Editor’s note: This year the Chilkat Valley News partnered with KHNS on its election coverage in addition to hosting two candidate forums. A playlist of these profiles, as they are posted, can be found here.
This interview transcript has been edited for clarity and grammar.
Will Steinfeld: Doug Olerud, thanks for joining me. You’re running for mayor again this year. You were last mayor, was it three three years ago at this point?
Doug Olerud: Correct.
Tell me tell me why you’re jumping back into it.
When I didn’t run in 2023, I was worn down just dealing with the emotional impacts from the slide. Still recovering from COVID, needed a break. I’ve gotten that break and I’ve been able to sort out some things in my personal life that allow me some more time to reengage. And I think with some of the issues in front of the assembly now, I’ve got with my life experience, I’ve got a skill set that can help move some of those things forward.
The thing I’ve been observing with (Tom Morphet) is, I always see his truck parked outside his office all the time, and it got me thinking, being mayor, it doesn’t really have a job description. I’m sure you’ve had a lot of jobs in your life, and I would guess mayor has the least clear job description out of all of them. Tell me what you picture the job being for you.
By code, the job of the mayors is to run assembly meetings and represent the borough to state and federal agencies and elected officials, and just be the spokesperson for the borough.
But a big part of that is you’re also the conduit between the assembly and the administrative staff that are in the admin building. You’re in there many hours a day in non-public meetings and bringing that information back and sharing it not only with the assembly but also with the public. So helping the administrative staff in their job, but then also being a conduit and sharing that information with the assembly and the public is a big part. That’s where you spend most of your hours as mayor.
I honestly didn’t realize that, that you felt like your first term was mostly in that admin building. Is that what you expected going into the job the first time?
That is what I expected. The part that I didn’t expect was dealing with the landslide. None of us expected that. Nobody knew that was going to happen. I knew it was going to be abnormal, just because we were still in the recovery from COVID. You know, fall of 2020, still deep in that. So I knew it was going to be a little abnormal at that point, but then when the slide hit, that changed so much of what I’d hoped to do as mayor.
Things like working with staff, trying to improve things in the way that the borough deals with and interacts with the public, looking at economic development ideas: How the borough can be more efficient in the way they do things? How can we generate more tax revenue by increasing economic activity, not raising new taxes, not increasing the taxes we have, but just generate more economic activity? And as soon as the slide happened. I knew none of that was going to be happening because for the next three years, it was FEMA and Lutak Dock.
You had COVID and you had the slide. Do you feel like you have unfinished business that you started to work on, maybe on the economic development front or anything like that?
I don’t think I have anything that’s unfinished. I think there’s stuff that I didn’t get to start because the slide happened a month after. I was just still trying to figure out what the job entailed. It was my first time as mayor, and I was still learning that role when the slide happened. I remember one, I think it was February or March after the slide, and I had some idea that I thought was just brilliant that the borough should do. I went in to see Aleka, who was the clerk and also the acting manager at the time, and I said, “Hey, listen, I got this great idea,” and explained it to her, and she just paused and she’s like, “Yeah, that’s great, but who’s going to do it? Where’s the staff? I mean, she’s doing two to three jobs at the time, and doing all the FEMA paperwork, and that’s when I realized, like, yeah, nothing on a normal level is going to get done in the next three years because everybody’s resources and efforts are being put elsewhere.
What’s the breakdown for you in terms of thinking the borough government should be focusing on short-term stuff, like get the roads plowed, be solid on efficiency in the admin office, versus some kind of twenty, thirty year vision for turning the borough into something or turning the economy into something?
You have to do both. You can’t choose one or the other. You’ve got to make sure the day to day stuff is getting done, but then you also have to be planning for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road. That’s one of the things we do in our business. You’re trying to get the basic stuff on a daily basis done, but you also have to think, what’s this going to look like in five years, 10 years, 15 years, and be open to having those conversations, and then also looking backwards: what did we do in the past, and is that still effective now, or do we need to change the policies and procedures that we’re doing because of new technology, new population dynamics?
