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.
You can find KHNS’ coverage, including audio-only excerpts of these conversations here.
We’re hosting a forum for assembly candidates on Friday, Sept. 25 at 6:30 p.m. in the Chilkat Center. It will also air live on KHNS, 102.3 locally.
Beau Bradley, thank you for joining me. Tell me a little bit about who you are and why you’re running for assembly this year.
Yeah, thank you for having me. My name is Beau Bradley, and I am one of the co-owners of the Bookstore here in Haines on Main Street. I’m an emergency management professional with years of experience in public service and public safety. I’m also someone who is a huge supporter of nonprofits and have been involved in volunteering in the nonprofit space for a long time, including 10 years of board-level experience with different community-based nonprofits. So community is something that really means a lot to me.
Yeah, is there anything specific about this time in your life, or this time in what you’re seeing in town, that’s made you want to get involved in this way?
I think part of it is I have the capacity in my day-to-day schedule, and the other part of it is that I think we need more representation for younger people and young families and small business owners, and I think that the assembly as a whole should represent a broader section of the community.
Do you think there are obstacles that prevent young people or small business owners from getting involved?
Definitely. I think time is a big part of it. Like I know moving forward, if I am elected onto the assembly, the summers are going to be a little challenging. I’m going to have to lean on Zane, my partner and co-owner of the bookstore, and our employees and other folks a lot more for bookstore things. But I think that the barriers that people face here to housing and employment and childcare and all of that that faces young people can inhibit their ability to have that time to volunteer, attend extra meetings, or sit around and spend hours doing research on different topics that are coming up, yeah.
I want to get into all the assembly stuff. But first I’m curious about how you balance — are you currently working in emergency management?
No, I stepped away from that soon after taking over the bookstore, just because I was ready for a change in my career and wanted to step out of that and do something more local. The first year or so that I lived here, I was doing that and working remotely from home, and I didn’t get to interact with people the way that I do now, and I didn’t get to participate in the day-to-day. So it was just kind of lonely to be at home on my computer all the time.
How is Haines compared to what you were expecting when you moved here?
You know it’s all over the place, It’s like it’s better than I expected. It’s different than I expected. I have two aunts that live here, and so my first exposure to Haines was coming to visit them. And then my last job in emergency management was with FEMA, I worked on the wildfire side, so not directly with Haines for anything, but I had seen kind of stuff from the 2020 landslides, and taking a course about that and the impacts of emergency management needs on rural communities and rural first responders. And so, I kind of had this very emergency-focused and then family-focused view of here. But there’s just something about the nature and the community, and just in my visits, the way that people would come up and interact with you, and remember who you were, and ask you questions about, not just what you do for work, but kind of what you like to do and what you care about, and community here seems deeper, and so that’s something that really drew us into moving up here.
I feel like in my also-brief time living in Haines, a lot of people that have been involved in borough government and on the assembly and whatnot, a lot of them have been longtime residents. They’ll say they’ll be sitting up there and saying, you know, I was here 40 years ago, and this is something we did. What do you think it is about having representation from young people or from small business owners that you think the assembly is currently missing out on?
Yeah, I think it’s just a different perspective. I think a lot of times we have to kind of talk to the people that are impacted by the issues that we’re facing to be able to understand what hurdles they’re facing and what needs to be overcome. And so I think having access to the voices of younger people, or for me in particular, I work right on Main Street, and so people come in from all parts of the community when they’re going grocery shopping or when they have other tasks in town, and so I just kind of get to have more candid conversations with people about their day-to-day and what struggles they’re dealing with, and so I think having the opportunity to bring those voices directly to the assembly is something that there could be more of.
What do you think are the big issues that are on the assembly’s plate these days?
Yeah, I mean, besides the importance of critical infrastructure and ensuring that we have infrastructure that is not only affordable for us to build, but maintain and service to make it have longevity. But I think that’s one everyone is really focused on and aware of.
I think some of the the social issues that impact young families, like lack of access to childcare and early childhood education, especially losing Chilkat Valley Preschool recently, is a huge concern, and in addition to that, the lack of affordable housing and the impacts that that has on how many jobs people have to work, or the seasonality of people’s employment, and and trying to fit everything they need to do into 24 hours in a day, and take care of their kids, and take care of their home and property and pets and everything else.
