manager. However, there has to be an engine put in place where there is an evaluation every 3 years or every 4 years that the city is progressing, the city is being managed like the citizens want it, like the council want it, the relationship between the council and the manager, the relationship between the manager and the staff, and most importantly, the relationship between the manager and the community. It is not this body, it's not the staff, but it is the community that elects us that judges the performance of what they receive. I mean, our citizens are used to a high quality of service, and with our restraints, with our resources, our revenue constraints, how you mitigate that and how you educate or inform the community of what's going on. I mean, this community right now is very fed up of rates going up across all departments.

There is an argument it is needed, but on the other hand, as Councilwoman Gage put it, the median income is $16. Young couples cannot afford even a $3 increase. $3 In one department, but across all department, that becomes $20 on a paycheck. So it's how you work with the community will dictate. But we would like to see somebody that's long-term, and Carl served us for 26 years.

So that, that is something that we need. That's a great track record. Yes. Yeah, on the longevity thing, that's kind of I think one of the biggest issues is it's a little bit daunting to look at so many different resumes and everybody moves every year and a half or 3 years, and that's definitely not what we want. So I think, as has been said, if we're on the right track, we want somebody for the long haul with a long-term plan.

And I don't quite know how to tie this into what you said, but I did want to just tell you something that our community is, in my opinion, the biggest problem we're facing right now is figuring out how to take those 1.6 or whatever million people. Our community doesn't feel like we're benefiting enough from it. And I think that's a fair assessment. And we go through this round and round. There's rules, there's CLIA, there's the law, there's this and there's that where they can't take money for this and that.

But We really need to find a way to get those dollars to those— we shouldn't have to be raising our rates like we are when we have that many people dumping money into our town. So for me, that would be the main focus, is figuring out a way to— so our year-round citizens see the benefit more. So again, that may not have tied into your question, but I wanted to tell you that because I've seen I've seen that and I've worked in other tourism communities and we have money and here we don't. So something's broken, right? Something— there's something going on that we shouldn't be benefiting from that.

And how do you fix that? What are the constraints that there should be more benefit? So that'll be, that'll be a good course of study I'll jump into. Abby, one component of your question that nobody's really addressed is like, how, how would we keep you here? Long-term, and I think, and I'll speak from one person on the council, maybe others feel the same, is we've been burned lately.

And unfortunately, the next manager is going to have to build that trust up, and it might take a little bit longer to build that. But, you know, once, once we can gain that trust, as we've seen in track record with Carl, And management is good. You know, we— the council worked very well with Carl, making sure that he wanted to stay because the performance was there and that trust was there. And so you won't probably see it right off the bat. I don't think any manager would see that right off the bat, but in hopes, long— the longer you stay, the longer you would see that.

So how we would manage that would really be dependent on, on the person that takes the position and how we can build that trust. Um, like we had in the past.

Any other questions? No, sir. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, good afternoon, Bill. Good afternoon. So to begin with, we'll start with a brief introduction. You have a series of questions for you today that leave time at the end for any questions that you might have for us. With that in mind, please briefly introduce yourself, share your background, career path, and key experiences or values you'd like council to understand as we consider your fringe rule.

Thank you. It's a multi-part question. I'll try not to lose anything in the middle. Um, again, I'm William Ponca. I go by Bill, and, uh, my career path over the last 30 years, I've been involved in municipal government of various forms.

Worked for a large community, 300,000, down to obviously smaller communities such as Unalaska most recently for almost 9 years. And I shared with some folks the other day that I was in the private sector working for mechanical and electrical engineering. My design— my path was design, and I was an architecture major before I switched in college and became And, uh, I only entered public service because we used to work with the public so often, and I wanted to understand what was going on on the other side of the door. And once I became a public, I really fell in love with that role, working with people, working with, um, communities, their issues. And I stayed for my first job in Toledo, Ohio, for 10 years.

I moved on to more rural, kind of rural city of 45,000 people. The county had 75,000. We had 17 townships and villages. We represented all those folks. They were member-driven, and it was my job to get out there and meet all those folks.

It was quite a different challenge from being more of a city dweller. I am both kinds of issues. From that point, I moved to New Mexico for brief 2 years. I think that kind of prepped me for coming to Alaska. My experience had no opportunity to work with Native organizations or Native groups.

There really are none in Ohio. So it was a short stint. I didn't enjoy my work on NSF as much as I hoped. I think part of that was moving and the culture clash and being where I was with a younger family and having to go through a lot of things like that. But once I ran to Alaska for that position, I really enjoyed it.

I thought I was going to be there a short time, stayed there for 9 years. And I found that I really do like the rural sphere of working with people, small community. What that does for me is to bring some of the experiences that I've had with larger-scale economic development, community development issues, I never thought I'd work on any of those types of things in Alaska, and obviously there were those opportunities. It's a lot different in Alaska than it is in the Midwest. You're point-specific.

You don't have to go out and attract people. They come to you because of what you already are doing, and you build on that. Completely different from trying to diversify your tax base, et cetera, in the Midwest. When you're on the highway system, you can be anything. So, The career path really was private sector design, but I began enjoying working with public and neighborhood organizations and causes that really are quality of life about people who live there and blending development.

So that just isn't intrusive. That's always the case. How does new get along with the old? And, uh, some design work had helped with that. Historic preservation was a big part of what I did.

And Tolito, and you always have to continue to move on, but maintain your character. So I do embrace that in a small community. I like Alaska. I never thought— I was just telling my wife— but if you asked me in a million years when I was a younger person growing up in a subdivision in the Midwest, would I ever be in Alaska? No, I never would have envisioned this, but I do enjoy the scenery.

The openness, and there's a way of life here that's far more laid back, believe it or not, than it is in the Midwest. And I enjoy that. As I get older, I enjoy it more. So I would like to stay in Wisconsin. Thank you.

Dick, what draws you to the Ketchikan City Manager position at this point in your career, and why are you interested in this community specifically? I think I shared with someone last night that, um, Ketchikan has a good reputation in the state of Alaska. Um, you know, anyone looking out, you look into a community from afar, you have one of two reputations, where they really are— they don't have their stuff together, or they do. And your reputation is you have your act together. You're well known as a tourism community with all the stops that you have here.

It's attractive, and what draws me to it is, frankly, it's a position that I enjoyed working in on Alaska as their city manager for 2 and a half years. It's not something I ever set out to be. I stepped up in that position because they had 6 city managers in the first 6 years, and I felt drawn to trying to help solve a problem that they were having. I didn't walk in to be a city manager. I actually tried to stay away from those type of leadership positions and found that there was a whole, you know, 180-people organization that were having trouble with, uh, their spirit of coming to work.

When you go through leadership changes like that, it's a real problem up, down, and I have a lot of peers there that I care about and I enjoyed living there, so I felt it was imperative to step up. I do enjoy that work. I have those skills. I think it was rather selfish of me to not want to step up. So this is an opportunity to stay in Alaska.

It's a larger community, and frankly, it's closer when you think about travel. It's a lot easier than Dutch Harbor. 40% Of the flights have canceled. Cancelled for some reason or another. You have jet service.

I have a lot of family down in the Lower 48 that I want to be able to get to, you know, grandchildren's birthdays and things like that without getting cancelled. So, you know, you have a lot of amenities here that when you live in a place, you forget that you have. And there's a lot of reasons why someone would want to live here. I think this position would suit me well. I worked more in utilities than I ever thought I would.

In Alaska, we had the year before I became city manager, 24 unscheduled power interruptions that harmed our businesses, that harmed our companies. Every time, you know, a crane came on without coordinating it with our power pumps, power would go down for everybody. The first year I fixed that with my team, we had one. It really came to people paying attention, wanting to do their job, and having the resources to do it. So I enjoy this kind of work.

The fact that the public utilities goes with this job, I think would be a good fit. Any folks? Can you hear me? What's that? You all hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you just fine. Thank you. Okay.

Mr. Hope, welcome. How would you approach negotiating with organizations the city works with, such as labor unions, cruise line agencies, and intergovernmental partners, in a way that benefits the city while maintaining strong communication and positive relationships? Well, those are 3 different groups to start with, right? Your labor organizations. Um, in all of the cases, endorsing a city manager to represent your community and represent you in these org—.

Is very serious. I take that role very seriously. Um, being professional, trustworthy, honest, as transparent as possible depending on what that role is. You know, not having a game to play that isn't yours to play is very important. You have to be able to be trusted by the people that you are representing as well as people you're sitting across the table from.

When it comes to organized labor, we had an issue in, on Alaska. We had an issue because we're so remote and because of our transportation. Everyone across the country is having an issue attracting police officers. So imagine being that far out there. I had 7 positions and I, some of them were working more than I was comfortable having them work because there were 4 vacancies of the 7.

How do you do that and have 24/7, you know, protection? And we found through a salary survey that our police officers were 16% below the market value that we wanted to be. And it was a rather unique position, but I did talk to the council about going on a market-based negotiation rather than a straight 3%, 5% across the board, because some of the positions were already above market. And I worked with 5 of our bargaining units to do that, bring those all up to the 85th percentile. Some got more than others.

And it was embraced. PSEA group was the hardest at first, so that's where there was the biggest gap. And I thought to be organized, to negotiate with organized labor fairly, we need to do a reset. And I think everyone saw the value in that, and I was able to sell that to both the elected officials and the labor organizations. Working with people on the outside of the organization is different.

I'm there to represent all of you and the interest that I've said about confines or constraints or with the objectives. And you have to keep those straight. What do you want from the cruise ship companies? What do you want from other businesses? What do you want from your extraneous partners?

I can tell you, when I took the position, um, we had a trilateral agreement. It was, uh, basically there were 3 people in this group. That represented the two organizations, the city, the tribe, Puyallup Tribe, and the Onalaska Corporation. And those relations weren't always the best, and I'm being conscious that this could be online. And I wasn't sure as planning director how well this trilateral— trilateral relationship, did it really mean?

Too often, you know how it is when there's three people trying to write a a school project, one of them doesn't do the work and the other two do a lot of the work. Maybe one does. What does it mean? And so I was skeptical, but as I became city manager, I realized that the material was there, the opportunity was there, and the personalities were there, which is a lot of what it's about— how can you get along with people? And I realized it was a great opportunity for me to work with those other two.

I'm going to give you something after the city and advance our common initiatives forward. And that's what I did. And for the most part, we enjoyed that work. And that was a first. For a long time, they didn't really get along with city managers before.

And I'm not talking just the 6 before me, I'm talking for, you know, a decade and a half. There was a lot of growth there. And one of the things you get from people who are not from your community such as myself, I don't have some of the history and the baggage. You know, a lot of feelings of what happened before, hard to dismiss. But when you're learning, I use that opportunity to try and reset some of those expectations.

Or go outside all of you as you help me understand what happened, what could happen, what the pros and cons are to actually meet with folks that maybe you don't really want to meet with, but it's an opportunity to be a new start. And that's—. There's no two ways about it. You're new to the community, you have to leverage the fact that I have to learn, and I'll have everyone I can alongside me learn. That will require some people meeting, some working together, but maybe don't want to.

Hopefully I answered your question. Thank you. Follow-up, Abby? Describe the kind of working relationship you seek with the mayor and city council. What are your expectations, communication style, and guiding principles?

Well, you know, I answered to the council. I'm your, your employee. So it's— when I started In Unalaska, I set out a 6-month agenda and a year where I wanted to be. It was a rather difficult time. I had to rebuild an entire team.

I had to appoint 10 of the 11 people who were injured. So that was a goal, and everyone could say, that's true, let's work on that. But at the same time, you had to keep the ship running. You're not in that position. From what I can tell, your ship doesn't run any mal.

So what you expect of me is what I will do, but there's my work with the council and then there's my work with my team, you know, and where are they at, what do they expect, and how does that all go together? Because ultimately I represent them when I'm sitting here talking to you, and if I don't have their support, it's going to be difficult to meet your demands. So Why I communicate to you all, a weekly email on Fridays that I would like to summarize anything that you may or may not know. Um, it's usually the week that's an off meeting from council. I'd like to meet with council people.

It's at your discretion for me to meet with you once a week, but I certainly would like to see you once a month. How else will I get to know you and you get to know me? In the electronic age, and of course then the public information age, you have to be careful of what you share, how you share, make sure it's fair and open to the public. So, you know, texting, Microsoft Teams, all those things have rules. But I try and make sure whatever I share with one, I share with all.

Okay, follow up.

Judy, can you share an example of how you improved an organization's financial performance through cost control and revenue generation?

Repeat the question, please. Can you share an example how you improved an organization's financial performance through cost control or revenue generation?

Um, well, Alaska really didn't have concerns about financial performance, but I can say that one of the projects that I inherited as city manager I wanted to see through was the establishment of a sustainability fund. Basically, they had a running ledger and investments. They didn't have some targeted goals about how to leverage their money that they had in reserves just was invested, like, been invested by the same policies for many years. And there was an effort to try and put together some sort of a— it kept getting confused with PFD, you know, and it wasn't a permanent fund by any means. Um, but I helped finish that work, and I set aside a large sum of money for future goals in terms of community benefit, community support.