Do you feel like you have one of those twenty or thirty year visions in your head, enough to be able to describe?
No.
Are there parts of it that you (could describe)?
In very general terms, yes. I don’t have a complete roadmap on how to get there, but making sure that all the kids are getting a great education out of the school. Making sure that our seniors have resources necessary, that the young kids that want to come back have a job, have an ability to get back here and earn a living that allows them to buy a house, put down roots, and fill that school with kids.
Make sure our infrastructure is well taken care of, that we’ve got clean water, we’ve got a sewer treatment plant that works and serves the needs of the community, that our roads are in good shape, and that people feel like they can come to the borough office and and have a conversation about their needs and be treated in a kind and respectful way. I mean, it’s just general things that I think we should be looking at all the time.
Some of them are easier done than others.
What do you think are the easiest done, and what do you think are the hardest done?
Just the way you treat people, just have that respectful conversation with people, and make sure that when they come into the borough office, that the information they’re being given is very clear and precise.
There’s a lot of ambiguity in code. The way two people can interpret the same written word differently is a big factor in why we have some of the issues in front of the assembly, especially going through the planning commission. People interpret something in the comprehensive plan or in code two different ways, and you can get a lot of harsh words based on that.
I think getting through the permitting processes and trying to make that’s as clear and forthright as possible for people. So if they’re planning on building a house, building a business, it’s easy for them to understand what the procedures are in front of them. And as somebody that’s filed for building permits and looked at some of those things in the past, it’s not always as clear as I think it could be.
When I came to town, people all told me Haines has this reputation for the assembly being at odds with each other, for having it be a tough environment in (the assembly chambers). Have you ever seen a time when it wasn’t like that? When you saw the assembly working civilly and productively, like people hope it would?
Oh, without a doubt.
When was the last time?
I thought the three years that I was mayor, people got along very well.
What do you think was the difference between then, and before and after?
I think it’s just setting a standard for how you expect people to behave, and if people realize that this is the standard that the meetings are going to be conducted by, I think that’s the role of the mayor is to set that standard.
My three years weren’t the only time that’s happened. It’s happened numerous times in the past, but just making sure that the people that are on the assembly understand that they’re all equals when they’re sitting there, and that they need to treat each other with respect. They need to treat staff with respect, and they need to treat the public with respect. And it’s the mayor’s job to make sure that happens. You’re going to have times when some people get out of line a little bit or go overboard, and it’s the mayor’s job to rein that back in and also to set the example, set the standard that this is how we’re going to treat people.
One of the hard parts of the job I’ve observed is, they have the assembly code of conduct, but it’s not like middle school. You can’t send someone to the principal’s office. So if someone feels like someone else is violating the code of conduct, they might bring it up. But there’s no way to enforce it in any strict sense. What does it look like when you’re sitting in the chair when you say set a standard or rein it in? What does that actually look like in practice?
Well, the biggest thing is how you, how the mayor, how I engage with people. You address them respectfully. You listen to them. You’re engaged in their conversation. I think a lot of times when you’re looking down, you’re not paying attention to people that are speaking. I think it’s disrespectful, and I think by setting that standard to start with, if other people follow that, that helps. And then when you have somebody that is speaking disrespectfully, you interrupt them and let them know that’s not how we’re going to engage with people here.
If you want to talk, you have a right to talk, but you’re going to do it in a kind and respectful way. You can have a disagreement with somebody and still be respectful and kind. It doesn’t have to be shouting and name calling, and so I think just if you keep modeling that and you keep calling people out that aren’t meeting that standard, eventually people get the idea that this is how it needs to be done.
Yeah, in a funny way, I feel like that’s like the issue that has the strongest consensus behind it: trying to get the assembly to a point where it doesn’t always get as nasty in there as it might (currently) sometimes.
