Houston moves forward, hires new clerk

HOUSTON — Hiring on with the city means a lot of things for the new head clerk in the Valley’s smallest municipality.

First of all, Christine DeLong said it means getting back to a type of work she likes.

“I really enjoy working in the clerk’s office in Anchorage and when I saw this position come open, I looked at it like this is a job I can do and it would be great experience to come in and help,” said DeLong, who has been the city clerk since Nov. 23.

Before that she worked at the Alaska Native corporation, CIRI, and in the clerk’s office at the Municipality of Anchorage.

For DeLong it also is an opportunity to keep the city moving forward after a strange year in city politics that included a recall attempt of the Mayor, which led months later to the resignation of DeLong’s immediate predecessor Steve Cunningham on Election Day in October.

DeLong said she’s well aware of that history. But she said she doesn’t think it’s productive to spend a lot of time looking in the city’s rear-view mirror.

“I came into this position with the intent that we are trying to move the city forward,” she said. “And the cloud that hangs over Cunningham’s departure really has not made the job any more difficult than any new job that you step into.”

Since she lives off of Knik-Goose Bay Road, stepping in as Houston’s clerk has also meant she is able to cut her commute down from an hour to CIRI’s Anchorage headquarters to 20 minutes. She said her job there was in the company’s energy development department.

“I was assisting the senior director and our main focus was the Fire Island Wind Farm,” DeLong said.

When considering whether to apply in Houston, she said one of the draws was that the job is in a relatively dynamic area of the state.

“Houston is growing and just to watch it grow would be really interesting and exciting,” she said.

So far, she said, she’s been spending a lot of time getting up to speed. Municipalities generally have their own ways of doing things. So she has to learn Houston’s processes. Working as a clerk in Houston is similar to working in Anchorage, but it’s very different, she said.

For one thing, Houston is much smaller. Which means that unlike in Anchorage, where she specialized in business licenses and keeping minutes at various city meetings, in Houston she’ll perform all the duties of a city clerk. Indeed, in Houston, the city clerk has, at times, resembled the position of a city manager, running the day-to-day operations.

Thursday night, DeLong’s duties included helping Mayor Virgie Thompson run the city council meeting. It was DeLong’s first meeting on the job.

“The two of us kind of worked together to make sure everything ran smoothly and we were following Robert’s Rules (of Order) to make sure everything ran right,” DeLong said.

Aside from offering her a chance to perform a wide array of clerk functions, she said the relatively small size of Houston’s government means that it didn’t take long to get to know everyone she would be working with.

“I love working in a smaller office and working very close with everybody that is part of the city,” DeLong said.

She said that in her work with business licenses in Anchorage she got some of that. That kind of work requires coordinating with various other city departments. But in that way her job there was kind of rare.

“Not everybody that works at the Municipality of Anchorage really has that ability to get to know a lot of the other employees because they have 3,000 employees.”

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