Five candidates are running for four seats on Bethel’s City Council. This week, KYUK is airing interviews with each of the candidates.
Newcomer candidate Pamela Conrad recently retired following a 30-year career in public health. She said that she's running for city council to try to give back to the community.
Conrad spoke with KYUK about her candidacy on KYUK’s morning show, "Coffee at KYUK," on Sept. 20.
Find a transcript of the conversation below. It has been lightly edited for clarity, but may contain transcription errors.
KYUK (Evan Erickson): Pamela, thanks for joining us for 'Coffee [at KYUK']. I hope you can hear me now. You're the first of five city council candidate 'Coffee [at KYUK'] episodes we are doing here, and for the next 15 minutes we're just going to give you a chance to follow up on what we heard from you during the candidate forum. So if we could just start, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background, and kind of introduce yourself, maybe beyond what you were able – had the time to do at the candidate forum on Sept. 11?
Pamela Conrad: Sure, can you still hear me?
KYUK: Yep, you're good to go.
Conrad: Okay. So my name is Pamela Conrad. I was born and raised in the state of Pennsylvania, 45 minutes west of Philadelphia. I relocated here – I first came to Bethel as an extern in the optometry program from the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, because I – well, it wasn't really a mistake, it turned out to be fortuitous. I voluntarily jumped out of a perfectly good airplane just because it was sort of on a bet. Between the first and second years in optometry school, during the summer, there were fourth year students that were living next door to us, and they came over and said they were going skydiving. And of course, you know, you gotta do what the upperclassmen do. I didn't think they were serious. And on the way up. They came back the next day to get the money. And on the way up to go skydiving, they were discussing where they were going for their rotations, and one of the optometry students was coming here to Bethel, and I was just mesmerized. And from that, that was a trajectory. From there, I ended up coming up here for my rotation. And at that point they were offering loan repayment. And so I thought, I can do anything for three years. And that was done in [19]95 and I'm still here. So I was a step optometrist, and then director of the Optometry Clinic at YK[HC] for, I just finished up 30 years, it was, Oct. 1. I retired, bought my first house here, got married to my husband living here, had two children that were born and raised here in the hospital, and so here I am now deciding on a second career of running for city council. I don't want to make a career out of it. There should be term limits, so I figured, yeah.
KYUK: I would not have guessed in a million years, the origin of you coming to western Alaska was through skydiving. That's –
Conrad: Well, I always wanted to go places, but that was what started it. I remember my roommate and I both running, but this is, you know, I'll hate myself. This is when all data was in a three ring binder in the optometry school library, and we just spent hours poring over the rotations you could do. I ended up in Santa Fe first at the Indian Health Service out there, and then decided to come up here. It was actually my off rotation. We all were given a three month rotation off, but you could elect to come someplace. So I'm like, you know what? I'm not paying all this tuition to not go someplace. And so I ended up here for three months. And that's – it was sort of a life defining moment.
KYUK: Very cool. Can I ask? Was it tandem or solo? The skydive.
Conrad: Tandem. And it was because it was tandem. We were at the point it didn't seem that way, as I am dangling out because I'm rather short. I'm 5 [foot] 4, and the tandem jumper that I was with was 6 [foot] 5. So they take you up in a little – well now I'm used to being in the little planes out here, but they took us up. We went to 10,000 feet, and I'll tell you that that's quite as the altimeters going around, I had heard 10,000 on the way up, and I'm thinking that we're not going to 10,000 feet, we're going to stop sooner or later. But nope, they dumped us. I'll never forget that moment, dangling out of the plane. The only thing in the plane were my ankles, because I was strapped to this 6 foot 5 guy, and then the plane just goes “boop” and you get dumped, and you have no choice, but it was pretty memorable.
KYUK: Yeah, I tandemed too, myself, and I had to tell the instructor to actually push me out of the door of the plane. I couldn't do it. I couldn't take the leap.
Conrad: Did you do it voluntarily? Or was it all to bet for you too?
KYUK: No, it was voluntarily. It was just a big fear thing I had going, Yeah, but yeah, so you kind of touched on it. But what? What exactly made you want to run for city council? Other than that, you have time now to get involved politically.
