(Sage Smiley / KSTK)
After two years at the helm of the City and Borough of Wrangell, Jeff Good will vacate his position effective January 1, 2024.
“It was tough to put in the resignation letter,” Good said in an interview Wednesday (September 27), the same day he submitted notice that he’ll resign at the end of the year. “We have a great staff here, a great crew, and they do tremendous work, and it’s been great working with them.”
“I feel a little guilty,” he continued, “Because I definitely set out to do a lot of things, and we’ve made a lot of progress and a lot of projects on the horizon that I really wanted to complete. So I feel like I feel a little empty, because I still want to get those things done. But at the same time, we have a great staff here and I have all the confidence in the world that they’ll do great and continue to do great things.”
Good has accepted a position as the Division Chief of Water and Power for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. While it’s a national position based in Colorado, Good said he’ll still live in Wrangell.
“It’s a civil engineering position, mainly overseeing the water and power resources for the Bureau of Indian [Affairs] – so all of the tribal nations in that region,” Good explained. “[I’ll] be working with them for their water and power rights.”
Good said while it was a hard decision to make, he’s making the switch so he can prioritize family – his dad, who lives in the Lower 48, turns 80 at the end of the year, and his sister and son are down south as well.
He said the job “would allow me to travel back and forth a lot more. Every time I left here, we’d go on vacation, and I just felt guilty about even being on vacation. So I just want to be able to have that opportunity to spend more time with my family, especially as my dad’s getting older and, and just really didn’t have that opportunity over the last two years to spend as much time with him as I wanted to.”
Good submitted a letter of resignation on September 27. Coincidentally, the letter came almost exactly two years after the borough’s previous manager Lisa Von Bargen resigned to tend to family obligations.
Good said in addition to the flexibility of his new job, part of the selling point was that he’d be able to remain home-based in Wrangell, “But then also if I have to be down there for two weeks to four weeks, I could do that and not really impact anything.”
Good moved to Wrangell in 2020 after retiring from the U.S. Coast Guard, where he’d served for more than two decades. He’d first visited Wrangell in the 1990s with his wife, who is from the island. Prior to his retirement, he was the commanding officer of Coast Guard Base Kodiak.
He was hired on as interim borough manager for Wrangell in November of 2021. After three months in the interim position, Wrangell’s assembly hired Good under a 3.5-year contract which was set to end in June of 2025.
Good brought engineering experience to the borough manager position, as a licensed professional engineer and facilities engineer in the state of Alaska.
Good said as he thinks about leaving his current position, he’s looking forward to being a bit less visible.
“I think personally, being in a fishbowl – everything you do, everywhere you go, just the constant eyes on what you’re doing and how you’re doing it – I think that’s probably been the most challenging for me,” he said.
Asked what he’s most proud of in his time as borough manager, Good spends a solid two minutes listing accomplishments of the staff in every borough department, from utilities to administration to the library.
“It’s really just the accomplishments of the people that I’ve been able to work with here,” Good said. “Just all the things that they’ve done.”
But Borough Mayor Patty Gilbert doesn’t hesitate to praise Good himself for his leadership, as well as “his commitment to finding solutions – helping the assembly and the administrative staff find solutions to our problems. He’s authentic. He has good engagement and guidance in our progress goals for the borough and I value his insight,” Gilbert said. “He has that mathematical, engineering mind that blended well with our goals of developing and rehabilitating our infrastructure. I think that he was a good fit at the right time for the borough.”
There are a lot of irons in the borough’s fire, Gilbert said Friday, from a major update to the island’s water treatment plant to renovations of the community’s Public Safety Building and schools. She said she hopes the local government can keep continuity between administrations. She’s not sure yet whether the assembly will pursue an interim manager, or go straight to recruiting a longer-term manager to step into the role.
“One thing I don’t want to see happen is any halt in our forward movement,” Gilbert said. “We have some momentum going, we have projects that are slated for the next construction season, we have a water treatment plant that we have to gather funding for. So there are so many vital items in the hopper, if you will, that we need to act on.”
She continued: “My biggest concern is that I don’t want us just to tread water until we get a permanent borough manager. I want us to, in the interim, continue our forward progress.”
Good still has about three months left on the job, and he said he intends to keep moving major projects forward throughout that time.
Beyond the day-to-day, Good said he’s thankful to have had the opportunity to serve as borough manager for the past two years and gain an understanding of the hard work that goes into running a borough.
“I think kind of getting to peel the curtain back and seeing everything they do every day on a day-to-day basis – that’s really been rewarding for me to be able to see that, and then just kind of see the inside of the government process and how it works,” Good said. “I know it’s slow sometimes, but there’s reasons for it. And then you’ve got to go through public comment for everything just to make sure that we are transparent.”
“I would say that over the past two years, we’ve been transparent in everything we do,” Good added. “There’s no hiding anything. If anyone wants to know what the City and Borough are doing, it’s easy to find […] where every dollar goes. I think they do a great job of being transparent in every decision that’s made.”
And that transparency will extend to the process of hiring Good’s replacement – Mayor Gilbert said Wrangell’s Assembly is set to formally accept Good’s resignation and discuss the recruitment process at its regular meeting on October 10, which is open to the public.
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