I know you have a community support program here, but they have a rather large one. Um, one of the things that I know they're going to have to be facing is an increased, increased support of their healthcare health clinic out there, something similar you have with your hospital here. They're just now entering this era where they're going to have to start supporting more because of just the way they're structured, insurance rules, federal regulations of how they're structured. They can't charge for what the services are at cost. So that had been coming, and I've been on that board for 7 years and tried to prevent that from coming because it becomes political.

You—. I'm going to say the word political I would go back further than to say one that would be more fledgling is when I was the director of the Regional Planning Commission in Ohio. It had, I think, 3 staff members and a budget of $280,000. And really all it did was site plan reviews and zoning changes for the city. Excuse me.

Well, when I left there, we had a staff of 7. We diversified 3 funding measures that they had to probably more than 15. That was rolling because we had a lot of grant revenue. We started a grant program. We did start that with Alaska's loan because, you know, grants are fun to get, but they're also costly to administer, and it's important to do it correctly.

So I left that organization with a strong membership. We did a membership drive, 17 townships and 10 villages. We were administering revolving loan fund, um, balances for 3 entities: the City of Finley, the City of Bostovia, and Hancock County, which means we applied to the state for capital funds to do projects. And help people open up anything from a restaurant to a small manufacturing company. And those funds would come back into either the county or one of those communities, and we would then lend those out again.

They weren't doing anything like that, and we would get administration funds from those. And if you remember during 2007 and '08, it was, you know, the housing crisis and rather poor period of economic For us across the country, my organization did, I think, 70% of those deals for the state of Ohio. So we were really busy making sure that we were administering those funds that were available to everybody. So I like to make sure, depending on where you are as an entity, what opportunities are there, and we explore those and make sure that we diversify. Great.

Thank you.

You follow?

How do you evaluate staffing levels to ensure departments are adequately resourced without overextending the city's budget?

Well, first of all, you have— as a city manager, you have employees, and I like to know who the employees are. I like to know what they do. I don't by any means pretend something that I'm not. It's not something you'll see in my leadership style. I don't fake answers.

I don't pretend I know more than I do because you know what, there's going to be people who work for you who know you don't know what you think you know. I'm telling you all I know. There's no— that's in the zero-sum game. So I like to get around. I like to visit the departments.

I like to get to know the employees. And as you do that, you build trust and you also get to observe more. I'm not going to observe anything sitting in the office. So I try to make sure that I dedicate time to getting out, meeting the employees, seeing what they do, learning about what they do. And while you're doing that, you kind of can tell if there's fluff happening or is it something about scheduling.

Hey, you know, we got a rather large snowstorm. Why didn't they get the roads cleared faster? So you start asking questions about what happened. And in that, you'll find out if it's if it's balanced or not, or if there are any kind of games being played with seniority and, well, so-and-so gets that, they weren't available, we didn't get a response in time and that's why the roads weren't cleared. You have to deal with those sorts of things.

But I think whoever you hire should be out there looking at how the, how the departments function and getting to know your employees. They will let you know one way or another what they need and what's not right.

Thank you. Any follow-ups?

Right.

Describe your leadership style with department heads and staff. Do you— how do you balance support, accountability, and performance expectations? First, I don't ask my staff to do anything that I won't expect of myself. I think, uh, I, I call it a trust model. It's one that I believe in, and it's one that has great results when it's working.

You have to trust your staff. It's a two-way street. Of course, I am the boss, and there's always hesitation among the staff because you have higher firepower, you're the boss. So it's never 50/50.

Being transparent, and I think I shared a little bit about this just in the last answer, but the word is humble. If you can't be humble and approachable, all your staff will never fully engage with you or certainly never trust you. And if you don't follow up on what you say, you talk one thing but you do another, that becomes more. I'm saying walk the talk or whatever, that you're, you're, you're not going to be effective. So my leadership style is, I can tell you, I had probably 40 interns, started internship programs about everywhere I've been.

So I've had that kind of leadership building with my own experience, how to work with people, mentor people where I can mentor Frankly, if I expect people on my team to help share with me what they do so I can better advise facilities with the finance department meetings, I can at least share so when they have to come up and answer a question in front of you, some tips for discussion, some tips for how to present themselves, how to write better reports. Those, those are the mechanics that someone like myself have. To offer back. And when you build a team from bottom up, uh, you can say 4 of my directors I mentored. I had to almost negotiate with them to take the position.

They were concerned about where they were. My trust in them helped sell them on taking the position. There wasn't a lot of eagerness in some cases to step up. Because they've seen how shifty the soil is in leadership. Suddenly you're not there.

So I work with several department heads to help them accept the position, and it was an added burden, but it was above and beyond what my position was. Didn't have a team of professionals ready to go. I had to work with what I had. Frankly, it worked really well.

Follow-up, Kenley. Oh, you're next. Oh, I'm next. Yes, I thought maybe I was raising my hand by accident. Um, what does living on the island and being visibly engaged in the community mean to you as a local Government, second.

Oh, it's being visibly engaged and it's being engaged, right? Um, I'd like to answer that question by saying I can be both. I've been doing— I started my public career in 1994, so I'm doing this for what, 20, 30, almost 2 years.

As you look for one job, it might be 6 months in there, so I say 30 solid years, and 28 of that I've been on boards in the community. And not just to be on it, but to do working boards. And I think that's one way that not only do I ingratiate myself into a community and learn from— you learn your surroundings from work, right? And maybe where you live. But there's a whole other group of people that you can learn about the community, make friends with and peers by getting engaged and being on a nonprofit board.

I've done that for a long time. I've been on, I would probably venture a guess, 10 significant boards. Most recently, our clinic board, $6 million, uh, or small nonprofit, $6.5 million budget, significant, 35 employees. I was on that board for 7 years. I've been on board such as Leadership Toledo, come up with unique fundraisers, meet frogs and— or rubber frogs, excuse me— and slingshots to, you know, off skyscrapers, make 9-hole golf courses, you know, unique things to, to really find your niche in a community.

And you have to not only invent that, but you have to sell it, you have to get sponsors, um, support, and you beg everyone you know to come and be a part of it. So that's one way. Another way I can tell you is I enjoy shooting pool. I enjoy getting out and meeting people. Long.

It's different in here than I can say in Dutchman. There was two places with pool tables there, but, um, I definitely like to get out, talk to people. I don't hunt for problems, but when you're the city manager, you know, you will find out what the problems are. And people just really enjoy finding out that you're a person, not just some big head that sits at a desk. So I make myself available.

I do things like everybody else, or something. Follow up. Yes. So, as you engage in activities such as community opportunities, like nonprofit boards and stuff on your own time, how would you separate yourself from your job and the influences in a meaningful way, taking their concerns to heart, but also managing that so it doesn't dictate what you bring to the table? I think that's a good question.

To me, it doesn't seem to be as big a concern because I've grown doing this for 30 years right alongside it. And I would say initially, one of the things that I found to be a benefit, you know, trying to do, say, fundraiser in downtown One square mile needs— I was surprised at how many people that I knew that were bankers, vice presidents, whatever their field was, didn't know how to work with the city at all. How do we request a barricade so we can shut off the street on a Saturday so we can do what we want to do? I'm like, well, you just call the Public Works and there's a form. And they're like, what, really?

So you find that One way, you're an ambassador for the city because there is this perception that it's, you know, the city, you know, and I found that in quite a few places. So you help break that down. That's a benefit by having someone, anyone from the city be on some of these boards. Uh, they don't have to be the city manager. On the other side, you learn not to put yourself in some sort of conflict of interest.

For example, the clinic— I was the planning director at, you know, in Alaska when I first went there and was on the clinic board, and we had our community support program. The clinic got $180,000 a year, and they had to apply just like the other nonprofits. Well, my office actually received those applications. So even though the director normally participated in the review of those, I restructured how that review went. I had nothing to do with the actual point system and reviews.

I made sure whoever was applying, we get everything they needed from all the 13 applicants, or 10, whatever it was that year. But I trusted my staff to do that, make those recommendations. Sure, I saw the report because I'm responsible for the content of the reports, but I never once swayed anything to do with it. In fact, our system there was not to make a recommendation to council because it was their program. So it was always up to City Council who they wanted to fund and how much they wanted to fund.

So on the clinic side, I was never on the committee that helped put the grant application together. I'm always very clear at the meetings that this is a function that I can't participate in. So, thank you. I'm not making those funding decisions at the city, nor am I making applications at the Oregon State.

Yeah, Bill, thanks for being here today. Imagine you're faced with a situation where the city council is leaning toward a decision that would address their immediate priorities, but your professional assessment shows that a different course of action would better serve the long-term interests of the community and its residents. How would you navigate that situation? What steps would you take to balance maintaining a positive relationship with the council while still advocating for what you believe is best for the city?

Well, that's a theoretical question, um, because I don't really believe I've ever been in a situation where I've been at odds that greatly with, um, the leadership in terms of being a planning or community development professional or economic development professional or a city manager. Um, I had the benefit to be on the and I should say, and be again careful, of what was a power purchase agreement for Unalaska that they had prepared with a private entity. And we were looking for better power options out there, and no secret with the geothermal project in Alaska. And I had my questions even as planning director, and I took those to the city manager and shared my concerns with that at the time. City Manager had her concerns, but her job was to represent the council.

I inherited that project, and really by the time there was a decision to be made on whether to continue a power purchase agreement or not, council had been— had their share. They were done. So I had the luxury of watching the council go through a few extension agreements, knowing from the beginning, with my experience, that Economic development that this wasn't going to work. But I wasn't in that position. I didn't overextend or exert myself or any kind of influence on the councilwoman to go around my city manager to try and say, look, you guys, this is bad.

They had to learn themselves. And at the same time, I'm learning about the community. And I'd never been a geothermal developer by any means either. But there are elements that are in every kind of economic development agreement. Were missing.

So it's a long answer, but to say originally I was completely suspect and opposed to that deal, and I got to actually watch the council change its own support, and I had the benefit at the end to support them in saying we shouldn't renew this, and that's indeed what they did. Um, I don't believe that there's any real body of council that's out there looking to do things that wouldn't be in the best interest of the council. That, so professionally, I have heightened skills and looking— I get paid to do this. You guys are mostly volunteers, right? But as a group, that would be very rare, and I don't think I would wind up working for a group like that.

I wouldn't want that kind of aggravation. Thank you. Thank you. Any follow-ups? Yeah, yeah.

Assuming you have investigated and evaluated the city's current status regarding the operating and capital budgets and the city council and general city operations, what would be your first 3 actions as a city manager? This is written down, right? I'm going to read that. I tried handing him the microphone 4 times last night, didn't want it. Now he's up here grilling me like this with 5-part questions.

So, give me the mic. Just sat in the right spot. City Council and general city operations. First 3 actions— well, I guess it depends on what we consider actions. Um, you know, a key difference here in your community is, uh, you're on your power.

I understand you just went through raising the rates, and I know nothing— nobody ever wants to pay more for services they already have. And, you know, should they pay more? How much should it be? I definitely want to understand, uh, your power situation better. Your reputation is having hydropower is something that I was planning to come here and bring a team just to see how this worked, and Not only that, an issue with the mayor, your airport agreement, how does that work?

Because of course, Dutchess, lose 40% of our scheduled flights out there for— I call it Dutch Harbor over— there are 13 reasons or more why flights don't work. So I think your transportation access issues to and from Yonk— how well that's working, talking cruise boats and the fact of how our general population comes and goes from here what their regular costs are. How—. I, my wife and I drove up towards that cove and I saw, uh, you must have landfill operations up there, and that's interesting. What do you do with all your refuse?

It's like, get out of here. That's, that's a growing industry. So your power, um, transportation, and your basically trash, how does that all work here? You have a private entity helping with your power. I don't I don't exactly claim to understand how all that works.

I want to know what that is and how is that working for all of you. I want to make sure that, you know, reviewing all of those kinds of agreements, where in there is there anything that needs improvement or better understanding?

Did I answer your question, sir? Good.

Yeah, just out of curiosity, how does the trash, um, work in, uh, Onalaska? Or how did—. Yeah, trying to deal with the junk cars has just been an issue. And, um, I'll share this. I don't care if he sees it.

Um, we had this issue every time we had a police— police chief, you know, kind of got pushed on for him or her to to fix. And one time they just went out and just spray painted a dot on all the cars they thought were junk, and people were coming out of their house the next day like, "It's my regular car, it's not junk." So, but, you know, there's quite a few folks. We have about 8,000 to 10,000 temporary workers, and a lot of them somehow wind up with cars. And the state of Alaska is a problem because it doesn't require you to be present to sign over the cars. And whereas other states they do, and you don't have to register in your own county, which we have the technology that should be worked on.

And that's an initiative I was pushing up there at state level because there were people that wanted to avoid the additional, um, $100 that you're supposed to go to helping pay to get the junk car off the island. And when you have a rental car company that's saying they're refer— they're represent— they're registering them at Sandpoint and they're not paying our fees. So junk cars have been an issue. We started an initiative working with the private sector and the Mlaska Corporation to coordinate removal of junk cars with barges that were coming out to do anything else, to try and keep our costs low. But they all go to either Seattle or—.

