It’s election season, and in Haines two candidates filed to run in the mayoral contest. KHNS is bringing those candidates to you as part of a series of profiles that will air in the weeks leading up to our Candidate Forum. Doug Olerud is challenging incumbent Mayor Jan Hill.
It’s been over a decade since Doug Olerud served on the Haines Borough Assembly, but he says each year he considers another run.
“I got a lot of a lot of support from people that I didn’t expect that were encouraging me to run that thought that my skills and experience would be beneficial to the borough,” Olerud said.
He says he thrives on a challenge and that encouragement prompted his candidacy.
“This year, I think with a lot of the challenges the community’s facing with the economic issues caused by COVID, the safety issues with COVID, that it was more exciting for me to run.”
Olerud was born and raised in Haines. The 51-year old left town for a couple of years to attend University of Washington, studying history. He moved to Minnesota to work in freight with an uncle, then back to Washington state for a management training program with a national sports chain. He returned to Haines in the mid-90s to run the family stores with his sister.
Olerud sat on the Haines Borough Assembly for nine years and spent a year on the Planning Commission.
He served for nearly a decade on the board of a nationwide business organization, including a couple of years as its chair. He says he’d like to bring the management lessons he learned on that board to the local government–like having well defined roles for management and office holders.
“The part that I think the mayor can control is having assembly treating each other and the community with respect, treating management with respect and dealing with it in a respectful manner. Recognizing their roles, having concise meetings, everybody comes prepared, try and limit the number of meetings,” he said.
Olerud says he would like to streamline meetings to attract more public participation.
As mayor, Olerud says he has two major priorities in light of the COVID-19 pandemic: safety and fiscal sustainability. He says on the safety front, the borough needs a plan to protect future tourists and the community from the spread of COVID-19.
And on the fiscal side, he wants to explore how to keep the employees and services the Borough already has.
“It’s going to be a very lean budget. There’s not, there’s a lot of revenue that’s not coming in that normally would come in, and how do we look to help because there’s several businesses that they didn’t have any look at the tourism sector, that zero income all year? How do we help them going forward to make sure that they can survive because all those people are an integral part of our community, and we need to make sure that they see a light at the end of the tunnel going forward.”
When he’s not managing the family stores, you can find Olerud outside: hunting, camping, or hiking. He says the Riley trail is a personal favorite. He’s also coached and refereed basketball.
If he’s elected, he’d like to see more respect for opposing opinions in local government and more focus on common goals than on wedge issues.
“How do we get the best employment for kids that are graduating? How do we have the best school system for the kids? What’s the best way to keep the streets paved the facilities open, every everybody likes all these things? But how do we pay for minutes the details that we seem to disagree on? And I think I can help us bridge some of that,” said Olerud.
He says his experience in the private sector has taught him to be open to new ideas and to see what’s working elsewhere that may work here in Haines.
You can listen to the candidate profile for incumbent Mayor Jan Hill here.
