Transcript

[00:00:05] Anthony Flint: Welcome to Episode 3 of Season 7 of the Land Matters podcast. I’m your host, Anthony Flint. In our Mayor’s Desk series here at the Lincoln Institute, we interview municipal chief executives from around the world. Our latest conversation brings us all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska, a city of about 30,000 people, way up north near Russia, the gateway to the Arctic as it’s known, the second largest city in the state after Anchorage, and a metropolis that has been awarded the title of coldest city in America, having set a record low of minus 66 degrees Fahrenheit.

We’re talking with 44-year-old Mindy O’Neall, who recently replaced an incumbent and campaigned on themes including downtown revitalization, affordable housing, and public safety. She grew up in Iowa and drove a stick shift pickup truck up north, first working as an aide in the Alaska State Legislature, then the Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation and the Interior Gas Utility, and also founded Blue Canoe Media, a boutique communications and consulting firm.

She holds a BA in event planning and business communication from Iowa State University and an MA in professional communications from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where her research focused on governance and climate impacts on rural Alaska, including the relocation of Native communities. Prior to her election as mayor, she served on the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly and was executive director of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center, and also serves on the boards of the Alaska State Homebuilders Association and Alaska Municipal League.

She lives in downtown Fairbanks with her dog, Tito, who, as she pointed out, is the true official dog of Alaska, the mutt. I first met her at a program for mayors at Harvard and followed up with this interview.

For the uninitiated, including those of us in the lower 48, what kind of place is Fairbanks, and why did you want to be mayor?

[00:02:22] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: Well, thanks, Anthony, and thanks for inviting me onto the show. I get this question a lot, especially for the uninitiated, as you said. That’s cute. You’re right. Fairbanks really is an exotic place. I would say we’re the land of extremes. We are extremely cold in the winter. We’re extremely warm in the summer. Some people may be surprised to learn that we can get up to 90 to 100 degrees in the summer. The force of the sun, the feeling of the sun, is so direct that it is just something you have to experience. We have exotic animals, grizzly bears, and polar bears. We have extreme industry like mining and gas and oil development. We are definitely a place of extremes.

At the heart of it is the people. It’s these people who have grit and determination, and oftentimes this mindset of abundance, where we have so much, as far as so much light, so much darkness. Then, a lot of times, this mindset of scarcity as well, where we’re at the end of the line, we have three to four days of food security at any given time. There’s things that also come into play that really just demonstrate how much of an extreme environment we live in.

Yes, wanting to be mayor. I’ve been in Alaska for over 23 years. I’m originally from Iowa, so I’m a land dweller from the middle of the United States. I came up here, just like a lot of other folks, looking for adventure. If you’ve ever been to the Midwest, they say, “Why would you ever want to leave the land, the heartland?” I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a year. I just want to go check it out.” After a year, it was painfully obvious that there was so much more to discover to Alaska that I just had to stay. I made my way up to Fairbanks from Anchorage after being there for seven years. I worked in the legislature and started to work for an interior gas utility that brought natural gas to our town.

During that time, I was an untraditional student and went back to our flagship university at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and got a master’s in organizational development. I wrote my thesis on the politics of relocating Alaska Native villages due to climate change. At the time, I didn’t really realize how that was going to inform my career as much as it has, because after being a labor agent for the laborers. I was the executive director for the Cold Climate Housing Research Center. I spent the last four years doing that while also serving on the Borough Assembly.

One of the things that’s interesting about Alaska is we have seven boroughs that are like counties in the lower 48, and then we have cities within those boroughs. Fairbanks has a borough that has a governing body, which is the assembly, and a mayor. Then within the borough, there are two cities that have each their own mayor and each their own governing bodies. Now I am the mayor of the city of Fairbanks. I have a city council that’s a smaller council that’s located within the borough. The borough is about the size of New Jersey, with 130,000 folks in it. The city is 32,000 of those. Then the city located within the borough is the city of North Pole. They have about 2,500 folks in there.

Like a lot of places where you go from city to city in urban areas, you may or may not know what boundary you’re in. That can be sometimes a point of confusion. We always like to joke for a place that’s so against government and against overregulation, we have a lot of government regulating us.

After serving in the assembly for six and a half years, I started my public service during COVID. I think I had been appointed for about six months and then elected about four months before COVID happened. I really learned how to govern in an elected position through a screen. I do think that COVID was obviously and certainly a pivotal point in politics, but even just in the way that we communicate. That’s my passion, my heart and soul, is communication and journalism, and that sort of thing. We had a mayor that was on paper doing a fine job. He had gotten programs started and knew the city really well and led it, but he was very discriminatory to the Alaska Native population here.