Yeah, I think with the possible solutions for those issues like childcare, or I kind of figure you’re talking about the (Lutak Dock) when you talk about critical infrastructure, I think there are a lot of people with ideas about what can be done, but I think another question is how to actually get those ideas done given the constraints of the assembly. I’m wondering how much you’ve been watching how the assembly has been going about its business and what you’ve been seeing on that front.
The meetings I haven’t been able to attend so far, I’ve been watching retroactively online, and so it’s been interesting to be able to go through that way and be able to stop and kind of pause and look up things in the interim. And I know that that’s not a luxury that one would have sitting on the assembly, but it’s fascinating to me — I’m thinking of how to word this…
I wonder how many people watch recorded assembly meetings for pleasure.
Probably the same amount that read borough code for fun, which I do too. I think it ties into kind of like my last job. That was a big part of it, was interpreting public policy and recreating public policy and and making needs of the community and of public entities fit within the constraints of that, and so I think that’s a something that is really interesting and intriguing to me, and something I hope to be able to translate into borough assembly work.
Do you think there’s anything specific about how the assembly’s been deliberating or writing policy that you’d hope to change?
I’m interested in having conversations with the current assembly members on how they’re targeting kind of the the impacts of their policies and how their ordinances and how they’re looking at all of the possible impacts of of the decisions they’re making when it comes to taxes or policies or bonds or spending money or going into debt. I’m curious how that process works, and I don’t want to pretend to know how they’re all working on that now, but it’s definitely something that I’d like to chat about and figure out a way to move forward.
Are there other ways you’d want to assess the impacts of policies?
Yeah, I think it’s important we continue to open conversation more so than just a few minutes in assembly meetings. I think we should host more public forums and more opportunities for the community to truly share what they think. Because, like specifically for childcare and early childhood education, no one knows more what those struggles and hurdles are than the educators and the teachers and the families themselves that are dealing with it. So I think giving them the opportunity to speak up about what they’re going through and what they’d like to see happen would be a great way for us to kind of crowdsource or group think some potential solutions.
I feel like what I’ve been hearing from (childcare providers) is just that the economics of providing that service are really difficult right now for whatever reason or for a number of reasons. And what I heard Chilkat Valley Preschool saying at the assembly in the past year is, “we just need some kind of monetary support from the borough.” Do you think there’s some other, more deft policy solution, or is it just a matter of finding the money?
Well, part of it, we did just get the million-dollar federal grant for early childhood education, and I think part of it is finding the most responsible and fruitful way to use that and put that to work for the families here in the Chilkat Valley.
But I think that we also have to look into creative solutions like maybe space sharing or donated space. I know that the economics of running this and having staff that’s educated in the right part of childcare, whether it’s like early preschool education or early-ed in general, and so I think finding ways to either recruit that talent, finding ways to support the people that we have getting that credentialing or getting that certification, and finding ways to minimize some of those other costs … I just think it’s a multifaceted issue where we’re not going to be able to solve it with one lump sum because the issue is still going to persist past that funding, and it is an issue across the whole U.S. It’s not just an Alaska or Haines issue.
If grants don’t keep materializing, is there a sustainable way to fit that into the budget? The borough has spent from savings the past two years, last year much more significantly than this year. But it seems like the consensus is money is pretty tight in the budget. Is there a way to fit childcare in there?
That’s a great question. Not being on the assembly currently and not having the super intricacies of how they have and why they’ve budgeted certain things the way they are, I think that’s something that I definitely want to kind of learn more about before I speak on it. … I know there’s a meeting coming up about the borough’s permanent fund, and I’m curious to learn more about that and kind of the different financing and revenue options that we do currently have because I have some familiarity with it, but there’s a lot I still have to learn.
One thing I’m curious about is, you talked a little bit about getting more younger voices on the assembly, and childcare I think is an issue that I guess most directly affects young families. Do you feel like there are trade-offs that have to be made between the borough putting its resources towards serving the younger half of the population versus the older half? One thing I think of here is we have the senior property tax exemption on the ballot this fall, and when I talk to experts, they say that’s exactly what it is: It’s a trade-off between how much you’re taxing elders and how much you’re taxing young people.