And your refuge? Refuge, refuge, we have cells We have about 15 years left on the garbage. We were looking at whether or not we wanted to basically have incinerator, that thing running 24/7. That didn't make sense because we didn't have—. We—.

Everything new you add requires staff and money, and so there's a balance. We just seem to have that kind of Okay, given our limited resources, how would you manage departmental spending and reduce bond debt principal while minimizing the financial impact on citizens? I think I misunderstood the question. If we had unlimited resources— given your limited— I thought you said unlimited. Why are you worried about it if you have Resources.

Yeah, I wish. Um, even if you have unlimited resources, you don't just go out and spend frivolously. You know, you set goals and you want to maintain those goals. Um, I can tell you, as far as reducing bond debt principal, minimizing the financial impact on citizens, whatever we've already committed to, we certainly want to pay or get ahead of paying to save ourselves that interest if we can pay it off earlier. We can and should.

We've done that before in Alaska. When it comes to spending, I will tell you, you can spend your— you can save yourself into a corner. It's one thing that I did set about to try and fix in Onalaska because we were always on a 3% cap. And just as I was leaving, we had $40 million in roofing needs because no one was watching. We have 50-some roofs out there, and it's expensive to do roofs.

Just to paint the high school is $500,000 every couple years. No one will come and do it. So what are you going to do? So you have to stay on top of these things. So you can't set arbitrary goals of, oh, we want just 4%.

What does that mean? And what happened was everyone was cutting out maintenance. No one was watching. And we had such high turnover, whoever had the list of all the city resources Well, that was Gary's list. That was Joe's list.

That was Lisa's list. Well, whose list is it? Where is it? And why isn't it typed on a computer by now? So you really have to take stock, come into a place knowing exactly everything you have to take care of.

Every time I walked around, my, my perspective was so different from planning director, city manager. One day I was walking across the pedestrian bridge between our Breck Center Library, and I realized I've done the CMMP or CIP process for 6 years, and I've never seen anything about this bridge on any list.

So in the course of, you know, coming and going people, new employees, retirements, in the course of, you know, elected officials coming and going, sometimes information gets lost. Someone needs to really make sure that all that information information is there, because that's the number one thing to be worried about versus what do we want to keep spending at, 3%, 4%. You don't know everything you need to be taken care of. How can you make a number happen? Then you know, well, we have a 10-year— we had a 5-year capital plan, but everyone always put everything in year 5 because they never— you know, it takes so long to get the quotes, it takes so long to figure out what we're going to do.

It was a holding spot. That wasn't anybody's plan. So we moved up to 10 years, but really your capital assets need to be looked at in 20 years. That's really where that's going. And if you don't have everything the city owns on that list, you know it needs something in 10 years, in 20 years, then we're dropping the ball.

You have to back that out. What can you do in-house that you're already paying for and you have the technique? You know, people can fix headers on the generators at the powerhouse. Great, they have the technical skills. Is that in their job description, or do they just like to do it?

Because when that person leaves, you can't expect the next person to do it. So you have to build that capacity in-house. That's something that I find is worth doing, hiring the skills for people and paying your folks in-house to do the maintenance of letting things go and then having to pay top dollar in 8 years because no one paid any attention to it. So that's what I would make sure we have a list of everything, make sure we know when things have been maintained, when the life of the ambulance or, you know, whatever the piece of equipment is, is due to expire. Do we have the cash on hand to replace that, or do we have a plan for it?

And if we don't, we need one. Thank you. Let me follow up.

Abby. A record number of cruise ships are scheduled for the upcoming season, and residents are raising concerns about overcrowding and infrastructure strain. How would you address both the economic opportunity and the community concerns?

Well, you're not alone from anybody that has any sort of economic driver. There's factories, if you're in transportation and distribution centers, you know, people that live around that don't like the lighting, security fence, they don't like the onslaught of the people showing up for the shift work, but they can't get out of their drive at the same time they're trying to get their kids to school. You know, folks, there's always a reason that what supports your community has other factors that people forget that they are supporting our community and we have to all get along together. I don't know a lot about the shipping industry. I shared with someone that my wife and I are on a 300-foot wooden boat, and we wound up going to St. Martin.

We were dodging in between those Princess Cruises. I never knew how big those things were. I've never even been on one, but I felt like I was in a little tub. So when I hear that there's a lot of impact coming here, you know, I was looking online, what does that look like? It sounded terrible.

And I was expecting to go on YouTube and find just throngs of people shoulder to shoulder running for the deals at the T-Shirt Shack. I didn't see any of that. Um, it sounds like those cruise ships come on a schedule, morning and afternoon. It sounds like you are planning, you know, you have infrastructure that accepts and welcomes these folks. You can drive around when it's not tourist season and see everyone getting ready for it.

It's a huge driver. But it's not just the cruise ships. This is your economy. There are ancillary jobs that support this economy. I never knew there existed underwater welding.

How do you do that? I learned all about it on Dutch Harbor because it's too expensive to take the fishing boats out of the water to fix them. And that's a huge industry out there. I never would have known that exists. They recruit Florida to get those folks to come up and be qualified.

So you have the same type of thing here. I think some of it is to continually remind folks at regular intervals what your community is about. What are the ancillary support network that shares in the burden or the benefit of having this type of economy? And it also is very important. This is one of those industries that could move without any real burden on the industry itself.

I mean, they're boats. They can go up to another port. They like your community for some reason. They've been coming here for a long time, and it is the envy of a lot of other places. I can share that with you very easily.

So, I think people have a tendency not to like how things impact their daily lives, but as council people, we recognize, as you know, City Manager and our staff here, that that's where a lot of the resources are coming from to support this community. And how you have those dialogues— you can't ignore it, you can't confront people, you can't say that their concerns don't matter. But you have to still talk it through. I had a conversation with one particular council person here the other night, helped me understand, because I was hearing a lot of one side of the equation, and I was glad to hear there was another side up there. You know, it's just, it's really through dialogue and understanding when those concerns are valid, and do they really need to come into a decision that you need to make.

You could be making a very large capital decision, say, in a new old work. That's when all those folks should be coming out and having that dialogue and understanding why you're discussing and making a decision on improving, say, amenities that support that industry. That's the time to really have those discussions. You know, otherwise it's part of your day-to-day.

I hate to say it, but a lot of people like to complain about this. Does that answer your question?

Just a follow-up.

In that case, what is your understanding of when too much becomes a detriment to the community as well as the visitor's experience?

Well, I think in our day and age, I'm not going to pretend to be a tourism expert. I'm not. I got saddled actually with tourism responsibility in New Mexico, and I thought, wow, this will be interesting. You know, I mean, these Chaco Pines, they've been here for a long time. People either want to come see them or they don't.

That's destination specific. But I think you can see people's reviews. On Travelocity and elsewhere, if they start having bad experiences, if the wait lines are too long, the industry, the shipping industry is just taking your money and not following through on what they're promising in terms of, you know, your onshore activities. People start letting everyone know, don't go there. So that has an autocorrect feature to some degree, but it's not helping you in terms of how you guess what you need to provide for them.

So I think your function in terms of talking with those folks, talking with schedulers— I know we had that issue, we only had 22 scheduled every year, you know, making sure that what they're promising is what we can deliver. Don't promise what we can't deliver. Make sure that numbers that we're getting in terms of what we anticipate, they line up every year. I mean, you guys have experienced hands of that. I'm sure that's already happening.

So what's the next level?

Have we had a plan that we're going to sit here and talk about how do we want to grow and curate more of this? I know that there's groups that all talk, share with each other, other— how are they handling their volumes and their issues? Because you're not going to be unique in that way, right? Those other —what they call— have problems and what worked there or didn't work. I hate to be vague, but I'm not a political planner, but it's like anything else.

If you bring a factory in and you didn't think about having a red light, stoplight at that intersection, you're going to have problems with people on the regular day-to-day traffic, factoring that into your road volume. So there needs to be some sort of instruction set that comes from plan. All right, again, I'm not going to try and be a tourism planner. Please, it's something that I would recommend.

Thank you. I think it's me. I think it's you. It is Judy. Describe your approach to managing employee compensation, benefits, and long-term obligations while remaining fiscally responsible to the taxpayers.

—My name is Jeff. Pay employees a fair wage. I think I talked about that a little bit. We did an employee wage compensation study, and in Alaska there hadn't been one in 12 years. There have been promises to do those.

Typically it's the unrepresented employees that pay the price for that, those union professionals.

But I think there's also opportunities where some of the One union in particular, those at the table always made sure they represented themselves very well and they didn't really care about— sorry, that showed up in the salary survey and they didn't like it, but they paid a price for that because they didn't get a raise that year. The cops that were getting 16% less than market— it's not a straight percentage across the board. There has to be a reset. And that doesn't mean that people who are working hard for you don't deserve something. It's not their fault that this happened, this inequity.

And the way I sold it to one of the unions was who, you know, basically they were just 10, 15 cents off from the 85th percentile mark, is I gave them a lump sum bonus with the approval of council. And we sold it because it doesn't go into legacy costs. You know, it's just something that represented their hard work that year. But you didn't get 5% just for being there, right? It has to not just— this is like what I was telling you earlier about percentages across the board.

You can get yourself in a box, you know, running government that way. For some people, there is a value to a job that peaks out at some point. That's why they have the step system, for example. So Council, what I found, you know, negotiating 5 of these with my team, and trust me, I had a good team, wasn't me doing it all, uh, is to give council as much information as possible. I gave them the options that we worked with our consultant.

Where do they want to be? Do we want to be in, you know, what way out, 800 miles from Anchorage? We can't get line then. They're even in the wrong union, so that's a problem. They didn't have lines, they're all underground, so you had to kind of figure that kind of issue out what special market you need.

But, um, it comes down to educating council and getting their blessing on what they want from the direction of our team. Did we continue to want to have a language program, or did we want to privatize it, which is kind of where it was going? And we elected to keep doing that. Well, that's at a cost. However, it was still significantly cheaper than using private sector.

And that's not a decision I made alone. That's a decision with feedback from council and with the numbers in front of them and contracts which they've been approving that show what the trends were. So I think we have to be realistic about services that we want to provide versus services we need to provide and know that everything we say we'll do, every new program, every sometimes new regulation comes with— maybe you don't need a part-time employee, but 5 or 10 of those decisions adds up to some increment of the new employee. I find that you're double the size of Unalaska, you have the same number of employees. I think some of it is because you, um, you have the borough who does some of the functions that Alaska did, like, you know, plenty.

Alaska money. But from 4,000 people to 8,000, and then we would have another— no one really told me, 8 to 10 to 12, it depends on what they bring in every season. We had 7 police positions. You all have 25 and 3 paid firefighters. So how did you have 180 you know, full-time equivalents, and we have 100 full-time equivalents.

And where's that difference? Well, the difference is how you do your work, what are the, you know, support you have from other forms of government. But you're double the size and you have completely different economy. So there's lessons there to be learned, but you're looking for where you have employees that you don't need them. I'll tell you, that's not going to be the case.

You have employees that you need. And you need it for a reason because these are services we provide. You can't just say, well, you had 4,000 and we have 8. They start doing that out there, and that's the wrong direction to go, as I'm saying here. Can't say, well, we're losing people, so cut 2 jobs.

You still have the requirements to do that work.

Sometimes folks don't understand that.

Thank you. Quick follow-up on that, Your Honor. Yes, you may. Uh, you talking about in that question, the negotiations with the unions and, and that type of thing. What would your approach be if, uh, if certain, uh, salary things are awarded to the union through those negotiations?

Would your approach be to apply the same percentage to non-union folks, or how would you go about negotiating increases for the non-represented higher-up staff. So what we did was what the rate was for every job wasn't by a union, it was by every job. What does an Executive Secretary II make in several other places in Alaska? And, you know, that would include down the market where we were finding practicaries from anywhere from Northern California up, and we identified cities, and then we pulled that data. So, and what those all paid, and then we would figure out what the 85th percentile was in there.

So for lineman, the same thing, every job had a— that's what I'm saying, it was a unique way to bargain. And they— we tried to have conversation with some of the unions ahead of time, And they just thought it was some sort of trickery to not, you know, let's wait until we officially start. And when we officially started, they were upset because there's so much data. They had no idea. Well, again, I tried several times and several of my team tried to open up those dialogues early.

So it took 9 months to negotiate PSEA contract. I didn't push anybody to do anything they didn't want to do. But they all have to wait. Um, you know, jobs pay a certain amount. If you can make money doing Job A and you can make 30% more somewhere else and you feel like it's time to move, would you stay somewhere making 30% less?

Well, the same thing goes for if you're 30% overweight, you know, you can't keep just raising it just because, well, it's time for 5% again. So it has to be some sort of educated information, data-based channel. Otherwise, there's really nothing to bargaining, just, well, you want 3%, you want 5%. And that's what a lot had been happening without anything else going into it. So you won't need to do that every year, but when you do a market reset Tells all the employees what they're valued.

