Determination and Disruption in Fairbanks

Mindy O’Neall, 44, was elected the 53rd mayor of Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2025, flipping the seat from Republican to Democrat for the first time in a decade and becoming the fourth female municipal chief executive in the city’s history.

The Iowa native drove a stick-shift pickup truck to Alaska to look for adventure 23 years ago—landing first in Anchorage, where she worked as an aide in the state legislature, and then in Fairbanks, home to roughly 30,000 people including the Fort Wainwright military base. She worked at the Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation and the Interior Gas Utility, served as a labor business representative, and founded Blue Canoe Media, a boutique communications and consulting firm.

At the University of Alaska Fairbanks, O’Neall earned a master’s in communication, researching governance and climate impacts in rural Alaska. 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 boards of the Alaska State Homebuilders Association and Alaska Municipal League. She campaigned on the issues of downtown revitalization, affordable housing, and public safety. She lives in downtown Fairbanks with her dog, Tito, who she pointed out is the true official dog of Alaska, the mutt.

This interview is also available as a Land Matters podcast.

Anthony Flint: For the uninitiated, what kind of place is Fairbanks? And why did you want to be mayor?

Mindy O’Neall: I would say we’re the land of extremes. We are extremely cold in the winter. Some people may be surprised to learn that we can get up to 90 to 100 degrees in the summer. We have exotic animals, grizzly bears and polar bears, and we have extreme industry, like mining and gas and oil development. At the heart of it is the people … who have grit and determination and oftentimes this mindset of abundance … [and a] mindset of scarcity as well. We’re at the end of the line. We have three to four days of food security at any given time.

I’ve been in Alaska for over 23 years. I’m originally from Iowa, and 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 heartland? And I said, don’t worry, I’ll be back in a year. I just want to go check it out. And, after a year, it was painfully obvious that there was so much more to discover to Alaska that I just had to stay.

One of the things that’s interesting about Alaska is we have seven boroughs, that are kind of like counties in the lower 48. And then we have cities within those boroughs, and so Fairbanks has a borough that has a governing body, which is the assembly, and a mayor, and then within the borough, there are two cities…. We always like to joke that for a place that’s so against government and overregulation, we have a lot of government.

I started my public service during COVID…. We had a mayor that was on paper doing a fine job. But he was very discriminatory to the Alaska Native population here, and after some comments and blow-ups on social media … 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 … [a] 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 do think that one of the benefits of being in this position is being a female. This is the first time Fairbanks has had a female mayor in about two decades, and I’m the fourth one since 1903 … a young female in my 40s, leading this community and being a role model for girls in our community to see that there’s somebody like them … in an environment that is sometimes very hostile and sometimes very male-driven.

AF: Everybody’s wrestling with affordability these days, and one big part of that is housing. What are the policies that can help, in your region, whether homebuying or renting?

MO: 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, and what happened was there was such an explosion of [people] 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 that they had. So we suffer from very inefficient housing.

[We need to focus on] building generational wealth outside of homeownership. Building homes and housing has been the game or the business of large, wealthy developers. And in our community, we just can’t really afford that. We don’t have enough folks for a large developer to make money here.… How can we lower the amount of investment [that is necessary for housing]?

AF: 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?

MO: Absolutely, I do. A few facts for you here. Sixty percent of our land in Alaska is federal, and 25 percent is owned by the state of Alaska. 10 percent is owned by Native corporations, and one percent is private. So 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.

We have a parking structure that has been mothballed for probably five years. The university that used it ended up not needing it, and so they literally welded the doors shut, and this building has been sitting there, kind of deteriorating ever since. There was some funding that became available … for land acquisition. 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 the garage for parking, covered parking, which is very important in Fairbanks, but also getting units into the downtown core. So, that’s one example, and there’s a few others that we have, but I’m really eager to see how that plays out.

AF: 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?

MO: 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. Something’s been happening in our environment for quite some time. We have more wind in Fairbanks, which means that we have more risk for summer fires. In the winter, we’ve had more snow than usual, and it’s also been colder than usual, which means that our ground will not thaw quickly—meaning that when the temperature gets hot in the air, it’s all going to melt into water, but there’s going to be nowhere for it to go because the ground hasn’t thawed yet. And so now we miss out on that water, and 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.

I don’t think there’s really much we can do about this now. It’s happening. We’re in a cycle of climatic disruption. But we can plan for it. We can plan for extreme events—what we’re going to do when the power goes out and it’s negative 30 degrees.

The other thing is, with planning comes money, and 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. So we pay property taxes, and that’s all we pay. As we address these more and more 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. We’re seeing less and less investment from the federal government for events like that. So as Alaskans, it’s time for us to really think hard about how we want to protect … our assets that we have. And what level of commitment comes from our own pocketbooks.

AF: Leading into that, how have you navigated being a mayor at a time when the federal government is reducing funding, and withdrawing from being a partner on so many issues?

MO: We continue to ask our public employees to do more with less. At the same time, the public expects services to be modern. So, that means we have to invest in technology.

It’s a tough spot. I have all of these ideas and plans for being mayor, and then you come into the office.… The way we want to provide services and make things more efficient … with less and less funding, from the state and from the federal government, 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.

It’s tough. It’s definitely something I’m working on—how we do more with less, how we explain the value of good governance, [and] putting our own skin in the game.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: The Midnight Sun Festival in downtown Fairbanks, Alaska. Credit: Jacob Boomsma via iStock/Getty Images.