New Mat-Su Borough public works chief likes Valley life

PALMER — A lifelong Fairbanksan has taken over the helm of the borough’s public works department and, she said, she plans to be a permanent Valley resident.

“I’ve got a beautiful view of the mountain and I think I’m going to sit in my rocking chair when I’m 85 years old sipping toddies and talking about the good old days,” Shaune O’Neil said Monday.

O’Neil took over for Public Works Director Keith Rountree in September after Rountree resigned. She said a lot of the work so far has been getting up to speed on the myriad projects Rountree was in the middle of. Public works includes things like building schools and roads as well as maintaining the landfill and the various borough buildings and assets.

But even if she’s still getting up to speed, she’s gotten a few things done since starting Sept. 17.

“I found a few bucks so they were able to put that wind generator up at (Sherrod Elementary) school last week. That was kind of a scavenger hunt,” she said.

She also put together the bid documents and ironed out the grant funding for the barge dock the borough recently got federal stimulus money to build at Port MacKenzie.

O’Neil said she came to the borough from Anchorage, where she worked on a project before finding land and building a house in the Valley. Prior to that she’d owned a mid-size general contracting business in Fairbanks.

“I got divorced, my ex kept the business,” she said simply of why she left that industry.

But she said she didn’t come to the borough job lacking municipal government experience. Prior to entering the private sector she worked for both the Fairbanks Northstar Borough and the Tanana Chiefs Conference. At the Fairbanks borough she worked in the public works department. Her first job was working on the Carlson Center. Then she moved on to a number of different projects.

“I don’t even have a clue what they all were. Those were so very long ago,” she said.

She also worked as landfill manager. Which is good because the Mat-Su Borough has a landfill as well and O’Neil said there are issues there that need to be worked out. Public works jobs, she said, are pretty similar from one borough to the next.

“They had road service areas, we have road service areas, they build schools, we build schools,” she said.

She said she left the Fairbanks borough and went to work for the Tanana Chiefs Conference working on projects like designing water and sewer systems for Bush communities. When the divorce brought her to Anchorage, it took her awhile to get used to the idea of living so far south.

“I grew up in Fairbanks. I built a house about a half mile down the road from where I grew up,” she said. “I always thought that south of the Alaska Range was a suburb of Seattle.”

And while she didn’t care much for the big city, O’Neil said she was taken with the Valley. So she built a house. And then she started looking for work.

“I started to look for a job after I already put down some roots,” she said.

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