And certainly there were more people who were undervalued than there were people who were at market or overvalued. I will say that it was not a difficult sale. The difficult sell was, if I may, I didn't enjoy being at the table with my team and all of our salaries up there. It's how would we objectively make any sort of— if I ask you, what do you want to make? You know, you're not going to say, well, I want to make 10% less than my you know, offer me.

That was difficult. And so we kept all that close to our vest. And that's one thing that causes some distrust. But I say, when your own team is basically a non-representative bargaining unit, that's a very tough spot to be in. And I wouldn't change that.

I would talk, but that's how it had to play. Thank you. Follow-up.

What is your experience with enterprise fund and what strategy would you use to address rising cost for infrastructure maintenance such as utilities, streets, and public facilities when capital needs outpace available funding? If I knew all those answers, I'd be somewhere else. Everybody's dealing with that. But as far as enterprise funds, that's— I look at them as their own, their own business. And those funds and the utilities that people— utility rates that people pay go into those funds to pay for the cost, to pay for what the ancillary support costs are to provide those, and to put away funds for, you know, the improvements and whatever you're going to need to pay for in the future.

You have far more complicated budget system than I say a lot of places have, including in Alaska. Alaska was cash flow rich. Really, you just didn't have to share funds with the borough, for example. It got all the fish taxes. So there wasn't a lot of competition with the chief, maybe, between use some funds from the Port Enterprise Fund or the Electric Enterprise Fund to supplement something over here.

We didn't have that issue because we did have plenty of funds coming into the general fund. However, as simple as that was, it still was complicated when it came to budgeting time. Why are these all separate? Why can't— we're the council—. Why can't we do what we want to do with these funds?

And that is always the case in terms of When you're trying to do a balanced budget, how do you do it? You all have a lot of— right, sponsor. So I took a specific hard look at how that was structured and wanted to make sure that I could answer this question for you. You have to stay ahead of your rate studies. One of the things that we did in Unalaska this time was normally they do a rate study every 3 to 5 years.

And suddenly you find out that you're behind the curve. We were behind the curve on electric and solid waste. And we discovered that that is because so many things can change in that 5 years, 3 to 5 years. And so my team came to me with this opportunity, and I was a little skeptical at first, but I heard them out. And I think it's not the only company, but this one that we use It was called Waterworth, and you plugged in all your information.

It wasn't something like a Playboards. I mean, you gave it your budget, that's 6, 7, whatever budgets you had put in there, and it started tracking right away where you need to be in terms of rates. And it gave yearly what you, what you were costing out, what you should have been charging. And it's not that you're going to charge, you know, something all the time different, but isn't it nice? It's like having a gauge on your car to tell you what you're doing speed limit-wise or not.

And so we bought that for all of those enterprise funds and have all that information out there so that we can monitor and know better going forward if there is a trend that's happening differently, and not wait 3 years and surprise the ratepayers when you huge increase. So I think the more information and the more dials you can put on knowing where you're at, sooner the better. Certainly helps keep all of you from the hot seat, like, oh gosh, you know, whose fault is it? Well, it's how you always did it. But there are so many ways now, and I keep pointing to technology, and I don't like tech for just tech, but there is serious technology out there that helps you do what you need to do to make the city better now so you're not regretting it later.

And that's what I would help position us for. Thank you.

Riley, controversial decision made by the city leads to strong public backlash at the council meeting and online. How would you respond?

How would I respond? Well, it's one of the reasons I never want to be an elected official. You know, that's something that you all have taken on, and by God, or out of a commitment to being civically involved. I'm a professional. I represent you in the city, and I represent those interests.

The council is going to take all of the information into consideration, and whether they agree or disagree, the buck stops with council. And in my opinion, as long as you have heard every— as long as you have been provided everything that you feel you need to make a decision, I feel it's my job to make sure you're not missing anything, that I don't know of something that you're not considering. There's no information missing. I'm not trying to keep people from being— you're doing your job. People can be angry about things, and today it's easier to express yourself with a limited platform more than ever.

Um, but there's nothing more that I can say that I can add to that except making sure that your decision is equally presented. You do a great job on that. You guys provide your videos online, your minutes are ready right away. They can— they know why you did what you did. Don't relitigate it.

Decision must be decision. What I won't do is help stir that bucket, or what do you call it, handle the beehive with a stick. That doesn't help anybody. I'll support you on the decisions that you make because you're the ones that make the decision, are in the hot seat. You should be able to count on me to be someone who supports you.

Thank you. Let me follow up. Denalee. Okay, so what do you see as the most pressing challenge for Kitchigan in the next 12 to 18 months, and what specific steps would you take in your first 6 months to begin addressing it?

Well, this position comes with being, you know, the head of utilities as well. And it's interesting that it's called out like that because, of course, even with the director of utilities in Onalaska, I'm head of everything there, right? So I want to understand that better, why that's called out. Like that, why you've chosen that sort of joint title. And I can say that I am no electrician or lineman, but I learned quite a bit.

And when I was in at the power station there, I was interested in why some of that technology looked like it needs to be updated. You have SCADA systems.

But I'll give this example.

10 Departments in Alaska coming in. I had the benefit of having worked there for over 5 years, so I was aware of those issues. It's different here. I'd be having to come in and do some quick assessments on what really needs my attention, and I knew that the electric utilities division needed my attention. With all those brownouts that we were having.

Um, we took a hard look with our consultant, with our local business that helped provide electric consulting services to the city, and then our new team, my new director, find out what was going on. You know, and it's kind of a funny hairpin design there. But the real issue that there were some things happening there was that there was some leadership problems earlier on, and someone thought because we were going over to geothermal that we didn't need to order any of the existing replacement cabinetry, support equipment, lines, because we'll be going to a different system. And they just quit ordering. Ordering things that needed to be placed, and there wasn't anything.

Suddenly we're not only just on a year backlog, we're on a 2-year backlog. You know, we're looking for things on eBay and everywhere else, reconditioning some of these, um, equipment pieces because we didn't do our job. And they were holding one piece of equipment, and the bad thing happened, because if they use this last one, we had nothing left. And so it kept overloading, and it was costing us a lot. So we had to fix that.

We had to come in again, do an entire assessment of what needed repaired, what needed fixed. And let's do this out 5 years— we need to get it done in 2. And we dropped from 24 unscheduled power outages to 1 the next year. It wasn't that big of a problem for So much flexibility. So it comes down to knowing what you need to know.

And I think the question, if I didn't lose it, I would want to make sure I knew what I needed to know.

Meanwhile, there were 9 other departments. People ask, why am I focusing so much on utilities? Well, something can happen in water, but It's not going to be as noticeable as when all the lights go out. So the public will notice right away. So you kind of make sure you're insulating your services to make sure what they know.

They have to leave the library for 2 hours to clean the carpet before they spill. It's not going to be as big a deal as if you don't have any power, right? So my job is to assess where it needs my attention the most, make sure that I have a plan for that first, and then go down the line. And how I would function. Did I answer your question?

Yes, thank you.

When faced with resolving an issue about which you have limited knowledge, ranging from the specific needs of utility to competing schools of thought on a community issue, how do you seek and assess relevant information, and how do you then weigh and apply whatever information that you have gathered?

Well, there's a lot that I don't know. Again, that sits here and tells you otherwise. Obviously not. I mean, none of us can know everything, but you have to— again, that's why I said deploy a trust model. And I like getting around and meeting people.

Um, some people don't want to work with you just because they're that way. You have to think through who's not on your side or not on your side, but who wants to do good work, who wants to be a part of the team, who isn't burned out. No matter what you're talking about, this is every facet of this will work. That's true. We don't have the benefit of putting the blame off on some other senator from Illinois Ohio like they do at the federal level.

That's what you see happening all the time. Real government happens at the local level. That's what I always tell people— get involved locally if you're really concerned. Um, sitting around watching the tube and complaining about what's happening nationally doesn't help anybody in your own community. So, um, I'm always asking people what to do.

What's the problem? We had a bus and transportation issue You know, we had no transportation at all. I heard you guys had buses. I had no idea there were giant RTA buses driving around. I didn't know that that was a scale, even though I knew as a number how many ship crews you have.

I didn't think that— I didn't translate that to the size of buses. I was thinking they were smaller, 13, 14-passenger buses. We get 6,000 to 10,000 people that don't have cars on Bar Island and on Alaska. There's no transportation whatsoever. They all walk around in black and there's no lights on in the dark and the rain, and I'm surprised more accidents have happened.

So we ran a system to see how could we do it. Could we do an hour system, half hour system? How much would it cost? And it came down to council, do they want to do it? The answer was no, we weren't ready.

And no, I, I was not a transportation planner. By any means, but I deployed knowledge that I had from other people, my relations. What would you do? How would you plan a route? So if, as long as you have some time to plan it out, well, you have some time to do a good job.

You don't always have that. You know, sometimes you have to make a decision. We had a boat that had gone out with two people that everyone Well, new on the island and the Coast Guard said they wouldn't go, it was too bad. And I, I thought the safety people asking me, uh, we can do it, we can get out there and do it. I didn't know enough, but I knew darn well I was risking my people's lives.

Well, if the Coast Guard won't go do it, I said no. That was the worst decision I— I shouldn't say worse, it was a good decision, but it's the worst I've ever felt. I thought, well, what if they don't make it? I'm the person that made that decision. They're not going to risk their lives to go out and save two people that probably should have known better.

So there are some real fulcrums there where the person in charge has to make that decision. You can't just put it off or ignore it. So that's how I feel. Thank you. Thank you.

What questions do you have for the council?

What questions do I have for the council? I don't think I have any at this time. I think when you're in this long, just working for municipal government, you have a lot of basic questions. I would say, look out, I understand how this works. I wish you all well in your decision making.

I've given you the information that you need to consider me fairly, and I would like Alaska— I like the view of it. You guys really should turn this around, you know. Yeah, yeah, then nothing would get done. First thing I do, I'll let you guys have the view. How's that?

So, but I do appreciate y'all. Thank you. All right.

Another break, another short break. We'll be back, be back ready to go by—. Good afternoon, Glenn. Hey, sir. So to start off with, uh, you could give us a brief introduction We have a series of questions for you today that will— and we'll leave some time at the end for questions you may have for us.

That in mind, please briefly introduce yourself, sharing your background, career path, and any key experiences or values you'd like the Council to understand as we consider you for this role. You know, I, I first want to humbly say thank you. I'm humbled to be here. It is a unique environment, and I believe my skill sets give me the opportunity to be here. But Ketchikan is doing so amazing.

It's not just a beautiful city, it's beautiful, wonderful people. I've met them throughout the last couple of days, and it's, it's just enjoyable to have what my assessment was on paper as I did the research be the reality when I got here. And that's, that's nice. So who am I? Why am I here and what's my background that gives me the ability to be here?

I will tell you that I'm a husband, I'm a father. My wife and I have been married for over 30 years now. My 2 kids are in law enforcement, so I think we've done a pretty good job of raising them. I'm a leader first. That's really my strength.

I've had every imaginable scenario that you can have thrown at you. As a 17-year-old person enlisting into the Army and suddenly finding myself the platoon guide in charge of 30 people in basic training at 17 years of age is a unique experience to have. I spent 26 and a half years in the military. I had opportunities that I would have never dreamed I would have because You know, when you swim with the current, you can go to different ports and docks and find things that other people can't because they're resisting all the flow and they're fighting the systems. I had an opportunity to, to really grow and develop and find myself in the military.

In 1994, I saw through an alderman and the city administrator of the city of Santa Fe I'm sorry, city of Savannah, Georgia. They were hit by a hurricane that downgraded to a tropical depression and just sat on top of the city for about 30 hours. And I watched the community and the citizens in the city itself bring itself back to life. And hearing the alderman explain how that process was inspired me to eventually become a city manager. I changed my career path in the Army to do that.

I did civil affairs, psychological operations. So I learned how to build and create a government after military operations. And psychological operations is, is less nefarious as it sounds because you can actually use it to communicate with a population to be able to teach them to be part of the government that's being set up. And I had practical uses of those in multiple situations. Later on, I got into construction because the, the things that you see in a community is required everywhere.

And so the construction side of the house, I ended up being a facilities, uh, one of a 5-member facility team that set the conditions for the invasion in Iraq. And I don't think anybody understands what that means. There was 5 of us that had to set the basing for 2 divisions, 2 corps, and all the air assets that were there. I was spending over $280 million in the first 6 months I was there. We, we built, and I say we because you had a primary and alternate for everything.

And so I was an alternate for others, but my responsibility was for 3 cities. 2 Airfields, building them from scratch, basing 20,000, uh, soldiers from, you know, different parts— normally 3ID and 101st Airborne. But that was significant emotional events. I learned utilities, I learned power, I learned how you do all of those things at an amazing level. And then carried on in 2005, the whole year I was the S3 in the the XO for a 1,200-soldier engineer battalion doing construction throughout Baghdad, acting in both as public works and doing combat construction.

We were building things in combat. We were engaged by the enemy, but because of the leadership things that we put in place at a time 4 to 6 people per 100 were being killed, we didn't lose anybody in that one whole year. That's just the leadership things that we do. We in the Army. And one of the things that you guys are looking at is you're very much citizen-centric, and that really resonates.

