Editor’s note: Police chief candidate Gregory Boris has withdrawn from consideration.
A police chief finalist and two borough clerk candidates were interviewed this week as city leaders work to fill key roles that have been without permanent leaders for months.
Assembly members met in a committee of the whole meeting on Tuesday to interview two candidates for the borough clerk’s position. The position has been without a permanent employee since late October when the borough fired Kristine Kennedy.
Finalists Margarette Jones and Mike Denker are both Haines residents with experience in local government. They were quizzed on the role of the clerk, technical skills and expertise, and conflict resolution.
First, they interviewed Jones.
Margarette Jones
Jones, who has a degree in political science, is a former assembly member. She was appointed to that role and served from February through November of 2023 and then decided not to run for the seat. During that time she was also working for Constantine Mining as a special project coordinator, a position she held from 2021-2024. She was also a member of the borough planning commission.
Now, Jones is working a temporary job at the Bamboo Room which she describes in her application as a time to step back and consider her options and priorities for future jobs.
Jones told assembly members that she was interested in the borough clerk position because it’s a way to be a part of positive change in the community.
“This position, in particular, is exciting to me because it is less of a political position than I’ve been in, in the past. I’m excited to have conversations that have less of a political nature and that are more just about trying to solve problems that we all know exist,” she said.
When asked how she handled workplace conflict, Jones said she sees most conflict as being caused by a lack of communication; her approach to solving them is to overcommunicate and check in early and often.
“That has been really successful for me, is understanding what page, what book, what library everyone is in,” she said. “Then trying to bring people together so that we’re seeing the problem from the same perspective so that we can approach solutions together on the same page.”
Jones said she tends to approach conflict by first trying to think before she speaks and having an internal process that identifies why she is feeling conflicted.
“I like to say that I like conflict, but really it’s because I like resolution. I like solutions, and you can’t have really satisfying resolution without conflict,” she said.
She was also asked about her philosophy on customer service.
“To me [it] is a lot of listening and a lot of trying to understand before speaking and offering solutions. But also, being knowledgeable enough to have solutions to offer people and doing my due diligence so that I know my job well enough that if somebody is coming to the clerk for a clerk-related issue, that I’m able to be helpful,” she said.
When asked how she has learned from mistakes she has made in the past, Jones laughed and said she learned a lot about mistakes during her time on the assembly and a valuable lesson about how to use her words wisely.
“Specifically, … working for Constantine and being on the assembly was going to be a conflict and it’s very tense to say the least. I wish I had gone about it differently,” she said. “I wish that I had been able to just be more candid and less worried about what people would think about what I said that it changed what I was going to say. Just, be … transparent, authentic, ‘this is what I think, this is who I am,’ and not try to put up any facade or whitewash anything.”
Jones said if she were hired, she would be able to start immediately.
Mike Denker
Mike Denker is a professional pilot who is currently a medevac air ambulance captain based in Juneau. He has also worked at Delta Western in Haines first as an operation supervisor for a decade and then as a terminal manager for a year.
In his application to the borough, Denker said he has been studying constitutional, administrative and public process law as they apply to how people interact with their local governments.
During that time he has been appointed to Haines’ Code Review Commission and to a Minor Offenses Ad Hoc committee.
“These studies have allowed me to submit numerous memoranda to the Haines Borough advocating for citizen rights, while at the same time seeking to protect the borough from legal exposure,” he wrote.
And that extensive research showed when he was asked about the role of the clerk. Denker spent 11 minutes detailing how each borough officer’s position is supposed to work and that the role of the clerk is the “practice of government.” That is, that the clerk must understand both the structure of government and how it is practiced.
He touched on the differences between the organizational structure on the borough’s website and what the charter calls for – ultimately saying that the clerk’s job is to execute the will of the assembly. On the practice side – he laid out how the clerk’s job is touched by the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Open Meetings Act, Alaska Supreme Court Case and, Roberts Rules of Order; he also invoked Aristotle when he said that equality and fairness are fundamental to stability in government.
“I think in our history in Haines we’ve seen those times when we have public process failures or something like that. That’s where that inequality and unfairness [come from] and we get instability. A lot of the issues we’ve been having in the government revolve around that, that concept one side or another feeling that the process isn’t equal or fair,” he said.
Ultimately, Denker apologized for the “long-winded” answer but said he believed that even if he is not appointed, borough officials should start thinking about the executive and legislative branches of local government and understand those different roles.
Denker told assembly members that he is interested in the clerk’s position because of a calling to civil service in a community he has been in for 32 years, because it certainly isn’t a financial one for him.
“At some point I think there’s a calling and I think we all answer it,” he said. “I believe you all answered that calling, I believe our interim manager, our interim clerk answered that calling, everybody in the admin building answered a calling… that’s serving our friends and neighbors in our borough.”
On conflict in the workplace, Denker said he has developed a philosophy of empowerment during his 20 years of experience as a manager and 18 years of commercial flying.
