Borough Manager Gives 90-Day Report

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

Kodiak Island Borough Manager Michael Powers joined the staff this summer and, last week, he presented his 90-day manager report to the borough assembly at its work session Thursday night. He said he applied a “fresh set of eyes” to the community, and its diversity stood out.

He also said he noticed how haphazardly the greater metropolitan area seems to have been set up, especially with regard to Mill Bay road between downtown and Safeway – it just grew with the community.

Powers said they could give some thought to land use.

“Where do we want to develop new development that’s heavy commercial, light industrial because I don’t think that’s part of our plans, but I don’t think we’ve really embraced, gee, maybe we ought to move off of our main strip some of the heavy commercial, light industrial types of uses.”

He also turned his attention to the setup of the borough government and said they need to look at how departments and their responsibilities are organized.

“We have multiple leases out there and some of them have been handled by one department and then other types – the exact same types of leases are handled by another department, in some cases the lobbyist for the borough for a while, finance managed those agreements, and for a while the clerk’s office managed them, and now they’re kind of being pushed off to the borough manager’s office.”

Powers said they should work on improving that structure, and also pointed out inconsistencies in the borough’s labor classification and salary study.

“That’s one of the more interesting personnel things that I’ve ever run into. You have a classification plan that applies to part of the employees, but not the others, but you have a salary schedule that does apply to all – it just doesn’t quite make a lot of sense.”

You can find the full report from the manager in the August 25 work session packet on the borough website.

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