Kodiak Island Borough Finance Director Retires

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

A Kodiak Island Borough employee is trading a life of finance for a life of leisure and fishing. Borough Finance Director Karl Short says Friday was his last day of work and the conclusion to 33 years of borough employment.

Short says he joined the borough in 1983 as a general accountant and became finance director in 1990.

“I really like preparing budgets, preparing the annual report. And I’m involved in a lot of things, everything from the IT Department, and we do the insurance and budgeting and everything , so a lot of it’s really good. I enjoy doing the work. I like doing good work. It is stressful because you don’t ever want to make a mistake and you deal with different people who have different ideas about what they want you to do.”

Short has good intentions for his newly cleared schedule.

“I say I’m going to disconnect my cable TV so I don’t sit in front of my TV my whole retirement. The part that worries me is I’m going to become a couch potato, which I don’t want to do, but it’s going to be fun to go on vacations and go home on a sunny day and stay home on a rainy weekend.”

Short says the first order of business is a trip to the lower 48, where he’ll visit his sons and celebrate his thirtieth wedding anniversary with his wife, Shirley.