It's, it's people first. But in the Army, we did mission first, people all. And so when you start looking at that background and then add it into the things that you're asking for here, I would tell you I have a great background. I was a facilities branch chief for US Forces Japan. I supported over a billion dollars in host nation funded construction every year, managing that construction and making sure it happens.

I was there, my family was there in 2011 when the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear incident hit, and we went 24/7 operations. And we were supporting the Japanese in all of the things for recovery. And you wouldn't believe how good socialism works for recovery operations. But the skills I learned from communicating at an international level, providing support at an international level, of being able to solve problems in a very complex environment such as a nuclear incident, it translates so many places. Let's fast forward then.

I was a chief of staff as a civilian. White Sands Missile Range. And I think it's important you understand that that's— it's like being a city manager, but the difference is you're responsible for the success of the businesses there. You are directly responsible for their successes and failures because you're the backbone of all the tests that's going on. It's a major test facility and installation supporting all the Department of Defense.

We're required to be 45% reimbursable. Which means we had to look at our operations every single day and make sure we were delivered. We had to make sure that we were the best we could be because there was other test ranges that other people would want to go to if we weren't. And we stayed viable. We looked at ourselves very critically almost every year.

We reorganized the staff 3 times in my 4 and a half years. Very complex job. 100 Miles by 40 miles. That's the, the fulfillment that we can. So as I did that, both sons ended up in Texas.

My wife said, hey, you need to move to Texas. And that's when I got the municipal start. I became the, uh, city manager of San Fe, Texas. Um, the council looked at me when they, they hired me and they said, we want you to invoke change, make change happen. We haven't been a city that we've been a name to city for 42 years, but we haven't done anything to be a city.

And I go, that means I won't last long. Nope, don't worry, we'll be right here behind you. At the end of the first year, I did great, got huge pay raises, pats on the back and everything. But guess what? Council switched over.

I had one council member leave because of severe medical issues, had another council member, she had a great job and had to move out of the city, and Regrettably, the mayor, um, was recalled because PTSD. I don't know if many of you understand that Santa Fe, Texas had a school shooting May 18th, 2018, 2 years before I got there. Um, he was a newly elected mayor and regrettably sometimes small towns don't know you don't let mayors go into a crime scene. They did. He had taught 8 of those kids in different sports events.

All 8 of those kids that were dead, he knit. And he suffered from PTSD, did some stupid things that got himself recalled. And it's too bad, he was a good person. He still is a good person, still stay in touch with. But I will tell you, that was this transition point of that part, because the new council came in and they didn't want change.

And I was the face of change, and I started so much change. I did good things that are really related to here that I'll explain later, because I'm sure you're going to have questions. And I will tell you that that is a unique skill set that I have developed, being able to go in and assess a city and help put it on a right track. And I was asked to do that several times. I did it in Percival, even though I was only there for 5 weeks.

I think you saw my note on that. Um, you look it up, I, I left because I'm not going to to do things that violate my ethics or my principle-based leadership. And right now, the vice mayor and the town manager are indicted, and they will probably serve jail time. The city of Martinsville— I was put in that position by the Berkeley Group. They reached out immediately after I resigned from Percival and put me into that role as an interim city manager.

They try to revert from a, a city to a town, and the city the state of Virginia, and they didn't communicate with anybody. So everybody fought them, and then new council was elected, and they fired so many people. I came in and I had to do 5 people's jobs, but they thankfully let me hire people. But that's where I really realized what my skill sets are, that I can take a divided council, find the things that make success within the areas and get them working together. So they, they stopped having a split vote when I was there.

It went from a split vote on a regular basis to a unanimous vote on a regular basis. Regrettably, when the new city manager was hired, um, it, it changed directions. I was hired as an interim. I had a non-compete clause, so I couldn't compete for the position. And so they, they kind of reverted backwards, but I got a job as Homewood, uh, interim city manager.

Love the job, but they, they offered a contract that I, I just couldn't live with. My wife couldn't live with. And so I started applying for permanent jobs elsewhere, and that's what brought me here. That's my background. I hope it was rich enough, but what I bring is such a broad background of skills and experiences and things, and I've lived in 38 cities, I've seen things that work and seen things that don't work, and I've seen things that didn't work in one city work in another just because they did it differently.

And that's what I'll also— so I hope it wasn't too long. I will be happy to stop now. Dick, uh, what draws you to this Ketchikan City Manager position at this point in your career, and why are you interested in this community specifically? I'm going to start with the community first. Community— I really enjoyed my time at White Sands Missile Range because it was a small installation, 6,000 total people.

Everybody got to know each other, everybody was friends, and even, even when they're fake friends, they were still better than you would find in a larger community where they weren't going to be fake friends, and they do things deliberately to harm you. The difference here has already been proven. As I say hi to people, they talk to me and I ask questions, and they're excited that I'm asking the questions that I'm asking. It's, it's a beautiful city with wonderful people, and I, I really am excited that the research I did was validated in the few, few days that I've actually been Now, what I will tell you is I was a fighter, firefighter in the Army, not meaning if you, you know, spraying water anywhere or anything. I— they put me on jobs that they didn't know what to do and expected me to solve them, and I did.

Matter of fact, I had one conversation that says, am I really that incompetent? I don't understand why you keep moving me from one job to the next job. I just don't understand. No, Glenn, you're solving the problems we can't figure out. So And as soon as you start getting them on the right track, we put you on something else and let somebody else take it.

I'm like, phew, I thought I was that incompetent. They kept taking me off of it. And because they were that complex, you guys have complex problems here, really complex problems. Your utility infrastructure is enormous.

The issues that you have with Retaining your culture as Ketchikan, we have 17,000 to 19,400 people come in every single day. I even asked your staff, I asked, how do you do things for the citizens that are specifically for the citizens when you have 19,000 guests every single day? How do you put on a Fourth of July party for your citizens when there's 19,000 guests? That's more people than you have. So you have real issues that I think I have unique capabilities of bearing down.

And look, I'm not going to look you guys in the eye and say I got a magic wand that's going to solve this, but what I am is I'm the kind of person to roll up my sleeves and dive into it, and I will start giving you all options of things that can be done. We'll have the discussions, we'll start looking strategically, figure out how we can better ourselves and put us on the right path. And, and I am a leader, and I, I am capable of finding things that your team, your staff already have ideas, and get them refined and give you new insights into your own organization that probably wouldn't be found by anybody else. But, and it's not that I'm amazing or brilliant on that, it's just the environment that I create that is positive empowering environment that makes people do better.

I noticed you have a lot of positions of interim, um, city manager. What's, uh, assisting with the, the move to a more permanent position here? What has kind of driven that? It started in Martinsville when I was able to get a city council that was divided to start thinking strategically together to realize that, yeah, there's some hard, fast issues that, you know, this side and this side aren't going to get past, but that doesn't mean we stop the city. There are a lot of things that are in the, the area that's able to be blended together and moved in a positive direction.

And I got excited about it again, and I no longer— look, I can go into any environment and start moving things in a positive direction. I did that for 26 years in the Army, moving every 1 to 2 years, being immediately responsible for everything about every organization that I assumed. The thing that's changed there was how they changed too, and they saw the difference and they started being a team during the time I was there. And then in Homewood, it was exciting. We had 12 elected officials I don't ever recommend that.

That's like being in a cat room with a room full of rocking chairs. But, um, they, they were pretty united and I was transitioning them from a strong mayor council to a, a council manager form of government. And it was exciting to do the things that you can do as a city manager in that environment. So I'm excited about the opportunity to come here and be part of the solution.

Okay. You, Mr. Adams, for being here. How would you approach negotiating with organizations the city works with, such as labor unions, cruise line agencies, and intergovernmental partners, in a way that benefits the city while maintaining strong communication and positive relationships?

So first off is setting a, a format of communication, getting routine meetings with them and having that be the baseline of things. So you're not just talking to people when you need something, you're talking with people and developing a relationship that you can communicate things on a regular basis. I did that at White Sands Missile Range. Uh, we had 2 states, 6 counties, and 14 cities that we had to keep abreast so that we can make sure that all of the mission requirements were acceptable, meaning what they were doing, we could provide input. So what we're talking about here is the ability to talk to these different agencies and be able to share information within a reason.

You don't show your whole hand, but you have the conversations that develop the relationship so you can request things and they can request discuss things in a format that's less formal and being able to have negotiations behind the scenes where I could keep the council informed to make sure they understand the kinds of things that are being asked. As far as labor unions, I've been really good at getting them involved early. I get them into the budget cycle. Um, I have in every single labor union that I've dealt with from Mike Sands, Missile Ready John. I will tell you that things have been a benefit.

Santa Fe was probably the best. Their, their Police Officer Association had zero trust in management. They've been taking advantage of them multiple times, and I started doing a monthly meeting with them, and then it moved to quarterly. And when they put in things that I was able to change immediately, I did. And then other things, I'd bring it to the council with recommendations recommendations and having discussions, I would have those leaders of that police officer association actually brief the council and get approval for some things.

And the best thing was when they, they came up with having a corporal so we didn't have to bring a sergeant on duty. This person was in a leadership role. It saved a whole bunch of overtime and allowed us to to buy 2 more vehicles so that we had capacity for the sergeants to have a take-home vehicle. So that's a bigger reward in an environment where it was very competitive to keep officers. So it's a very unique thing when you can communicate on a regular basis.

So you're not just communicating when you need something, you're communicating on a, in a format that allows people people to have the relationship that solve big problems in stride instead of making it a, a big fight each time you do it.

Thank you. Any follow-ups?

Debbie, describe the kind of working relationship you seek with the mayor and city council. What are your expectations, communication style, and guiding principles? Well, first off, I'm, I'm principle-based. You know, I, I, I don't overreact, I don't underreact. It's, it's appropriately reacting to the incidents that occur.

But the truth of the matter is I need to have a relationship with everyone, and I need to meet wherever you are comfortable and ever regularity that I can do that. If some people it's once a month, some it's every other week, some of them have it in line with the timing of the council meetings, all of those things are really pretty much up to the council. But I want to have those relationships because relationships are like a bank. Sometimes you have to draw from the reserve you have in the bank and just say, hey, just trust that I'm trying to do the right thing here, and let's have this discussion and continue this discussion. Um, and that goes both ways and things, because really you're holding me accountable for everything that the city does.

And that's the interface point. You need to feel comfortable that you could ask me a question and I'm going to get you the answer in a timely manner. Because, you know, small towns, small communities, you probably know most of the directors and probably run into them in stride, have kids going to the same schools and stuff like that. So you probably have conversations with them. The critical point is, is I need them to also provide information.

Information to me. And so I'm being held accountable for a conversation that I wasn't involved with. I need to understand. So really having all the communications come through me to them in the formal parts for orientation, that's pretty important. But relationship-wise, um, it needs to be we're part of a team.

And as you guys go around, you'll see that I'm one person. But you all see things and understand things, and you have background in history, and you should feel comfortable coming to me and having conversations about anything you have. And it doesn't necessarily mean I have to action that item right away. I, I tend to store things back. I take notes on them, and as I see things fitting together, I bring them back up and start having solutions created.

But what I'm really looking at is, is the council is the governing body. I'm the one you hire to run the things that need to happen on a daily basis. And so you're looking at the big picture. I'm supporting your, your methods of review and analysis with all the directors providing that input. But that's the relationship needs to be happening.

You, you need to be able to stand up and see that you're in charge of everything here, and I need to be down in the the weeds, solving the problems in a way that gets you the solutions you want. You create the vision, and I help you create that vision, but then that's when we get the entire staff going in the same direction. Create it, make it come true. Hey, Paul.

Judy, can you share an example of how you improved an organizational Wait a minute. Is that the right one? Yep. I'm going to start over. Can you share an example of how you improved an organization's financial performance through cost control or revenue generation?

Well, I think the first one would be Santa Fe, Texas. Pandemic hit and everybody was shuttering their, their doors, and I was just actively communicating with everybody. I started off just going around to different businesses and saying, this is what I know. In less than a week, I, I decided to have a daily update on Facebook. And a city of 15,000 people had 46,000 followers.

Um, so it was a pretty impressive thing that, you know, I, I would sit there and they would ask me questions. And over time, as we further into the pandemic, we all had similar understanding. People would use that to ask very difficult questions about city functions, and it became an educational background, an opportunity for them to communicate with me. So I, I would tell you that during that time frame, that relationship I started building with businesses by going to them and talking to them allowed me to start coordinating with them not just in the Chamber of Commerce, but having the relationship that they can come up to me and talk to me. And I'd start asking some of the toughest questions, which is, what is the city doing that's hindering you versus what we could do to help you?

And everybody understands, as you start looking at it, it's much easier to grow current business than it is to start a business. And so, you know, I had the owner of Galco come up to me and goes, if I had to start Galco today instead of 45 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to start it because you guys are so rigid in your processes and procedures. And the council's rigid in the way they have things written in the ordinances that we can't flex. The government that existed when I started, flexed with, worked with. I go, well, give me examples.

