The CVN reached out to this year’s candidates for assembly to learn more about their background, their motivations for seeking an assembly seat and what’s important to them. Interviews with the candidates on specific issues will appear in a future edition.
Brenda Josephson
“I’m running because I want to give back to my community,” said Brenda Josephson, 56, who worked for Southeast Roadbuilders for 10 years and has served in various borough government roles over the last decade. “I know borough code well, and I have excellent research and analytical skills.”
Josephson said a priority if she’s elected would be to diversify Haines’ economy. “The last year and a half has shown us that we’re very dependent on tourism,” she said. “We have to have a diversified economy.”
One idea she has is to promote local agriculture. “Not only could we grow an agricultural community to meet more of our needs locally, it could be something regionally that we could be effective at,” she said.
Josephson hopes that expanding economic opportunity and addressing infrastructure will keep more people in Haines. “It has been challenging for people who do live here to be able to stay here.”
Josephson, who has a Master’s in Business Administration and 25 years of accounting experience, moved to Haines in 2008. Since then she has worked in various capacities for the borough government. She served a term on the borough assembly from 2017 to 2020. She unsuccessfully ran for reelection last October. Josephson also served on the Haines Chamber of Commerce board, school board and was on the planning commission for three years.
Josephson said her experience on the chamber board was “good for me to understand the business community and the economic issues,” while “the school board made me intimately aware of the needs of our children as well as funding mechanisms.” Serving as planning commissioner taught her about land-use code and gave her “empathy” towards neighbors. And after a term on the borough assembly, Josephson said she got “a broad overview of all the legislative and policy issues for the community at large.”
Now semi-retired, Josephson is enrolled in a virtual food business leadership program at the Culinary Institute of America, where she trained as a chef after graduating high school. She said she’s interested in learning about food sustainability and farm-to-table. She has completed two semesters and has four left, with graduation set for December 2022.
Tyler Huling
Like Josephson, Huling, 29, said she is running for assembly to give back to the Haines community. Huling’s background is quite different from Josephson’s.
Huling said two experiences in particular have prepared her to serve on the assembly: volunteering for two years with the Peace Corps in Uganda and working, currently, on Alaska’s COVID-19 response at the state’s public health department.
Serving in the Peace Corps, Huling said, was “a real deep dive into working across cultures and across a difference of backgrounds and lived experiences.” Huling was a community health worker in a remote Ugandan village. She said she focused on public health campaigns and education, working especially with young women on sexual health.
“I was able to thrive in that really challenging situation,” Huling said, adding that she thinks her time in Uganda will help her overcome differences on the borough assembly.
At the Alaska Division of Public Health, Huling is on a team that created and runs a data analysis program for the state’s COVID-19 response. Through that work, Huling said, she has learned about the ins and outs of government. “Ultimately what I am doing is assessing the function of a government structure and trying to make it function better,” Huling said.
Huling also said she spent four seasons as an Alaskan wilderness guide in Lake Clark National Park and Kachemak Bay State Park. That work taught her “about Alaska’s economy that way and about the pros and cons of tourism and what a healthy relationship with tourism might look like.”
While Huling doesn’t have local government experience, she worked at the Haines library for a summer and said her experiences in rural Uganda and with the state public health department have given her the tools to succeed on the assembly.
Huling said her campaign is not focused on a single issue. “I hope to engage in conversation about all the important issues here.”
She said she is running, too, to give Haines’ younger population a voice in politics. “I think it’s really important that we have a really intergenerational approach to decision making as we move forward.”
*In last week’s print story, “Two declare for assembly, day left to file,” the CVN referred to Huling as Tyler Yarrow, a nickname. Huling is her legal surname and the name that will appear on the ballot.
Richard Clement
Richard Clement, 66, retired from Alyeska Pipeline in 2017 when he moved to Haines with his wife Laura. After moving to town, he joined the Kluane Chilkat International Bike Relay board and the local chapter of the Alaska Miner’s Association. He also worked for the Port Chilkoot Company and is currently volunteering with the borough’s emergency operations center.
Clement said he’s wanted to run for assembly for a while, but was too busy renovating his Fort Seward house. Similar to Josephson, he thinks Haines relies too much on tourism as an economic driver.
“We’re at a real turning point, I think, in this town,” Clement said. “We have to look at all the options. We’ve glided along on this tourism thing for quite a while. Do we put all our eggs in that basket? Probably not. We need some other baskets out there.”
Clement has a bachelor’s degree in geology and has lived and worked in Alaska for 30 years. Before retiring from Alyeska, where he was a manager and performed risk analysis, he also worked as a contractor for the oil and gas company British Petroleum (BP) and as a GIS manager for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.
“My jobs were always very data-centric,” Clement said when asked what skills he would bring to the assembly. “My wife calls me Spock. There’s a lot of divisive issues and I’d like to take the emotion out of those divisive issues.”
Clement said he wants to play a role in developing a long-term economic plan that will attract young people to Haines. He said he’d like to see the borough identify performance indicators to learn whether it’s reaching such a goal.
“That was really important in my previous work,” Clement said. “How do you know if you’re getting to your goal? You figure out what to measure and those facts tell you whether or not you’re steering away from or directly toward your goal.”
He said he doesn’t think there are limits to growth, but that it needs to be well thought out and planned.
“I think there’s people here who want stagnation, or even a reduction in population. I’m not that kind of person,” Clement said. “I’d like to see a lot more young people here. We’re trending toward older and older ages. We aren’t attracting young people. We’re becoming a retirement group. That’s not a good long-term plan.”
Debra Schnabel
Debra Schnabel, 69, is a Haines High school graduate and has served several stints in local government, worked as the borough manager for nearly three years, was a founder and manager of KHNS and was the executive director of the Haines Chamber of Commerce. She has a master’s degree in public administration.
“That course of study gave me a sense of what government is meant to do and can do both positively and negatively.”
Like Clement, she said she sees Haines as reaching a “pivotal point where planning is crucial to where we are” in the coming decades. “I want that to be a good place,” Schnabel said. “Planning needs to include the broad spectrum of people, but we have to be able to whittle it down to a practical goal that we can achieve.”
Also similar to Clement, she wants to use a data-driven approach to making that happen. When she was manager, she advocated for public engagement software that would ideally yield increased input from a broader swath of residents.
“Most people hang out in their circles and they think that’s the community. It’s not,” Schnabel said. “We’re a reactive community,” Schnabel said. “I want to help develop a plan we can commit to work through so that we are moving forward and know how we want to be responsive.”
Schnabel said she’d bring perseverance and courageousness to the assembly and that she’ll seek input from people whose opinions are either unknown or known to be different.
She also wants to advocate for updating the borough’s comprehensive plan, which was supposed to be updated several years ago. She said it needs to be more focused, and that it currently can be used to justify nearly any project or plan.
When a former assembly fired Schnabel in 2020, current assembly member Paul Rogers said Schnabel advanced her own agenda rather than the assembly’s.
“I was terminated in large part because I came up with solutions to issues,” Schnabel said. “As an assembly member, I can involve the other members of the assembly in a dialogue. I can bring the topic up to a public debate.”