That’s a good goal to have. And not just at the assembly, but I see it in the community too. That there are times that people — the best way to put this is they just don’t treat people as respectfully as they should, just because somebody has a different opinion from them. I think a lot of that is with social media. It’s really easy to get siloed into areas, and you can sit behind a keyboard and you can type out nasty stuff about somebody that you disagree with and just hit send and and post it, and there’s no repercussions.
I just enjoy talking with people from a lot of different perspectives. I feel it gives me a better idea of the situation and looking at different ideas on how to move forward with it.
I’m curious about a kind of different thing. I think it’s more clear how a mayor has an impact on the kinds of things you’ve been talking about. When you were talking about young families, good schools, those more policy and assembly oriented things, what are the levers that you think you can pull on, what are the actual ways that you can have an impact on that process?
I think one of the biggest things is engaging with state and federal officials, whether elected or now just your government workers that are on those levels, on what are options out there? How do we change the dynamics? Take education. How do we look at that? I was reading an article in the Seattle Times this last week that there were teachers were going to go on strike before the first day of school, but in the last year, they and the superintendent of schools said that they had they were going broke, and the the columnist wrote that in the last year they had approved $3.2 billion in tax increases to fund the schools. He goes, how are we paying an extra $3.2 billion in our? We still don’t have enough to fund the schools, and I’ve got a great working relationship with Superintendent Boron, and having those conversations with her. That first of all, I think how do you get enough kids in town? Because the more kids you have in the school, the more money you get from the state, and so that helps offset the local contribution on that. So how do we make sure that the curriculum is the best for everybody? How do we make sure we got more jobs in the community? But a lot of that just comes back to I can’t change the number of people moving to Haines. There’s no magic button to say, okay, we’re going to create 10 new jobs this next year. But as mayor, I can have conversations with our state senator, state representative, our national senators, national representative, the governor’s office, people’s like, how can we work on policies that, at those levels, that help the borough achieve those ends?
Are those conversations you had in your first term as mayor?
Yes.
What did that look like? Were you going in person to to the capital?
I made one trip to Washington D.C. We made a couple trips down to Juneau. A lot of those were on fundraising trips, trying to get money for Lutak Dock, Public Safety Building, but a lot of it also we’re talking about education. Also at Alaska Municipal League, you have a lot of people there that you can talk to from other communities and representatives from different agencies.
You have a lot of times you’ll have fact finding groups coming from Washington D.C. from our delegation and having those conversations with them and saying, listen, these are the challenges we have. How are other communities dealing with those? And then, and and again, getting back to the same thing that I’ve talked about from the beginning, having conversations with the community. What is that? Because my idea of what a successful school looks like could be totally different than yours. So, how do we bring that whole? Community viewpoint into making the school district the best school district we can have. I think it’s already really good, but let’s improve it.
Did you ever see anything specific come out of those conversations? Like, is it as simple as you have a conversation that translates into 10 million bucks?
Yes and no. We did have conversations that led to money getting passed at both the state and federal level for the public safety building. Not so much because we and also I think they got some. Can’t remember if we got anything for increased. I don’t think they did anything while I was mayor to increase the base student allocation, we talked about it with them, but it depends on the makeup of the legislature and what they’re because we only had one vote in the Senate, one vote in the in the state house, and there’s a lot of others to talk to down there as well,
Yeah, just building those relationships and and continuing to have that dialog because there’s a lot of things that go beyond just the dollars, as far as how good the education system is.
Yeah, this is kind of speculation, but I would guess that there’s some part of those conversations that are you being an advocate and speaking strictly about the grant at hand or whatever the issue is. But I would also guess when you’re in person in Juneau and talking to legislators, you have other conversations, and at least when I spent some time in the Capitol, people ask about, you know, what do you think about this issue in Haines? Where do you think Haines is going? So I would guess that you have some ability to have a broader conversation…
Absolutely
When you’re there, whichever capital, DC or Juneau, it’s usually much more focused on a couple issues. But when you get their staffers, or when the elected officials are in Haines, and you have a chance to take them on a windshield tour or something, then you can be much more broad based on the things that you can talk about. You’ve got more time with them. They’re not rushing to their next meeting. They don’t have a floor vote to get to right away. They don’t have a committee meeting to get to.