He goes, you have to have a non-permeable, uh, parking lot. Why can't I just have gravel down while I'm trying to get things going? Give me a timeline in 12 months, 18 months to get that, that, that done so we can do those things. So I took that back to the council and they were willing to change the ordinance saying, hey, look, the building inspector can work within this parameter to allow businesses to grow. So we had a coffee place go in that allowed drive-through coffee, and they took off.

There was a line bigger than Starbucks, and Starbucks was just 2 miles outside the city, and we had that line there in the city. And so we grew revenue during this process because I made simple changes. I allowed the things to happen. I allowed businesses to communicate, and it was so good, and And it was so well received that the Chamber of Commerce elected the city as the best small business that first year because of how much we helped. But we grew revenue at the same time that the pandemic was taking away everybody else's revenue.

So that's the interaction that I'm talking about for doing that. But there's more than that. It's, it's being able to look introspectively at yourself. And go, what are we doing right and what are we doing wrong? And Homewood, it was just a calamity of mistakes that had occurred.

And if anybody does any research, when they pulled me into Homewood, they had just had a finance director embezzle almost a million dollars out of the city. And he did it through a deliberate process of, of trying to teach the finance clerks and everybody else wrong practices. Creating what you call entropy, absolute chaos out of the books. And believe it or not, the people who were supposed to do the audits would allow him to write his own audit, and they got paid $200,000 and just said, this is our audit. And why that was able to happen, I don't know.

But as we uncover this, as the FBI came in and looked at it and uncovered all this stuff, that's what I inherited is And so they hired a new finance director. I didn't have authority over— they contracted before I got there, so I didn't hire the person, so I couldn't fire the person. He was doing all sorts of crazy things. He wanted to put drop boxes in 3 parts of the city, and it would cost us to rent over $100,000 a year. We didn't pull up— pull that much cash in a year.

They were paying by check and they were paying by credit card. So doing the simple audits and looking the things that are going on and being able to set the conditions that we don't do things that just cost money because they cost money, and having the courage to ask the stupid question, why are we doing this? I do that all the time. And then I get my department heads doing that, and suddenly we're getting more and more efficient. The mayor of Homewood, uh, said this is the most efficient and best culture that he's seen in 18 years that he's been there.

Follow-ups: How do you evaluate the staffing levels to ensure departments are adequately resourced without overextending the city's budget?

That, that's so difficult to try to explain in a nutshell, because everybody's going to expect an immediate answer. The thing that I could tell you is somebody who comes into an organization on a regular basis— and I've done it with 3 interim jobs— when you first get here, the last thing you're looking for is how do you rearrange the personnel structure? Because if you want to really make your, your staff angry with you, do that in your first 3 months. But you need to be smart and look at things. And, you know, one of the things that I do is the simple thing with public works, for example.

Anywhere you do a construction, you have mobility and demobilizing for the day's events, getting all the equipment ready, take it out to the site, do work, and then you got to close down at the end of the day. And those, those two things cost 2 hours a day. So I normally tell everybody to go 10-hour days for those organizations and just work 4-day work weeks. Yes, they could have altered them, but a lot of the times I get the council to support Monday through Thursday or Thursday through Friday— I mean, Tuesday through Friday. Sometimes we've had them split, you know, this group of them will go Monday through Thursday, this will go Tuesday through Friday.

But it builds morale for one thing, because everybody gets a 3-day weekend in this organization. But another thing is, is you now only have 8 hours of mobilization that you lose, and you get those extra hours of work, and that's more efficiency. And those are the simple things that you look at. You look at the things that are going on, and you create an environment where they're allowed to think outside the box. And I listen to them as they say, hey, look, I'd like to to do this.

And I, I endorse what I call failing forward. If you're trying something and doing something for the right intent and you fail, I'll dust you off, talk about it, and send you back out on the road. Because guess what? You're trying. Most people do try.

Most people have the right intent. There are always people who will take advantage of things, but my leadership style and the way that I'll mentor trading to develop the directors, you tend to create an environment where everybody wants to be successful because it's so much more fun. You get the feedback. Nobody is ever surprised by their annual evaluations because they communicate every quarter. They know exactly where they're staying.

I hope that answers the question. It does. Thank you.

Riley. Describe your leadership style with department heads and staff. How do you balance support, accountability, and performance expectations?

So the most difficult thing that I ever had to learn was when I went from being a private in the platoon that I was. I started off in the reserves as a private, and then I magically overnight went I signed with the ROTC, I became the cadet platoon leader and starts that same platoon and learning that I had to evaluate my NCOs who were the ones who were teaching me just the previous drill. And I was fortunate enough to have amazing Vietnam vet NCOs in that organization who decided— they'd use more colorful words than this, but they said they're going to make sure that I I am successful because they're not going to let me kill them when we go to combat. And so they're going to train and teach. And so the most important thing they taught me was to sit down with them and look them in the eye and tell them where they're meeting expectations and where they're not meeting expectations, and then have the courage to ask how you're failing.

So I've done— I incorporate that. So when I sit down with every one of my directors Normally in the second month, and then it's monthly until we're comfortable enough that I know that they are going to bring me anything that I made a mistake and let me know immediately instead of sugarcoating it or anything like that so that we can solve problems together. But it's about building relationships. But the first part of doing that counseling is, is you take what their job description is. I put expectations on it.

Give it to them, let them bring it back to me with what they really are doing also, so we can prioritize the things. Because all of them have had job crew, and you prioritize things. And what that does, it means they no longer are accepting the risk to themselves. They're letting me know everything they're doing, because as a leader, my job is to accept the risk, not that they are to be informed to be able to have the knowledge of these are the prioritizations. You can do these, these are you, you touch once a week, and these you ignore until something comes up.

And guess what? I share that with you all. But having these conversations builds trust, and having that conversation means we are now seeing everything they're doing, not just what the job description is, and we have a better understanding of all those things. The next thing is I create an environment in a weekly director's meeting. It's not a formal thing that has a list of all the requirements that they're supposed to do.

It's just simply the 3 top things that their department's doing next week. And it allows them to communicate, and members of other organizations see all the amazing things that we're doing as, as a city. And suddenly their expertise is being shared. Oh, by the way, I've done this before. Let's talk about that afterwards because there's some pitfalls on that.

And having additional discussions in every city I've seen, we find— start helping things outside of the silo. We're looking across the board and solving each other's equations because we've created an environment that we're now a team. And having the conversations and the weekly— I mean, monthly counseling sessions There's 3 more things in the counseling session that's important. What are your professional and personal goals over the next 20 years? And then helping them with it.

And that last one is that bullet where I go, how am I feeling? So that they can address that every single time they meet. And that's how I create the environment. That's how I have the communications. And of course, there's a whole bunch of things that you have to do in It's the soft skills that you have as you interact with your directors so that they are inspired to be successful and to find new ways to solve old problems and find a better, more efficient way to do things.

Thank you. Anybody else? Ken Lee. Um, what does living on the island and being visibly engaged in the community mean to you as a local government? That's exactly what I said earlier on.

It's the mission first, people always. You know, as a person whose family has been in the military every generation since the start of this nation, there's enormous amount of service that you feel in it. I didn't tell my sons to become law enforcement officers. There's just this amazing feeling in our family that we have to serve. And I have a unique set of skills.

I believe I'm that missing piece to your puzzle to help make this community better. I know it's going to be a monstrous job. I'm not pretending that it won't, but I think this community— and I sought it out because of the two things, the things that you're having difficulties with and how amazingly friendly everybody is coming here and being able to talk to people and having that validated. Today I just decided to go look at a house just in case I'm lucky not to go in this position. I just wanted to see this.

A neighbor was watching over the house, was like, what's this guy doing slowing down looking at at this house. And I just got out and said, "Hi, my name is Glenn Adams. I'd like to talk to you. Do you like this neighborhood?" And she looked at me and she's really trying to figure out why. And then she goes, "Well, the house is for sale.

Are you looking to buy it?" I go, "Well, I'm looking to look at it." But from there, we suddenly had this huge conversation. She's a teacher who taught on the north side, who 2 years ago had decided she was going to leave. Now she had the opportunity to because her kids stopped visiting her here. But she had lived here for 13 years, absolutely loves everything about it, loves the neighborhood. And we talked for almost 30 minutes.

She was supposed to be walking her dog. That's why she came out. But you don't see that in most areas. Most people won't sit there. One, they wouldn't have engaged you in the first place because they don't want to front, but she was looking after her neighbor's interest.

And then she engaged with me and we had a huge conversation and I got all sorts of additional insights validating some of my assumptions, but it was outstanding. But that's the difference here. This is an amazing community. It's not just the picturesque views and the visitors, you know, the great place to visit. This, this has got some amazing background.

If you look at the culture, the things that are going on here— you guys are supporting the library in spite of the borough. There's amazing things you guys are doing that are all right. They're right. That's why the community is happy here. That's why I want to be part of it.

Thank you. Anybody else?

Jack, that— was that teacher's name Becca? Okay, this is small town. Uh, no, it's not my question. It's a question. We know who's leaving and who isn't.

Imagine you're faced with a situation where the city council is leaning toward a decision that would address their immediate priorities, but your professional assessment shows that a different course of action would better serve the long-term interests of the community and its residents. How would you navigate that situation, and what steps would you take to balance maintaining a positive relationship with the council while still advocating for what you believe is best for the city? So I think the first and most important thing is how far are we into building relationships? Because as I said, it's all about relationships. And remember I was talking about the bank— you're building up a bank account.

Because in a case like that, I would look you in the eye and say, I know this is really important to you, at least give me another month to have a discussion on this and talk to other people, give you more information so the staff give you the things, because I have real concerns about it. But if I'm in my third month, I don't have enough credibility in our relationship that you would probably take that risk. But in the truth of things, having the conversations and, and feeling things out for what they are— the other thing is, is I love workshops. I, I would propose that maybe we could have a workshop bring in all the right people, have a discussion about it, and get more information going, and then get guidance from the council for, for the staff to go out and look at additional information so we can make a more informed decision. But I'll be honest with you, there are absolutely times that we have to make the wrong decision right now and then correct it later.

And I know that sounds confusing, but sometimes you have to do something and then course correct as you have more information to come in, that we can adjust it so it's not necessarily doing all the wrong things, it's doing what it was intended to solve, and then it has more chances to solve even more things. So hopefully, as a relationship is built, and as I, I have had that time to successfully build the trust, that you go, okay, let's wait one more month. Because if I'm mad at him, I, I will tell you, I'm a very principle-based person, and I, I hate to tell war stories like this, but I was the aide to a 3-star general. He had a very specific process in which I'm allowed to tell him and interrupt his day. And a major event came in.

I came in, followed his policy, was ignoring me, told me to get out. I go, no sir, I'm not getting out. I need give you this, and you need to understand. And he got really mad at me, and I said, sir, you need to pay attention to this now. Trust me, this is important.

He didn't. 11 O'clock that night, he called me in and chewed me out. He goes, why didn't you make me know this?

Go, I just didn't have enough time that you trust my perspective. That's the truth. From that point on, he listened to me when I came in because I endured so many rear-end chew-ins that he understood.

But, you know, having those conversations and building that trust, building the relationship, so when I come in and I say, if I'm violating everything that you and I discussed because I need to get a point to you, you can go, okay, I'm I'm— maybe I should look at this. I'm principle-based. I will be reactive, saying somebody knocks us on the floor, I won't care, I'll just get something and clean it up. And if somebody has an accident, I will probably be a little bit upset, but I'm still going to ask, are they okay?

It's all about being consistent. Follow up? Dick, assuming you have investigated and evaluated the city's current status regarding the operating and capital budgets and the city council and general city operations, what would be your first reactions as the city's general manager? I'm not sure I'm understanding the issue on that, because if I, if I understand the capital investment, the budget that we're doing, what is the issue that I'm trying to resolve?

Um, you, I assume you understand we've got an issue with our operating budget and capital budget. Yes. So we need to solve that issue, and there's also, and then the general operations of the city. So what would be your actions to bring everything back into alignment. So you already are making some of those steps, and the staff has talked to you about the utility cost increase to be able to take care of the utility infrastructure, because enterprise items are supposed to be separated.

There are times and places that I've seen money move from other accounts to support those things, and that's normally under an emergency situation, declared emergency. Um, so what I would tell you is, is as I continue to evaluate it, I would continue to refine and provide feedback to the council for adjustments. I believe in mid-year reviews and being able to sit down with the council in mid-year and having a conversation that maybe we need to adjust the budget again. But one of the things that I would tell you is, as I take time and evaluate things, I communicate with the council on a regular enough schedule. Every week I'm going to send you a weekly update with just the things that are important for you to know and understand.

So if you're put on the spot by somebody, or a reporter puts a, a microphone in front of you, you know what's going on. So you should be able to hear me as I start saying, hey, I've got some concerns with this, and these are some of the adjustments we have, because it's trying to create that dialogue that I've mentioned that I— we have to have the relationship. I have to be able to communicate with you some of the things that I'm concerned about. So when we sit down and have our regular communication, you could ask me for more detail, you could ask me to look into more things and provide additional data. But it's all about making sure you have all— everything you can do to make the right decisions for this community.