I think it’s hard to answer that directly, young versus old. I think important things to note on this are that we have the highest mean age of any population of any borough in Alaska. Yeah, and so the majority of our residents are older, and so it’s hard for me to find sustainability in giving a blanket tax break to the largest sector of our population. I think that any breaks or anything we’re doing to help should be needs-based and through an application versus just kind of across the board. But I do, I do think there needs to be more balance there, for sure.
When you say needs-based, would that be in terms of income?
Yeah, income, or I guess, I’m not sure exactly what every factor going into that should be, but I definitely think that if there are people that can’t afford to stay here, this tax break would help them stay and be able to be an active part of the community. That’s more important than us losing all of our children and the ability to have school and education here.
Something I hear people talk about with young families is it seems like one school of thought is, it’s a lack of year round jobs that prevents young families from staying. Do you think there’s some kind of mix that you like? If you have a 20-year plan for Haines, where you want the economic mix of year on jobs to be, do you have that kind of vision in your head?
I don’t know if this directly answers your question, but I think that we need to continue to build a diverse base as far as the sectors of our economy here, and I think that talking about tourism and childcare and all of these things are very, very important. But we need to also look at the longevity of that and the jobs that are made from that, and what is year-round employment. Like, we have a lot of different opportunities, I think, to create either trades, apprenticeships or opportunities for people to learn from the craftsmen or the people that we have. We have a need for a lot of trade work here, and I think there’s a lot of opportunities for us to kind of expand how we’re training or teaching or what the opportunities are for people growing up here to stay here and be a part of the community.
I think for example, one of the things that specifically I thought about, and this is when we’re talking about the state forest and forest management and and timber sales, and I think that we have such great local assets in logging and milling and timber harvesting, and I think that using those to create either finished projects like firewood or construction materials helps to keep that money and that intention in the borough, and I think it also helps to create local year-round jobs, and not just jobs in the labor, but also in management, in administration. And I think looking into all these different sectors, as to how we can create more jobs, is a big part of it. And I think tied into that is the borough support of nonprofits, because our nonprofits are the source of a lot of our essential services around here, and also create year-round jobs and opportunities across sectors.
I was curious when you were talking about local timber. Where do you think the assembly can exercise power to influence that? It seems like one answer is nonprofits. Is there anything else?
I think that’s a good question. And the way you worded [it], I don’t know that I have a direct answer. But I think the assembly has the ability to create policy and create opportunity for how we want to move forward, and maybe not put that into operations because that’s much more, like, the other part of the government under the manager and borough employees. But having the ability to create where our funding goes and how we can use that to invest back into ourselves and into the future of the town, I think is a huge part of that,
I think a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about[is] kind of hot topics that have been in the conversation. Do you think there’s anything that isn’t being talked about right now that should be?
Let’s see. Not specifically. I think there’s a lot of issues that we’ve scratched the surface on or started talking about that are a part of the comprehensive plan, and I think we need to continue to use that as a guiding document and see where we can go with the input we’ve already gotten from the community and continue to solicit that input, but I think just aligning where we’re moving with that and focusing on that is a huge part of us moving forward as a collective whole versus as one issue or one person.
Are there any issues where you have something you’re most excited to bring forward as a solution? Something that you just think is a really good idea that people haven’t proposed yet?
You know, I don’t know if there’s anything I have that I think that no one’s proposed yet. I think more so than just generating new ideas, I think one of my strengths is in active listening and hearing what people have to say, and trying to use that to creatively problem solve. And I think there are definitely ideas that I have, but I’d rather not speak on them until I fully research the impacts of what I’m saying. But I really pride myself in hearing all sides of an issue and finding a way to have those different sides communicate to work and move forward. And I think that’s something that I could also bring to the assembly is more of that intermediary versus us versus them or you versus me, that a lot of local governments tend to fall into.
Have you seen that with other local governments?
I, yeah, yes. I think that there’s definitely that level in other local governments. I’ve worked in county-level government in a couple other places I’ve lived, and there are which – I guess county is the borough equivalent, so similar level – and it is not as an assembly, as more of an emergency management or public safety role. But you see the insights, and you see the meetings and conversations, and I think it’s really easy, especially on the hot topics, to kind of get blinders from what you think should happen. And I think I can have all of the ideas and all of the like potential answers in the world that I think I have, but what I want isn’t as important as what the community wants as a whole and the direction the community wants to go in. And so I think that is the important part of what to focus on there.