You’ve got them for an hour or two, three hours, whatever the time is in Haines, and then it it can be much more impactful because you can show them the public safety building, and they can walk in there and like, oh my God, this thing’s falling apart, and so being able to engage in that, and then while you’re driving between places, you can talk about Fort Seward, some of the issues that there’s that happen in Fort Seward. You can show them some of the transportation issues we have with roads. We can talk about what education should look like in ways that we can combine local, state, and federal resources to improve education. Yeah, so it happens in a lot of different ways.
Those kinds of interactions with elected officials at higher up levels, I wonder if they take on so much importance because we’re so reliant on outside money for our water sewer infrastructure, schools, hard infrastructure, docks – you name it. Do you think that’s a sustainable revenue mix for the borough?
No. You look at the amount for our major infrastructure needs, how reliant we are on the state and federal government-it’s pretty scary, and especially when you look at the state budget and the federal budget, and how both of them are fairly strapped at the moment. They both seem to, especially the federal government, continues to spend a lot of money, but with $40 trillion in debt, I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last, and for a lot of our big projects, it’s where a good chunk of the money comes from. And so, trying to figure out ways that we can supply more of those funds locally is a key thing for me.
Going back to what I said earlier, it’s not raising the level of taxes; it’s getting more people invested in the economy. Whether that’s more tourists coming through, how can we create more jobs? Like you know, Harry Reitze out at Haines Packing Company. He’s done a great job moving the amount of fish that he does through here. If you look at where we’d be if he hadn’t started that up, and that raw fish tax was going to Sitka or Petersburg instead of Haines Borough, a significant amount of income.
You look at Zen Bath Works, and they’re hiring people and shipping stuff all over the world. The brewery, the distillery, just these people that have these ideas, Woolhaven. You know, they’re making products here. How do we get that entrepreneurial spirit into more people and be able to support them as a community as they push forward with that? Because each one of those small little nuggets of economic development helps all of us.
How do you think that translates into borough revenue directly? Is it a sales tax thing?
It’s a sales tax thing. It’s a property tax thing, and the people that are here, they’re charging sales tax on the stuff that they sell retail. But then, they’re also buying stuff at the hardware stores, grocery stores. Yeah, it’s both of them. They’re improving their buildings so their building’s worth more, so you get more property tax off of it. They’re building a house, increased property tax, and more times you get that. And then if they’re able to grow it, and then they start hiring more people to help them, then it just keeps ramping up with more revenue.
Do you think that there are other things stopping other barriers between Haines and having more of those year-round jobs, besides just you know, you talk about encouraging entrepreneurial spirit.
Transportation is the biggest thing. You’ve spent winter months in Haines. You know how hard that can be, and so if you’re trying to get people to move here that want to be flexible, they want to take a vacation. Just the barriers to getting in and out of Haines for five six months out of the year is a real chore, and a lot of people don’t want to endure that. I know several people that have left in the last six, seven years, and that was one of the main reasons that, for medical and travel reasons, visiting family, having their family visit them, it’s just not sustainable.
They didn’t want to deal with that anymore, and they went south where they can take care of all those things much quicker, and so trying to come up with what does that new transportation system look like? Since the the state doesn’t seem to be wanting to invest in ferries, we got some the state got a bunch of money from the federal government for ferries, but who knows how long it’ll be until those ferries come online, and whether how suited they’re going to be for Southeast Alaska, and so being part of that conversation to make sure that what they’re building gives us better access in and out of here.
Are there types of economic growth that you’re worried about? Like some people are worried about various types of heavy industries. Some people are worried about various types of tourism growth? Is there anything you want to steer the borough away from?
I wouldn’t say steer the borough away from, but I think just evaluating the cost-benefit ratio of all of them. I mean, there’s there’s a ton of different industries out there that they can they can provide a lot of income to the borough, but they also, with anything, there’s going to be costs associated with it, and so making sure we’re we’re not heavy on the costs and light on the revenue, and making sure that it’s still anything that we do on economic development is still something that supports the way of life that those of us that live here for now and for a long time.