Conrad: Well, I came from a family of huge, what I say, of volunteers. My parents started softball leagues for kids and they were, you know, always active in the church. Both of my parents were always of the mind that if you have a skill, and I think I spoke to this in my opening statement, if you have a skill, it's your civic responsibility to provide it to the community that you live in to make it better. Now. I'm not saying I have the skill, but what I'm getting at is I do have the free time. I've lived here for a while, and I feel like I should give back instead of just sitting back and saying, ‘Oh, this isn't right. That's not right. That's not good. This, somebody else needs to fix this,’ and then becomes NIMBY, not in my backyard, kind of thing. I think we need to get away from that and realize that we all need – instead of leaving Bethel, because it's not what you want, if we all chipped in and made it a better place, we would attract people that would want to come and stay here and see the beauty of this community.
KYUK: Yeah, and do you have any specific ideas through council that you'd like to accomplish, things you'd like to focus on? I know you touched on some of that with your role with the roots of Bethel Friends of Canines and other things. Is there anything specific that you want to bring up about your hopes for council?
Conrad: I've often been told that my love language is food. I love to cater. I have a food truck I'm trying to launch at some point, and I've always believed that we all have a basic right to a safe place to sleep, a good place to be nourished and fed, and a community family environment to be in. And I believe that the root of a lot of the issues we have in this community with the drugs and all these things are people whose basic needs aren't being met. It's kind of Maslow’s pyramid of needs that if you don't, don't have your basic needs, you can't achieve greater success that you know, once you meet those basic levels of the pyramid, you can go higher and higher with intellectual learning and things like that. So I really believe if we can continue to support Bethel Winter House. Get these housing issues where people have a place that they can call home, that they love – I think one of the reasons my husband and I both stayed here for 30 years is we just stumbled on our house, and it's a great place. We love this house, and I and we raise our family here, and we've had, you know, many social events here, and things, weddings and whatnot. And I think when you have a place that you call home, it makes you feel grounded. And I think if we could alleviate some of those infrastructure problems, people would feel safe and be able to pursue their best life.
KYUK: Yeah. And were you involved at all in the, I mean, the latest thing in that vein would be like the Permanent Supportive Housing that was built. And were you involved in that?
Conrad: I'm an at large member on the board for Bethel Winter House, so I've been, I wasn't, I wasn't pushing as hard as the other board members. I don't want to even take any ownership of that. There were a lot of heavy players in there that got that job done. But I have been on the board enough to, you know, meet quorum and things like that. And to me, if you look at other states, the state of Colorado has done amazing things with refurbishing old hotels. They have an 85% recidivism rate back into society. So 85 of every 100 people that provide these permanent housing things manage to get back into real life. And I think that that speaks volumes. You know, you're not living out of a grocery cart or whatever, or you know that you also have a place. You know, it's funny. I was listening to a person in an airplane flight complaining about how there are so many jobs out there, the homeless should just apply. And me, being now 60, my filters, I never really had great filters, but they really, really slipped, and I couldn't take anymore. I looked at her, I said, ‘Do you realize the reality, if you don't have a house, of applying for a job?’ She looked at me. I said, ‘You need internet, you need a cell phone. You need the ability for that person to be able to get back to you. How do you apply for a job if you don't have a cell phone and you don't have a permanent residence and you don't have a driver's license, because you don't have the opportunity to go get there to get one done?’ So the reality of that is, you know, if you have a place where you can get these support – there's always this mantra that the homeless want to be homeless. Well, I don't know if they want to be homeless, but they don't necessarily want to be in a shelter that is unsafe. Or that one reporter in Anchorage had gone and spent the night at the Sullivan arena, and it was quite an eye opener. If anybody's ever seen his, his interview or his piece that he put on the internet about that.
KYUK: Was that Jeremy Hseih, perhaps?
Conrad: You know, I don't know the Alaska Landmine and all that and all those guys, they kind of, I'm not sure which one it was, but it was pretty eye opening that, you know, we're all, I always laugh about the United States. We're all dominantly programmed to be rebels. You know, all of our well, not the first people, but the rest of us who weren't, who aren't native, had people who didn't want to be where they were and so a lot of us want to live free. And that's part of the mantra of the United States. So I get it when people aren't comfortable in shelters. I'm sorry, I really got off on a tangent on this. I just feel really, really strongly about again, people should have a safe place, especially children, where they can sleep at night, and feel safe, and know they're going to be nourished and all that kind of stuff.