Yeah, what does that look like in practice? Like when you’re sitting up on the dais and it’s some issue where people … have really contrasting interests or opinions. What do you actually do and say to try and bring people together?
I think part of that is being proactive, and since you get the information of what is coming out ahead of time, going and talking to community members and kind of soliciting feedback before the meeting and trying to understand and research all of those sides, and then in the meeting itself, being able to to point kind of back to this like statistic or factual survey or comment from someone in the community, and being able to use that as kind of a redirection versus just hypotheticals could be a way to do that.
Interesting. I kind of want to take that and apply it to two big issues — cruise ship stuff, Global Ports, and Lutak dock as well. It seems like there are going to be really big decisions to be made, like right when the new assembly is seated.
I’m wondering if on either of those two issues, you’ve seen things in recent months that you would have approached differently, or I guess your approach for if you have to deal with that right after you’re seated.
I don’t know if I have a direct answer for that. I think, I mean, there are definitely things that are going to need to be addressed and discussed. And I think that we should ensure that we have the access to Lutak Dock, for example, to ensure we have access to our food, to our goods and products that come through there, including our fuel.
We need to make sure that it’s safe and functional. And I think focusing on what we need instead of the hypotheticals of what we could have, and going back to earlier in our conversation, focusing on what we can afford and what we can afford to maintain are really important, so that we don’t wind up in this position again and again and again.
I think that understanding where funding is coming from, understanding how the bonds or debts that we might be discussing going into to work on these projects. I think the whole picture has to be addressed and looked at instead of jumping into options just because they could close this chapter and move forward.
Are you thinking specifically about the design selection from April?
I guess I was more directly talking about the topic that was recently brought up concerning revenue bonds and using that as a way to potentially fund (the dock project). And I think we need to be sure if that’s something that we’re thinking about, that we’re looking at how we’re going to pay back what we need to make to do that a year, and whether or not that’s feasible. And that’s just one example. I’m not necessarily opposed to it or for it. I just, I think we need to consider all the implications of it before we agree to move forward.
What do you think could go wrong if the borough bonds for this?
My fear is that we’ll bond for it in a way that we won’t have the revenue to make up what we have to every year, and so it’s just going to continue. We’ll default on it, or we’re going to continue to have to move backwards, or what have you, because we’ll owe more money … It’s the longevity and sustainability of how we’ll pay for that is my biggest concern.
One thing I was hearing from people is there is a difference of opinion on how large or expensive of a dock the borough should go for. But it seems like with new information from the contractors, that even the cheapest options they’re proposing are over budget.
Do you think there’s a way to not bond for this?
You know, I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know enough about the different bonds to know what the right answer is, but it’s something that I want to continue to look into and have conversations about. And even the special assembly meeting on the dock, what Jila brought forward and her insight on the different accounts and savings and what we have, I think, is really important, and so I want to kind of continue to understand that.
One thing that I was interested in from that meeting was one assembly member seemed to be saying, with respect to the borough’s engineers, we’ve hired them because they’re experts, and we’re not experts — they are. We’ve hired them for this purpose. We should trust what they have to say and trust their expertise.
And then another assembly member was saying, our job is to listen to the expertise and then provide oversight and ask questions. Where do you stand on experts? How do you manage that relationship?
I think it’s definitely important to get the information from the experts, but I also think it’s important to ask questions because there can always be a disconnect between what they’re saying and what we’re understanding they’re saying, especially when it comes to lingo or specific, like the experts have more technical expertise in these realms than we do, and so I just think it’s really important to understand where they’re coming from and what they’re saying instead of just saying yes and agreeing to everything.
There was one question at the assembly meeting where someone asked something about cost estimating, and then the engineer said, “I really can’t explain it to you. It’s really technical. You just have to trust us.” How do you approach that kind of situation?
That’s a great question. I think that there’s definitely, again, that leniency of, this is an expert who understands what they’re talking about, but I still think there’s due diligence, especially when it comes to us being sure we can pay what we’re agreeing to pay.
So I think I see where they’re coming from, and I also recognize what (Paul Wallis) was saying about that they can give an estimate, but what the actual contractors and equipment and materials come up to is going to be different because it’s going to be after this permitting process, et cetera, time and money and inflation and all of that. But I think we still have to ask the questions to understand what we’re getting ourselves into.