We still want to go out and hike. We still want to be able to fish. We still want to get our berries. You know, we still want to have that somewhat quiet and tranquil community. But you have to give up if you want more revenue. If you want more economics, you have to give up something. An economy is not a zero-based game. You’re exchanging one thing for another, and so it’s trying to figure out what we’re willing to give up in exchange for more revenue. And that’s a large community because what I would be willing to give up is different than what you would be willing to give up, or Joe down the street is willing to give up. And so we need to have those public conversations to make sure that the direction we’re going in is one that benefits the most amount of people and disturbs the least amount of people.
When you need to figure out what people’s individual cost benefit analyses are, how do you have these conversations? I feel like I’ve sat through a lot of conversations about things like the dock, the mine, whatever it is, that are productive. But when it comes down to actually making decisions, people have their interests, and it becomes a lot harder than just the initial dialogue.
Oh, without a doubt. Yeah.
Have you seen anything at the assembly level in the last three years, last six years, where you felt like there was legislation that was written that had that kind of middle ground that you’re looking for?
Probably, I can’t name anything off the top of my head.
One thing I think about is the safety belt ordinance, and I don’t know enough about the specifics to say, but how they were pitching it was a lot like what I’m hearing from you: that there needs to be an understanding of maximizing revenue and minimizing costs.
It ended up being kind of getting stuck in some ways. Severance tax is on the ballot this fall, but you know there were legal challenges that the lawyer had to comb through… the biggest thing to me was they had a plan for a big public comment period, and almost no one came in to comment on it.
The hard part of that is the way borough meetings are set up, whether it’s a town hall, whether it’s assembly meeting, committee meeting, that there’s never a chance for a conversation. You get to say, Will gets to stand up and give his opinion. Joe gets to stand up and say his opinion. Everybody gets to stand up and share an opinion, and then after a month, two months, whatever, at the end of the meeting, the assembly gets to share their opinion, and then they vote on it.
There isn’t currently a forum where you and I can have, or you and somebody else, me and somebody else can have a back and forth dialog where you state your opinion, and I can say, “Well, Will, what about this? What about this? Have you thought about this? And you can do the same with me. So right now, there there’s there isn’t that form of dialog, and trying to figure out how we can do that, I think would be very helpful in moving some of these things forward, because you could have that open discussion with people about what their fears are, what what they think is positive about it, and why why they don’t like it, and because it could be because you used to live down by the dock in Ketchikan, and you saw five six ships coming in every single day, and it was loud. It was noisy all summer, and it totally ruined your life. That’s a very valid reason for not wanting cruise ships in Haines. But then you have the other person that wants to start a gift shop, but there’s not enough people coming into town to support the gift shop, and so like, okay, maybe I’m going to have to leave because I can’t make enough money to pursue my passion or as an artist or whatever. There’s not enough people here selling it, so they move to another place where there is more economic activity. So that’s but having those conversations, and I don’t know. One of the things I thought about is if the borough would sponsor, I don’t know, having kids from the debate team, or just having two people, and have it here at the Chilkat Center, and just like, okay, this is the topic. Let people come in and have two, four people, or whatever, have a back and forth conversation, and then take questions from the audience and have somebody. Well, I was wondering about this, and have the people up there debate it. I don’t know if that would make a difference or not, but I think having more of those in-depth conversations rather than you have three minutes or six minutes, whatever it is, to state your opinion and then move on, I think that would be more effective if we could find a way to do that and still have that at a at a public meeting where people get to have their say. I think that’s very important.
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do that. Haven’t figured it out. So if anybody’s got any ideas, love to hear them.
I feel like you seem like a big believer in positive dialogue getting us somewhere. And I wonder if you ever feel like there are issues where people just have different interests. That no matter how much they talk, they can agree to disagree, but they’re not going to find common ground.
Oh, absolutely.
How do you address that?