KYUK: Good on you for bringing some nuance to the idea that just a paycheck is going to solve your problems. You know it's, that's a good point you bring up. But as for, like, how to fund social services and things, and programs that bring people up and give them actual opportunities and level the playing field more, what do you think Bethel can do to create a better economic future? Are there any things that you can do through council to help facilitate that?
Conrad: Well this is a really prickly topic, so I have to be very careful about how I approach this without pointing fingers. So I want to make this as generic as possible. There is a huge swath of low hanging fruit, of taxes that A) aren't being collected on businesses, or B) taxes that were collected by the business owner but not paid to the city, which is, frankly, theft, in my mind. So I think that there is a really quick fix to that, and if we started enforcing that, or coming up with some way to effectively police taxation that is viable, there have been many efforts over the years. There were efforts quite some time ago to instill, you know, you had to have all kinds of computer programs. And it kind of didn't go much farther. Things tend to sort of be personality driven, but I do think there is a lot of revenue that's lost because we aren't collecting the taxes, or they're being collected and we're not enforcing the payments.
KYUK: Yeah, I heard that from several candidates at the forum, and I wanted to ask about last week's candidate forum. I mean, you guys were really in the hot seat getting asked questions that were, I mean, if you hadn't been on council before, those are incredibly difficult, some of them. Were there any questions that you wanted to follow up on, or anything you wanted to flesh out better from that forum?
Conrad: I've done a little bit of amnesia from that forum, it was when the adrenaline's gone, you tend to forget something after the fact. I think maybe the ballot initiative, I was a little taken about by that, but I think we rounded back and figured that one out or were able to go back to it. We talked about doing some sort of survey. And I guess that would be kind of what – I don't know if that would be something the community would be interested in, in a survey of what the Bethel, residents of Bethel, top five wishlist would be. You know, sometimes you go into things, the story my grandmother told me, and I don't know if it was truly her, but when she made her first Thanksgiving dinner, she cut the legs off the turkey and put it in the pan. And her husband was like, ‘That's not how my mom makes turkey. Why are you doing that?’ She's like, ‘Well, that's how my family did.’ So she went and asked her mom, ‘Why, you know, why do we cut the legs off the turkey?’ And her mom was like, ‘Well, that's because the pan wasn't big enough otherwise.’ So sometimes we do things that we just repeat them. Wash, rinse, repeat without ever taking a step back and analyzing, is this what we really need or what? So you know that ballot initiative, I don't know, I thought about that a lot, I'm like, 'Hm. We should ask our constituents what they want.'
KYUK: I do remember that you and multiple candidates had that answer, let's, let's do an initiative to find out what people really want to have an initiative on.
Conrad: I mean, you think intuitively, you know, but you don't always know. Sometimes when you do things, you'll be like, 'Wow, this is not what I expected.' So yeah.
KYUK: Yeah. So we just have about a minute and a half or so left, I'll just give you a chance. Is there anything else you want to tell people that might help them make a more informed decision when they go on Oct. 1 to vote for their new city council? We've got five candidates up for, I believe, to fill four seats. Is there anything you want to close on to help people make a more informed decision and why you would be an appropriate choice?
Conrad: Pretty much what I had said before, I feel like it's my time. I feel like, you know, my family is raised, I've gotten rid of some of the job responsibilities. I'd love to come back and try to help. I've sat here for 30 years, and I'll be honest, I've complained about things a lot, and it's time to stop complaining and try to figure out how to solve the problem. And I'd love for the city of Bethel to give me a chance to give back. I've had an amazing, amazing life here, and I would like to try to create an environment that would allow other people to move here and enjoy the same 30 years plus that I hope to continue enjoying here.
KYUK: Well, I don't know how anyone couldn't like the sound of that. I thank you for joining us for 'Coffee [at KYUK]' and the first of the candidate 'Coffees [at KYUK]' here. And you have a great day. Pamela Conrad, thank you very much.
Conrad: Okay, everybody have a great weekend.
KYUK: Alrighty.