After some comments and some blow-ups that he had on social media, I knew that if anybody was going to be able to beat him in an election, that I’d be able to do it. I just believe that public service is a privilege, and somebody who is in office has to have the respect of every population that is within their community. I’ve wrestled with this a little bit coming into office as, well, the last mayor, he wasn’t doing a bad job. He was actually doing a good job, but he wasn’t showing our community the respect.

I think sometimes we miss out on that key piece of public service is showing your community respect, even if you don’t understand them, even if you don’t agree with them. I think that we have lost that on a lot of levels of government these days. I believe in government. I believe that we have government for a reason. When you don’t have good governance, I do think that one of the benefits of being in this position in the last six months is being a female. This is the first time Fairbanks has had a female mayor in about two decades. I’m the fourth one since 1903.

It’s really touching to be able to be, and especially a young female in my 40s, leading this community and being a role model for other girls in our community to see that there’s somebody like them who treats a community with respect and can lead in an environment that is sometimes very hostile and sometimes very male-driven. That’s a long way of saying that’s how I ended up here.

[00:09:02] Anthony Flint: Everybody’s wrestling with affordability these days. One big part of that is housing. What are the policies that can help in your region, whether home buying or renting?

[00:09:14] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: I mentioned at the beginning that Fairbanks is at the end of the line. While that’s true, we also have an abundance of resources that are part of our economy. We have timber, we have renewable energy, we have access to gravel, and alternative methods such as mycelium. While we’re at the end of the road, we have these resources at our disposal to be innovative on how we approach housing. I think that those answers come in local manufacturing of our own resources, innovation, and then also building things like kind of part homes that have been tested for extreme environments.

We suffer from a housing stock that’s from the ’70s. Alaska really got its last big boom during the oil pipeline of the ’70s. What happened was there was such an explosion of Westerners coming up to the state that they built things the way that they knew how to build things, which was without a lot of insulation, built out of whatever they had. We suffer from very inefficient housing. When we talk about what affordable housing is, for us, it really has to include a component of energy efficiency, so we can even afford to heat our homes.

This year, we’ve had one of the coldest winters on record. I think it was the fourth coldest winter on record. We also got a remarkable amount of snow. It’s been very challenging for folks, especially now that oil prices are going up. We have about 1,200 folks in our community that are on natural gas. Everybody else is heating their homes with diesel fuel. If you think about that, we have folks who are getting delivery of diesel fuel to their homes, myself included. I live in the most urban part of our city.

Going back to affordable housing, it really does include this holistic look of what’s going to work and how we can be energy efficient with our housing, but also how we can use our local resources for innovation and how we can manufacture the resources that we have here. Secondly, and this is something that I think is really interesting, is this idea, this concept of building generational wealth outside of homeownership. That’s a model and a tool that I’d really like to explore more as we talk about how we’re building affordable housing in our community.

[00:11:45] Anthony Flint: This is this idea that not everybody has to buy a home. It’s perfectly fine to rent.

[00:11:50] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: Perfectly fine to rent, but then the next question is, how do renters gain generational wealth so they’re not just handing over money every month without anything in return? They get a house to live in, but there’s no equity in it after a while. In what ways — and I know there are models out there — when we’re building affordable housing, how can we lower the amount of investment for folks in a way that it might not come back to them for 30 to 50 years, but in 30 to 50 years, they’re on their second or third generation of family where they have security in their family in a form of tangible wealth?

[00:12:34] Anthony Flint: There’s also the community land trust model, where you have this more shared equity, and there’s limits on resale, but you still have it.

[00:12:43] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: I like that. There’s more and more folks talking about how to do this in innovative ways. I think typically building homes and housing has been the game or the business of large, wealthy developers. In our community, we just can’t really afford that. We don’t have enough folks for a large developer to make money here. When we start to rethink about who’s investing in our own community, and who can invest, then we start to, I think, build out that wealth better.

[00:13:17] Anthony Flint: The Lincoln Institute has been helping municipalities identify government-owned land that can be used for affordable housing. Do you see opportunities in that approach?

[00:13:29] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: Absolutely, I do. A few facts for you here. 60% of our land in Alaska is federal. 25% is owned by the state of Alaska. It’s about 580,000 acres. 10% is owned by Native corporations, and 1% is private. We have a lot of government land that’s available. Now, about 80 million of those acres are managed for conservation, but that’s still quite a bit of land left for us to use. I think what the Lincoln Institute is doing, exploring these different land-use models, including transportation and other components of community building, is fantastic. I can’t wait to get my hands on more of that information. I signed up for the newsletter.