“I believe to get the best quality decisions, effective, safe decisions … those around you have to be empowered. You have to empower them,” he said.
He said managers have to sit down with subordinates and figure out where the conflict is coming from and hash it out.
“You have to develop a culture so that people feel comfortable to speak, so they feel comfortable to engage,” he said. “When you have a conflict, a lot of times that breaks down and as a manager and supervisor, you have to work to build that up here again having the wisdom to realize – to look in the mirror and say – ‘could I be the problem?’”
On customer service, invoked his time working at the sole fuel supplier in Haines.
“Almost every day, somebody came in and said the ‘m-word, monopoly,’” he said. “I heard it for 20 years. You have to have thick skin to work in that industry, gotta have thick skin here. I used to tell staff … we don’t have any competition. [But] we can’t act that way. In fact, we have to act like there’s competition right next door.”
He said Haines Borough government is similar.
“We have to act like there’s another local government right next door and we have to have better customer service than if we had a government right next door,” he said.
Denker, who is currently on a biweekly schedule, said it would be at least a month before he could start work as clerk, as he’d need to work his next shift and make sure that the new captain starting – most likely can maintain good medevac service.
He said he could potentially do some things during his two weeks off in the interim.
Assembly members decided to hold an executive session on Tuesday, Jan. 28, during their next assembly meeting to discuss who to hire.
Police chief
About a dozen people showed up to meet a finalist for Haines’ police chief position on Monday evening at the library. The role has been open since former chief Josh Dryden announced his resignation and left in November. Michael Fullerton has been filling in as interim chief since. Fullerton said Tuesday that he now intends to apply for the position, but has not done so yet.
Gregory Boris, 52, arrived on the ferry on Sunday. It was his first trip to Alaska. He’s one of two finalists for the position, the other is a man named Michael Greelee.
According to his Oct. 14 application to the borough, Boris is currently working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Fort Washakie, Wyoming, is a longtime law enforcement officer who spent 28 years at the Baltimore Police Department and did a brief stint at the Alamogordo Police Department in New Mexico in 2022. He has been in his current position at the Wind River Reservation Police Department since then, according to the application.
When asked about his interest in Haines, Boris described a high-intensity career in law enforcement covering homicides, investigating shootings, overdoses, suicides, and trying to find fugitives in Baltimore that lead to burnout.
“Emotionally it was hard, you know. You don’t know how much of a toll it takes on you to do all of those things for all of that time. I could still smell the autopsy and hear it,” he said. “You spend so much time at crime scenes… I have a vivid memory when it comes to that and sometimes it’s hard to shake. I just needed a break.”
Boris has four kids. Two are adults and out of the home. The other two are seven and three years old, and he lives with them and his wife in Wyoming. Boris said he loves the job.
“I love working with the Native community. It’s probably the most rewarding thing I’ve done,” he said. “In Baltimore you don’t really have the time, it’s havoc all the time.”
In Wind River the call volume has been considerably slower and he said there’s time to build community.
“I have time to go to the schools. I have time to pass out stickers to the kids. I have time to go to pow-wows. You can do all these things inside a community,” he said.
It’s also the first time he’s had the opportunity to head up a department. Boris said he’s been stepping in as acting police chief and has had to take on the kind of responsibility that comes with it – everything from managing equipment to managing people.
“I get it. You have to be held accountable to things that never were before,” he said. “I have to make sure … if I’m paying people overtime, I don’t want them to be sitting at a turnout watching Netflix all day.”
But he got a taste for leadership and said he’d like to continue doing it.
However, his current job requires a lot of travel and Boris wants to spend more time with his family.
“I got little ones,” he said. “I can’t get that time back.”
Boris said he’s never lived in a town as small as Haines, but Wyoming is sparsely populated and he thinks a lot of communities have the same problems: staffing, morale, recruitment. He also thinks his wife specifically will love living in a small community.
“She’s from Caracas (Venezuela), so she comes from a population of, like, millions,” he said. “I think she’d like small-town living. There’s comfort, safety, and community.”
Assembly member Cheryl Stickler said she is looking for someone who is “willing to make those community connections and is kind of an anchor for our town.”
Stickler said her ideal leader for the department would be someone like former police chief Heath Scott, who stepped down in 2023 after seven years in the role.
“He was totally approachable and didn’t have this posturing, puffed-up presence,” she said. “I think we want a police chief who will just embed himself or herself into our community. Just be a community member. Come and join the party.”
Haines Mayor Tom Morphet, who also spent some time talking to Boris, said he had some hesitations about Boris’s experience running a department.
“This job supervises five dispatchers and four officers. It’s not a small supervisory role,” he said.
Still, Morphet said Boris came across as fairly modest and introspective.
“I don’t know that that’s a bad thing in a town where we tend to have a lot of [anti]authoritarians in the citizenry,” Morphet said. “The citizenry in Alaska is generally anti-rule, anti-power, anti-tell me what to do.”