Mat-Su Borough has new planning director

PALMER — Christine Nelson said she came to her new job at the borough to a desk loaded with work.

“I don’t even have an idea quite yet of what that desk-load is,” she said. “There’s so many different projects and activities going on all at once. That’s one of my first tasks is to really get a handle on what those projects are.”

Nelson took over this week as the borough’s director of planning. She oversees a department of about 30 people who work on everything from subdividing land to cataloging the borough’s archaeological resources to drawing up thick documents spelling out long-range plans for everything from airports to towers to roadways.

She said she’s excited to work in Alaska, though it’ll be a bit colder than her previous homes.

“Most recently I was living in Florida taking care of my mom but all of my work experience has been Pacific Northwest.”

She’s worked in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. In La Pine, Ore., she worked as city manager. Make that the first city manager.

“They newly incorporated in 2006, so I was their first city manager,” she said. “Building everything from scratch.”

She said she’s visited Alaska — including the Valley — a number of times but never lived here.

“I started coming up here in ‘74 when I had an elementary school friend whose family moved up here.” It was right around the time Boeing went bust in Seattle, she said.

Nelson said her friend’s family was living in Mountain Village on the Yukon River where they’d just sold a store to the local Native corporation.

“They were there helping manage and teaching the Native corporation about the ins and outs of the business.”

She said she worked around the area, painting boats, working at the fish processing plant and at the store.

“I’ve come up every four or five years for a vacation ever since.”

When she started thinking about going back to work, she started looking at job postings on a website run by the American Planning Association. Over the years she’d check there for jobs in Alaska and even interviewed for a few but it had never worked out. This time she found one at the borough.

“The job looked like an interesting, challenging, growth job where my skills and their needs would mesh.”

In her view, she said, the borough has been growing for long enough that the effects of that growth are starting to be felt. And that’s where the planning department comes in.

And that, in turn, fits in well with one of her favorite parts of the job — the community involvement portion. That end of things requires attending to a lot of meetings and talking with a lot of community members about those changes and coming up with plans to address them.

Of course community involvement isn’t without its challenges. Not least of which is scheduling. Her nights fill up fast, Nelson said. So fast she’s already had to pick and choose which meetings to attend.

“I’ve never worked in a department like this where there are so many night meetings.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.