We have a parking structure that has been mothballed for, gosh, probably five years. The university that used it ended up not needing it. They literally welded the doors shut, and this building has been sitting there deteriorating ever since. Through the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, who is a statewide housing financing bank, they purchased that parking garage and have put it out for bid for affordable housing. They worked with us, saying, “Okay, we own this now, but it’s right in the middle of your city. What do you want to do with this?” We walked through the options that we have. Do we want senior housing? Yes, we desperately need senior housing. Is this the right place? We don’t think so. Okay. Next option, affordable housing, high-end housing, two bedrooms, apartment. What is it that we need? Through that process, we’ve put out an RFP for a developer to then build two or three stories on top of that parking garage, therefore activating the space using, again, the parking garage for parking, covered parking, which is very important in Fairbanks, Alaska, but also getting units into the downtown core.

That’s one example. There’s a few others that we have ongoing in town, but that’s one example that I’m really eager to see how that plays out.

[00:15:48] Anthony Flint: What are the unique challenges of living with climate change in Alaska, and what, at the state and local level, can be done about it?

[00:15:57] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: They often call the Arctic the canary in the coal mine because we start to see the issues of climate change far beyond and far before the lower 48 or other parts of the world. The Arctic has been saying that something’s happening in our environment for quite some time. I mentioned before what we’ve noticed is we have more wind in Fairbanks, which means that we have more risk for summer fires, wildfires. In the winter, we’ve had more snow than usual.

It’s also been very cold, so colder than usual, which means that our ground will not thaw quickly, meaning that when the temperature gets hot in the air, what’s going to happen? It’s all going to melt into water, but there’s going to be nowhere for it to go because the ground hasn’t unthawed yet. Now we miss out on that water. We get lots of floods, and then we don’t have moisture in the ground, and so it’s more susceptible to wildfires in the summer. That’s just one instance of the cycle of how climate change has affected the interior.

I don’t think that there’s really much we can do about this now. It’s happening. We’re in a cycle of climatic disruption, for sure, but we can plan for it. We can plan for extreme events, so we know what we’re going to do when the power goes out and it’s negative 30 degrees. We know what’s going to happen when our river floods in the middle of our town and we’ve lost access to the hospital or to hotels. We know what to do when we have an ice event because we got three or four inches of rain on top of three or four feet of snow in the middle of winter, and how that affects the animals, the moose. How it affects our ability to hunt and fish and gather berries or medicinal foods.

I think planning is a very big part of how we are prepared because, honestly, you don’t know what’s going to happen from season to season. The other thing is with planning comes money. Alaska is a place where we do not collect sales taxes on a statewide basis. Some municipalities do — we do not, as the municipality of Fairbanks — and income taxes. We pay property taxes, and that’s all we pay. As we address these more and more climatic, dramatic events, it’s costing us more and more to repair the roads, costing more and more to protect the utilities that are above and below ground, and somewhere that’s going to have to come from funding.

We’re seeing less and less investment from the federal government for events like that. As Alaskans, it’s time for us to think really hard about how we want to protect and at what level we want to protect our assets that we have, and what level of commitment that comes from our own pocketbooks.

[00:19:04] Anthony Flint: Yes, leading into that, figuring some of this stuff out at the local level or the local and state level seems to be really important right now. How have you navigated being a mayor at a time when the federal government is reducing funding and more or less withdrawing from being a partner on so many issues?

[00:19:26] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: Yes. It seems like we continue to ask our employees to do more with less. At the same time, the public expects services to be modern. That means we have to invest in technology. A lot of times, we just don’t have the funding for that. It’s a tough spot, I got to say. I have all of these ideas and plans for being mayor. Then you come into the office and you’re like, “Okay, how am I going to make this work with the operations that we already have going, the way we want to provide services and make things more efficient for our public with less and less funding from the state and from the federal government?”

Again, I do think that we’re going to have to look at ways that we contribute to ourselves, and that comes back to the values that we hold as a community. We’re a place where tourists want to be because that’s also a big part of our economy. It’s tough. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I have two and a half more years to go. It’s definitely something I’m working on a lot, and how we do more with less and how we increase, or how we explain the value of good governance with putting our own skin in the game.

[00:20:43] Anthony Flint: Mindy O’Neall is mayor of Fairbanks, Alaska, the latest leader to be interviewed in the Lincoln Institute’s Mayor’s Desk series. We love talking to mayors, and we’ve compiled 20 of these interviews in a book, Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems, which includes a forward by Michael Bloomberg. Otherwise, Mayor’s Desk interviews appear in Land Lines magazine, in addition to most of them being broadcast here on the Land Matters podcast. You can find everything on the Lincoln Institute website. Just navigate to lincolninst.edu.

On social media, our handle is @landpolicy. Please go ahead and rate, share, and subscribe to Land Matters, the podcast of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. For now, I’m Anthony Flint signing off, until next time.

[00:21:41] [END OF AUDIO]