And my job is to keep you advise as I continue to find and uncover and learn more and more. And what you're going to find is I will often overshare, but it's much better than undersharing. So as I start finding things, I'll be communicating it with the council, and then hopefully we'll work together to make the adjustments that are required. That's the way I, I work. I, I don't, I don't do it on, on my own.

I, I solve it as a team.

Okay. Given our limited resources, how would you manage departmental spending and reduce bond debt principal while minimizing the financial impact on citizens? So that's so multiple. So the, the method in which we do budgeting with me is we try to keep the level of services that we have and create the CPI change in cost for the next year to budget. And so, as we look at those things, as I describe levels of service, the easiest way for me to do that, and it's probably not as relevant here, is, is mowing frequency is a good example.

If you're used to, and you have the expectation that the department mows all of the city's lawn once a week, then maybe that level of services goes down to once every 10 days or every other week. And that's a level of service that you could have discussions on and lowering the cost and the expense of providing services to the community. And then you have funds that are freed up by doing that. And that's simplified method of changing the level of service that you provide so that you can afford things. Bonds really come down to is not taking out new bonds while we're trying to pay things down.

You create the budget in which you can afford to have the level of debt, and then you service that level of debt. You don't try to take on debt. In this case, we have, we have a huge demand for our enterprises to be able to fund. And so we're going to have to go to the state and hopefully go to the federal government and be able to find ways to get additional funding, even if it's an earmark, and get those done. But we've got to be actively working those at the same time.

And the best way to do that is create create those plans. But right now, as, as I look at it, I'd be working directly with the directors, having conversations and discussing what levels of service that we are providing, and making sure the council understands that level of service. And if we need to lower that level of service, then you all are informed and can say, okay, we want to change that level of service. But you appropriate the fund for me to provide that level service. I shouldn't change that level of service without keeping you informed.

Yeah, every now and then you have an emergency, you do an all hands on deck, so surfside, but you don't, you don't just change it.

Answer everybody's question. Any follow-ups?

Abby, a record number of cruise ships are scheduled for the upcoming season and residents are raising concerns about over- overcrowding and infrastructure strain. How would you address both the economic opportunity and the community concern?

So ironically, we've had that question last night. So what I think I'm probably the only one that stepped on that grenade specifically as it was put out.

When you have 17 to 19,400 people on a daily basis coming into the community, it's tough to keep your community identity. Not to mention, let's look at the impacts. Let's just talk buses. Buses damage roads, and people are like, well, why? Well, I hate to go into engineering now.

The area of the tire is higher concentration of weight in the area of the tire on a car. So it does more specific damage to the road, and every time it goes down the road, it does more damage. And it's not necessarily the wear surface, it's the subsurface. And as somebody who's done a million roads in combat, they break down very quickly when you over— put too much weight on a road that wasn't designed for that structural weight. Then you talk about, let's go to the bathroom.

Every single one of them has to use the bathroom, and that's a lot more use of the facilities that we have. And oh, by the way, we don't have the proper facilities because we're no longer allowed to use our waiver. We've got to solve it within 5 years. All of those things have an impact. And then I've already talked about keeping your own community identity when you have 2 times your— 2 to 3 times your population coming in on a daily basis.

You— there's so many issues, and everybody believes that the amount of money you get in court fee is— should be enough to solve it. Well, it's not, and, and it's a year mark. So it's, it's really tough to solve all of the equations where you guys are trying to do by having a different rate. I even looked into— when I was in Hawaii, they had the kama'aina rate, and And I regrettably found out that they can't legally do that anymore. Only businesses can choose to lower the amount of money for residents.

But back then, there was a different tax rate for Tom Iden and people who were residents. So you had the visitor rate, and now you— and then you had the other. You can't do that. I was very disappointed. I was really going to be happy that I could say, hey, why don't you do this?

You've done the best you can by raising it during that period of time that you can to try to get some of the impacts back, but it doesn't match. It doesn't even match up to the impacts of, of people coming in as seasonal labor, taking up space in buildings and structures. And as I talked last night, you are having a gap in 20 and 30-year-olds. And I know this only simply because I have close to elementary schools. So 20 to 30-year-olds are— those are the ones that have kids in elementary schools.

And so when the kids grow up, you're going to have less kids here. So you're going to lose more and more of your citizens. So you're losing generations, multiple generations at the same time. So we have real issues to solve here. And I don't have the right answers.

I did learn that the Ranger program where the environmental— they have the intent. They announced it last night on the news, as I was paying attention, to provide shore power to the ships in Ketchikan and Juneau. And I'm like, well, are they going to fix where we create the power? It doesn't— it's only one thing to create shore power. Yeah, I get it that environmentally it helps us, but these are all real big issues.

And I, I wish I could just sit here and look you in the eye and say this is the the solution. I, I can't. I can just tell you I'll be part of the team, I'll roll up my sleeves, I'll talk to anybody I can. Heck, send me to Juneau, I'll go do a Vulcan line mill with everybody there so I can learn what to do. But I, I, I don't have the solution right now.

I could just recognize that there's very complex things that are going on, and the adjustments of the little things that you guys are already trying to do It is helping, but the citizens don't understand it. And one of the things I talked about is start having communications in a way that some of the citizens understand. I was able to explain some of the utility rate things to people pretty quickly. I've been through this. Georgia does it right.

Only state I've been to that does it right. They forced it. The legislature forced it over 2 decades ago that you You will have a rate that will do full capital improvement, life cycle replacement of everything that you have in your enterprise. Otherwise, we're not going to let you get a bond. Immediately, every municipality started doing it.

But that's how it worked. So no, I don't have your answer. I'd love to, um, but I'll be happy to be part of the team to look into it. I, I At least last night I showed you that I'm willing to dive into it by being the one that said, hey, look, this is an issue and it's very complex. And I explained what I just explained right now.

Thank you. Any follow-ups?

Judy, describe your approach to managing employee compensation, benefits, and long-term obligations while remaining fiscally responsible to taxpayers. This is so multi-part. Um, so first off, I would be always be looking at the CPI, and the reason why is that would be the thing that we can keep them at the same pay grade. So their dollar is just as strong today as it was last year and year before. It stays steady.

Um, but that doesn't mean we always have the affordability of doing that, and across a lot of the businesses. When businesses are doing great, they often get great pay raises. When businesses are doing poor, they normally get very low pay raises. So it's a discussion.

Pay doesn't on its own cause people to leave organizations. Leadership— poor leadership, poor management— causes people to leave organizations. And so I will be working the leadership side and management side. And one of the things that I do teach is class called Time Management for Real People. My dad did it in early 1970s, um, he merged a leadership program, Time Management, and the Army, you know, every officer is the most intelligent leader they've ever met.

So if you call it a leadership class, nobody would go to it. If you call it a time management class, everybody goes to it. Um, but that's one of the things that I I will teach them is that there's so many things in leadership that solves equations that others can't. Because when I talk about where do you want to be in 20 years, both personally and professionally, there's reasons why I do that. And sometimes it's to have the difficult conversations.

And I, I'm going to sidetrack here because it's important for you to know, as Chief Staff White Sands Missile Range, I was the junior GS-15 in charge of the installation. They're junior. Nobody younger than me is GS-15, less time in service. And I got 14 people to GS-15 before I left because of the programs and processes and procedures. And so people see that they can get the things they want to get to the goals they want to achieve in life.

Those also are reasons why they stay. Yes, sometimes they leave But they're leaving because it's part of getting them to their goals, both personally and professionally, and being able to do so. Sometimes you make those things happen that they will accept less pay this year than they would normally because they're getting put on the track to get their own goals, whether it's personal or professional. And if you'd let me digress for a second, I want to give you an example. My, uh, public affairs officer was the last one to be, uh, counseled by me.

And I told you that by normally by the end of the second month I've counseled everybody. It was the first week of the third month and she was quick to inform me of that. She was rather upset that I did this late. And I looked her in the eye and I said, that's because I could take risks with you because I, I see that you have more potential than I have. She looked at me and she goes, nobody's ever said that.

What do you mean? I go, I can see a point in my life where I work for you. She's like, huh? And I go, you have that potential. And I go, I want you— I, I don't know you, I don't know your husband, but you need to have a conversation with your husband that your star might be brighter than his star.

And all I know is he's a pilot. Trust me, pilots have huge egos. And I said, I want you to have that conversation. And she did. And he agreed.

And 9 months later, she had an opportunity that something happened in Las Vegas and the Air Force put her out there. She was in the Air National Guard and she had 2 goals that she had for professional. Being in the National Guard, she wanted to be 06 Colonel. And as a civilian, she wanted to be a GS-15. And I looked her in the eye in the second month and said, neither one of those could happen here.

You need to be in a 4-star command, and those are only like things like CENTCOM and stuff like that. You need to find a major command. So when she came up and said this, I said, hey, here's the opportunity. And she goes, I don't understand. I said, based off of your performance at the end of it, they're going to give you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I work for a 3-star General, I know how this works. You're going to have 24 to 48 hours to make a decision. You need to have a conversation with your husband and what things you're allowed to do to accept that and what you're willing to do to take that position, because when you get it, it's going to have a time limit. She finished up her thing, she called me up, she goes, how did you know? I go, because of your performance.

I told you you're better than I am. And she goes, they offered me Southern Command to be a congressional liaison. It's a GS-14 position, and it's going to get me a lieutenant colonel commission in the Air Force. If anybody knows in the National Guard, you have to be put in a billet that has the next higher rank to get the promotion. And she got that.

And then 4 years later, the commander of Southern Command became the commander of Special Operations command, pulled her over with her, made her a GS-15, and then she had a command there and she made 06. That is Reader's Digest. It's not that I am better, it's that I recognize talent and I do the right thing to put them on the course that they're going to be on. So when we choose not to pay them more money, they're still happy with being in their position because they're getting the professional development they need to achieve their goals. And that's a long way to give you the story, but the truth is, is our job is to take care of their interests, and then they are more loyal to this organization, so they take care of the interests of the city better than anybody else.

Thank you. Any follow-ups?

What is your experience with enterprise funds, and what strategies would you use to address rising costs for infrastructure maintenance, such as utilities, streets, and public facilities, when capital needs outpace available funding? So I already talked to your directors on that one, and it, it comes down to this: you have two things you have to do simultaneously. Um, you have to start creating a plan replacement, or not lifecycle replacement because you can't afford that, or lifecycle extension. And you got to create the plan and you need to implement it equally. So if you're talking roads, you need to be able to diagnose what roads are the worst and have a process in which you prioritize the funding that you have to attack the, the higher priority roads.

Whether it has an effect on, on businesses, maybe you prioritize it because that— if you have the communication that says these are the standards in which we're going to prioritize things, they get blessed off by the council because you guys at the end of the day are the ones who has to accept the final risk. And they, they'll bring it to you, they'll brief it to you, and they'll give you the, the method in which they do it. In Santa Fe, Texas, we were only producing enough to do a lifecycle replacement of our road every 50 years. That is incredibly bad, but only through that communication did the council go, okay, we need to find additional funds to do this. And so they changed the way they budgeted money so they could start doing these things.

But when you're talking the amount of resources that we need, you know, for electrical, It, it's gonna be tough to get the engineering we need done to figure out the solutions to the equation of what needs to be done in what order and how to do it cost effectively. We've got a lot of lifecycle extension ideas that are going on, but you need a real analysis of the electrical assault. And you already know that we need to look at another water method because we could lose our water resource. It's, it's scary when we see those kind of things. Yes, I'm intimidated by it, but I'm not afraid of it.

It's, it's a lot of things to take on, and it's too early for me to sit down and say this is the absolute way that I would do it. But as I do my 90 days and spend the time and go out and look at every single directorate, meet every single person, have the conversations through discovery. That's where I'll learn the most and be able to give you better advice. But in this case, I, I have to learn it thoroughly first to make recommendations on what's going on. But between now and then, I'm going to trust my staff.

They're the subject matter experts. Just because I have experience in every one of their areas doesn't mean I'm the subject matter expert. I know that's not the perfect answer to your question. I'm sorry, I, I can't think of it. That's twice now that I've done that.

Okay, Riley, a controversial decision made by the city leads to strong public backlash at, at a council meeting and online. How would you respond?

Well, I alluded to it with the Santa Fe thing. Sometimes it's just taking ownership. In Santa Fe, I, I brought up, hey, let's do the Fourth of July celebration. The council member added on they wanted fireworks. PTSD from the school shooting freaked everybody out, attacked me.

I took ownership of it. I had the subject matter experts on PTSD come down and sit down and talk because we had those people They're already helping our community. And we had the discussions, and then I said I'd go to the council and have a discussion about the moving fireworks. We ended up having to cancel the fireworks because of COVID taking such a high level of turn at that exact moment, so we couldn't do it at all. But I, I turn and face it and have the discussions.

I'm not afraid to have the hard conversations. A lot of the times it's they don't have enough information to understand what's going on and having the courage to have the conversations and let them vent. You know, sometimes they need a vent. Sometimes it's sort of like kicking the dog. You don't want people to kick the dog.