People have different motives in life. Some people are happy to live in a dry cabin and haul their water and have firewood as their main source of heat, and they’ve got a garden and subsistence fishing, and they don’t need a lot of a lot of money to sustain that lifestyle. They’re extremely happy with that. Absolutely, have at it if that’s what makes you happy.
There’s other people that want to have a 5000 square foot house, and they want three or four vehicles and a bunch of ATVs and snow machines and stuff, and that requires a much higher level. Those two are probably not going to agree on economic development in Haines, but there should be spaces for both of those people in the community, even if they don’t agree. How do we, how do we take the concerns and desires of both of those groups of people, and meld them into something that works for us.
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s got to be the hardest challenge of government. Like, helicopters, for example.
There are people who don’t want them, people who do, and it’s just hard to live right next to each other if you have those different viewpoints.
You look at our community, and we have to figure out ways to communicate better and develop a plan moving forward. All of our costs are going up. Everything’s going up. The school costs are going up. Electricity is going up. That’s going up for the borough too. And so the borough needs to, we either need to cut services, which some people want to do, or we need to increase the amount of revenue coming into the borough to afford the things that we become accustomed to.
I don’t want to raise taxes. I don’t want to raise the level of taxes at all. The best way to do that is to have more economic activity taking place in the borough. That brings you more sales tax. That brings you more property tax, and that helps if you have more economic opportunities happening in the same footprint. So you’ve got the same sunk costs on that footprint, the more money you have to pay for these rising costs.
Do you think there’s anything the borough is doing right now that’s inhibiting more economic development? Like, why don’t we just have more economic development right now happening?
There’s several things with that. First of all, we are limited in the kind of economic development that’s going to happen in Haines, and we don’t have a large flat spot for a data center. Thankfully. I don’t think a data center would fit in Haines very well at all.
You have the transportation issue. You have the high cost of doing business here. A lot of these things are outside the control of the borough, but if we can have a great community that people want to live in, that is responsive to the needs of the residents and the businesses, and have a straightforward permitting process that stays consistent, so people know what they’re getting into when they’re when they’re moving here, when they want to start a business, I think there is room for economic growth.
If you would have told me, getting back to Zen Bath Works, if you would have told me when they started that, seriously, you’re going to sell hot tubs if you’re going to sell these all over the world. Shut up, that’s never going to happen, and it did.
How do we support the people that some people would say they’re a dreamer, or people, but the entrepreneurs, the people that have that small idea, and they want, then they just gonna grind at it, grind at it, grind on it, and they build it into something that’s amazing. And it’s you look at the brewery, you look at the distillery, you look at these businesses that people are starting here in Haines and have slowly grown over the years, and now they’re center points of our community. How do we find the next person that wants to do that and give them that nudge and support to follow their dreams and to make that happen?
I have two last questions for you. The first one is, do you think that there’s anyone currently being underrepresented in the borough government in the assembly? Anyone that you want to go in there and advocate for specifically?
I wouldn’t say any specific group because the thing that I’ve always told people, and this goes back to when I was in assembly. As soon as you get elected, you’re representing everybody in the community. You need to be open to hearing from every person in the community, and it drives me crazy when somebody in a meeting is saying, “my constituents want this.”
It’s like, shut up. Once you get elected, you’re not in a district like when we’re sending senators to Washington D.C. Here, since it’s area wide that you’re being voted on, you have no idea who voted for you and who didn’t vote for you, and so you represent everybody that comes to every meeting, everybody in the community. And I hope people look at it that way when they do get elected, who represent everybody, and you have to listen to all of them.
Last question I have for you: You’re running against Jan Hill. I asked her this as well. What’s something that you admire about Jan?
Jan has done so much for the community. She’s been on the assembly. She’s been mayor for three terms. I think just her desire to help the community and her willingness to give of herself, you know, with her leading the dancers, greeting all the cruise ships and stuff. She’s just a terrific ambassador for the community, and I’ve got the most respect for Jan
Doug, thanks for joining me.