PALMER -- After 24 years walking the increasingly crowded halls of the Mat-Su Borough office building, John Duffy left his top-floor office last week, with plans to start a new chapter in life.
Duffy said last week he doesn't know what's in store next. He's "waiting for the next chapter of life to come here," he said.
He's not closing the book on the borough just yet. Duffy agreed to lead a group of Assembly members and borough staffers on a trip to Washington, D.C., to get everyone acquainted with the federal employees he's been working with in recent years.
He said he has a few other loose ends to tie up, such as meetings he agreed to attend, over the next few weeks.
But don't call him looking for help, he said -- at a recent Wasilla Chamber of Commerce meeting, he directed all calls "for potholes or if your cat is missing ... or if the sun isn't shining" to assistant borough manager Elizabeth Gray.
Duffy, 56, came to Alaska as a soldier and like many stayed because he fell in love with the state. A Southside Chicago native, he was stationed at Fort Richardson doing reconnaissance.
He left the Army as a specialist 4 and got a political science degree from University of Alaska Anchorage. He returned to his hometown to get a master's in urban planning from the University of Illinois. When his exams finished, he left for Alaska again and began working at a small engineering company that later folded.
This was the mid-80s, smack in the post-pipeline meltdown. With little engineering work coming, Duffy said, he spotted an ad for a planner for the Mat-Su Borough and jumped at it.
Little did he know that he was jumping into piranha-infested waters. But somehow he managed to keep afloat. Last week, he talked a little about that experience and others he's had at the borough. Below are excerpts of our conversation.
Q. Didn't you arrive at the borough when the anti-planning mood was at its height? What was that like? What was the population then?
A. The population was right around 17,000. They had fired almost everybody out of planning, and I didn't know any of that. I was just looking for a job. I got the job, came here, and was like, "Oh my god."
They had a big comprehensive plan that went up in smoke. There was a lot of anxiety about planning and zoning. It took us about a decade and a half to get over, maybe two decades, and there was a lot of distrust.
Then you had the Alaska Depression, from '86 to '87. There were no jobs ... there were layoffs at the borough -- it was amazing.
Q. But if everyone was opposed to planning, what were you doing?
A. The Assembly ... said communities have to be in charge. That's how planning was happening. About a year or 18 months later, they found that didn't work.
We started with the Chase plan. You'd have about 200 people show up for those meetings. It was like pure democracy. It was easy enough when you were working with easy issues, but on the tougher issues, they'd take a vote. Whoever prevailed wouldn't show up at the next meeting (thinking their issue was solved) and the community would just re-vote (and reverse the decision). It took years.
We developed some rules ... then we started getting success.
Q. The borough has grown so much since then and attitudes toward zoning and planning have changed a lot. What are today's issues?
A. They're much more complicated and complex. There are many more competing interests.
When I look back at that time, it was really unfortunate that the '86 plan failed.
Because that didn't happen, we lost a decade or so. A lot of things that should have happened didn't happen, so then we played catch-up. There wasn't a foundation to build on. So water quality, we really don't talk about water quality a lot. Or quantity, no one's talking about quantity and over near Wasilla there are wells going dry. We haven't dealt with that. That's part of the problem.
Because we have that lost decade ... people lose an understanding about the value of planning. Everyone thinks, "You're trying to take my property rights away," but no, you're just trying to figure out where the roads should go or where the school goes.
And the cost of government; people don't understand what it takes to put a paramedic out there. You have the paramedic with all the training, you have the gear, you have the vehicle, you have all that stuff.
(The problems) are more population related. These are all growth pains. That's been the one thing fascinating out here, dealing with that. This is why it's exciting.
This is the place to be if you're a planner or a manager; this is action. In Chicago or somewhere else, it's "Should we tear down that building and put up something different?" Here you can draw where a road goes.
Q. It's still a little that way?
A. It's a lot that way. With 25,000 square miles, it's a lot that way.
Q. In your time at the borough, what did you see happen that you thought never would?
A. When I first got here, Gary Thurlow left and John Hale became the borough manager. He was talking about Port MacKenzie.
I went to Port MacKenzie for the first time and got off the boat (into water up to his chest). I remember thinking, "How are we going to get there?" Then you could get to the end of the road ... (by car) but we were four-wheeling it all the way down (to the current port). My goodness how do you create a port out of the wilderness?
Then the ferry -- how do you create a ferry for that?
I didn't support the ferry early on. Who's going to use it? Going where? We had to create the rationale. Now it all makes sense -- but it took a lot of work for that. By a lot of people, not just me.
Q. What project are you most proud of?
A. I don't know. There's too many of them. And really, there isn't an "I" -- it takes all of us. I can't point to any one thing. You take a look at our bond rating increasing and we've done great there. The school construction program, the ferry, the port, it's all those things.
It's been kind of fun.
Q. What do you think the future holds?
A. I predict in five to seven years, you have a unification vote. Why would you have four different administrations?
What I think is going to get people thinking about it is, you have about $120 million in sewer and water investment needed. To me it doesn't make any sense, enlarging the city administrations, meaning we have to enlarge too.
But that's in the future. The population will drive that, just like it drove it in Anchorage and drove it in Juneau.
Find Rindi White online at adn.com/contact/rwhite or call 352-6709.
By RINDI WHITE
rwhite@adn.com