In the late 1960s, Cheryl Stickler’s family moved to the Chilkat Valley. She attended kindergarten through the third grade in town.
She was young, but Stickler remembers a different landscape in Haines at the time.
“I remember walking to school by the big, scary woods,” she said. “ I remember there were so many children in school, we had to go to school in shifts. The school wasn’t big enough.”
She attributes those crowds to the three sawmills that were going at the time. Her family then moved to Wyoming, where she grew up. But the summer before her last semester of college she came to the Chilkat Valley for a summer job and met her future husband Robin Stickler.
“We met in July and we got married in January,” she said.
Stickler moved to logging camps with her new husband and they lived there for many years.
“We were so blessed at the time that I didn’t have to have a job. I could stay home with our son,” she said.
Eventually, she finished her degree at Sheldon Jackson in Sitka and then taught in the camps for years.
The couple moved back to Haines in 1999. Stickler got a job at the Klukwan School for several years and then took a job as principal in the Haines school district and stayed in that role for about 12 years before she retired.
Since then, she and some friends started the Haines Gals shooting club and she has volunteered for years at the Haines Sportsman’s Association. She worked for some time at Haines Assisted Living and was also elected to the borough assembly serving from 2020 through 2023.
As her term was coming to a close, her husband suggested that she take a break from politics.
“[He said] let’s just, let’s not do this again.’ Because when you run for assembly, it’s not just the person – it impacts your relationships, your family, it’s just so much time in service, right?” she said.
So, she took a year off.
“I’m a Christian and so I believe that my husband is the head of household,” she said. “I believe that I’m his helpmate. And if he says ‘Cheryl, we need to take a break,’ ‘Alright, ok.’”
Ultimately they decided together that it was time for her to run again this year.
One of the things that motivated her to run again is what she calls the tone and tenor of the current assembly.
“The first time I was on the assembly, somebody – I don’t remember who – told me that in every assembly when the new one comes in, they work to undo what the previous assembly did,” she said. “And I thought, that’s a little jaded. But that’s what we saw happening.”
In particular, Stickler said when the current assembly took on the stewardship of the borough’s public safety building project, it seemed like the projects went off the rails quickly. She points to conflict over the Lutak Dock in particular. Stickler said the community needs the $20 million MARAD grant it was awarded.
“All they had to do was shepherd it through,” Stickler said. “Yes, supervise, but not manage it. Be aware of our timelines, where we are in the procurement process, where we are in the permitting process … but it’s not the assembly’s job to manage it at all.”
Stickler said she also decided to run again because there’s a need for a public safety building and she’d also like to see more nuance in conversations around the large infrastructure projects in and around the borough.
For example, Stickler wants a diversified economy and hesitates to weigh in strongly against any kind of mining in the Chilkat Valley as she believes it could be a part of a healthy economy.
“I believe it’s the government’s job to stay out of the way of business,” she said.
But that doesn’t mean she’s fully pro-mining. Rather she said that she wants to see it be developed responsibly. And there are situations when she wouldn’t be supportive of a mining project – though she noted that the borough doesn’t have the authority to supercede the state and federal regulations that would come into play in developing something like the Constantine-Palmer project in the Chilkat Valley.
“When we worked in the logging camp at Long Island, which is on the other side of Prince of Wales, the corporation owned the timber and when we left it looked like a nuclear bomb went off,” she said. “We left that logging camp and we worked for another logging camp that was being logged on forest service land. I was looking at how they were paying attention to the watersheds. They had engineers go in and say, ‘this is how you’re going to cut this swath. You can’t go over this direction or this direction, and it needs to be cut at this angle.’
That gave Stickler an idea of what responsible resource development could and should look like.
Stickler is also interested in pushing for more civil public discourse, which she says requires building civic trust.
“That means civic trust, and that means trust in your government, in your leaders … that when you bring an idea or a need to them, that you’re going to be heard,” she said. “Now, you might not get everything you want, but you should walk away feeling like ‘I had an opportunity to speak.’”
Stickler said that does not mean everyone will get what they’re asking for, rather that they should be given the opportunity to weigh in and feel respected – something as simple as the body language of an elected official can have a lot of influence on that process.
Stickler said one lesson she learned about how to engage with people respectfully happened the last time she served on the assembly. A friend came to her with an issue and asked that she not vote in a particular way. Stickler did end up voting that way, and her friend was hurt not because of the vote but because Stickler didn’t close the loop with her and explain her decision-making.
Now, Stickler said she knows to engage with people respectfully, listen and then follow up. She knows that sometimes she’ll never get certain people on the phone or to the table.
“I’m not Pollyanna-pie-in-the-sky about that. But for those members who are willing to sit down at the table and have a conversation … in the public meeting – it us up to the chair to maintain that decorum and model that decorum,” she said. “It’s up to the assembly members to call points of order to bring the decorum back to the forefront, because we lead by example.”