You want them to come here and have the conversation, but sometimes they just got to vent. And I, I go to them. I, you know, I've gone to every single one and Whenever citizens ask to, to have me come and look at it, I go and look at it, look at the issues. But if it's a controversial thing that's going on, I'll hit it straight on. I own it.

You guys gave guidance, this is me executing, and this is me going out there and having those conversations. I'll give you the constructive feedback, but the staff gave you a decision or recommendation. You gave Make the decision, we own it. Good follow-up.

Janalee.

What do you see as the most pressing challenge for Ketchikan in the next 12 to 18 months, and what specific steps would you take in your first 6 months to begin addressing it? Did you take my question? I was going to ask you all that.

So, um, I, I, I will tell you straight up, as, as somebody who will do triage on everything that I see as I do things, I, I will look at all of the, the enterprise systems, and I, I, I really need to get an understanding of what is the actual timeline that we have and what, what what we can do to mitigate things, bring opportunities to protect our interests. Just like I said, life cycle extensions. What are the things that can be done? There's a lot of things that they brought up. Um, you know, we readily— is, uh, my brain has just dropped— in hydroelectric power.

Um, I don't have as much experience in hydroelectric power. Everything else, I have more experience. And so I have to listen to them more and learn more about it. But I will tell you that, you know, Martinsville, Virginia abandoned a hydroelectric dam because it hit 100-some-odd years of age and they just couldn't maintain it. There's no way to get the parts to continue to fix it.

And so they abandoned it. And And when they did that, they had to find other resources, and it didn't come in the way they wanted. And regrettably, here you only have the additional power that you can reach out to on either side, and that gets very expensive when you have to start adding generators. So, um, it's going to be a process of getting educated and understanding everything that's, that's going on, um, and being able to triage and be be able to give you all the recommended courses of action. But for electrical and hydroelectric, I really think they're going to end up needing a real engineered study to figure out how to go to the next steps of solving the equation of how, how we get to the next 100 years.

You know, it's, you know, creating a shared environment where maybe we're helping the other ones out with some of the resources we have may be the solution. Work as a team across boundaries, and we've done that in multiple cities. Santa Fe, the best one, was solving flooding. We fixed somebody else so we'd fix ourselves, because we're one big island. Everybody needs power.

They be supporting somebody else from improper.

Thank you. Good. Yeah, I think you've addressed this, Mr. Adams, in some of your answers to some of these questions. For the interest of uniformity, I'll pose the question anyhow. When faced with resolving an issue about which you have limited knowledge, ranging from specific needs of utility to competing schools of thought on a community issue, how do you seek and assess relevant information, and how do you weigh and apply whatever information that you then gather?

This is a tricky one because I'm crossing a line by going too far. You all are the elected officials. You're the ones that are the face of, of the city. I'm the one who's executing everything that's going on. So there's, there's a point of which I take ownership where this is what you all said we're doing, and we're doing it.

But if there's communication that's going on, based off of that communication, there's got to be involvement with some of the council so that they are in, in the front of it and having the discussions, and my staff is providing the background and the understanding and the depth of the information to inform you on everything that's going on. So we as a team can educate the community. It's not as easy as just saying, okay, I'm going to be out there in front solving the issue. In some of these cases, it's— it is a political issue, and the politics really comes down to is a conversation with the mayor, the vice mayor. And I realized I didn't answer part of your question there, is because the mayor and vice mayor, I need to have conversation with once a week, and it needs to be sitting down and having the ability to know and understand that, hey, this is something that either politics is going to solve or I'm going to solve.

And having those discussions and being able to do it, because what you're describing is right there on the edge of getting into politics. And I, I'm supposed to be the, the separation between those. Below me is no politics, is the directors. Level, but from me up it's all politics. And so yes, I get in some of it, but it's really at the direction of the council telling me to be involved.

Does that make sense? I mean, your expression made me think I didn't answer it. That was a trick question.

What questions do you have for us?

In alphabetical order.

So I, I think the toughest one is one that you addressed, and I, I didn't put you on the spot like I put her on the spot. But, um, when you're looking at tourism, what strategies do you recommend that we can somehow take what revenues we we do get from tourism and feed it into economic development for year-round jobs for our citizens so that it transcribes into a— and so again, I'm one of those people, I don't have a question unless I have a solution. So my recommendation is based off of the things I've seen in this environment. I would want to look at the commercial capability of doing ship repair and stuff like that, as I'm looking at it. But there's other capacity that you guys may be aware of where we can put funds into the economy to develop and/or grow some of the industry that's here already, because it's easier to grow an existing business than another.

But how do we blend the year— the the surge of tourism to year-round jobs? So part of that in tourism is this dock out here, the asset, right? Yeah. So tourism is seasonal, the cruise ships are all gone, these docks are empty. But we have a brand new operator, a shipyard, and they have the ability to bring more work to the community of Ketchikan.

They're looking for that, Coast Guard being one right? They do Coast Guard contract all day. So by powering docks, there's an opportunity to do winter layup and do work on those ships off of these docks and get the mortgage for that, to sell them more power for when they work on those. We could also run water and sewer and charge them for that also. So making this a year-round port for, for small cruise ships that want to be laid up.

A lot of times They go south because they get their work done, then they have a place to moor. So if we could do that and add the power to that, and it may be working to develop the dock front and put floating docks in so they don't have to tend lines. But those are, those are some of the advantages we can have in regards to the infrastructure we already own and the ability to maybe update that to where we can work with the shipyard for instance, to, to manage that, um, because the Navy and the, and the Coast Guard are building more ships and they need to— they're going to need to have places to put them. But there's not every ship needs to be lifted out of the water to be serviced. Yeah.

So right now it's like the ship laying up against the dock here. We have the availability because we don't have the cruise ships yet. So using that year-round infrastructure for that makes sense. And so when the tourism increases, then maybe there's more charter boats, maybe there's more, you know, vehicles. All those have to be maintained in the community in the off-season.

So there's, there's those type of opportunities. So I have lots more, but I'm going to make sure they're less Housing affordability and workforce retention. So I've had experience with doing tours, and from what I'm seeing here, there's opportunities to do a tax increment reinvestment so that developments can— or developers can come in and develop. To put a deep restriction to a local. And, and for example, in Santa Fe, we were able to build 270 homes $30,000 cheaper because we did the TERS.

And so that infrastructure was paid for, the offset of the taxes that would have come to us, just gave it back to them so they could get a loan. Um, and it basically was a bond. So the question I have is, is that something you'd be interested in to provide more affordable housing? And you can create the deed restriction to a local and you put a group of panel together, whether you want to call it a commission committee or whatever, that actually looks at the applications for people to buy those houses that are discounted. In that area.

Is that something you would want to do for affordability for locals? Well, I think we're open to anything in regards to the, the housing stuff. Our biggest problem here is that we have limited land. The borough has the, the land that would be utilized. The city of Ketchikan itself doesn't have that much available land, and then it's getting access for utilities— the road, the sewer, the water— to power to the lands.

A lot of times developers don't want to pay that cost. And then in some places the guy buys a lot in the back of a big subdivision and he's responsible to build a road in order to build his own house. And so that doesn't work out real well. So some of that is all based on availability of land, but I think that there's opportunity we haven't probably looked at in regards to tax credits or incentives or different things we can do to help with that. And I think the last one that I want to bring up is, is, is more of a selfish perspective.

If I'm lucky enough to get the job to get the insights, looking back on your tenure as being on the council, what's a couple of things that you wish you knew on day one that you know now?

Okay, everybody here like, holy cow. Yeah, if I knew that the economy, the inflation, the cost of fuel was going to have such a huge impact on our smaller communities, um, healthcare is crazy. And so, um, I think if I knew that going in, it would affect how we budgeted and what we did in regard to development. With earlier on. And so that stuff is all at the forefront now, and we're trying to adapt to it.

We're using, you know, we got a 2026 Bravo with a 1969 budget.

Roger. Anybody else? Yeah, we had Dick and then Abby. I've been here too long.

I can read, I, and I can own up to this. We know we've got a, we've got a perceived, well, not perceived, we've jacked up the rates on a number of things. And some of the conception is, the perception is somebody back 15 years ago wouldn't raise rates. And so we got ourselves in trouble and I gotta raise my hand. I was one of those people.

I didn't wanna raise the rates. Because I was sitting in this chair. And so if I knew then what I know now, I would have probably said raise the rates because we would be on an even keel up. We'd still be where we are, but it wouldn't have been a big jump. So that's the Reserve.

Yeah. There's another one going on too. Go ahead and I'll think of it. Abby. Mine would be Knowing the, um, the regulatory aspects of decisions.

So, like, water, it was long after I started that they talked about all of the filtration waiver, and we learned about these things, which if I would have known that day one, I wouldn't have pushed off, you know, certain projects or, or studies or things like that, knowing that we needed to stay ahead. So, wouldn't cost us that much, like, when— if that were to ever go away. Um, the sewer outfalls, just those, those regulatory things that we have to do, or our community doesn't have that service. So that was one thing I wish I would have learned right off the bat and knew that, so it was in the back of my head before I made a decision.

Joey. So when I first came in, 2015, it was, we were constantly in emergency mode. And I'd say that it was constant catching, getting up to speed. I think in what I know now is just the amount of having to learn so much at one time. It was a mental overload in a lot of ways.

So there's like things that I think we all drop when we're doing that. So I would have, if I'd known what I know now, I would have asked for some kind of strategic 5-year plan then versus like 5 years in. And having—. Yeah, that was—.

My eyes are crossed. So one of the trick reasons why I brought this up, just so you know, I discovered as I did these interviews that the understanding the council was afforded an opportunity to do— and this, this Clay's probably going to slap me for doing this, um, I don't believe it violates any kind of separation of what a council should do and what a city manager should do. If we take you on a tour of every one of the facilities and you get the same kind of tour that I'm going to force them to do if I become the guy here and get the thorough run-through— because when you get that, you get the no holds barred. These are all of the things that are going on. And sometimes it's completely overwhelming.

But before I left Homewood, every one of the new council members that was elected— because they had to have 100% election— every one of them went through that process. And every one of them came back and said, I am so glad you pushed that hard for us to go through, because then they understood the city they have to govern. No, they do not have to do any of the things that those people are talking about them doing. What they do is they understand, they see themselves in their community with the reality that it is. And that's why I ask that question.

And so regardless of whether or not I'm the person, you guys should probably— any area that you don't fully understand, take time to go through it. Let them give you what it was. So you do a better understanding. Thank you. That's all I had.

Anybody else? Thank you. Thank you all for this opportunity. Yeah.

I drank too much water at dinner. You ready for another break? Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's take it.

That brings us to item 6, executive session request for an executive— review the candidate for vacant city manager, general manager position for the city of Kentwood. Do I have a motion? Your Honor, I move the city council declare, consistent with the acting assistant city manager's memorandum dated April 16th, 2026, It is in the best interest of the City Council to review and discuss finalist candidates Abner Hogue, Glenn Adams, William Homka, and Michael Kovacs for the vacant city manager/general manager position in executive session in accordance with KMC 2.04.025 and , which may involve matters immediate knowledge of which would clearly have an adverse effect upon the finances of the city, and discussion of subjects that tend to prejudice the reputation and character of any person, provided the person may request a public discussion. Move into executive session.

Please call the roll. Uh, Gage? Yes. Zingy? Yes.

Kuss? Yes. Madani? Yes. Gass?

Yes. Finnegan? Yes. Bradbury? Yes.

Well, now we'll move it. Okay, we'll come back out of Executive session. We met in executive session, had discussions. Do I have a motion? Your Honor, I move the city council select Glenn Adams as the city manager and direct the recruitment consultant to enter into negotiations for terms and conditions acceptable to the council.

Second. It has been moved and seconded. Any discussion? Uh, I would just like to thank all the candidates for coming. We had a very strong cool, and, uh, we really appreciate the interest from all the people who applied and wish everyone well.

Anybody else?

Seeing none, would you please call the roll? Coos? Yes. Zingy? Yes.

Gage? Yes. Bradbury? Yes. Finnegan?

Yes. Gass? Yes. Montani? No.

That passes, Your Honor. Thank you very much. Bring it to the mayor and council comments. Nick, just like to thank all the people that showed up and the council for making a good decision. Okay, thank you everyone.

Uh, thank you to the recruiter, assistant city manager. Uh, I know I was exception at this vote, but I will support the bill of the council. And support the manager that comes on board. Thank you. Abby?

None, Your Honor. Judy? I have none, Your Honor. Right? Nothing.

Natalie? Yeah, I just want to thank everybody for coming in, and long day and a beautiful day. Yeah, yeah, I just want to thank each of the applicants for their time and attention and wish each of them the very best. Especially the applicant to which we have extended this position. So, got a lot of work in front of them.

I'd also like to thank him. It was very nice to get to meet him. Very strong pool to select from.

It was really nice to hear from them and the perspective of what our community looked like and how they treated them. I think that speaks well for our community. Um, and thank you. So with that, adjourned. All opposed, hearing and seeing none, stand adjourned.